I was recently told that if Steve and Tommy had paid me what I felt was fair, I would have faded into the sunset without a peep... Sure I would have! Instead, I'll spend every working moment second guessing what their next potential move will be and doing everything in my power to shine the light of truth on it. Scamper roaches, scamper! It's Lancaster's good fortune that this is how angry I am because nothing is off limits to me. What I know, I'll tell and what I don't I can still venture an opinion on. Here's some food for the hungry...
Lau...John and Jevon, Do a search. You'll find that these folks are developers somewhere in Denton, Anna and other places. NOT Lancaster. So why then was most of my funding coming from the Lau's bankroll? You guessed it, Tommy and Steve. In previous posts I've explained that Tommy, otherwise known as "The Goat" never spends his own money. It appears that Steve decided that spending someone else's money might be a plan for him also. Lau was, as best as I can figure, a partner in projects having to do with Anna, Texas. Because these projects were fairly worry free, Tommy or Steve or both came up with the idea to lead Mr. Lau to believe that zoning was an expensive business requiring at least $100,000.00 to get it off the ground. These funds were deposited into (presumably Steve's accounts since he paid me ) and then disbursed in accordance to Tommy's instructions.
Of course, in the beginning things were great. There was more money than you could shake a stick at! Then Mr. Lau caught on, or backed out, or both leaving Tommy and Steve to bankroll their own projects. All of a sudden, my "staff" became just me, my pay was "renegotiated to 2/3rds of what was agreed, and public donations came to a halt. Does this sound like the actions of professional developers that have, in Tommy's words," Plenty of money." I think not. It sounds more like two A$$holes that have land they need to develop themselves but can't make it happen. Somewhat like a used car salesman that decides to buy a customer's trade in order to sell it themselves. Having no real knowledge of what it costs to do so.
So when someone asks if I was in it for the money, Of course I was! I have a family to feed just like anyone else. Why am I in it now? I guess I'm just bored... I really like these three dots, sort of adds a continuance to our conversations here. Although technically it's not a conversation because you're not responding in kind. Told you I was bored!
5 comments:
Most of your readers can't comment yet because they don't know quite as much about the development racket as they need to. You might want to fill in some of the general city-civics lessons about how things are supposed to work. Then the Tompkins/Topletz deviations become more informative.
Ten Mile Creek is a good place to start. How is a city supposed to determine whether or not a project will cause flooding? And what did Lancastter do instead?
Good point, I'll touch on that next. What the city should have done is looked the Ten Mile Creek developer in the eye and asked "where's all the water gonna go?" If he hesitated one second in answering, the project should have been killed on the spot, before it ever made it to final Plat! Instead, I'm sure someone at the city said, "Wow, you mean your gonna build fancy homes with panaramic views of Ten Mile Creek's gentle flow?! Great, where do we sign?"
You realize by "killed" I mean "encouraged strongly to modify the plat in accordance to the proper drainage and flood plain needs under promise of waiver denial if not done." I certainly wouldn't have denied a Plat based on it's stupidity alone.
Interesting comment on the Laus. (I called him in 2005, doing my stories on Eagle, and he said "I'm in a meeting, can you call me back?" Right. Sure. Of course, he was never available after that.)
Doesn't surprise me, Mr. Lau was caught unawares of the whole political aspect of his involvement until he was asked to write a check.
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