There Are Some Questions Jim Lane & Marty Leonard Need To Answer

What you are looking at here is a section of a mailer mailed to Tarrant Region Water District senior citizens, with that section being the section of the mailer which had a letter purporting to be from Fort Worth Mayor, Betsy Price, spreading the lie that a Dallas businessman is trying to do the nefarious deed of taking over Fort Worth's water.

Betsy Price really should be ashamed of herself.

It has now become quite clear that this TRWD board election is going to out-do the previous TRWD board election's level of propaganda smearing spewing from the TRWD incumbent's campaign.

However, I think this election the opponents are going to fight back.

With the facts.

Sometimes facts trump lies. Sometimes.

A series of a few Facebook posts which were posted in response to one of my Facebook posts is, maybe, an indicator of the facts the TRWD incumbents may be about to face....

Jeff Cooper These crooks drained Eagle Mountain Lake and Lake Bridgeport during a multi-year drought to increase property values along the river in Ft.Worth. currently most of the area lakes not under the control of these crooks are filled up with the rain this spring. But Eagle Mountain and Bridgeport have not increased at all, the flood gates are still open. Yet the river downstream from these lakes is full to the bank!

Jayne Marshall Yes, when the true story is TRWD wants to "take" land and Jim Lane is in real estate inflating land value the TRWD wants to buy! Sounds so much like the old Savings & Loan land flips!!!

Craig Bickley That only scratches the surface. Jim Lane also paid $18 million of your tax dollars to buy a property from a bankrupt college buddy that was only valued at $9M. We must put an end to the cronyism.

Jayne Marshall Boy would I like to follow that money!!

Craig Bickley Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be laying it out. The (not so) shocking fact is that the majority of our opponents' donors are people receiving contracts from the TRWD. Ours are from people who will never get a dollar of TRWD money.

The incumbent's propaganda makes the bogus claim that a Dallas businessman is financing an attempt to take over Fort Worth's water supply. While the TRWD incumbents get the majority of the funds they are using to spew their propaganda lies from the contractors who win no-bid contracts to do high paying work for the TRWD.

And how does Jim Lane justify his finagling to rescue his bankrupt buddy with $18 million of TRWD funds, to buy a property worth $8 million, on which the world's first drive-in movie theater of the 21st century was built?

If only Fort Worth had a real newspaper doing real investigative journalism, maybe we'd get answers to some of these questions. However, that newspaper was founded by a man who set the tone for that paper, a tone which continues to this day, with Amon Carter being a man who bragged he took a sack lunch with him when he had to do business in Dallas, so as not to spend any lunch money in that evil town.

One thing I'd like to see out in the open, is a thing I have opined about wanting to see previously. That being the record of the TRWD board meeting which led to the decision to hire Fort Worth Congresswoman Kay Granger's son, J.D., to be the Executive Director of the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle.

Don't records have to be kept and available to the public of all TRWD board meetings?

I can not be the only person on the planet who would like to read what was said which led to the hiring of a low level county prosecutor to run a big construction project for which he had zero qualifications.

I think the public learning the details of what led to the hiring of J.D. Granger is a particularly pertinent issue in this current TRWD board election, what with the Trinity River Vision now clearly a boondoggle, with little progress after years and years of paying J.D. Granger to be its director.

Unless, as progress, one counts that after 10 years, three small, simple bridges are now under construction, with an astounding four year project timeline.

And, unless one counts as progress spending a lot of money on a bizarre marketing campaign touting an imaginary island and events taking place at the imaginary island's imaginary pavilion.

If J.D. Granger is not held accountable for The Boondoggle's current sad state of slow motion to no motion progress and perverse things like Rockin' the River Happy Hour Inner Tube Floats (and other events) in the polluted, brown Trinity River, then who is to be held accountable?

The TRWD board who hired him?

Yes. I think that sounds about right.

Which would mean the right thing for the voters to do would be to fire two of the board members who helped hire J.D. Granger, with those board members being Jim Lane and Marty Leonard, by electing Craig Bickley and Michele Von Luckner.

And then when the new TRWD board convenes for the first time first thing on the agenda should be the firing of J.D. Granger, followed by the firing of Jim Oliver.......