Less than a week after getting the campaign piece masquerading as a newsletter, I got the REAL Lakewood Ledger in my utility bill. While talking to a few residents, I found out that if you don't get your water bill mailed to you, you wouldn't get this newsletter and if you happen to live in the Gates who gets their bill next month your newsletter would be late. So, as a public service, I'm sharing the Resident Useful Ledger.
If you look at that two page newsletter, you will learn about vehicle stickers, brush pick-up, hydrant flushing, and yard waste bags. Are those things that you would expect to find in a newsletter for the residents of a community? You might be interested to know that in the years of newsletters there has only ever been one other mass mailing that contained zero residential information -- it was called Year in Review in 2017 written by past Village President Paul Serwatka. While our administration who manages the website felt that the campaign piece was important enough to put on the home page TWICE (despite making sure all of us had it in our mailboxes) -- along with two other versions of this same information, they don't think the newsletter I attached above is worthy of even being located in the newsletter section of the website.
Home Page:
Newsletter Page:
But that's not even the best thing I learned. It appears that I was wrong with my estimate of the cost of those fancy, 8 page glossy booklets ---- I estimated the cost would be about $2,000. Oh....we have the bills.
First just to print the 1600 booklets -- please note the extra $100 we paid for this to be a rush job.
And they all had to be mailed to each of our homes, right?
But wait -- the postage permit that was used had expired, so there was a fee to reactivation it:
Oh -- that says "Annual fee" so, surely this is a permit we use all the time? Nope -- apparently the last time we used it was October 2018!!
Grand total is $3,426.62!!
Yup -- our village spent $2.14 on each of us to send us Phil's campaign piece that not only is poorly written, full of errors and overstatements, and generally in poor taste -- they overpaid for it. Seriously, how is it that we can continue to allow this wasteful spending? I guess the one positive thing to say -- for the first time in my research, this actually had budget for at least the postage portion (at least in October, it did) --- I don't know where she will hide the campaign printing.
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