“HOLY BOONDOGLE BATMAN. THAT COST $180K?!?”

As business after small business shuts down here in Temecula (T-town), and homeowner after homeowner just walks away from the home they hoped would one leverage them into a higher tax bracket, Al Rattan’s favorite group of big spenders, the T-town city council, made one blacksmith’s Christmas bright. Budgeted at $180,000, the city council paid out the large sum for the ‘wall hanging’ that graces one side of the Overland Overpass. Long hailed as idiotic by the hoi polloi, the idea of hanging anything over the side of an overpass, illegal by the Highway Patrol but OK by the city, was always one that seemed to be half-baked at best. Kept off the front burner in the main stream (local) media, the grumbling which started when the scripture was first viewed, and only grew louder when the price tag was once again exposed to the public, who paid for what has lovingly been called a ‘turd salad’. When you think about the fact that on a good year, the TVIFF (Temecula Valley International Film and Music Festival) only gets $30K to host it’s gala week long affair and the city just spent $87K for a report about the Youth Master Plan (not the master plan itself), it’s easy to see just where Big AL is getting his ‘political bedfellows cut up T-town pie’ talk to tell the Rescue Temecula townsfolk. In all honesty, you would think that all that money could have been used to help keep some of the small business open during this recession as well as stock some food pantries for the fire and layoff victims instead of buying a blacksmith a bigger bass boat. Still one wonders if all those kind Murr-ville folk who drained Cuppy’s Coffee cup are aware that T-town city is poised to take a bite out of Murrieta by glomming up French Valley and their 48,000 home tax base and including it in the land the T-town city council is annexing. Bet you thought only the Quarry land was up for grabs. Forty-eight thousand homes with families is not ‘chicken feed’ for the T-town forces.