Who is a ‘town employee’? (August 7, 2016)

This is with no intent to sell short personally the individual recently honored as town employee of the quarter. However, as this situation applies to the council at the Town of Apple Valley there is something very wrong in this picture.

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Source: Facebook

How is it that the company this employee works for cannot honor its own employees, or that its other employees do not submit their nominations to their own employer? Just because this company has been contracting with the town for 27 years should not mean they have somehow become town employees for which taxpayers must buy awards.

Even more interesting is the fact that this honored employee, per the town, tracked all the invoices for the Yucca Loma Bridge job, and yet the town cannot accurately identify the actual cost of the Yucca Loma Bridge, nor the origin and amount of each source of funding, and now we see they haven’t even correctly identified each of the contractors and their respective costs, as in addition to Security Paving, Parsons, and Dokken Engineering, we now learn there is a cost for Charles Abbott Associates as well.

If the Town’s records are to be believed, its attempts to identify the cost, funding sources, and contractors on the Yucca Loma Bridge has been like nailing Jello to a tree.

Obviously the town is more concerned with making multiple announcements of bridge completed except for on a bridge to nowhere, than making full public disclosure of the use of our public funds. PR antics carried out to boost the town’s image before an election and again dupe the public are their priority, like so many other projects that lack transparency.

— Leane Lee, Apple Valley

Published: Daily Press, August 16, 2016