The Town Meeting, Part II

In Part I, we talked about the town's plan to raise needed revenue for infrastructural repairs to the town's water system, resting heavily on the backs of the businesses, and to a lesser degree, the residential customers. The monthly water bill for the Riverside was arbitrarily raised from $150/month to $750/month. I say arbitrarily because it is obvious that those on the town council or whoever refigured this new rate have no concept of cash flow as it relates to running a business. That $600/month increase translates to an additional 103 room rentals per year – and that’s just to maintain our current levels of income vs. expenses. Multiply that by the 5, which is the total number of hotels in town who will also have similar rate increases, and that requires an additional 515 room nights spent in Hot Sulphur; this increase needing to occur in a depressed economy, where average bookings were down this year by 20%. So we know this isn’t possible; memo to town council – wishing and hoping don’t make it so! One of the town council members actually said “if the business owners aren’t smart enough to figure out how to come up with the extra revenue, they shouldn’t be business owners.” Smacks a little of Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” attitude, doesn’t it? I say to you, town council person, “if you’re smart enough to be on the town council, you’ll be smart enough to figure out where to come up with all of the lost tax revenue you’ll need to recover from the stupid business owners who’ve gone belly-up!”

So the first round of elevated water bills hit our mail boxes in mid-July, and the much discussed “what-ifs” became reality for all of the business owners, complete with an August 15th due date. (One of the other problems with the increase is that the water bills are quarterly, so you need to come up with three months worth of $750 all at once. That's a big check for water that the town pulls out of the adjacent Colorado River.) This spurred several of the business owners to band together for a meeting – not a town hall meeting, but a meeting of business owners-only to discuss what could be done to stop this municipal cash grab from all of those Hot Sulphur business’s million dollar war chests – yeah, right. I was informed that we were to meet on Wednesday night at 7:00PM at the Barking Dog Pub. Unlike the last town meeting I attended, where the participants had to stoke up on hooch at home before spending the next few hours at the HSS Town Hall, the meeting planners decided to skip that formality and just have the damn meeting in the town bar. Anybody yet see a potential problem with that? Let’s get a bunch of people together who are already fuming mad, then let’em pound down brews before and during the meeting, and then have a heated argument. That should make for a productive evening.

When we enter the Barking Dog for the meeting, there were only a few of the business owners present, and only two that I had previously met. There was one man whom I didn’t recognize holding court down at the end of the bar. He was a tall, slim fellow, made all the taller by his outlandishly conspicuous white cowboy hat – not a 10-gallon hat, but maybe a 7.5 gallon hat. He wore a grey tank top, the armpit areas of which were truncated with dark sweat stains. He was loudly waving his arms about as if he were below deck in a rolling sea swatting at…..…..…wait a minute, it was Ron, the drunken plumber who tried unsuccessfully to unclog our pipes on New Year’s night. What in the hell was he doing here?? What the hell kind of a business does he own?? I didn’t know being the official Hot Sulphur Springs “Town Drunk” qualified someone as a business owner. Can “Town Drunk” be some sort of a new franchise opportunity I’m not aware of? (And let me tell you something; earning the moniker of ‘Town Drunk of HSS’ is no easy feat, as the competition is ferocious!) Ron was at the meeting not because he was a business owner; he was at the meeting because he lives at the bar, and the meeting was at the bar. WHY IN THE HELL DID WE HAVE THE MEETING AT THE BAR?? (Maybe that town council member was right to question the intelligence of the local business owners after all.)

At about 7:30, when all of the owners arrived, we ordered one more round for the discussion and moved from the bar to a large table to begin the meeting. Including Cowboy Hiccup, there were 11 participants at the table, representing three of the five hotels, owners of most of the towns’ apartment units and the owner of the Barking Dog. The meeting started badly, as Ron the plumber was dominating the conversation with inane drunken babble about how he personally ran the water treatment plant for 20 years and how he was the town’s master plumber and everything is this town is screwed up and blah blah blah blah blah. After about five minutes of this, the meeting organizer asked that we limit our responses to two minutes, and then suggested that we appoint a ‘Sergeant at Arms’ in the event that participants got out of order. How many informal meetings have you attended where the first order of business was to appoint a ‘Sergeant at Arms’?

We went around the table, with everyone getting their two minutes to state their issues, offer solutions, ask questions, etc.; except everyone’s two minute allotment turned into five minutes as the Popped Plumber kept interrupting with his nonsensical blather, which would then bring the Sergeant at Arms around the table to shake a finger in his face and threaten to throw him out – several times he actually grabbed Ron in a bear hug and tried to pull him out of his chair. Again I ask, ever seen this sort of thing in one of your neighborhood meetings? But then I don’t suppose you have your meetings in a bar.

One of the apartment owners, a lovable old curmudgeon named Lou, barked so loudly at Ron to shut up that he was actually able to get him to shut up and make the two most sharply perceptive points of the evening; point one being that they should no longer officially refer to the town of HSS as the ‘county seat of Grand County’, rather, it should henceforth be known as the ‘toilet seat of Grand County’. His second point, the highlight of the evening, involved the importance of water conservation in this water starved area, and suggested a citizens awareness campaign with a slogan of “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down!”

It was at this point, after picking ourselves up off the floor, that Julie and I excused ourselves from the proceedings and headed back to The Riverside. The end result of the group meeting was a decision to show a united front as business owners and write a formal letter to the town, demanding to know specifics on forthcoming stimulus money, educating the council as to the catastrophic end this town will come to – on their watch - if they run all of the businesses off, and finally, a strong suggestion that all future town hall meetings be held at the Barking Dog and Ron the Plumber be installed on the town council as it’s voice of reason. He couldn’t do any worse.