City Council Meals Have Changed

My how times change, and so do spending habits of the City Council when the Light of Shame was cast on them back in 2010 over the food purchases for council meetings!

Ian McCann did a story back in February of 2010 about the meals, http://richardsonblog.dallasnews.com/2010/02/council-meeting-catering-bill.html/. The Council meals totaled about $30,000. It came to an average price of about $34 a plate.

Today the paperwork was picked up for the meals for 2013 and 2014. Anybody care to take a guess at what they showed?

For 2013, money spent on council meals totaled $14,695.08 with an average plate price of $16.59 with 886 meals served.  That is less than one half of what the Keffler/Slagel administration had for the normal.

For 2014, money spent on council meals totaled $11,415.95 with the average plate costing $15.88 and total plates served 719.

Here are the places and amounts: Council Dinners for 2013 and 2014.pdf

Maybe in the future they can knock that price down another 50%. You can get a pretty decent meal for less than $8.00, especially if you brown bag it.

Looking through the invoices, a few funny things did show up. For the 8/25/2014 council meeting, they ordered dinner for 20 people. That is about average, 20 meals a night. The item that got my attention was the number of dessert and the types of desserts. For those 20 people, 40 desserts were ordered.

Given Mark Solomon’s comments published in the paper about his dessert, if you were to take a guess at what the dessert was, and guessed it had to do with strawberries, you would be right, 40 Assorted Chocolate Dipped Strawberries. The Cost, $74. And the taste, priceless.  Or at least I would bet that is what Mark thought about them.

 

It is worth noting that the city manager and the mayor from 2009, are gone. Maybe the new guy and gal in those positions are having some positive effect. I would certainly like to think so.

When the Light of Shame started having effect, I don’t know. But I am glad it finally did.