Raul Godinez is getting ready to raise your water rates again!
Have you enjoyed watching your water bills in Santa Ana get higher and higher? Well prepare yourself. Public Works Director Raul Godinez wants to raise your water rates again.
I spent some time the other day with a City Hall insider and got an earful about what is really going on at the Santa Ana Public Works Department, since Godinez came to town.
Like most city agencies, the Public Works Department has had to let go a lot of people. Senior operators and techs are retiring and not being replaced.
Godinez is trying to use computers to regulate water pressure at night, instead of hiring nighttime operators. The result? All those damaged water mains. What is damaging them isn’t corrosion, but rather water pressure spikes. The computers cannot adjust the pressure the way humans do. So sometimes the water pressure zooms up and some of the pipes cannot take it.
City administrators privately are thrilled about the damaged water mains because they can tell residents that they need to raise water rates in order to pay to fix the system. But the problem is one they created! And the money isn’t going to be used to fix anything.
What Godinez and City Manager Dave Ream have been doing is transferring water money to the general fund, and to other agency budgets. If they have to open up a street to put in a new water main, they transfer money from the water budget to the road repair budget, for example.
Understand this, there is NO relationship between our constant water rate increases and actual investments in our water system. The extra money is being siphoned off!
Ream and company know they can get away with this because Santa Ana residents will take it. Try this crap in Irvine and you will have a war on your hands!
Godinez is now focusing on brainwashing our residents. He is using the City of Santa Ana’s online Citizen Observer program to send out propaganda about his department. This program was supposed to be used to send email notices to residents about crime in the city. Click here to see how Godinez is now using this system to promote his road repairs – which in many cases continue to be slurry, not real fixes.
And watch out. Godinez was brought here to replace Dave Ream when Ream finally retires. Godinez is smart. He is going to be hoodwinking us for years if we don’t wake up now!
Santa Ana residents are runing out of time to fight back…
