Watching the pennies

It's comforting to know that while I'm on vacation, there are people like Tracy Warner keeping an eagle eye on how my tax dollars are being spent:

The City Council's inclination to block Mayor Tom Henry's proposals first and ask about them later apparently cost city taxpayers about $11,000.

As Benjamin Lanka reported Saturday, that's the city's estimate for starting Renaissance Square renovations two weeks later than scheduled. The council's usual suspects held up the contract after suggesting the city was being so irresponsible in not accepting the lowest bid with alternatives for renovating the building.

Let's recap. The city borrowed $17.2 million to buy Renaissance Square and refurbish that building and the City-County Building, a wasteful extravagance Tracy was perfectly happy with. But damn those "usual suspects" (i.e. council Republicans and that one rogue Democrat who refuses to toe the line) for wasting $11,000.

That $11,000, by the way, is about 15 percent of the $72,000 the city is going to pay a "social media consultant" in order to "develop a strategy for how to best use social media tools to communicate with residents." See that K2-addled teen across the street? He Tweets. His aunt blogs, and his grandmother has a Facebook account. The city has to spend $72,000 to get its PR efforts in the social media flow? Not one single person in the administration can figure it out?