One Million Hits

The Paper of South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley's latest and greatest alternative weekly (and a publication I freelance for), received the one-millionth hit on its website today.

This comes on the heels of The Paper's political cartoon lampooning McAllen's mayor and the city commission over their refusal to negotiate with the police union. That image by cartoonist Ramon Ramirez ran on the cover of last week's issue.

The drawing proved extremely popular (at least outside City Hall), prompting television Channel 4 to do a news story on the cartoon and KURV 710 Talk Radio to run a People Poll (scroll down) asking if the 'toon upset listeners (78 percent said no).

Word is getting out that there's a new source of information in town. Congrats to the folks at The Paper of South Texas!

IMAS Audit

The International Museum of Art & Science passed recent audits, but The Monitor's Marc Gellar reports that it's not all roses and sunshine at the McAllen facility.

According to the story in the Sunday paper, IMAS has climbed out of its hole two years after a 2004 city audit revealed cash-flow problems, misuse of museum property, and other problems. However, the audit also said "management needs to pay more attention to certain cash accounts to ensure the funds are used properly and in a timely manner." Furthermore,

The auditor also noted that inventory records didn’t match up with the general ledger; the museum didn’t have a written purchasing policy; some purchase orders weren’t prepared in a timely manner or didn’t have authorized signatures; and electronic membership records didn’t match up with manually recorded membership records.

This finding comes as IMAS wants the city of McAllen to bump its contribution to the museum by $100 grand, to about $772,000.

The story also mentions the huge amount of turnover at the museum. For an insider's perspective on what's happening at IMAS, check out the blog At The Museum, especially the comments in this post, which points out that IMAS doesn't even offer any art classes or programs.

Current and former museum employees and volunteers, what do you think of this newspaper article?