This writing by the Times columnist (maybe satarist is a better term) poked fun at the people concerned about the health risks involved in felling the Asarco stacks. I guess that he has no responsibilities regarding reporting. His efforts seem to be more oriented toward influencing public opinion than toward reporting. Maybe that is his job. I haven’t figured that out.
On the other hand this article by a Times reporter seems to try to present facts about the precautions that are being taken with the city hall demolition. This quote was attributed to the city engineer: “He added that there are minimal levels of lead in the building, but that the amount is safe and legal for disposal”.
I guess the word “minimal” here has to be interpreted in light of the way the city engineer speaks. In There They Go Again we learned about how the city engineer recommended that city council award a contract for “minor work” and then three months later used that same contract to perform $694,000 of work on the same city hall that will soon be torn down. The post even provides a link to a video showing the city engineer assuring council that the contract would only be used for minor work. When asked about the term “minor” he openly muses about the wonderful ambiguity of the term. If it is unfair to call him a liar we should at least know how he likes to equivocate.
Is it safe?
I am writing strictly from memory here and have not found any documents to susbstantiate my recollections. I might be mistaken.
When they built the
city hall about a quarter of the bottom floor housed the city 911 center. This was before E911 and the formation of the 911 district. That portion of the bottom floor was not below ground but was at the level of the parking lot. The designers at the time (the 1970’s) were concerned about nuclear activity and saw to it that the 911 portion of the building was incased in lead, thick lead.
Does the lead exist? Would it be considered minimal? Maybe the environmental people will not catch this. Maybe it will be safe.
The Times
I don’t quarrel with the reporter not catching this. Maybe I am wrong and there is nothing to catch. The individuals involved probably have no way of knowin.
But what if I am right? The world will not end but we could have a costly problem on our hands.
What I would hope for though is for the Times to do a more balanced job instead of being the propaganda organ for the city.
Muckraker
elpasospeak 
We now know that City management and certain council members were planning the ballpark and negotiating with Mountainstar behind the scenes for a long, long time before it was actually presented to the public and voted on by City Council. Given that reality, it seems to me that a lot of unnecessary money was spent on the city hall we’re about to destroy and those expenditures were advocated by those who knew full well the building was likely to soon be destroyed. Why would they do that? It would be interesting to research which firms benefited from these unnecessary expenditures. At minimum, this once again validates the belief that our city managers and leaders are not good stewards of tax dollars.
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It is interesting to note that the EP Times has not had any in-depth investigative reporting about the baseball stadium – City Hall scandal. It couldn’t be that the Times had a building to sell and they put a gag order on their reporters……..after all, the City of El Paso was the most likely buyer, and the Times didn’t want to jeopardize the sale by one of their reporters uncovering juicy details. After all, business is business, and what the citizens of El Paso don’t know will not hurt ’em (well, not physically….just financially). Seems to me that the corruption seen in the greater El Paso area has rubbed off on the EP Times as well!
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The $694,000+ that Basic IDIQ got as part of their $4M on-call contract was to renovate the El Paso Times Building. Not the current city hall. This post wasn’t clear on what exactly they were referring to – old city hall or new city hall. EP Contractors are none to happy about this Basic IDIQ contract and it was done through a Buy Board.
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Maybe the ASARCO dropping won’t turn out like this… http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/demolition-team-finally-topples-giant-175-foot-smokestack-171016102.html
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