Our mayor has decided that he should not review the city manager’s performance because the media has become aware of the process.
Let me try one more time. Mr. mayor, everything the city government does should be public.
Yes details about individual’s lives are exempted from disclosure by state law. The law does a great job protecting the privacy of individuals.
A performance review is subject to disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act.
The mayor, city council, and the city manager seem to have trouble with this fact.
If the mayor had said that the new mayor should handle the review and left it at that, we would have seen some wisdom that we have not seen during this administration.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Yet, the Mayor has freely shared his personal debt and financial difficulties with us in hopes that we will feel his pain and pony up some of our own hard-earned dollars to help pay the legal bills he ran up while disregarding the public’s vote on an issue.
The Mayor, council members and City management want to pick and choose when they will use and manipulate the media. And as you say, they want selective sharing of information, not freedom of information.
Cook blamed this review process gone bad on a leak by a council member, but I don’t recall seeing the name of the council member. Gee, if he thinks we have an elected official acting inappropriately, don’t we deserve to know who that is?
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Oh come on…..Emma and Eddie leaked it! There is a reporter that gets unfettered access to these two people and papers sitting on their desk! OMG! Get a clue people. She had a review – it was very public – nothing else needs to happen. Maybe in the last days of this Mayor’s miserable 8 years as a lackluster leader he finally has some compassion.
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Thanks. You’re right. I didn’t have a clue. If Cook really thought the leak was inappropriate, however, he should have called them out on it.
Now how about identifying the reporter who has “unfettered access”. But your comment makes me wonder: why are we more concerned about a reporter having “unfettered access” than we are about special interests having unfettered access during decision making processes? That’s not meant as a challenge to you, MEK. I do appreciate your perspective.
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its common knowledge who the reporter is. Cook has no balls – he won’t call out the “leakers” at city hall.
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I would suggest that business man Oscar Lesser never pay The El Paso Times another cent in advertising dollars.
It might be construed as conflict of interest.
Now that said is there any conflict of interest with the City of El Paso Texas renting the Newspaper Printing Corporations office?
Did anyone from the media ask Steve Ortega whose brilliant idea it is to lease Union depot to Texas Tech Architectural School how they plan on getting 500 people in to Union Depot for class and who is paying the upkeep of the building and what did it cost us to move Mass transit to another location? Is it a dollar a year for twenty five years with an option to renew two more times? Oh well at least you didn’t tear it down.
While we are discussing this we gave Sun Metro away but kick out The Train Museum.
City Manager wants a 5% raise after a Ten Million dollar mistake and the valley burns up while City manager gets gets a Public Works award.
All I can say you will get more of the same if you do not go out and vote.
One is a businessman who earned his money the other is supported by business interests. Your choice.
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The city isn’t renting the Times building. They bought it. Catch up with the news – old news from November 2012. Normally when the city leases a building for $1 to some non profit entity they are responsible for repairs and maintenance. Not the city. City staff asked council to delete the $10M request. Vote was 5-3 to delete the items. No change – $50M for ballpark.
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It’s unfortunate that the Texas Tech leases of both the Fall Mansion and the Union Depot have not received more scrutiny. City council and management were upset that the railroad museum dared to take the liberty of using some extra vacant space for educational displays, yet they themselves gave away much of the building for nearly nearly a century for $75. These decisions carry high price tags, but those prices are being paid by us, not those benefiting directly.
Based on today’s editorial, it seems that the $10 million overage on the ballpark costs might have been a wake-up call for the EP Times. It will be interesting to see if they quickly dig deeper. They could answer at least one of the questions raised in today’s editorial simply by looking at their previous coverage of the ballpark plans.
On October 7th of last year, the Times reported that “the development agreement between the city and MountainStar” [requires] among other things “20 to 30 luxury suites; 250 to 300 club seats”. These luxury suites and the club seats are precisely what Alan Shubert said last week that they need $5 million in new money to cover. If you look at the early architectural renderings, it’s also quite obvious that were plans for suites and a private club, which is where “club seats” are located.
Shubert said in October that “The city and the ownership group are looking to the experts, those with very specific baseball experience and strong reputations for this project. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever done, but these experts have done it all under a number of circumstances.”
Can Shubert blame his experts for inaccurate cost estimates? Of course not. He knew the requirements all along. If he does try to blame them, he needs to explain why part of the $10 mil overage is earmarked to pay these same experts for for even more services.
Unfortunately, we have no real mechanism for holding the mayor, city council, and management accountable for these lies in a timely fashion. If our only recourse is elections, we run the risk of being like the Titanic. We’ll sink before help arrives. Meanwhile, those who were designed and steered the ship will fly out on their private jets to their second or third homes.
This isn’t about the ballpark. It’s about a lack of truthfulness. Shubert should be fired immediately.
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