What were the voters saying?
Was it about gay rights?
Was it about city council ignoring the results of an election?
Was it about downtown, destroying city hall, the ball park?
My take is that it was about competence and honesty. All in all, El Pasoans are a pretty tolerant bunch. We tend to live our own lives and pay little attention to the temporary tempests that happen here.
What we have witnessed from the city for the past few years got our attention though. Tearing down city hall and building a baseball stadium with poor planning is costing us a lot of unnecessary money. The city chief financial officer told us that it would cost us $33 million to move into new city facilities. We now know that the number is over $70 million and we are still learning about more.
The city manager admitted in public that the true cost of the stadium won’t be known until we finish building it. If the project had been handled in a measured manner instead of the “hurry up, we have an emergency” way it was handled, we could have known — down to the penny. I would have voted for a well planned ball park.
The voters approved $470 million of quality of life bonds last November. The city hall move and the ball park showed the citizens that the team down at city hall could not or would not manage our money with respect.
It looks to me like they chose the mayor based upon his ability to manage money and his promise of honesty and transparency. My take on the city council election is that the voters wanted to get away from the rubber stamping mentality seen on council. The voters rejected all of the candidates the Times endorsed for election to city office. The runaway train must be controlled.
We have committed to spend almost a billion dollars recently. I think the voters want to get their money’s worth.
In a word, this was about stewardship.
Eternal vigilance is the cost of liberty
Cato
elpasospeak 
Honesty and transparency were definitely the issue. The real damage to the ballpark process was caused by Rick Horrow, a consultant hired by the Paso Del Norte Group to advise on the ballpark and bond projects. As Mayor Cook has indicated in his interviews in recent weeks, local leaders led by Mountainstar principals and our city manager followed the playbook of Horrow, who advised them to make this a secretive process and not let the public know what was really going on.
Unfortunately, when you try to keep secrets, you end up misleading people and being blatantly dishonest about things. One lie leads to another and pretty soon things are out of control, especially when you have multiple people, including politicians, involved. In
In Horrow’s way of doing business, the end justifies the means. To reprise a line used by our city manager recently, I guess we won’t know until we get to the end. Horrow’s advice, however, ultimately cost a number of folks their positions and their credibility.
Mountainstar has its ballpark. Rick Horrow made a nice big fee. Joyce Wilson is probably moving on. Steve Ortega says he is going on vacation. The rest of us are working.
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