Something good happened in yesterday’s city council meeting.
A city representative had placed an item on the agenda that would allow inquiry and action relative to the city’s lawsuit against the Texas attorney general. I have written about the issue before with Help stop the lawsuit being the most recent post.
The mayor started the conversation by explaining that a few weeks ago he had asked the city attorney to look into discontinuing the lawsuit. Council and the city attorney participated in the conversation after his introduction.
The city attorney informed council that the total legal bill for the city action so far was about $7,000. That means that very little had actually been done and confirms the wide-spread belief that the city lawsuit was primarily designed to delay the release of the emails in question.
Council ended up instructing the city attorney to bring the matter to a close and report back to the council within three weeks. They did this after adjourning into executive session to answer one question that a city representative had. Council stayed in executive session for quite some time.
To me that suggests that there will be some consequences of the release of the emails and that the city attorney was trying to work through the issues with council. Stay tuned for the fireworks.
Some council members spoke about how they thought the city lawsuit was the wrong thing to do. Others who were on council and voted to try to suppress the emails through the lawsuit remained mostly silent.
The truth will start coming out when the public gets to see the documents.
The new mayor and council have done a good thing here.
We are getting better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
I’m sure that Joyce Wilson and council member “holdovers” from the last city council are not eager for release of those emails. Like Brutus said, it will be interesting for the fireworks to begin. El Pasoans deserve to finally have transparency with what transpired during the last administration. As taxpayers, we deserve to know how our tax money is being spent. I suspect we will be deeply angered by the behind-the-scenes deals cut by that administration. The baseball stadium/city hall issue will be in the limelight, but I am also wanting to know more about the EPISD offices being ousted to make room for the new hotel and associated shops which are destined for the airport area. If that move is costing taxpayers an additional $40 million, we need to know who was involved in those negotiations. Our elected officials should be working for the taxpayers of El Paso, and the last administration has put our fine city at one of the highest “debt per capita” rates in the state.
Yes, we do deserve better!
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Desertratjim: I checked Susan Combs’ fine website created to hold cities’ feet to the fire and rank them by debt per capita: http://www.texastransparency.org/yourmoney/localdebt/cities/
El Paso is ranked 639 out of 818 towns and cities in terms of debt per capita. Definitely not one of the hightest.
Do you have an updated ranking? thx
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$7000 legal expenditures doesn’t sound right. Hasn’t the city spent something like $1 million or $2 million on just legal fees pertaining to the other lawsuits like those relating to the ballpark and the demolition of city hall?
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