The new mayor is working hard. Thankfully he has taken a strong hand in trying to fix our mess at the city.
His highest priority is to help create more and higher paying jobs in El Paso. I don’t know anyone who does not support him on this.
Let’s say you are thinking of moving some jobs to El Paso
Unfortunately we are not as attractive as we could be. Consider these issues:
- We have the fourth highest tax rate of America’s 50 biggest cities
- We have the highest hotel occupancy tax in Texas
- The FBI has indicted 34 local public officials over public corruption issues in the last few years
- Our largest school district has had it’s elected board neutered and replaced by a state appointed one
- Our airport is about to lose the protection of the Wright amendment, thus losing flights
- We are not attractive enough as a city for our local refining success to keep El Paso as his company headquarters
- Our new city budget spends less across the board on quality of life issues and more on internal city departments
- We tore down a children’s museum, passed bond money to build a new one, but have no plans to build it
- We have mismanaged a downtown plan to the extent of spending more than twice what we were told it would cost
- Our city is suing the attorney general of Texas to deny the citizens the right to see communications relating to city business
- 26% of our citizens over the age of 25 had not completed high school in 2010
- Our economic development team is an abject failure
On the other hand
- We have great weather
- Our labor is cheap
- We are the safest major city in the country
- Our geographic position is advantageous to some businesses
- We have two good universities that have the potential to help our economy
The mayor cannot fix our problems in even a four year term. What he can do is take action to restore trust, clean up the mess, and set us in a positive direction.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Everyone has their own favorite theory of what makes a city vibrant. The city once paid Prof. Richard Florida to come here and tell us we needed more gay people because they’re urban hipsters. Now the city is telling us that a AAA team and ball park is the key to urban greatness. Well, it won’t hurt as long as it doesn’t bankrupt us.
I have a theory, too, but it is very simple. There are only two things you need for a vibrant city: college-educated people who also vote. That’s it; you just need smart people who care enough about their town to turn out and vote. The rest will take care of itself and quality of life will be an outcome of this, not something you have to back into every 10 years with a QoL bond issue because development did not pay for itself. I think it would help keep politicians honest, too, as an activist citizenry is less likely to be tolerant of a culture of corruption, such as we have here in El Paso.
I just looked at cities I consider “vibrant” on these two measurable criteria: 1) percentage of adults with 4-year degrees or greater; 2) percent of eligible voters who voted in the last election. For example, Seattle has 73% of people with a bachelors or better; El Paso is 27.3%. Seattle also has a lot of immigrants, mainly Asians and far fewer Hispanics. Depending on the election, voter turnout here is around 14% in non-presidential elections; Seattle recently had about 34% which the local press considered anemic.
It’s not a perfect measure (San Antonio has a lower voter turnout than we do) but it does seem to fit the data. Of course, Texas has about the lowest voter turnout in the US overall, so may it is better to look at other states.
If El Paso wants those high tech jobs rather that the “hot dog” jobs that are on offer now, it’s time to encourage our young people to start with a college education and citizenship. It will take a generation, too, and won’t happen overnight no matter how the AAA Aardvarks do next season.
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It would be easier to bring peace to the Middle East than to recruit high-tech companies to El Paso.
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I agree if by that you mean IT jobs. But I think that medical technology jobs, military technology, manufacturing technicians and the like are possible to develop here.
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No doubt, you’re correct about the importance of education and citizenship. However, one thing that keeps the college educated residents number down is the churn or exodus of those with college degrees and the fact that once local kids leave and get an education, most choose not to return for both financial and lifestyle reasons. The actual number of college educated persons will likely mirror the number of good jobs requiring college educated persons. If there are no jobs, there is no reason for a college educated person to be here. Plain and simple.
Even experienced, college-educated persons who might want to remain in El Paso would have trouble doing so because of the lack of career opportunities and jobs that pay decent wages. A baseball stadium, another shopping mall, and more bars downtown will not fix that. Exorbitant property taxes certainly will not help attract new businesses or encourage people to remain in El Paso. Great weather? No doubt, but that doesn’t pay the bills.
As Brutus points out, Western Refining moved its own corporate offices to Arizona. As Mountainstar has started to hire front office personnel, even low and mid level sales and marketing jobs like season ticket sales have been filled by persons from outside of El Paso. Those jobs were not even advertised locally. That suggests that the executives brought in by Foster and Hunt to run Mountainstar do not think much of El Pasoans. They do, however, want you to spend money at the ballpark.
Regardless whether you agree or disagree with Richard Florida’s creative cities concepts, to boil his theories down to a Gay message is unfair and misleading to Mr. Florida.
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It’s a chicken-or-egg thing. No disrespect to Prof Florida intended; it’s just that that message jumped out at me back then as kind of superficial when what is really meant by the statistic is that a community exhibits tolerance and openness. These are supposedly attractive to the blaze orange Mohawk types who will start the next Facebook.
You describe what systems theorists call a “wicked problem” in which everything is connected to everything. So where do you start.? That is why I focused on education and community involvement – two things you can get your arms around instead of everyone bickering at the personal level like they do here (see DK’s and Max’s blogs for examples).
I’ll have more to say about development and QoL here, too, now that I no longer work for the City.
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My suggestion would be Quality of Leadership.
If citizens and businesses cannot trust local government they will be reluctant to invest.
Brutus
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I second Brutus’s comment. We can’t have quality of life without quality of leadership. Unfortunately, things like corruption and failure of the school districts coupled with the way special interests have manipulated local government for their own self interests have caused many citizens to lose confidence in both government, business and the community as a whole.
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this is why being a mayor should be one job that needs a lot of qualifications
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“We have the highest hotel occupancy tax in Texas”
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Which fact apparently is not stopping attorney Jim Scherr from asking the City for another property tax abatement (he already has a 10 year exemption for the Doubletree) to build another hotel downtown.
How about our City Council grows a spine tells him that we have adopted a new tax abatement and zillionaire subsidy policy for these requests since the stadium brouhaha. It’s called “NO.” If it’s such a good deal, then pay for it yourself and stop sucking off the City teat and expecting us to make Swiss cheese out of our tax base so you can play monopoly! And while you’re at it, pick up a copy of Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom” for a refresher course on why this stuff never works in the long run.
Tax abatements. How many “upscale” new stores has Mr. Foster made good on at the Fountains? Best Buy doesn’t count:)
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Don’t forget the number of Foster’s Fountains stores that were poached from other shopping malls, which will ultimately damage those centers and the landlords who pay the full tax rate? The language for the Fountains tax abatement was crafted carefully to enable Foster to poach tenants and still get his tax breaks. Either the people at City Hall are stupid or they knowingly helped Foster at the expense of other commercial property owners. Or both. The old expression “Robbing Peter to pay Paul” is appropriate.
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There are reasons to do some tax abatement, e.g., to remove and build or remodel a blighted property. The Doubletree and to a lesser extent the Farah/Fountains qualify here. But I do not think that the tax abatement should be 100% or should be the deal-killer for the developer, i.e., their profit should not depend on a tax break and the property’s economics should stand on their own.
This hotel does not meet those criteria anymore than the stadium does. Plus, the City does not do well partnering with a business whose environment is more volatile; the business is likely to come back to renegotiate the terms as I believe the Doubletree has. The City should stick to its knitting – potholes and toilet flushes – as it is culturally unsuited to the ups and downs of the market.
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