How are we doing with the Hotel Occupancy Tax (HOT) collections that are to be used to pay for the bonds that we have issued to build the ball park?
2 percent growth
On June 26, 2012 the city’s chief financial officer made a presentation to city council that assumed a 2% growth per year in HOT revenue.
I’ll see your two and raise you to three
Then on October 29, 2012 the city’s chief financial officer made another presentation to city council that assumed a 3% growth.
Remember that at that time the ball park was still supposed to be a $50 million dollar facility. The first $10 million over-run did not become public until May, 2013.
Bad gamble
The numbers for the first six months of 2013 show the HOT revenue down almost 1% from 2012.
HOT revenues have declined, not increased 2% much less the 3% she presented. The city will probably have to make up the shortfall with general fund revenues which primarily come from sales taxes.
I’ll see your three and raise you to 4.3
The 2014 city budget anticipates a raise in sales tax revenue of 4.3%.
The state has only posted the numbers for January through March at this point.
Those numbers show a 2.5% increase, not the 4.3% that the city needed to balance the budget before the HOT shortfall.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
I’m sure glad you picked the gambling topic and theme today. You must have been reading my mind.
Today’s EP Times was entitled “BikeShare good gamble by council”.
Note the phrase “good gamble”.
It went on to say that “City Council is taking a gamble we think is worth a try. It will fund 25 percent of an overall $400,000 pilot BikeShare Program in Downtown and at the University of Texas at El Paso. UTEP will invest $24,000 and the remaining $276,000 will come from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s Rider 8 Fund.”
The word “gamble” tends to be thrown around a lot by our city management and its supporters like the local media. Wilson recently used that word in an interview she did regarding the ballpark.
It’s easy to gamble and take risks when you’re playing (intentional choice of words) with other peoples’ money and when you will not be held accountable or personally suffer the consequences of the a lost bet you made or recommended. That goes for both the Times, which has no skin in the game, and for people like Wilson, who place bets and then quit and leave El Paso with the money they made off the backs of taxpayers.
I am a strong supporter of bikes, but not this program. It’s absurd. Neither the media nor the city have discussed the cost per bike and the unfortunate but real risk that these bikes will be stolen. It’s almost as though the city wanted to spend this money just because it could get additional money from other sources to help with the program.
The other thing that makes no sense is that we plan to soon have lots of pedestrians strolling around downtown, yet council has made it permissible for people to ride bikes on sidewalks. That’s an accident waiting to happen, especially in such a litigious community. If I get hit, the first person I am going to sue will not be the person on the free bike. I’m going to sue the city who owns the bike and was negligent in allowing them to be on the sidewalk.
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Good information. You’re right, the statistics are not encouraging. Also, City Council keeps giving hotels incentives that will decrease the HOT more. The new hotel to be built near the airport won’t pay HOT for 5 or more years. Revenues down, expenses up. That’s what I call burning the candle at both ends.
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It looks to me like City management and more specifically the CFO make up numbers on the front end to support and justify their spending agendas and they later adjust certain numbers to try to make things balance when their earlier assumptions are proven to have be totally wrong. As others have pointed out, there are no consequences for poor performance of city staff. The one thing that doesn’t change is that they get to keep their jobs and they get their annual pay increases, regardless of their failures.
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Nothing like an easy bike ride when it’s 105 degrees. It might work in Portland.
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