The city council agenda for October 15, 2013 has another interesting ball park contract on it.
The item would authorize the city manager to sign a contract in the amount of $347,474 (plus another $50,000 if it is needed) for “Construction Testing and Inspection Services for El Paso Ballpark’’.
The backup material for council indicates that the funding source might be the baseball stadium construction accounts. That’s the one that has 50, no 64, no 72 million dollars allocated to it so far. Unfortunately the resolution contains this phrase that we see all too often:
“and that the City Manager be authorized to establish the funding sources and make any necessary budget transfers and execute any and all documents necessary for execution of this agreement.”
In other words the city manager can take the money from whatever account she wants to.
There are millions of dollars being spent for projects around the ball park that are not being allocated to the $72 million dollar number that we see now.
Lots of technical help
In Inside Job I pointed out that we already have a contract for an owner’s representative for $853,000, and a contract with an architect for $3,820,680. We have also paid for traffic studies and demolition studies. One would think that with these professionals working along side of our city financial experts that we could build a $38 million dollar ball park for $38 million dollars.
Not another penny
The engineer being hired signed his part of the agreement July 1, 2013. Why has it taken so long for this contract to come before council? Could it be that other bigger fish had to be fried and city staff wanted to let the dust settle?
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Hate to say I told you so, but I repeat part of the comment I posted yesterday:
“Borne by others” means additional costs to taxpayers which will be paid for outside of the ballpark budget so that they can say they stayed within budget. As we get deeper into this, watch for costs to be hidden and more and more dollars to be moved around.
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