The November 12, 2013 city council meeting had another downtown give away item on it.
As part of the renaissance of downtown the city decided to move Sun Metro out of the Union Depot train station and lease the depot to Texas Tech for one dollar a year for up to 75 years. Texas Tech will use the depot to house their El Paso branch of their school of architecture.
Having a school of architecture in El Paso seems to me like a good thing. Unfortunately El Paso’s tax payers will have to pay for it when there is a university system already charged with that responsibility.
The agenda item proposed adding over $202,000 dollars to an architectural contract for design services to add 6,000 square feet of office space to the new facility that we are building to house Sun Metro. About $16,000 of the addition was for landscaping design. If that is correct we are spending $186,000 dollars to design 6,000 square feet of office space as an addition to a building that was already designed. That comes to about $31 per square foot to design add-on space to an existing building.
Construction costs extra
That of course does not include the cost of building out the space. I guess we will learn about that bill later. No hurry, we have already committed to the move. Costs can’t be considered now.
Because of the giveaway
The backup material for the agenda item has this explanation:
Due to the relocation of Sun Metro staff from the Union Depot, Sun Metro has requested to house staff at the Operations Building and an Administration Building Addition instead of leasing office space. This will allow them to serve customers more cost-effectively.
Sensible
Evidently someone over at Sun Metro has some common sense. They have figured out that having their administrative staff in the “Administration Operations & Maintenance Facility” would be a good idea.
Why did the original design not include the administrative staff being in the administration building?
Is this another example of city staff delivering the bad news to us in multiple steps?
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
If serving people were important to the City, they would be open 5 days a week.
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I agree 100%. Taxpayers have to work more than 5 days a week to be able to keep up with federal, state and city taxes. Unfortunately, after all that hard work our needs do not matter but our money better be collected on time.
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