According to the El Paso Times our city council has met and decided to offer the job of city manager to the fellow from Irving.
It seems like he will fit right in over there since, as the Times has written, he may have had “ethical lapses”.
The Times does a great job of pointing out that city council met in executive session to discuss the candidates. They then came back into regular session and adjourned without action.
At a press conference later in the day the city announced that it had directed their search firm to negotiate with the candidate.
Council cannot vote in executive session. Evidently they did.
Enabler
Our city attorney has once again abandoned her responsibility to the citizens and is condoning what council has done. The Times wrote:
City Attorney Sylvia Borunda Firth argued that negotiations can begin behind closed doors as part of the deliberation process and are not considered a final action. If negotiations are successful in this case, she said, the proposed contract will be up for council vote. The public vote to accept or reject the agreement would be the final action, she said.
High road
Our city attorney seems to consider the citizens to be her opponent. She watches council violate their own rules as well as state rules regularly without stepping in. Her trivializing of mistakes as “Scrivener” errors seems to me to be intellectually dishonest.
As far as open records are concerned, we all know her record.
Our elected officials can get away with many types of legal violations as long as they believe that their attorney has said that what they are doing is legal even if it is not.
I hope that when we change city attorneys we will get one who helps council to do the right thing.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
None of this seemed to bother then when they secretly and without a prior notice brought the stadium deal to the CC as a done deal.
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What’s particularly galling is that there is no reason that this decision could not have been made in public. Candidate Leeser promised greater transparency. I guess that was just a car salesman’s pitch.
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And in other business, the council voted to hire a new third-party audit firm to look at all of the income and expenditures of the city, including those related to the new ballpark. Ann Morgan Lilly voted against it and City Rep. Cortney Niland conveniently left the meeting at the time of the vote. I will take Lilly’s opposition and Niland’s refusal to vote as an indication that the auditor needs to start in their offices and with their pet projects.
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look, leeser wants the one with less el paso baggage and one that can be paid less because of his problems elsewhere(Gonzalez). he also wants one that will sign a lower year contract because we may vote to go back to a strong mayor government in a year or so anyway. i was told our two local candidates wanted what wilson had and that nots gonna happen. at least it shouldnt and both of them have ties to wilson. the 2 out of towners were basically a no brainer.
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OK, so what does any of that have to do with the shady way in which council handled the process this week? Why all the secrecy?
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maybe they didnt want those reasons coming out so Gonzalez wouldnt turn it down.
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They could have had all the discussion in private, and just brought it out of the closet for the vote.
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