A recent look at the El Paso Community College web site shows something else getting better.
Their agenda postings now include backup materials that help explain the nature of the item on the agenda.
Thank you El Paso Community College!
Something got better
Brutus
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Posted by Brutus
If things continue the way they are headed now we will soon have a new city manager.
We have witnessed many problems with city staff over the past few years. The tearing down of city hall and building of the ball park have been supported by wildly misleading financial projections, backroom discussions that we cannot get the city to divulge through open records requests, and parliamentary tricks from our city attorney.
The facts will come out eventually.
A smart new city manager will distance himself from these acts. Replacing the administrators that have helped perpetrate the problems will make the new city manager look like part of our solution.
Replacing the city attorney is not one of the city manager’s prerogatives. Making life miserable for the city attorney is however.
A new broom sweeps clean. I predict that we will see many of the senior staff at the city leaving soon.
We deserve better
Brutus
20 Comments | Ball park, City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
The El Paso city council agenda for May 20, 2014 is out.
Item 1 on the regular agenda proposes the signing of a contract with a new city manager. Some details are:
Seems pretty reasonable to me.
Item 2 on the regular agenda would make Sean McGlynn interim city manager from May 21, 2014 to June 23, 2014, the day Mr. Gonzalez assumes his duties.
Long live the king.
Brutus
21 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
Our local governments (particularly the city) have unfortunately been buying from buy boards instead of using competitive bidding.
Many of the buy board evaluations are little more than “beauty contests”. Competitive pricing is frequently a minor component in the evaluation criterion if at all. Some contracts are awarded because a seller offers X% discount off a manufacturer’s list price. The fact that another manufacturer may have a lower list price is not part of the consideration.
While buying through a buy board allows an institution to “pick their favorite vendor”, the purchase seldom produces the best economic result.
Market conditions change and issuing a real bid for a product or a request for proposals for a service often can provide better economic and performance results than buying from a buy board.
The problem with bidding is that local governments have to do their jobs and that is too often an inconvenience to them.
Here in El Paso much of the remodeling of the various city hall buildings was done through buy board purchases and was not bid. Schools in Houston benefited to the tune of 4% of the money that we spent since that was the fee that the buy board charged the vendor for the privilege of being listed on the board. This happened because the city did not want to take the time to develop specifications and take the projects out to bid. They were in a hurry to get out of the old city hall.
Now it seems that the Texas legislature is becoming aware of some of the problems with buy boards. This article talks about some of them, including the fact that vendors were allowed to write their own bid specifications.
For those readers that are new to this blog you can enter “buy board” in the search window on the right side of this page to see some of the articles that have been written about in the past.
They tell a story of waste, mismanagement, favoritism, and just plain unfairness.
We deserve better
Brutus
2 Comments | City government, County Government, Purchasing, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
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.
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.
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
7 Comments | City government, Open Government, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
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