Now that the newly proposed city budget is out we can take a deeper look at one of our former chief financial officer’s whoppers.
When she went before city council to seek approval for $45 million to build a facility for the rental car companies at the airport she told us that we would see a 1% increase in the customer facility charge each year, thereby paying for the facility.
The customer facility charge is a fee that people who rent cars at the airport pay. In addition to having the highest hotel occupancy tax that the state allows, we nick visitors with other fees too. Economists probably would not say that those fees are conducive to attracting visitors.
Actually
The proposed city budget projects the customer facility charge revenue to fall from a 2014 budget number of $3,450,000 to $3,300,000.
That is a $150,000 drop. According to the proposed budget that amounts to a 4.35% decline.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
When city hall and the vested interests decide to build something, e.g., trolleys, stadium, rental car facility, and they need a business case for it, do you think anyone in the bureaucracy is going to say that it won’t work? Martin calls this collective behavior the “horde.” The next thing you get is editorials in the Times hyping the idea, too.We really need to cultivate a culture of financial scepticism in our government toward these big ideas and seek out expert 3rd party expertise to vet them. It would be worth the small cost compared to the huge capital expense and ongoing costs.
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These people just make up the numbers as they go to justify their own agendas. They’re just as dishonest as the Russians, who have been trying to convince their citizens that the downed Malaysian airplane was filled with corpses before it took off.
Don’t worry about airport traffic. Help is on the way. Sanders Wingo will soon have that $240,000 video commercial to remind people that the El Paso airport is a way to get to El Paso. Once that money is spent and they spend more money to run the commercial, people will soon be flocking here. Or so we’re told.
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Wasn’t that item removed from the city council agenda?
Brutus
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I don’t know. If so, I guess you do need to worry.
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May I suggest that you refrain from gratuitous insults to other nations, such as “the Russians,” particularly as this claim that a civilian airliner that was shot down actually was filled with corpses was first aired when the US Navy shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in 1988.
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:- )
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Fuzzy math at work again. How about today’s story on needing to raise parking meter rates AGAIN so we can pay off the Plaza loan which I’m sure had fuzzy math plans to be paid off….but now we stick it to the people we’re trying to attract downtown AGAIN! Is there no end to trying to come up with ways to pay off these loans.
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Let me guess. They need to raise the rates on the meters partly to offset the deal they made some time back in which they gave a bunch of prime parking spaces to some very special people who wanted those spots for use exclusively by their downtown businesses.
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