Maybe some of our readers can help clarify this situation.
Our local refinery stepped in at city council to express their disapproval of council raising the franchise fee that the electric company is charged.
In an earlier post I speculated that the refinery might be concerned about a tax that would be passed on to them, since they are a large electricity user, when any out of town competitor would not have to pay the fee if they used a different electricity supplier.
What I am not clear on is where the gasoline in El Paso comes from. I have been under the impression that all of our gasoline comes from our local refinery. Now I have learned that the 7-11’s in town use gasoline from Alon which comes from out of town. I might be wrong on this and would appreciate being set straight.
If it is true that the Alon gasoline comes from out of town then we can see that an increase in the franchise tax paid by our electric company would put our local refinery at a competitive disadvantage .
Our city representative that proposed the increase in the electric company franchise fee evidently got the word that her proposal would hurt the profits of the refinery. Being sensitive to the harm that would be done to this local business she changed her position and voted to impose a fee on all of the other businesses in El Paso.
Both the proposed increase in the franchise fee and the new water utility fee to businesses are attempts to deceive the public. They are taxes. By imposing the water utility fee on businesses city council was able to avoid increasing our property taxes even more than they are doing.
In this case the big company was able to avoid having extra costs imposed on them while the individual small businesses in El Paso got the bill.
Our city representative showed were her allegiance is.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
What is worse is that the 7-11 where you buy Alon gas (their refinery is in Big Spring) will have to pay that fee, so that gasoline will still cost us more! How can Council not see that their imposition of these fees are way too selective in who they are targeting? I still say more effort needed to be made to cut their out of control spending before new taxes are imposed!
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Valero gas is pumped in.
Howdys is western refining as are other stations.
7-11 or what ever it calls itself. I cant say where their fuel comes from
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Ive seen Western’s trucks pumping gas into some of the Chevrons and I believe those particular Chevron stations are either owned or ran by the Cardwell family here. Also noticed that the Cardwell’s tend to donate to the same campaigns as Foster. Valero is out of San Antonio from what I remember. Western also services the Giants in New Mexico and Arizona I think. Alon owns refineries in Cal, Dallas, and Louisiana. The Cardwell’s sold the Petros years back if memory serves.
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Western bought those Chevron stations from the Cardwells. Cardwells still own a distributor, so they buy a lot of fuel from Western
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My understanding is that the majority of the fuel produced at Western is sold out of town except for jet fuel, Costco and a few of the gas stations owned by Western.
There are some contracts with Western to supply fuel to the other oil companies in town when they have of shortages.
As far as taxes, Western has a track record of always bringing up charitable excuses. We gave millions here and millions there. We sponsor this and that. We hire and pay our employees well.
They have an annual, one day, wellness program, where they invite the community to come and get tested for all kinds of medical conditions. They advertise and they all ways get a pretty good crowd for their wellness day. But the rest of the year they are constantly poisoning the community and violating the TCEQ standards with minimum fines.
As far as paying their fare share of property taxes, Western is appraised at about 285 million dollars. Do you think that if Western was sold that it would be sold for around 285 million? I don’t think so. It would sell for close to a Billion or more dollars.
We the home owners have to pick up the tab !
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For Western to claim it would be at a disadvantage when competing against out-of-town suppliers is laughable. The wholesale cost of gasoline or other refined products trucked in from competing refineries includes a transportation cost, which is considerable given the distances from which it has to come.
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