The Times recently published a piece about traffic volumes at our international bridges. It included this:
Paul Stresow, city international bridges director, said “We have seen a significant increase in cross-border traffic at our ports of entry during the past year, overall a 5.45 percent increase in southbound traffic during the calendar year 2014 over 2013.”
“Certainly, the public-private partnership with CBP at our Paso Del Norte and Ysleta (Zaragoza) bridges, where the city pays CBP to keep additional lanes open during peak travel times and during holidays to reduce wait times is one of many factors that have contributed to the growth in travel and trade,” Stresow said.
Wrong, wrong, wrong
There is no public-private partnership here. The city government of El Paso Texas is paying the feral government of the United States.
Our feral government has chosen to assume the right to control our bridges. Our constitution leaves that as a Texas state responsibility.
What we have here is a situation where they are not allocating enough money to operate the bridges. As a result El Paso suffers economically. Our city council has decided to step in and make up the budgetary shortfall.
Our local congressman seems to approve of this. One would think that he would fight to get the funding needed so that local tax payers do not have to make up the difference.
When city council decided to do this we were told that crossing times would be under thirty minutes. According to the article “The wait times are under an hour and sometimes under 45 minutes.”
What’s next? Will we have to ante up to pay for other federal departments?
Then again
On the other hand maybe our bridge director was telling us that our city government is privately owned.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Agreed that this is a disgraceful situation, in which the city of El Paso is using city resources to pay a federal agency to do its job. One would like to know what the wait times are in other border cities, and if any have decided to pay the CBP to do its job. I’d wager not.
But I can understand the desperation that drove this decision, as downtown businesses that depend on shoppers from Juárez and local schools whose students are having to stand in line for hours must have exerted pressure. Easier to get the city to do something than the federal government, particularly as the CBP and the entire border apparatus are not focused on improving the flow of traffic and reducing the huge waste of time when the bridges are not properly staffed. That’s not their job description.
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Meanwhile, CBP thrives on treating U.S. citizens like second class citizens.
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The reason for the increase in cross border traffic is very simple. Our neighbor city has had their sales tax raised to 16% and we have a 8.25% sales tax that drops to zero when manifestos are filed, That is what is driving the increase in traffic.
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