El Paso’s city council is holding a special meeting this Monday, February 23, 2015.
The second of the two items on the agenda is shown as: “Presentation on the City Charter Amendment Process.”
We sent the mayor an advance view of our post Broken promise? with the hope that he would honor his promise to put the style of local government (city manager/strong mayor) on the ballot for us to decide. No response came from the mayor’s office so we don’t know if this agenda item is coincidental to our post or not.
Either way we thank him.
City attorney
The presentation will be made by an assistant city attorney.
After discussing various historical and legal aspects of the charter amendment process, this recommendation is made:
Consider a 9 to 12 month proposed charter amendment timeline to allow for sufficient review by City staff, employees, committees, and public outreach and input.
Stall, buy time
Our local agencies use time to manipulate results. They either tell us that we have no time and they just need to take action, even if the public is opposed, or they tell us that the issue needs to be studied–just long enough to try to make the public forget.
Who the heck is an assistant city attorney to be making a recommendation like this in the first place?
Simple questions
The mayor told us that he would put the issue to a vote as soon as the two year window between charter elections had passed. It has.
At least two questions should be considered:
1) Should we have a strong mayor/chief operating officer form of government?
2) Should city representative’s terms be two years instead of the current four years?
We might see council override the recommendation to stall, at least we can hope.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Where do I sign?
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I think we should keep the mayoral term to 4 years. But CC could be 2 years, like Congress. Good luck getting them to do that.
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Word on the grapevine is the dust up over the City Attorney appointment and process is an attempt by certain CC reps to boot the current City Attorney under the bus and replace her with you guessed it – the eminently unqualified Steve Ortega.
Supposedly the Mayor was not wiling to trash the current City Attorney to appoint some one with less the zero legal experience in Municipal law.
Anyway this is supposedly why they are pushing for a charter amendment to change the charter to allow council to appoint the CA rather than the Mayor.
So why Steve Ortega? Supposedly this is per “request” of a very small number of influential “downtown” interests.
Obviously no where is this “plan” in the best interest of the citizens much less the City.
I agree 110% with 2 year terms for CC reps as well as changing the residency requirement from 6 months to 12 months to help prevent factions from recruiting people to establish addresses in districts simply to stack the council votes.
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I volunteer to start the petition process. When and where can we start?
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I’m not sure that the petition process applies here. However even if it does not you could certainly send a message to the individuals on the board of managers.
Brutus
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Bad news for the City Manager haters. I’m pretty sure it’s too late to have a charter election. Personally, I think having Lessor as a strong mayor is an oxymoron anyway.
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Well said. He is a strong salesman, but someone else must be managing his business.
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