The El Paso Independent School District announced that they are considering a different plan for the school consolidation and refurbishing. Instead of needing one billion dollars they are now projecting the need for $686 million.
That is good news. It looks like the district is working to come up with the best solution that they can find.
Earn our trust
Many of us do not trust our local governments to handle bond issue money. Cost overruns, “repurposing”, switching projects, and never ending projects are events that we continue to see and are on our minds.
Much of the money will be used to remedy “deferred maintenance”. Instead of maintaining our buildings on an annual basis, past school boards have ignored maintenance in order to pretend to balance the budget. The result is that they have to ask for bond money when the schools are too run down to continue to operate.
I have a straightforward suggestion. Instead of asking for all of the money at one time the district should ask for a smaller more manageable amount (say $68 million) and then prove to us that they can handle the money wisely. They could then come back to us and ask for another tranche after having proven that our money was well spent.
Remember the old saying: “pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered”.
The quality of life bonds at the city have caused us to realize that the city staff does not have the capacity to handle the $400 million that we voted for. They are going to have to parcel out the construction over a period of time.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Consider this: If you needed a quadruple bypass surgery, would you tell your doctor to only do a double bypass because you wanted to see “how it goes?” If the double bypass goes well, then you might come back in the future for the other two arteries. Maybe. If you have the money. The point is Brutus, the problem doesn’t go away, and in fact will probably get worse the longer you “defer” the operation. Your next double bypass will end up costing you even more. The smart thing to do is fix everything at once and save money, even if the initial cost is high.
EPISD and almost all the school districts in the area are having to put up with cuts in federal and state funding (brought on by so called “fiscal conservatives” ) that, over the course of years would have been used to fix buildings.
The Conservative approach to problems and repair which looks like this:
1st: Deny the problem exists. “My school can’t be falling apart! It wasn’t falling apart 20 years ago!
2nd: Cut any funding that might be used to repair the problem and then say the problem is too expensive to repair.
3rd: Propose some useless technique based on magical thinking to fix the problem: “The free market/God/Reaganomics will fix the problem.”
4th: Blame everyone else for the final collapse. “Liberal tax and spending habits caused the school to collapse. It wasn’t my fault.”
We also see this nationwide in deferred infrastructure spending. Crumbling bridges, collapsing causeways, and schools are all a part of a much larger “deferred” repair picture.
Pay me now, of pay me a lot more later. Your choice. Sadly, with the current tea bag party in the Texas legislature, it is not going to get better any time soon. So El Pasoans will have to fix it ourselves.
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You’re right on the mark. Most of the “conservatives” to whom you refer care very little about public education or its demise. Their kids go to private schools. These same self-proclaimed free-market conservatives are also against government spending except when it is for contracts or stadiums or other public projects that benefit their own businesses or those of their friends.
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Someone should look into how much $$$ EPISD is spending on consultants! There seems to be a consultant for just about everything & the staff at central office is growing.
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