elpasospeak

The truth about the ballpark financing is finally coming out and the picture is not a pretty one.

Even though city council authorized incurring the debt,  a decision was made to not do so until after the May 2013 city elections.

The delay ended up costing the taxpayers about $22 million.

Our former chief financial officer and city manager must have been right in the middle of the mess.

The former city representative that was running for mayor in that election indicates that he did not try to delay the issuance of the bonds.

It is possible that some of the city council members wanted the issuance delayed but none of them had the authority to delay them.

As it worked out city council created the Downtown Development Corporation and gave them the authority to manage the bonds.  Our former city manager, the city clerk and our infamous former chief financial officer were designated as pricing officers and were the ones that had the authority to sell the bonds.

We should make an extra effort to tell each of these individuals how we feel about their failure.

We deserve better

Brutus

With the story about us spending $22 million more for the ball park bonds because city council decided to hold off selling them until after their election we seem to have forgotten just how bad the bond situation is.

According to this chart the city does not expect to pay any principal at all until August of 2023.  At that point they show a $17.6 million balloon payment.

Please don’t think that we are only facing $45 million in debt on these bonds.  They also sold ones that are not tax exempt and account for another $15.6 million.

We deserve better

Brutus

The email from our former city mangler  confirming that city council met in executive session and decided to delay the issuance of the ball park bonds points to another problem.

Texas law allows council to go into executive session for a limited number of reasons.

Discussing bond issuance is not one of the reasons.

Section 551.144 defines the penalty for participating in the closed meeting:

An offense under Subsection (a) is a misdemeanor punishable by:

(1) a fine of not less than $100 or more than $500;

(2) confinement in the county jail for not less than one month or more than six months; or

(3) both the fine and confinement.

I don’t expect that our district attorney will enforce this law.

We deserve better

Brutus

Our  city council met back on March 17, 2015 in their special form as the Downtown Development Corporation.

We have written before about them not posting their minutes.  Don’t look.

In this most recent meeting they got to look at the 2015 financial projections.

You might recall being told that the ball park would not cost us any money at all.  Revenues would pay for it we were told before we voted to increase Hotel Occupancy Taxes.

Then as things started to crystalize we were told that we would have to subsidize the ball park with general fund revenues up through 2018.  The only people that can argue with a straight face that those funds are not property tax funds (which they are not allowed to use for this project) are our city officials.

In the March report we now are being told that the subsidies will have to continue until 2023.

The report also shows the cost of the ball park (before financing) at $76,020,750.

How can that be when on June 18, 2013 council made a big show of telling us that our cost would be $64,000,000 and not a penny more?  Well, the team coughed up another $12,020,750.  That brings us to the $76 million number.

What they don’t talk about is that they actually got $65,073,891 from the sale of the bonds instead of $64,000,000.  Then  also took $1,857,868 from previous Hotel Occupancy Tax collections making a total of $2,931,759 more than the promised $64 million.  They used that money to pay for public art and bond issue costs.  Both projects were directly related to the ball park but needed to be removed to maintain their story that we were only spending $64 million.

We deserve better

Brutus