elpasospeak

The December 17, 2013 city council agenda has an item on it to approve a 614 thousand dollar contract for planning for what is now known as “Multipurpose Cultural & Performing Arts Facility, Cultural Center, and Children’s Museum”.

Sit back and watch told us how the city wants to combine the three separate projects into one project.  Tuesday’s agenda item lets us know that the Hispanic Cultural Center project is now a plain old Cultural Center.

The backup material says:

“This contract provides for hiring an urban planning firm to facilitate a community-wide, bilingual dialogue and gather input on these projects.  The firm will engage the community in an extensive public input process, develop business plans for the facilities, identify programming options, evaluate appropriate venue sizes and amenities, evaluate and recommend siting options that provide connectivity and serve as a catalyst for revitalization and economic growth in the community.”

An out of town firm is being hired.  They will spend about half of their contract with “sub consultants” here in El Paso.

Translation

Extensive

The term “extensive public input process” means that someone will spend 131 hours conducting public forums, workshops, presentations and interviews.    There will be a maximum of four meetings to facilitate “extensive public input”.  The complete engagement will consume 1183 hours.

Connectivity

I think this means they can pick any place they want as long as it is  part of the downtown complex.

Catalyst for revitalization

I doubt that this contemplates revitalizing northeast El Paso and I suspect that most of this blog’s readers would interpret this to mean downtown.

Looking for trouble

It seems that someone anticipates that there may be some trouble with the final report.  The consultant’s proposal includes this language:

“Crisis management is not included in this scope of services and if required will be an additional service”.

We deserve better

Brutus

Our strategic thinkers are scheduled to ask city council for approval to change some of our city statements at the December 10, 2013 meeting of council.

Self promoting

The city’s current vision statement is “To be a high-performance, customer-focused organization.”

The proposal will be to change the vision statement to “The City of El Paso is a high-performance, customer-focused organization”.

Evidently they think that if you say something often enough it becomes true.  I would think that if they were customer focused they would have included some citizens in the feedback process.

Less community

They want to change the city government’s mission statement from “Dedicated to outstanding customer services for a better community” to “Dedicated to providing outstanding customer services for a better El Paso”.

This change goes right over my head.  I don’t understand what they are trying to say.  Why drop community and replace it with El Paso?   Hopefully the blog readers will be able to explain it.

Cost be damned

They propose changing the statement of core values to:

We value:

• Excellence
• Integrity
• Respect
• Accountability
• Our People

I think it would be nice if they included cost effectiveness, but then again they aren’t paying the bills.

New direction

Thankfully they do include this statement in their presentation for council and the public:

We will ensure continued financial stability and accountability through sound financial management, budgeting and reporting.

Maybe this way we can avoid having a promised $30 million move of city departments that has cost us more than $70 million so far, or having to spend an extra $17 million because of a failed bond issuance, or maybe we could actually build a ball park for what city staff told us it would cost.

We deserve better

Brutus