More disrespect from city council

January 7, 2020

Aaron Montes of El Paso Times recently wrote this article about the district 6 city council representative.

It has been a while since we have seen this kind of reporting in the Times.

Thank you Aaron.

None of us can know what the city representative’s motives were.

From the outside it does look like she was using city money to promote both her and her husband’s political careers.

There evidently is a long standing city council rule that requires city representatives to get city council approval before spending their “discretionary funds” and in this case it appears that she spent the money without approval.

Some questions come to mind:

Why the heck do city representatives get any discretionary funds?

Does she have a city credit card and can thus spend money without going through purchasing?

If she did go through purchasing why wasn’t this caught?

Why doesn’t council do something about this?

We deserve better

Brutus

4 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Sun Metro continues to shrink

January 6, 2020

Sun Metro has not been publishing their quarterly fixed route numbers so I made a public information request.

Their response was quick, the service was good.

They provided me with their year end report for FY2019 as I requested:

They claim having more than a million riders for the month of August 2019 and more than 12 million for all of FY 2019.

Unfortunately their records show another 6% decrease in ridership between 2018 and 2019.

Also please take a look at their cost per trip.  In August 2019 they show it as $5.00 per passenger trip.  The most a passenger can pay is $1.50.

Their records show that passengers paid $11.59% of the cost of operating the service in August 2019.

We deserve better

Brutus

18 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Stop the spending

January 5, 2020

Here’s another idea to reduce city expenses:

Don’t do this:

Discussion and action on the award of Solicitation No. 2019-909 Bicycle Connectivity Infrastructure, Phase I to Horizone Construction I, Ltd for a total estimated award of $1,898,160.80. The project consists of the re-striping of Alabama Street, Viscount Boulevard, Resler Drive, Robinson Avenue, Fort Boulevard, and Los Angeles Drive. The project also includes roadway improvements at the intersection of Alabama and Fred Wilson.

They propose to create bicycle lanes on Alabama from Atlas to Arizona.

Do they plan to have an EMS truck nearby?

Robinson is already a nightmare.

These are luxuries.  We need to pay our past bills.

We deserve better

Brutus

14 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Government pensions

December 30, 2019

JerryK wrote this in a comment a couple of weeks ago:

Stop payments into City retirement funds (that are underfunded anyway) and convert employees’ equity into annuities. Subsequently make annual contributions into employees’ IRA accounts so they are on a level playing field with the private sector that has largely abandoned pensions. Contribute what we can afford, like the private sector.

I agree.

If any of us have to participate in the social security system then I believe that all of us should have to.

The pay that our government employees receive should compensate them fairly while they are working.  Pension plans should be eliminated.

We deserve better

Brutus

14 Comments | City government, County Government, El Paso Independent School District, Federal Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

City tax tricks

December 27, 2019

The city of El Paso charges a franchise fee to two of it’s own departments.

Both El Paso Water and the Environmental Services department (garbage) are assessed a fee.

The water and garbage customers see the fee getting passed on to them in the form of a bill.

The city powers maintain that the franchise fees are imposed to compensate the city for the use of city streets.

These are streets that we have paid for and are also paying to maintain.

The fees are not franchise fees, they are taxes.

The city has a few other departments that generate revenue.

Will we see them getting charged franchise fees?

Sun Metro buses travel more on city streets than any other entity.

El Paso Fire Department ambulances travel on city streets and generate revenue for the city.  How are they different than the water and trash departments?

All of these charges are wrong, they are simply taxes that the city would not normally be allowed to charge because of caps on their rate of tax increase.

The charges should be challenged in court.

We deserve better

Brutus

 

24 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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