elpasospeak

Put us on a road to fix our economic problems.

• El Paso has the 5th highest property taxes of the nation’s 50 largest cities
• According to a December 8, 2015 El Paso Times article:
  • The economies of El Paso and Las Cruces are performing poorly compared to many other cities across the country, according to the latest Milken Institute Best-Performing Cities rankings.El Paso’s economy ranked No. 121 on the list of 200 large metro areas, compared to No. 53 last year — one of the biggest drops among 200 large metro areas, according to the 2015 rankings released Tuesday.

 Stop the luxuries and fix our necessities.

It is absolute madness to consider building a downtown arena when our streets are crumbling.  We have facilities that are good enough, not great, but what we can afford.  Bring the quality of life bonds back to the voters to see if they still want to spend the money in light of what they have seen coming out of the city.

Build trust.

We have city representatives that helped to create the mess at the city.  Now they are lying to try to cover up their complicity.  Matters that the public deserves to know about are hidden in executive session.  The city frequently does what it can to frustrate open records requests by stalling and improperly redacting documents.

Work with us.

The El Paso Independent School District central office is on land that it leases from the city.  The city wants the land.  We are told that moving the central office will cost us in excess of $40 million.  This does not have to happen.

Face up to nature.

The city has assigned the responsibility of managing storm water to our water utility.  They avoided a tax increase by moving the costs out of the city’s general fund and making the water utility increase our bills.  Now we have a utility that seems to think that by spending our money they can solve the problem of water running off the mountain.  We are spending money to fight nature.

Stop the Brio.

The Mesa rapid transit corridor is a failure at this point.  Bus ridership is down even after spending $27.1 million on the system.  The Brio stops are expensive, unnecessary, and inconvenient.

Next the city wants to spend $35.1 to build a Brio Alameda rapid transit corridor.  If the goal is to provide more frequent service the city would do better to add more regular buses to the routes.  The regular buses can stop at our current bus stops giving them a definite advantage over the Brio buses that stop only at the much further apart Brio stops.

Each Sun Metro passenger costs us about three dollars.  Average revenue per passenger is 54 cents.

We subsidize Sun Metro with a 1/2 % addition to our sales tax.  That should bring over $41 million to the system this year.

The massive expansion of our public transit system that they are executing may make sense eventually.  In the mean time we have necessities that need to be paid for.

Buy local.

Relations between local suppliers and the city are horrible at best.  Purchasing is unfair to the point that many local vendors will not even bid.  The city cancels contracts with vendors that are performing well just because someone at the city wants to give the money to someone else.  Purchasing issues requests for proposals that are expensive to respond to and after getting legitimate responses cancels the procurement.

We deserve better

Brutus

Well we are now hearing that the El Paso Independent School District is going to gear up for a bond election in November of 2016.

District officials are saying that the Ysleta bond process taught them a few things.  They plan to place far more emphasis on a citizen advisory committee.  We should also expect to see our state senator visiting campuses to educate the 18 year olds in the district about their responsibility as citizens to register to vote and then vote at the bond election.

Few of us will dispute the fact that some of the schools are in sad shape.  We will be told that others need to be expanded so that smaller schools can be closed.

In the past we have been told that a consultant’s report indicated that it will take about one billion dollars to make the changes.

We should encourage the school board and the administrators make their bond requests of reasonable size.  The citizens of El Paso are living through the disastrous situation where they gave the city $420 million for quality of life bonds and the city engineering organization was overwhelmed with their new work load.

The district also has a history of promoting specific bond projects (I can think of two high schools) and then using the money for something else.

We deserve better

Brutus