Decline into lawlessness

November 12, 2015

DavidK over at Refuse the Juice wrote Let’s look at it this way the other day.

He pointed out that rules and protocol were broken when the city manager and a city representative circumvented city council and arranged to have speed humps installed in front of a local high school.

He wrote:

The safety of children was put before the process and rules for obtaining a traffic-calming device for a street.

His point here was that the children were in danger because of heavy traffic traveling too fast and that getting the problem solved even without going through the process was the right thing to do.

I have to disagree and ask the age old question “does the end justify the means”?

We have a dysfunctional city government.  Bypassing the established rules instead of fixing the dysfunction will only make the problem worse in the long run.

We deserve better

Brutus

10 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Great wall of El Paso

November 11, 2015

I am hoping to hear from some readers that have visited our digital wall downtown.

We have one of only two digital walls in the world and it only cost us $3 million.  If my recollection is correct we sent some of our city staff to Copenhagen to see the other one.

Has anyone seen it?

Has anyone had visitors fly in from out of town to visit this wonder of the world?

We deserve better

Brutus

5 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Rapid descent

November 10, 2015

Passenger traffic at our airport is down 1.9% from last year according to the airport’s monthly activity report.

At the same time we are spending $46 million to build a new rental car facility.

They took away half of our short term parking to make space for the building, making it less convenient for us to use the airport.

Our city’s former chief financial officer (you remember her, the one whose projections were almost always wrong, maybe deliberately) told us that we would pay for the facility because car rentals would increase 1% a year.

Take a look at this report from the airport’s web site:

epia10year

We deserve better

Brutus

17 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

City blackout

November 8, 2015

We are now in November of 2015 and the last interim financial report from the city is for the period ending April of 2015.

Even the old bunch used to publish the interim reports each month.

So much for transparency.

We deserve better

Brutus

5 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

I’ll work on it when I’m good and ready

November 5, 2015

Helen Marshall sent this note in for us to see:

I heard today that a large part of the city government will not be working on Wednesday.  Veterans Day is not a city holiday but council passed a resolution allowing departments to decide that they will observe such holidays (without taking personal vacation time).  Cute, eh?

Too much at one time

According to the city’s director of the capital improvement department the city is currently working on about 160 projects.

We know that many of the projects are stalled or delayed, some for years.  Have they created gridlock with such a large number of projects?

Now we have city department managers declaring holidays that are not part of the city’s holiday list.

We have to assume that there is not much of a sense of urgency when they work on the 160 projects.

Maybe we would all be better off if they took the next 160 days off so that they can rest up before they deliver their next round of excuses to us.

We deserve better

Brutus

8 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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