elpasospeak

Wanting to take a look at our almost completed San Jacinto Plaza, I wandered over to the web cam that the city provides on their web site.  I got this view when I looked on August 9, 2015:

My internet service is indeed high speed, certainly faster than anything that city council does for the proletariat.

The last image available from the “time lapse construction camera” was from July 18, 2015.  It looks like the web cam has been dead for about three weeks.

Then again since the text of the web page tells us that the plaza is scheduled for completion in “early 2015”, maybe we don’t need lack of progress reports.

We deserve better

Brutus

Wanting to learn from our city representative, I entered the term “Van Horn Texas public park” into my search engine.  Nothing relevant was returned so I tried “Van Horn Texas town square” with similar results.

Not wanting to give up I poked around some more and did finally find this picture:

Maybe we could copy this if the city ever gets around to replacing the Chelsea pool.

We deserve better

Brutus

Try as I might I can’t make this stuff up.

The Times article the other day about our local monument to corruption, favoritism, and poor government quoted a city representative.  She was talking about San Jacinto Plaza.

“We’re going to get it done,” Niland said, “but it’s going to be to the level of the expectations that absolutely El Pasoans deserve, because this is our crown jewel and it will be fabulous. It’s going to knock the socks off of Las Cruces, Van Horn and everybody else. It’s going to be fantastic.”

Slow to understand

Now I understand.  Our citizens have had the wrong standards in mind for our city.  Our crown jewel needs to be better than Van Horn’s.  We deserve this.

I suppose that even the people in Van Horn are shaking their heads over this one.

We deserve better

Brutus

This came in from Xavier Miranda:

We can demonstrate community influence by calling all city council members and demand that the city manager’s $61,000 raise be rescinded. Here is the link to contact them: http://gis.elpasotexas.gov/districting/

This came in from Helen Marshall:

Ms. Niland “asked for patience” about the ever-delayed completion of San Jacinto Plaza, and told us that when done it will be the wonder that El Pasoans deserve.  (Ask yourself what exactly this might mean…given that 90% of the voters do not vote, what might they deserve?)  AND, it will knock the socks off of Las Cruces and Van Horn! 

Wow!  Someday we might even make Ft. Stockton jealous!  And we’ll raise Tommy’s salary another $100K.  

Who’s planning to vote for increased salaries for council and mayor?

City council voted the other day to put several questions to the public relating to our city charter.  The election will be held November 3, 2015.

Evidently someone thinks that it is getting too troublesome to be transparent about council’s land dealings. One of the city charter ballot initiatives to be considered reads:

Should sections 3.9 C and 3.18 of the City Charter, relating to the use of ordinances, be amended to allow the City Council the option of using a resolution for acts that do not specifically require the use of an ordinance pursuant to other applicable law, including the conveyance, lease or grant of a franchise of city property, the adoption of an administrative code, and the establishment, abolishment or alteration of any City departments?

Proposed ordinances have to go through a multi-week process with the public first being notified and then ultimately a vote being taken.

Resolutions simply require a majority vote of the council members present.  Resolutions can be added to an agenda after the agenda is published.  Emergencies do come up, after all.

These people are asking for the right to have city council make deals on property without the public having a chance to react.

We deserve better

Brutus