elpasospeak

Word got to me the other day that a citizen was complaining that the email addresses of city officials were disappearing from the city’s web site.

I decided to have a look for myself.

Checking each of the departments I found that many listed their personnel along with their phone numbers and email addresses.  Those that did not were:

City Attorney, phone numbers only.   I doubt that the city records phone calls and  you cannot use emails (which are subject to open records requests) with this department.

Destination El Paso, phone numbers but no email addresses for staff members listed

Economic Development, a phone number but no staff members listed

Human Services, phone numbers but no email addresses for staff members listed

Information Technology, as you could predict they have pictures of their managers but neither telephone numbers nor email addresses.  Don’t call them, they won’t call you.

International Bridges, no staff listed

Libraries, no staff listed

Municipal Clerk, phone numbers but no email addresses for staff members listed

Municipal Courts, no staff listed

Museum of Archeology, no staff listed

Office of Management and Budget, phone numbers but no email addresses for staff members listed

Office of the Comptroller, phone numbers but no email addresses

Parks and Recreation, interesting.  Phone numbers but no email addresses listed.  Clicking on the staff member’s picture brings up a form that you can use to send in your thoughts (sometimes).

Planning and Inspections, no staff members listed

Police Department, no staff members listed

Public Health, no staff members listed

Purchasing and Strategic Outsourcing, phone numbers but no email addresses

Office of Resilience and Sustainability, staff listed but no direct phone numbers or email addresses

Streets and Maintenance, no staff listed.  That explains a lot.

Sun Metro, no staff listed.

Consolidated Tax Office, no staff listed.

Zoo, no staff listed

With no email traffic deniability is easy.

We deserve better

Brutus

It is interesting to note that the city has changed the status of the San Jacinto Plaza project.

If is now listed as “matter no. 12-1004-214” whereas before when they listed the item for executive session there was no mention of a matter number.

San Jacinto Plaza Redesign, Solicitation No. 2014-043 (551.071)

San Jacinto Plaza Redesign, Solicitation No. 2014-043; Matter No. 12-1004-214 (551.071)

I believe that designating it as a matter means that the city attorney has now opened a case file on it.

Are they finally taking this seriously?

We deserve better

Brusut

City staff is displaying another way that they mislead council and the public.

This slide was part of a presentation made to city council on June 2, 2015:

Notice that the art project to be placed at spur 1966 is scheduled to be completed by September 2015.

That’s good

Well actually it isn’t.

As we wrote in Blue skies under the sun, nothing but blue skies, “At the February 24, 2015 city council meeting we were told that this $500,000 project would be finished and installed at UTEP (spur 1966) in April of 2015.”

The presenter did not bother to tell council that the project was late.  He just reported a different completion date.  If somehow the slide was referring to a different project, then he failed to tell council anything about this one.

Maybe they need the cloud for our monsoon season.

We deserve better

Brutus

Several people have asked lately what Brio stands for.

We don’t know if it is an acronym, but there is an actual word brio.

According to the online service available at meriam-webster.com the meaning is:

enthusiastic vigor :  vivacity, verve 

That it is.

Brutus

I wanted to check up on how the Brio service was doing so I went to the Sun Metro web site looking for the  director’s quarterly report to the board (the board members are the city council members).  The last presentation was at the board meeting of April 14, 2015.  Item 12 on the agenda was:

 Presentation and discussion on the Fixed Route Performance Indicators for FY15 2ND QTR for period ending on February 28, 2015.

Unlike their prior quarterly report presentations there was no posting of the report for the public to view.

I decided to look at the national transit database web site.  Sun Metro is required to submit their information to this database.  Unfortunately their 2014 annual reports have not been published yet so I looked at 2013 compared to 2012.

The web site publishes a comprehensive manual that explains what each of their terms means.  One term that required some research was “unlinked trips”.   According to the manual every time a person steps on a bus the unlinked trips number increases by one.  If someone must transfer from one bus to another in order to get to their destination, that would count as two unlinked trips.

How are we doing?

For 2012 sun metro reported that passengers road the busses for 86,715,454 miles.  In 2013 their number was 65,226,810 or roughly a 25% drop.

Unlinked trips in 2012 were reported at 16,655,904 bus boardings compared to 12,710,270 in 2013.  That is about a 24% drop.

In 2012 their operating expense per passenger mile was reported at $.55 and in 2013 it was $.70 or about a 28% increase in cost per mile.

In 2012 their operating expense per unlinked trip was $2.82 and in 2013 it was $3.52.

You don’t need to be a chief performance officer to understand these numbers.

Maybe someone familiar with the situation can explain to us why they had such a dramatic decrease in their ridership numbers.

We deserve better

Brutus