Please vote

April 27, 2015

Today is the first day of early voting.  I plan to do it today.  I hope you will too.

Many people feel that voting is futile–that they will be out voted.

When citizens don’t vote the incumbents feel that they are free to do whatever they want, after all the citizens don’t care enough to have their voices heard.  If more of us voted our elected officials would be more mindful of how the public feels and thus less harm would be done.

Whether you vote the way I will or you vote differently, the simple act of voting puts our elected officials on notice that they are being watched.

Please vote–else we won’t deserve better.

Brutus

 

5 Comments | City government, El Paso Independent School District | Permalink
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Service not among the city’s goals

April 25, 2015

When they decided to destroy our old city hall one of the departments that had to move was the tax department.

The city decided to relocate them to a downtown bank building.  After a while the employees complained about the parking situation and as we wrote in Another inconvenience the city required their landlord to provide parking for the city employees in the adjacent parking tower.

That resulted in the parking tower having less places for taxpaying citizens to use when they needed to go to the tax office.

Yikes!

I went downtown the other day and tried to park in the bank building’s parking tower.  The sign at the entrance declared that there was only one rate to be applied whether you parked for a few minutes or all day.  The rate?  Twenty-five dollars!

The situation made me wonder how treating taxpayers this way could be consistent with the city’s published goals.  Poor against the standard was one of several posts where we listed the city’s goals.

As it turns out the city does not have a stated goal to provide service to the citizens.

We deserve better

Brutus

9 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

City debt budget

April 24, 2015

The city’s financial reports for the first six months of fiscal year 2015 reveal a lot about what they are doing.

They budgeted forty million dollars for the year to make principal payments against our debt.  At the six month mark they had made no payments, zero.

They also budgeted 51 million dollars to make interest payments.

Yes they budgeted more money to make interest payments than they did to pay down principal.

There is good news in that of the $51 million they only spent $23 million.  We don’t know why but if this shows up as real savings it will be good news.

We deserve better

Brutus

4 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Life on a diet

April 23, 2015

Looking at the city’s financial reports for the first six months of fiscal year 2015 and at the revenue shortfalls that are occurring it is interesting to see how they are doing with spending.  We would hope that with revenues not meeting expectations management would cut expenses.

The police and fire departments are spending consistently with what was budgeted for them.

The office of management and budget has spent 24% of their full year allotment after these first six months.  At this rate they will spend only 48% of their budget by the end of the year.  You might think  that this department would be running on all cylinders instead of being strangled.

The city manager’s office has spent 76% of their annual budget.  At this rate they will be at 152% by the end of the year.

In the quality of life area we have the parks department at 40% so far for the year, public health at 41%, and our libraries at 44%.

Economic development is at 37.35%.

Some things never change.

We deserve better

Brutus

6 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Short again

April 22, 2015

The city’s financial results for the first six months of the fiscal year are now out.

Building permit fees are important since they are indicators of growth in our tax base and our community in general.

How did they do?  Well for commercial building permits the numbers show that we are 16% below their projections and for residential building permits we are underperforming by 29%.

The shortfall in fees looks like it will be less than one million dollars of revenue but the important thing is that our new construction is not happening like they have projected.

That means that the current taxpayers will be paying more of the debt than we were told.

We deserve better

Brutus

9 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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