Best council money can buy

February 9, 2015
One of our readers tipped us off to the fact that the city now has new official goals.
You can read them directly from the city web site here:
Since the city is in the habit of changing their web site to remove our ability to see historical information the eight goals are listed below:
1.) Create an Environment Conducive to Strong Sustainable Economic Development
2.) Set the Standard for a Safe and Secure City
3.) Promote the Visual Image of El Paso
4.) Enhance El Paso’s Quality of Life through Recreational, Cultural and Educational Environments
5.) Promote Transparent and Consistent Communication Amongst All Members of the Community
6.) Set the Standard for Sound Governance and Fiscal Management
7.) Enhance and Sustain El Paso’s Infrastructure Network
8.) Nurture and Promote a Healthy, Sustainable Community

Well developed

I must have missed the notifications of the public meetings where the city sought citizen input on the goals.  If you take a moment to look at a recent city council agenda (hurry, the link may become invalid if the city needs it to go away) you will see that items on the agenda are now attributed to one of the goals.  How nice.  We will give examples in  later posts.

Our number one goal according to our city is to “Create an Environment Conducive to Strong Sustainable Economic Development”.

Growth in other words.  Some will argue that the goal is about improving our job base.  The mayor has certainly made this his priority.  We thank him for that.

Unfortunately this will translate into a continued subsidized land grab with our Public Service Board a primary target.

Our developers need vast new tracts of land in order to continue to make the profits that they want.  Forget infill, it is less profitable than new developments.

It is not as though we have an unlimited supply of cheap water.  Buying and developing agricultural land from farmers children who inherit land and  do not want to work a farm does not seem to be an option the developers want to pursue.  Doing so would help us by making water available for residential use.

None of us should begrudge the right of the developers to make a profit.  In our case however we are not letting the market decide what to do.  Instead the developers have decided to buy city council and control the market more effectively.

We try to keep our posts relatively short.  Stay tuned this week as we discuss problems with the other new goals that have been imposed on us.

We deserve better

Brutus

10 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Brio ridership numbers

February 6, 2015

As our regular readers know I hope that the Brio works out well for El Paso.

Brio is unfortunately excessively expensive.  The city is planning to build the Alameda corridor next with a projected cost of $35.5 million of our local money.  The project is not backed by feral funds.

If our public policy is to improve bus frequency and availability we can achieve much better results at much lower costs than with the Brio system.  The system uses special bus stops that we are told are about one mile apart and the busses do not stop at regular bus stops.  The first batch of busses cost us $790,000 each whereas our regular busses are $525,000.  To make matters worse the Brio busses only offer 48 seats compared to the 38 seats on regular ones.

Scheduling more of the regular busses instead of installing a whole new system would give us better service without the inflated expense of the Brio system.  This approach would also give us more flexibility and ability to respond to changing demographics.

60,000

The folks at Sun Metro told us through an article in El Paso Inc. that Brio ridership has reached 60,000 passengers a month.

I hope that is true but cannot see how.  Maybe someone will enlighten me.

The way I figure it the busses make about 1,600 round trips on the Mesa route per month.  Each round trip takes 60 minutes.  The busses run on different schedules depending upon the time of day and day of the week as follows:

Monday – Friday 6AM-9AM and 3PM-6PM every 10 minutes.

Monday – Friday 9AM-3PM and 6PM-9PM every 15 minutes.

Saturday 9AM-6PM every 20 minutes.

Sunday no service.

Doing the math, I come to the 1,600 trips I mentioned before.  If we take their number of 60,000 riders and divide it by 1,600 we come up to about 37 passengers per trip on average.  That’s every trip–even early in the morning and late at night.    There are about 20 bus stops on the route meaning that if the passenger load was evenly divided we would see two people at each bus stop every 10 to 20 minutes.  The loads almost certainly are not evenly spread out so we should  be able to see some busses more full than others.

I just don’t see it — literally.  I have not seen many people get on the busses and I have not seen many get off the busses.  I have not seen many people waiting at the bus stops and I have not seen any busses with more than a few people on them.

I hope that I am wrong.

We deserve better

Brutus

10 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Trying to say thank you

February 4, 2015

I guess that we need to bear with the city as they change their web site.  Much of it does not work anymore.

In Really, really special we pointed out that the city does not include special city council meetings in it’s list of council meetings.  You have to dig around to find the special meetings.

I sent a copy of the post to the mayor’s office via the electronic link that they had provided.

The mayor may have helped here.  The city web site now has a notice that lets us know that special city council meeting agendas will be posted with the regular council agendas.

I wanted to send a thank you to the mayor so I clicked on the old link.  It does not work anymore.  I poked around and found the new link and then typed a thank you note.

This is what I got:

MAYORTHANKYOU

I was careful to enter the captcha code correctly.

The problem will probably be solved eventually, although I would fire a web manager who messed up a site like someone has done here.

In the meantime I would like to thank the mayor for listening to my concern and taking action.

We deserve better

Brutus

7 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

New city website explains all

February 2, 2015

The city is  changing their website.

We published San Jacinto completion today  the other day and included links to a presentation made to city council in December and to a web camera showing the plaza.

Those links stopped working.  We have been able to find the correct link to the web cam and have changed the post.

While searching for the presentation the screen below appeared:

loremipsum

Note the larum ipsum text.  A commercial web master would be fired for making this page live.

Wanting to see how the rest of the site works we tried to follow the links to the comptroller’s fiscal reports section and got this:

fisicalreports

No reports and a new spelling of fiscal.  Maybe our county hospital administrator could use this to hide more bonuses.

We deserve better

Brutus

8 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

El Paso’s economy

February 1, 2015

We received this from Helen Marshall:

Can anyone explain how the mayor can be touting El Paso’s success in DC

http://www.elpasoinc.com/news/local_news/article_cdb73990-a570-11e4-a376-7f3e9d540c5f.html

and the El Paso economy ranks 175 globally, “outruns Tokyo and NYC..”  http://www.elpasotimes.com/business/ci_27388029/el-paso-economic-growth-ranks-175th-among-300

Meantime Representative Niland tells us that the city has been preparing for this success for ten years: http://www.elpasotimes.com/Opinion/ci_27252990/Cortney-Carlisle-Niland:-El-Pasos-success-is-the-result-of-a-decade-of-planned-growth

 
 Our city not only enhanced the lives of our citizens, but also garnered national attention as we grew jobs, built new roads, revitalized our Downtown and built new parks and venues. 
 
This last decade redefined El Paso. We showed the country what community support and civic leadership can accomplish. Our plan is set and we have the tools.

I must be on a different planet.

3 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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