elpasospeak

An alert citizen sent word to me the other day that he saw a Sun Metro bus in Sunland Park, New Mexico.

He was upset with the fact that El Paso taxpayers are paying the bill for Sun Metro and here we are giving service to people from another city in another state.

Of the $67 million that Sun Metro is budgeted to cost us in fiscal year (FY) 2015, $40 million will come from a portion of our local sales tax revenue.  He was right in that any money not spent on Sun Metro could be spent on other city needs.

By the way, of the $22 million that they report as service fees, $11 million is a federal transportation administration grant.    In other words our $66 million bus system collects $11 million from passengers.

I looked into the issue to see if we are in fact running buses out of town.

To my surprise I learned that we operate:

Route 83–NM Sunland Park via McNutt

Route 84–EPCC Mission del Paso via Clint & Socorro

County Route 10–Anthony/Canutillo

County Route 20–Montana Vista

County Route 30–Horizon City

County Route 40–Fabens/Tornillo

We deserve better

Brutus

Our loyal reader Reality Checker commented about this the other day.  I thought that it deserved more visibility.

Our police chief has been doing a good job in my opinion.

I hope that he steps in and changes the new color scheme that the department plans to use with their new patrol cars.

Changing from a blue and white to a black and white design is not what concerns me.

It is the change of their “tag line” or “motto” that is bothersome.

Our cars now  have “To Protect and Serve” painted on them.  It seems to me that this might help remind the officers what their job is and what their relationship to the citizens is.

The new cars have dropped the old tag line and now will say “El Paso’s Finest”.  Most of our police officers are good, but are they our finest?

Recently we have seen situations around the country where police might have or should have acted differently.  I would hope that policemen around the country are considering what has been happening and are evaluating what they might do to help avoid results like we have seen lately.

“To Protect and Serve” seems like a good reminder that can help our police do their jobs well.

We deserve better

Brutus

Our Public Service Board has ended up with the responsibility for the storm water system in El Paso.

City council transferred the responsibility to them so that a fee could be added to our water bills and council would not have to face the voters after having raised property taxes to pay for drainage improvements.

The people that I have spoken with tell me that the PSB would rather not have this responsibility.  The public is not happy with either the money they are being charged or the condition of the system.  Some say that city council made the transfer because they knew that the public would become unhappy with the PSB and that council could use the unhappiness to take direct control over our water utilities and the land that they own and manage.  If council had direct control over the issue council would be able to sell the land and make the developers happy.  As a group the developers are some of the biggest campaign contributors that council has.

Fixing nature

Now the PSB is indicating that they will have to raise fees so that they can finance $540 million in bonds to fix the drainage problems.  Our final bill will be much higher after including interest payments.

One of our regular readers categorized the spending as a waste the other day.  He is right.  Rain falling on our mountains creates large amounts of water that our facilities cannot adequately handle.  It has been that way since the beginning of time.

Why spend that kind of money as a partial fix to a problem that only happens once or twice a year?

There is a problem with water building up on I-10.  If for some reason we cannot live with that then there are more economical ways to fix the problem than building a multi-million dollar pumping facility that would only be used occasionally.  Past experience with our local utilities leads me to believe that since the pumps would only be used occasionally they probably will not function when we need them.

Could we put “French drains” in the problem areas of the freeway and divert the water under the freeway and let it flow out the south side?  Yes there would be water on the south side of the freeway.  It would be the very same water that used to flow there before the freeway was built or any drainage pumps were installed.

Some are saying that the $540 million number is just a guess.   We simply do not need to spend the money.  Nature will find a way to overload anything that we install.

We deserve better

Brutus