elpasospeak

The Tuesday, October 21, 2014 city council agenda has an item on it that proposes changing the zoning of a city owned parcel from R-5 residential to S-D special development.

The backup material shows virtually every city department either recommending the change or at least not opposing it.

Neighborhood opposition

According to the backup material:

“The San Juan Neighborhood Association was opposed to the rezoning request citing concerns over commercial uses close to their existing homes and submitted a petition with 32 signatures from the association members.  The petition did not trigger a 211 based on State Code requirements.”

Well I guess if the petition did not force a 211 then the city ought to go right ahead and ignore the neighbors.  By the way Texas local government code section 211 gives property owners near a proposed zoning change the right to protest the change.  If they meet the requirements of the code city council would have to have 75% of it’s members vote for the change in order for it to take place.  Since the petition did not qualify council can do this with a simple majority.

In order to have qualified the petition would have to have included signatures from the owners of 20% of the property area within 200 feet of the land in question.  In other words this is not one man one vote, this requirement is based upon a percentage of the area around the land in question.

Wonder why?

Take a look at this graphic:

It’s nice to know that oil refineries have rights too.

It is interesting to note that four of the people who signed the petition gave their address as TxDOT and their phone number as a TxDOT office.  Which office?  A TxDOT document lists the phone number in a list of district environmental coordinators.

The people promoting the petition probably did not know that the signatures had to be from property owners within 200 feet of the land to be rezoned and that they would need to get about 40% of those owners to sign since about half of the land appears to be owned by commercial interests.  Somehow I doubt that our city staff went out of their way to explain this to the San Juan Neighborhood Association.

We deserve better

Brutus

The  Tuesday, October 7, 2014 city council approved the purchase of a private residence and the land surrounding it to provide a place for the aquatic center that we authorized as part of the 2012 bonds.

The city approved spending $275,000 for the property.  The property is  valued at $113,865 by the central appraisal district.

City staff tells us that the taxpayers are getting a good deal.

How can that be?  Is the central appraisal district wrong here?  Has the property owner been benefiting from a low valuation?

Is the city giving our money away?

Good choice

It looks like the city is actually right here.  The property is adjacent to an existing city park.  That will allow them great flexibility when configuring the aquatic center into the combined properties.  The center will be close to the North/South freeway and thus be quite accessible.

The central appraisal district has the land valued at $1 per square foot.  They have the surrounding properties valued at about $1.50 per square foot.

The city could have used its power of eminent domain to take the property.  I’m glad they did not.

Maybe lightning struck here and the property owner just won the lottery.  Obviously the land is worth more than it is on the tax rolls for.

We have to wonder how many other undervalued properties we have on the tax rolls.

We deserve better

Brutus

We have disappointing news that our new city manager has the entitlement mentality.

When he agreed to come to El Paso part of his compensation package was an allowance of $10,000 for moving.

Now in the Tuesday, October 14, 2014 city council meeting we saw the city increase that amount to $26,000.

Try asking for that kind of treatment from your boss.

A deal is a deal.

You can read his original contract here.

We deserve better

Brutus

Our city  has once again decided to spend our money without thinking.

As we know, members of council have switched seats because they cannot get along together.

When the new city council room was built the city added room for two more members.  The two new city council positions are the result of changes in our city charter.  Those positions will be created when our population reaches one million residents.

One of our council members decided to vacate her position and then bumped another out of her existing seat.  As a result one member does not have the electronic equipment that the others have.

We learned this week that the city is going to spend approximately $6,800 setting up the new seat.

Why?

Without getting into the discussion about who should sit where, a question needs to be asked.

Why not move the equipment from the vacant position to the newly occupied one?  The city might have to hire some expert equipment movers to do this if the city staff cannot handle it.

Either way we would have some labor cost but would not need to buy new equipment.

Where was management on this?

Would anyone be surprised if the next thing we hear is that “it isn’t fair, she has new equipment and I don’t”.

We deserve better

Brutus

A regular reader sent me a note telling me that Sun Metro’s contractors are hard at work lowering the height of the curbs at some of the BRIO stations.  Evidently the rumor from the other day was true and some of the curbs were too high for the buses.

I sent an inquiry to the mayor’s office asking when we can expect our new rapid transit system (BRIO) to start operating.

Within hours I got a response from Sun Metro.

Soon

Sun Metro’s response is that they expect to start Monday, October 27, 2014.

We should expect Sun Metro to discontinue some of the existing routes.  Route 18 was express service between downtown and the west side transfer station.  An alert reader pointed out a few days ago that route 18 is no longer on Sun Metro’s web page.

This first portion of the rapid transit system is expensive and has been quite disruptive.

At this point we should hope that it is successful.

Brutus