Water torture

March 12, 2014

The other day city council decided unanimously to not increase the impact fees that the city charges when new buildings are built.

Some members of council expressed their opinion that raising the cost of a piece of land in the city causes people to build outside of the city limits.  We then essentially lose the property tax revenue even as those new county residents come into the city and use our facilities.

I can’t take a side on the issue, I simply don’t know enough about it.

The Times wrote an article about the vote and included a quote from the head of our water utility:

“We are OK with the 12-month delay,” Balliew said.

One of the driving forces behind the proposal to increase impact fees is the need to do a $43 million expansion of the Jonathan Rogers Water Treatment Plant over the next five years. Balliew said the utility will seek state money for the project from various sources including Proposition 6, which was passed by the voters last November and set aside $2 billion of “rainy-day funds” for water and sewer projects around the state.

Another double whammy?

State funds are available yet they wanted to roughly double our current impact fees.

I mentioned the situation to a few citizens and their responses were remarkably quick and similar.  In essence they said “Sure, that way they get an increase in local fees and can get state money to pay for the expansion too.  You don’t think the fee will be reduced once the project is paid for, do you?”

We deserve better

Brutus

3 Comments | City government, El Paso Times, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Bipartisanship

March 8, 2014

This made its way to me through a friend:

M. Stanton Evans, Texas author, educator, and journalist observed that in America there are only two parties, 

“One is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party…Occasionally the two parties get together to do something that’s both evil and stupid.   That’s called bipartisanship.”

We deserve better

Brutus

2 Comments | City government, County Government, Federal Government, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Something getting better

March 7, 2014

The Times reported yesterday  that the Ysleta Independent School District board has voted to:

“… provide all back up materials for board meetings available to the public on the district’s website.”

Hopefully this material will be posted along with the board agenda so that members of the public can be better informed before board meetings.

Both this blog and the Times have made this request.  Thankfully the board listened.

The El Paso Community College and the county hospital boards do not post the backup material.  I hope that others will join in asking them to do so.

The city has done a pretty good job of posting most of the material.  Once in a while we see agenda items with missing, skimpy, or misleading material.  Unfortunately the city has chosen to remove the ability to electronically search city council agendas before 2014.  We sent a copy of a blog article about this to the mayor’s email address but have not gotten them to change this policy.

A reader of this blog sent in this comment that has been helpful:

woodyco says:
February 19, 2014 at 12:45 PM  (Edit)

You can always use the city’s google search to look em up

just go to the city site, go to the google search

add the following:
+”AGENDA FOR REGULAR COUNCIL MEETING”
then a search term afterwards
Or you can use +”Special City Council Meeting”

if you don’t want the pdf’s, just add -pdf.

example:
+”AGENDA FOR REGULAR COUNCIL MEETING” alcohol -.pdf

He’s an example of their agenda’s that is “not searchable”

http://imgur.com/AAnfRiK

Let’s do what we can to get our local government agencies to be more transparent.

We deserve better

Brutus

3 Comments | City government, County Government, El Paso Independent School District | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

New and de-proved

March 5, 2014

It’s hard to tell the same lie twice.

Item 9.1 on the regular city council agenda of February 25, 2014 is an example.

Our city’s chief financial officer made a presentation supporting the expenditure of $45 million to build a rental car parking facility at the airport.  The facility is to be funded by a customer facility charge of $3.50 per day on each customer renting a motor vehicle from an airport rental company.  They started collecting this charge in February of 2012.

Remember that the chief financial officer has been projecting a 3% increase in hotel occupancy taxes.  More shortfalls explained that the actual numbers are down by 3.1% this year, leaving a shortfall of 6.1%.

New and de-proved

The airport presentation projects a 1% increase in vehicle rentals each year.

Look at column H in the chart from her presentation:

airportcfc

Remember that many of the people that rent motel rooms arrive in rented cars.  Look for this to affect the financing of the ball park.

We deserve better

Brutus

5 Comments | Ball park, City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Save the EPISD central office

March 4, 2014

The recent disclosure of a mistakenly sent email from an EPISD employee to, of all things, a news outlet has pointed out that the district is now actively planning the replacement of it’s central office.

Their current central office is on land leased from the city.  The city has notified the school district that the lease will not be renewed past 2019.

Prior postings indicated that EPISD staff was aware of the lease issue but that they were still exploring options with the city.

Why not?

The city does not have to kick the school district out.  We should all ask our mayor and city representatives to extend the land lease and save the tax payers the expense of building a new complex.  You may use this link to contact them.

District officials are telling us that a new building will cost us about $40 million.  I suspect that the number could be made smaller if the central office was more efficient.  If the city’s chief financial officer came up with the number it will probably cost two or three times more than the estimate.

Before any of my readers write in telling me that there are hard working and effective workers at the central office, let me first say that I agree.  We are lucky to have the services of many of those people.  On the other hand we have a significant portion of the central office staff that do not measure up.  Getting rid of them would reduce costs and improve performance.

We deserve better

Brutus

1 Comment | City government, El Paso Independent School District | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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