Question to the city

December 18, 2013

I submitted this question to the mayor on Wednesday, December 11 using the city’s mechanism on their  web site.

Would you please have someone point me to the law that allows the special election to be held as late as July?

The Texas Constitution at Article 11, section 11b seems to require that the election be held within 120 days of when the representative made his announcement.

Thank you.

As of now I have not heard from anyone.

I’ll share their response with the readers if I get one.

We deserve better

Brutus

4 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Valet parking

December 17, 2013

Today’s city council agenda has an item on it that gives a local business the use of an 86 foot long by 16 foot wide (1,376 square feet) section of the road in front of 303 North Oregon.

The property will be used to facilitate valet parking between the hours of 11 AM one day and 2 AM the next day.

The city will be paid $1,000 per year.

As a comparison, Sprint (the communications company) signed an agreement with the city allowing Sprint to bury 1,428 linear feet of fiber optic cable under city roads.  The surface streets remained open to traffic.

The fee?  $3,500 per year.

We deserve better

Brutus

7 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Wired deal?

December 16, 2013

The December 17, 2013 city council agenda has an item on it to approve a 614 thousand dollar contract for planning for what is now known as “Multipurpose Cultural & Performing Arts Facility, Cultural Center, and Children’s Museum”.

Sit back and watch told us how the city wants to combine the three separate projects into one project.  Tuesday’s agenda item lets us know that the Hispanic Cultural Center project is now a plain old Cultural Center.

The backup material says:

“This contract provides for hiring an urban planning firm to facilitate a community-wide, bilingual dialogue and gather input on these projects.  The firm will engage the community in an extensive public input process, develop business plans for the facilities, identify programming options, evaluate appropriate venue sizes and amenities, evaluate and recommend siting options that provide connectivity and serve as a catalyst for revitalization and economic growth in the community.”

An out of town firm is being hired.  They will spend about half of their contract with “sub consultants” here in El Paso.

Translation

Extensive

The term “extensive public input process” means that someone will spend 131 hours conducting public forums, workshops, presentations and interviews.    There will be a maximum of four meetings to facilitate “extensive public input”.  The complete engagement will consume 1183 hours.

Connectivity

I think this means they can pick any place they want as long as it is  part of the downtown complex.

Catalyst for revitalization

I doubt that this contemplates revitalizing northeast El Paso and I suspect that most of this blog’s readers would interpret this to mean downtown.

Looking for trouble

It seems that someone anticipates that there may be some trouble with the final report.  The consultant’s proposal includes this language:

“Crisis management is not included in this scope of services and if required will be an additional service”.

We deserve better

Brutus

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

Bumpy roads

December 13, 2013

Our local neighborhood streets are a disgrace.

Driving down them is a bumpy experience with all the patches that have been poorly done over the years.

City council issued $218 million of general obligation bonds in June of 2012 for street infrastructure improvements.  I have not seen a lot of construction going on yet as a result of these funds being committed — the city engineers are busy with the downtown projects right now.

I hope that some of this money will be spent in our neighborhoods and not all of it will be spent downtown.

Management

If they do get around to helping us residents I would like to suggest that they make some changes in the way they manage the quality of our streets.

While some streets may prove to be smooth surfaces immediately after they are paved, it seems that inevitably new reasons to penetrate and patch the streets come up right after the new paving is finished.

To me it would be nice if the city would adopt the following policies:

  • New paving projects will result in a smooth street, or the contractor will not be paid.
  • Those that cut into the paving must replace the cut with a patch that results in a smooth street, or the contractor will not be paid and the contractor will be ineligible to make a paving cut for some period of time after failure to restore a street
  • The city should keep track of which contractors worked on particular parts of streets and hold them responsible for repairing patches that result in bumps.  Their responsibility should be for at least a few years.

We deserve better

Brutus

15 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Out of line

December 12, 2013

Recently released emails show our city manager taking sides in local political races.

This page from Mock El Paso Times is one example.

The city manager is certainly entitled to have private political views.

Private

Not public.  Certainly not shared openly with elected officials, regardless of which camp they are in.

Our city manager should be an administrator, not a partisan.

Hopefully our city council will make it clear to our new city manager that he/she will need to stay out of politics.

While they are at it they should tell our current one to quit trying to manipulate the political scene and spend more time managing our finances.

We deserve better

Brutus

9 Comments | City government, County Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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