No telling

December 11, 2013

In Hurry up and waste we saw that city council increased a $1.25 million design contract to $4.7 million, no bidding necessary.  This was in September, 2012.

The contract was for services to design a new trolley system for El Paso.

The Texas Transportation Commission supposedly had $90 million that it was ready to give to El Paso for the project.  We later learned that the money was not available to us.  Sadly we might have wasted our $4.7 million.

The amended contract gave the contractor 210 calendar days from the city’s “notice to proceed” to complete the design .

Where is it?

More than a calendar year has passed since the contract was amended.  Where is the design?

I went to the city web site and got this page as a result of  my search for “streetcar”:

Streetcarsearch

Clicking the City Hosts Public Meetings to Present Preliminary Streetcar System link, I got this page:

streetcarsearchresult

We deserve better

Brutus

4 Comments | City government, Purchasing, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Balk!

December 10, 2013

According to this article in the El Paso Times,  this Wednesday the city is going to release a traffic study relating to our new ball park.

Wrong answer?

Brutus wrote Planned failure, a post about a ball park traffic study that the city commissioned and then published in December of 2012.

Are we going to see a new study?  If not, why does the article tell us that the city is going to release the study this Wednesday?

Could it be that the first study was unflattering?  Read it for yourself here.  Personally I think that waiting 875 seconds at one intersection while leaving a game is pretty bad.

Say it ain’t so, Joe

Maybe this is a new study.  Maybe it will predict different outcomes.

Maybe the city did not commission the study to try to get a better answer.

Maybe the Times will start researching subjects before just printing whatever the city tells them to.

Muckraker

10 Comments | Ball park, City government, El Paso Times | Permalink
Posted by Muckraker

Dim wits?

December 9, 2013

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately about a lighting display in a local park that a city representative asked for.

His request seems to me to be out of character with his stated position that he only wants the city to be involved in those things that the city is required to do.

This post is not about the political ramifications of the situation however.  Other bloggers seem to think that the political situation is the important thing here.

Competence

City council voted to fund the display.

City staff did a miserable job implementing it.

Did they do such a poor job to try to discredit the city representative?

Did they do such a poor job because they are not competent?

Either way I think that corrective steps should be taken.

We deserve better

Brutus

19 Comments | City government, Purchasing | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Keep on giving

December 7, 2013

The November 12, 2013 city council meeting had another downtown give away item on it.

As part of the renaissance of downtown the city decided to move Sun Metro out of the Union Depot train station and lease the depot to Texas Tech for one dollar a year for up to 75 years.  Texas Tech will use the depot to house their El Paso branch of their school of architecture.

Having a school of architecture in El Paso seems to me like a good thing.  Unfortunately El Paso’s tax payers will have to pay for it when there is a university system already charged with that responsibility.

The agenda item proposed adding over $202,000 dollars to an architectural contract for design services to add 6,000 square feet of office space to the new facility that we are building to house Sun Metro.  About $16,000 of the addition was for landscaping design.  If that is correct we are spending $186,000 dollars to design 6,000 square feet of office space as an addition to a building that was already designed.  That comes to about $31 per square foot to design add-on space to an existing building.

Construction costs extra

That of course does not include the cost of building out the space.  I guess we will learn about that bill later.  No hurry, we have already committed to the move.  Costs can’t be considered now.

Because of the giveaway

The backup material for the agenda item has this explanation:

Due to the relocation of Sun Metro staff from the Union Depot, Sun Metro has requested to house staff at the Operations Building and an Administration Building  Addition instead of leasing office space.  This will allow them to serve customers more cost-effectively.

Sensible

Evidently someone over at Sun Metro has some common sense.  They have figured out that having their administrative staff in the “Administration Operations & Maintenance Facility” would be a good idea.

Why did the original design not include the administrative staff being in the administration building?

Is this another example of city staff delivering the bad news to us in multiple steps?

We deserve better

Brutus

2 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Saying it doesn’t make it so

December 5, 2013

Our strategic thinkers are scheduled to ask city council for approval to change some of our city statements at the December 10, 2013 meeting of council.

Self promoting

The city’s current vision statement is “To be a high-performance, customer-focused organization.”

The proposal will be to change the vision statement to “The City of El Paso is a high-performance, customer-focused organization”.

Evidently they think that if you say something often enough it becomes true.  I would think that if they were customer focused they would have included some citizens in the feedback process.

Less community

They want to change the city government’s mission statement from “Dedicated to outstanding customer services for a better community” to “Dedicated to providing outstanding customer services for a better El Paso”.

This change goes right over my head.  I don’t understand what they are trying to say.  Why drop community and replace it with El Paso?   Hopefully the blog readers will be able to explain it.

Cost be damned

They propose changing the statement of core values to:

We value:

  • Excellence
  • Integrity
  • Respect
  • Accountability
  • Our People

I think it would be nice if they included cost effectiveness, but then again they aren’t paying the bills.

New direction

Thankfully they do include this statement in their presentation for council and the public:

We will ensure continued financial stability and accountability through sound financial management, budgeting and reporting.

Maybe this way we can avoid having a promised $30 million move of city departments that has cost us more than $70 million so far, or having to spend an extra $17 million because of a failed bond issuance, or maybe we could actually build a ball park for what city staff told us it would cost.

We deserve better

Brutus

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

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