El Paso ball park lease–continued

November 7, 2013

I found the first amendment to the ball park lease.  As it applies to parking the only thing that I saw in the amendment was that in years 25-30 of the lease the city will be entitled to $1.60 per parking spot per year.

The lease is now for thirty years with the sports group having the option to extend the lease three times for five years each.  That brings the period in which they can control the ball park to 45 years.

The lease will cost $400,000 per year for the first five years and escalates all the way up to $644,204 per year in years 25 to 30.

City use

The sports group gets first priority in using the facility each of the 365 days of the year.

The city may request to use the facility for:

“civic-oriented, community not-for profit or educational events such as City ceremonies, conferences, conventions, meetings and training sessions”

and the sports group will allow them to use it if the sports group does not have something else scheduled for that day.  In other words the city only gets to use the stadium if the sports group does not want it that day, and the city cannot use the arena to make a profit.

Concession

When the city is using the stadium the sports group has the right to run the concessions.  If the sports group declines to run the concessions for a city event, the city must “negotiate an agreement” with the sports group’s existing concessionaires.

The city will reimburse the sports group for any extra expenses that running the city event cause.

City ticket revenue

The city may place a surcharge of fifty cents for each ticket sold for a ball park event.  That number increases each five years up to eighty cents per ticket in years 25-30.

Escalator

I can understand setting fixed amounts for leasing of large facilities.  What does not make sense is a ticket surcharge that goes from fifty cents to eighty cents after 25 years.  Where were the city people in this negotiation?

We deserve better

Brutus

2 Comments | Ball park, City government | Permalink
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El Paso Quality of life update

November 6, 2013

Our interim city engineer wrote a column for the El Paso Times this Sunday.

She said that her engineering and construction management department had made “profound” progress on the projects in the last year.  She suggested that we go to buildingtomorrowtogether.com to see their progress, so I did.

Most important

The web page lists ten of the projects that we voted for, one of which they have already started construction on.  The city was in a hurry on that one so they chose not to bid it out but instead use a “requirements contract”.

This Quality of Life bond project is obviously the most important one (or it would not have been the first one started), it is the “Convention Center North Pedestrian Pathway”.

The pathway will provide a pedestrian entrance to our ball park and is scheduled to be completed by April 2014, just like our ball park.  This project is scheduled to cost $500,000.  You can decide if it is really part of the ball park costs.

Another project titled “Pedestrian Crossing and Way Finding” will not have it’s first phase bid out either.  The city plans to use a “requirements contract” on that one too.  Remarkably the web site indicates that construction has not yet started but completion for phase one is scheduled for August 30, 2013.  This project will evidently make it easier for pedestrians to find the new ball park.

Tomorrow is right

The buildingtomorrow part is accuate.  Of the other eight projects three are scheduled to have construction complete in August 2015.  Three, including the children’s museum, do not have anticipated completion dates but are marked as “BEYOND THREE-YEAR ROLLOUT”.  One project is scheduled to be completed in August, 2016.

Incredible digital wall

In Something is rotten in the state of Denmark I wrote about a new $3 million digital wall.  At the time the city was planning to force five city staff members to go to Denmark to learn about it.  The wall is scheduled to be completed in August of 2014.  It is a good thing we sent our staff over early, you never know where they might move Denmark to.

Children’s museum

According to the web page this project is on schedule.  “Urban Planner Consultant selected.  Received proposal on October 14, 2014“.  For those of you reading this post at a later date please remember that at the time of this posting it was November 2013.

Maybe we should nominate city staff for an award in fiction writing.

For those of you who are either crying or laughing too hard to go look for yourselves, the web site presentation is below:

qolOctober2013

qolOctober2013-2

We deserve better

Brutus

5 Comments | Ball park, City government, El Paso Times, Purchasing | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

El Paso Infill

November 5, 2013

If you look at the city council agenda for November 5, 2013 you can see the benefit of having a capable mayor.

The agenda is short.  City council is not up to much mischief.

Four of the items have to do with an out of town company seeking tax incentives to build two dialysis clinics in El Paso.  They seek property tax rebates as well as sales tax rebates (for the cost of construction) for the facilities.

Everything looks on the up and up here in that it appears that the company and city are following existing ordinances.  The company is simply seeking to take advantage of something that the city offers  — the Infill Development Incentive Policy.

Competition

I don’t know how well served El Paso is with dialysis clinics.  I don’t even know if the infill policy considers the nature of the business.

What I can see is that the infill zones defined by the city cover most of the city.  It looks like remodeling a building or building a new building within the defined areas qualifies for tax relief.

infill

In this case the owners will get 100% of their city property tax back in years one and two, 75% in year three, 50% in year four, and 25% in year five.  If passed they will also get the city portion of the sales tax they pay for remodeling back.

Maybe this makes sense.  The buildings are on Murchison and Trans Mountain, hardly areas that I would consider to be blighted.  Then again it does not appear that the infill policy takes that into account.

Does this make sense?  On the one hand we are providing economic incentives to new businesses to compete with existing tax paying businesses.  On the other we seem to be being new business friendly.

Alternative proposal

One of you may be able to explain this to me so that it makes sense.  My proposal is that we work to lower property taxes so that El Paso is more affordable for all citizens to live in and operate a business in.

We deserve better

Brutus

7 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

E-mail archiving

November 1, 2013

There has been some discussion lately about local governments deleting e-mails.

This presentation out of Laredo does a great job of explaining many of the retention requirements.

The fundamental rules come from the Texas Local Government Records Act of 1989.

Some of the basics are:

  • E-mails that deal with government business are government records — even if sent from a personal device.
  • Destroying local government records can be a Class A misdemeanor and under certain cirsumstances a third degree felony under section 37.10 of the Texas Penal code.  There are also criminal penalties under the Texas Public Information Act.  These penalties could lead to removal from office.
  • The sender is the custodian of the record.  The receiver can delete messages unless
    • the receiver needs to take action based upon the message
    • the message is required for documentation
  • The receiver may delete e-mails that are spam, personal, unsolicited mail like news articles, and carbon copies.
  • For those emails that must be kept, the periods of time defined by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) indicate how long they must be kept.  The periods of time generally are between 2 and 5 years, depending upon the nature of the message.
  • The TSLAC defines messages that must be kept for documentation.

I have not been able to find a law or regulation that requires any Texas local government to keep all e-mails.

There are commercially available devices that allow a government to capture all incoming and outgoing e-mail traffic.  These devices centralize the storage of the e-mails and thus make searching far easier.  Instead of having to go to each desktop or device an administrator can search the central archive.

Maybe it is time for our local governments to install these e-mail archiving devices.

We deserve better

Brutus

Leave a Comment » | City government, County Government, El Paso Independent School District | Permalink
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Baseball stadium now part of Quality of Life bonds?

October 29, 2013

I found this on the official site of the El Paso Chihuahuahas:

El Paso citizens approved $500 million in “Quality of Life” bonds, including the building of a state-of-the-art baseball stadium nestled in the heart of downtown to be completed for the 2014 season.

Mistaken

We know that the statement is wrong.  The baseball stadium was not voted on by the citizens.  It was not part of the “Quality of Life” bonds.

Whoever wrote that is either clueless as to what has been happening in El Paso or is trying to change history.

Move on El Paso

Some say that we should stop talking about how the ballpark came about and come together to support it.

Personally I’m inclined to think that supporting it at this point is the right thing to do.  Without our support the situation will become even worse.

As far as stopping talk about how this was foisted upon us, I disagree.  We need to remember this and see to it that our current and future city officials don’t get away with something like this again in the future.  

We deserve better

Brutus

15 Comments | Ball park, City government, Open Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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