Opening Day

October 14, 2013

According to this article in the Times opening day for our new ball park will be April 11, 2014.  The Pacific Coast League arranged the schedule so that our team will play the first few games of the season out of town to allow the ball park to be completed.

The October 15, 2013 city council agenda has the latest “Guaranteed Maximum Price Amendment” with the construction company they hired to build the ball park.

Surprise, Surprise!

My initial reading of the amendment yielded these jewels:

  • The ball park will enjoy substantial completion by April 28, 2014.  That’s a little late for an April 11 opening.
  • “Substantial Completion is defined as the Ballpark being ready for a full capacity Triple-A baseball event.  However, this may require code “work arounds” such as fire watch, extra stadium staff for security, etc. which costs will be borne by others.”  I may be wrong but I think that code work arounds are the same as code violations.
  • Final completion of the park is scheduled for August 31, 2014.  The regular season ends September 1, 2014.
  • The document excludes certain things from the price, like:
    • railroad platforms and bridge
    • railroad platform foundations
    • Missouri and Durango street improvements
    • offsite improvements/work (this probably includes the water and sewer work the city is not talking about as well as the pedestrian and road work around the park)
    • special construction provisions required at railroad
    • porcelain/art signage
    • 4 TOPP or 2 TOPP tables and loose chairs
    • aluminum and fabric sun shades

Reasons for increase

The presentation for city council includes a page that offers these reasons:

“Construction commenced before delivery of complete design.  Only recently has the design advanced to the point to allow the CMAR [Construction Manager at Risk] to set GMP [Guaranteed Maximum Price]”

“Project Schedule — Drives costs up due to overtime, expedited materials, etc.”

“Bids have not been as favorable as projected:  Bids have been as competitive as possible; however, many contractors lack the resources necessary to meet the schedule.”

In other words we could have built the ball park for less money if the team played in Tucson or at Cohen Stadium during 2014 and moved to the new ball park in 2015.

We deserve better

Brutus

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

Bad bets

October 11, 2013

How are we doing with the Hotel Occupancy Tax (HOT) collections that are to be used to pay for the bonds that we have issued to build the ball park?

2 percent growth

On June 26, 2012 the city’s chief financial officer made a presentation to city council that assumed a 2% growth per year in HOT revenue.

I’ll see your two and raise you to three

Then on October 29, 2012 the city’s chief financial officer made another presentation to city council that assumed a 3% growth.

Remember that at that time the ball park was still supposed to be a $50 million dollar facility.  The first $10 million over-run did not become public until May, 2013.

Bad gamble

The numbers for the first six months of 2013 show the HOT revenue down almost 1% from 2012.

HOT revenues have declined, not increased 2% much less the 3% she presented. The city will probably have to make up the shortfall with general fund revenues which primarily come from sales taxes.

I’ll see your three and raise you to 4.3

The 2014 city budget anticipates a raise in sales tax revenue of 4.3%.

The state has only posted the numbers for January through March at this point.

Those numbers show a 2.5% increase, not the 4.3% that the city needed to balance the budget before the HOT shortfall.

We deserve better

Brutus

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

Can we find a better way?

October 10, 2013

Why does the El Paso fire department send a pumper or quint along with an ambulance to many medical calls?

Common answers from people who do this for a living are:

  • They often need the extra manpower to lift a patient since the ambulance only has two medics in it
  • The pumper can get to the scene faster because there are more fire trucks than ambulances
  • The extra people perform other services like traffic control

These are all valid responses.  Could we do better?

Look at the physics

The United States department of transportation specifies that ambulances should be able to accelerate two miles per second up to 70 miles per hour.  In other words they should be able to travel at two miles per hour one second after starting and at 30 miles per hour after 15 seconds.

I could not find a specification for fire pumpers but I did see a purchasing specification issued by an individual department.  The requirement was that the pumper be able to get up to 30 miles per hour within 25 seconds.

An ambulance would be traveling at 50 miles per hour by then.

Remember that the pumper is not only bigger and heavier but may also be carrying 500 to 1800 gallons of water.  I have seen pumper units trying to climb up neighborhood streets on the mountainsides of El Paso slow down to 2 miles per hour.

Manpower

Our fire stations in El Paso have different configurations.  Some have pumpers, some pumpers and aerial units, some include ambulances, others have battalion commands or other special purpose units.

A basic station with a pumper and an ambulance has 5 firemen on duty each shift.  Three are assigned to the pumper and two to the ambulance.

All three travel with the pumper.  The rationale is that if the pumper needs to go to an actual fire, it can be ready without having to pick someone up.  There is a movement to put four firefighters on each pumper that has not succeeded yet in El Paso.

We end up with five people and two trucks working the scene once the pumper gets there.

I have heard of a different technique.  Here the department would have to buy an extra vehicle with each ambulance.  The vehicle would be a pickup sized unit that would have the basic medical equipment but not be capable of transporting a patient.

A call would come in and the two medics would get in the smaller truck and head to the scene.  A firefighter would get in the ambulance and drive it to the scene.  The pickup should get there even faster than the ambulance.  The medics could start their assessment and treatment sooner.  The ambulance would get there in the same amount of time as the method we are using now.  The pumper would stay at home.

What happens if a real fire call comes in while the firefighter is on scene with the medics?  This happens on occasion now in that a call will come in while the pumper is at a medical scene.  An officer (manager) must decide whether to leave the incident with only the medics there.  If the pumper needs to go to the fire, the two firefighters that are still in the station head out with the pumper.  The third one gets in the pickup and heads to the fire.

To be sure the pumpers need to be exercised.  Sending them on some medical calls to assure that they are in a ready state makes sense to me.

I anticipate that some criticism to this post will come in.  I welcome learning more about the situation and seeing if our technique can be improved.

We deserve better

Brutus

10 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Another two step on the horizon?

October 9, 2013

It probably is not fair for me to think that we will be taken advantage of again before a deal goes bad.  For my part I guess that I can’t help it since it happens so frequently.

We recently learned that a local developer and former city alderman wants to build a $17 million dollar Marriott right next to his Hilton Doubletree hotel.  His Hilton might turn out to be the biggest beneficiary of the new ball park.

The developer already operates a hotel downtown that has received tax breaks from us.   Insider’s club was about how our most recent former mayor tried to lobby for the developer in spite of a city ordinance prohibiting him from doing so.

Now the developer has come forward and publicly stated that he wants to build a $17 million dollar hotel right next to the one he already has.  I believe that they would then be the two closest hotels to our new ballpark.  He will need $3 million dollars in concessions from local government.  The concessions will need to be “virtually identical” to the ones his other hotel received.

His other hotel received concessions and a contract was executed.  Then the developer came back to city council and claimed that the contract was too stringent — he needed relief.  My recollection is that he got it.  Then as I recall he came back to city council again and needed more relief which council dutifully gave him.  This is the classic two step we see frequently in town.  Start with one set of promises and then change them once you have gotten what you want.

Nothing certain

The developer is in negotiations with the city.  We are told that the hotel will be a Marriott, he will spend $17 million to build it,  that it will have 140 guest rooms, and that it will have a 90 space parking garage.

Given past history we might wake up one morning and find that it is not a Marriott, that the cost was not $17 million, that it does not have 140 guest rooms, and that there is not parking garage.  What it will have is whatever turns out to be most advantageous to the developer regardless of was promised in order to get the tax concessions.

Competing with ourselves?

There is already a Marriott in town, located near the airport.  Is El Paso a large enough market to support two?  I hope so.  Will a new one take business away from the existing one?  Would that put us in a position where the existing Marriott has less business and thus pays lower taxes?  I hope not.  The developer says that no market study has been done.

The existing hotel does not contribute to the Hotel Occupancy Taxes that are being used to finance our new ball park even though it looks like the hotel will be biggest beneficiary of the construction.

This sentence comes from the 2005 staff report to city council:

Approximately 75 percent of the projected Hotel Occupancy Tax revenue is to be derived from business shifted from other El Paso hotel properties.

We deserve better

Brutus

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

Upscale promises

October 8, 2013

The new shopping center we know as The Fountains at Farah is another example of the two step process that gets used in El Paso to get the public to help pay for new development.

The pitch, or step one

The first step was the request for $12 million in tax rebates from the city and county.  The money was needed to make the project economically viable for the developers.

The sales pitch was that the new center would bring “upscale retailers” to El Paso.

They got their $12 million after a long battle. This quote from El Paso Inc. summed up the loser’s argument:

Simon Properties, which owns Cielo Vista Mall, and De la Vega Group, developer of Las Palmas Market Place, argued the center would simply steal tenants from other El Paso shopping centers and malls, especially damaging as the economy was slipping into recession.

The Inc. went on to write that our local leaders took measures to keep that from happening:

The city and county responded by tying the entitlements to a requirement that The Fountains attract net new tenants to El Paso.

We now know that Best Buy and Barnes and Nobles are doing precisely what the losers feared.  They are both closing existing stores and moving to the Fountains.

Step two

What about the promised upscale stores?  El Paso Inc later published another article that explained why no luxury stores have decided to come to El Paso.

The developers tried, but we just aren’t affluent enough, especially since our property tax bills will go up as a result of this.

None, nada, zero, zilch upscale stores.

The result

El Paso got a very nice brand new shopping center.  The taxpayers gave away $12 million.  Existing stores did move out of old centers and into the new one.  The existing tax paying retail center owners got taken.

We deserve better

Brutus

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

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