Wilson Unraveling

May 28, 2013

Today’s City council was pure entertainment. Things went smooth until the Baseball stadium which was to cost 40 million was now costing 50 Million dollars. The Wilson quintet went ballistic. Finger pointing prevailed as the City engineer said he ‘never said’ and Courtney said, “you said”. He almost said “but Ms Wilson made us do it” but he didn’t have a new position yet from all the goodies he’s promised. In fact they threw him under the bus as Courtney wanted them all fired. Isn’t she the one who kept information from Byrd as the beloved chief puppet.

Doctor Noe kept saying “no, no I didn’t get that information”, risking the East Soccer Complex that he recently was promised by the City Manager for his continued cooperation and to stop trying to run the city like a business.

Let me tell you, Ms Wilson became, what you might say Testy. She said the original 40 million was not guaranteed but actually given by another consultant who is no longer on the job. It was just a “guesstimate”. Want to see fancy dancing, the lady was doing the Cha Cha. She ended with “you won’t know what it cost until we get to the end”. They should have known this right along so “what’s the problem”. This was the City Manager at her finest.

Ortega was looking at his 27% desolving. He’s almost convinced he should vote for Oscar. Let him take the heat. He wants out and back to teaching middle school in Clint.

Robinson and Holguin couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Both of them developed intention tremors.

Emma thought it would have been better if she wasn’t unopposed and lost the election.

Ms Byrd asked if we could watch the smoke stacks fall again.

Stay in touch. Maybe the El Paso Times will turn and do free, Hyundai advertisements.

16 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by M.T. Cicero

Wrong side of the tracks

May 28, 2013

Last week city council voted to evict our local railroad museum.

Evict!

The city invited the museum  into the Union Plaza transit terminal back in 2004.  From what I understand,  the arrangement has been operating without a written lease.  It’s not that the museum has not asked for one, the city just won’t work with the museum.

Now the museum has two weeks to move out.  This is a volunteer organization that now has two weeks to pack up all of their many belongings and move out.

The museum provides free services to the city.  Among them is that the city is required to maintain historic engine number one under an agreement with UTEP (who owns the locomotive).  Guess who provides the maintenance — the railroad museum.

The city representative who was just elected to the EPISD school board was quoted as saying “We can’t be the sole source of support for that museum…”.

First, the city is not the sole source of support.  Many volunteers and donors contribute to this quality of life project.

Second, the city has just leased 17,000 plus square feet of the train station  to Texas Tech University for $1 per year for up to 75 years.  Maybe if Texas Tech paid a market based rate for the space we would not consider the city the sole source of support on the rent.  The city gave the Albert Fall mansion to Texas Tech for $1 a year.

Why are we supporting a state funded institution with our own local tax money when we will not support a railroad museum or a science museum?  It sounds to me like someone is not kissing the city manager’s ego.

Find the time to call your city representative.  The city still has time to stop this nonsense.

We deserve better

Brutus

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

He doesn’t get it and he probably never will

May 28, 2013

Our mayor has decided that he should not review the city manager’s performance because the media has become aware of the process.

Let me try one more time.  Mr. mayor, everything the city government does should be public.

Yes details about individual’s lives are exempted from disclosure by state law.  The law does a great job protecting the privacy of individuals.

A performance review is subject to disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act.

The mayor, city council, and the city manager seem to have trouble with this fact.

If the mayor had said that the new mayor should handle the review and left it at that, we would have seen some wisdom that we have not seen during this administration.

We deserve better

Brutus

7 Comments | City government, Open Government, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Just getting started

May 25, 2013

Before even breaking ground on our new ball park the city is telling us that they need $10 million more to build it than the $50 million they told us it would cost.  They also need another $750,000 for design and management work.

Who is responsible for this situation?

Let’s start with the city engineer.  A recent headline article in the El Paso Times quotes him as having said “We could not build the project we have designed without it … We would have to redesign it … It would not be the ballpark the community wants.  It would not be iconic or state of the art.”

The city engineer said that the ball park that the city committed to could not be built.  He was in charge of the technical details.  Is he incompetent, or is he a liar?  Why rig a bid when you can fool City Council? showed us an example of how this individual plays loose with the truth.

Now he tells us that the street and sidewalk “work would have been done by other contractors while the ballpark was built, but that it made more sense to have the general contract oversee the work for better coordination”.  More sense to whom?  His job is to oversee the construction.  This is a no bid give away.  El Paso’s contractors should raise Cain.

Then we have the city manager.  It was her job to see to it that her subordinates did good work.  The city manager made presentations to council selling a ball park that we now know could not be built.  The current decisions being placed before city council must have had her approval.

Demolishing trust pointed out how city staff had found a way to spend $500,000 over and above the $50 million budget building a pedestrian walkway that the ball park needed.  Then it told us about how the city water utility was using customer money to provide new water and sewer facilities to the ball park — once again outside the $50 million budget.

Now the staff wants to use $3 million that was to be used for downtown street projects.  Another $2 million will be stolen from the 2012 quality of life bonds that we approved for the downtown cultural district.  Baseball is not we think of when we speak of culture.  Where is the bond oversight committee?  What committee?  We didn’t promise to listen!  gave us an idea what to expect.

Then we have city council.  Are they part of this lie?  At this point we are in a situation where denying the $10 million dollars could cause the project to fail.  Did city staff fail or did city staff lie?

I guess if I were on city council I would ultimately vote for the $10 million.  I would only do that after I had the written resignations of the city engineer, the chief financial officer, and the city manager.  No resignations, no ball park.  We are going to have to spend good money after bad, but we should not let the same people administer it.

The owners

The team owners are developers.  They know about sidewalks and streets and how they affect projects.  I suspect they knew this was coming.  If one of their employees came to them with a $10 million cost overrun on a $50 million dollar project I suspect that some heads would roll.

The Times article tells us that “the $5 million in contingency funds would pay for amenities such as a bar-restaurant or group and party suites “.  It sounds to me that decisions have been made about how to spend the money.  There is no contingency fund.

Group and party suites will be among the most expensive facilities for the public to buy tickets to.  The profits will be higher on these facilities than on regular tickets.  Who will enjoy the benefit of this extra income after the citizens have spent $5 million?  I suspect that the money will go to the team owners.

The owners have always seemed to me to be good citizens.  Yet they seem to be going along with this two-step theft.  They certainly have not spoken publicly against it.  They benefit from it.  I don’t see how we can trust them in the future.

Not done yet

Like most things we will have to wait to discover the full level of deception here.  Will we end up over $100 million?

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty

Cato

4 Comments | Ball park, City government, El Paso Times, Purchasing | Permalink
Posted by Cato

Dumb public, dumb

May 23, 2013

According to this El Paso Times article at least five candidates for local office had trouble filing their required campaign reports Friday, May 8, 2013

The city clerk’s office is closed on Fridays like much of the city administration is.  You might remember that the city started a four day week back when they were in the old city hall.  Their stated reason was the energy efficiency to be gained from not operating the ten story building on Friday.  Now that the city has spread out to multiple buildings I suppose there will have to be another justification from the city administration eventually.  Public convenience certainly has suffered as evidenced by the troubles the candidates had.

The alternative was to file electronically.  The city has a new computer system to do this.  Evidently it did not work well.  We can all see that happening with a new system, but would we would have hoped that the thing would have been tested more thoroughly before hand.

What I found troubling in the article was the attitude of the city’s IT (information technology) director.  The article spoke of the comments of two of the candidates:  “Both said the new system was inconvenient and troublesome and needed to be fixed.”  The IT director evidently said “the system is being reviewed to ensure it’s more user-friendly, and he said there was a learning curve on the part of the users and the IT Department that created the program.”

In other words the candidates are ignorant and need to be trained.

I wrote in Phoney about the high salaries the city is paying — above the local pay scale.  Then in Something is rotten in the state of Denmark I addressed another boondoggle from IT.

It would be nice to see the city stop blaming the public and start providing better service.

We deserve better

Brutus

2 Comments | City government, El Paso Times | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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