Bad habit

April 26, 2013

Items 12A, B, and C on the April 30, 2013 city council agenda deal with construction activities after hours.

Noise levels, grading (heavy equipment earth movers), vibration, and general construction activities have been regulated in the past.  What is new here is that the contractor must get a permit.  If you like big government and restrictive development this is a good idea.  Well, in this case the permit is only $72.00 so government will not be getting much bigger.

Why the trouble?

From what I can see in the old ordinances there were ways for a contractor to get permission to operate like this after hours.  What could not be done easily was to waive the restrictions if the property was within 300 feet of property that had residential zoning.

Let’s see, where could that be?  The new ball park of course.

What’s done is done.

The residents around the ball park will have major changes in their lives.  In all probability their real estate will become the target of developers who want to take advantage of proximity to the new facility.  Most of the buildings are rented out to multiple tenants.  They are apartments.  Even if I am wrong and the buildings are not sold the residents will see crowds, traffic congestion, noise, lights and other new conditions even into the evening hours.

El Paso has committed to building the ball park and getting it done on time.  I suspect that most of those who were opposed to building it on top of the old city hall now realize that further objection is pointless.  To me if construction has to go on at night and on weekends in order to meet the schedule it will be a necessary evil.

Why hide?

It seems to me that this current bunch down at the new city halls would rather  hide the truth than tell it.  It seems like it has become a game to them.

That is why I have an inherent distrust for what they say.

We deserve better

Brutus

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Proposition summaries

April 26, 2013

Early voting is about to start.  Over the next few days we will cover the proposed changes to our city charter and my thoughts about them.  This will be a serial post in that it will be added to and when finished will cover each of the nine propositions.

Just in time for this series, the city has published their official notices and has actually given us the wording that they will use if we vote for any of the propositions.

Many will disagree with my thoughts about some of these.  Good!

Just go vote your conscience.  Show everyone that elections work.

I wonder how many proposals are turned down.  Then I wonder how many proposals turn out to be a bad idea. 🙂

Proposition 9–no

This would allow the sale of general obligation bonds for “any lawful purpose”.  Evidently there is some current restriction of what city council can sell.  Good!  We have a lot of debt to handle right now and that group already has plenty of ways to take our money.  They don’t need another one.

It would also allow council to buy property (land, buildings, equipment) through lease purchases.  This would allow them to spread costs out over many budget years thus stymieing our ability to force a tax roll back when our taxes raise more than a certain percentage year to year.  We need to be realistic with our budgets and not hide costs.  If we need it we should pay for it when we get it, or have a bond election.

Read Proposition 9 for more.

We deserve better

Brutus

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Propositions explained, but not how they were published

April 25, 2013

Great news!  The El Paso Times in their Wednesday, April 24, 2013 edition published six  full pages of “Legal Notice” to the citizens of El Paso.  Three were in English and three in Spanish.  I thank the Times.

Brutus has been writing about the proposed city charter amendments and has commented that he would like to see the actual text of the proposed change in addition to the ballot language that the city has been publishing.  Now he has it.  We will wait to see what he thinks.

Wait.  Those six pages do not appear to be available in the on-line edition of the Times.  Advertising is handled differently between the two editions.  Could it be that the city had to pay for the publication and the Times was the beneficiary?

The city is required by state law to publish this information.  There is nothing wrong with them paying the Times and the Times making a profit.

What I do question is whether the city also published the notices in El Diario de El Paso.  If they did then I applaud everyone involved.

If they only paid one paper, wouldn’t it make sense to put the English portion in our English language newspaper and the Spanish portion in the Spanish one?  Maybe there is some legal issue here and both sets of notices needed to be in the same newspaper.  I doubt it.  In fact I wonder if the city is even required to publish them in Spanish, not that I have a problem with them doing it.

Is it possible that the city just wanted to give more money to the Times to keep them happy?

Muckraker

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Losing our shine

April 25, 2013

I’m hoping that a reader will provide an answer to a question that I have been thinking about.

It used to be that our fire department equipment was always shiny.  We would see the firefighters out waxing the vehicles.

Now the red paint on many of the vehicles has faded closer to pink and we no longer see the firefighters out polishing them.

Is there a reason that this practice has stopped?

I am not complaining, just wondering.

Brutus

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2B but not really

April 24, 2013

Special thanks to The El Paso Times.  They chose to partially cover the contentious discussion at city council yesterday about the closing of seven rail road crossings on page 2B today (you can read the article here).  The closings are part of the deal that the city had to make to get the land to build the ball park.  See Train wreck by Brutus.

I have not seen the video yet but the article once again tells us a lot by what it does not say.

Three representatives from the Ysleta Independent School District were concerned about the unintended consequences of the closures and the fact that the school district was not notified.  Two city representatives “stood up” to them and pointed out that they had been holding community meetings for years.  Evidently the representatives feel that the city government can operate without regard for other governments and their agencies in El Paso.  The attitude seems to be “we hold meetings, you need to come bow before us, we have no obligation to reach out to you”.

The closing vote passed by six to two.  Most interesting to me is that the article did not mention the city representative who is running for mayor.  Did he sit back and let other council members carry the ball in this issue where parts of El Paso got sold down the river for the sake of the city hall destruction/ball park deal?  Or did he speak up for the progress that he and his cabal are inflicting on us?

Either way the Times should have told us.  The man is running for the office of mayor.  We have the right to know about his actions on council.  Maybe the reporter got tied up in traffic going to the candidate’s campaign office.

Muckraker

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