Our city council is planning to call for a special election on Tuesday, November 8, 2018 asking if the voters want to give city council and the mayor pay raises as follows:
For council members the pay would increase to $45,300 per year from the current rate of $29,000. That comes to about a 56% increase if my math is correct.
If approved the pay rates would also be indexed so that they would not have to trouble us in the future.
We deserve better
Brutus
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Posted by Brutus
Max Grossman sent this in:
Friends,
What do all six new candidates for City Council share in common? They are all opposed to the City’s plan to build an “Arena” in Duranguito!
CANDIDATE DISTRICT SUPPORTS “ARENA” LOCATION
John Hogan 5 No
Kizito Ekechukwu 5 No
Eric Stoltz 6 No
Dylan Corbett 8 No
Nicholas Vasquez 8 No
Rich Wright 8 No
Well, that is quite a wave of opposition. Apparently the City’s “Arena” PR campaign, paid for with our tax dollars, has utterly failed. These candidates would not be running on this position if they did not feel it were in the best interests of their constituents.
Rep. Peter Svarzbein of District 1 is the only incumbent who has filed his campaign paperwork with the City so far, and he is of course pro-demolition and pro-displacement, after changing his mind twice. We wish him good luck with that. We are informed that some formidable challengers will be throwing their hat in the District 1 race soon.
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Posted by Brutus
Max Grossman sent this in:
Friends,
The Austin-based Texas Public Policy Foundation, one of our state’s most influential advocacy groups, has a Facebook page that is followed by 315,091 people. In a recent post (5/25/18), they singled out El Paso for having the highest hotel occupancy tax in Texas.
According them, the top three reasons for ditching the hotel occupancy tax are as follows:
“1. This tax is supposed to fund projects like convention centers, which are supposed to then turn a profit. Sometimes those convention centers never turn a profit and sometimes they are never built in the first place.
2. This tax can hurt small businesses and local economies by discouraging tourism and siphoning away money that could have been spent locally.
3. Like any other private industry, the travel and tourism industry should not rely on taxpayer money for promotion and funding of its activities.”
As you know, some years ago the City tacked 2% onto our HOT, raising it from 15.5% to 17.5%, in order to fund the operations of a Ballpark that loses more than $500K every year and does almost nothing to support the hotel industry. Do you think anyone actually travels to El Paso and stays in our hotels to enjoy AAA baseball? We are constantly told that we deserve state-of-the-art facilities and that we must provide new amenities in order to keep El Pasoans from leaving El Paso. But in the end, we are being asked to subsidizeentertainment, even as our City’s tax-supported debt stands at more than $2 billion, we have the 2nd highest homestead tax rate among the 50 largest cities in America, and our streets are in third-world condition!
Since our City managed to turn a $50-million Ballpark into a $130-million boondoggle that will lose tens of millions of dollars over the life of our 30-year contract with the MountainStar Sports Group, and we are already $56 million over budget on 11 QOL bond projects, do you think we can trust the same City to manage the construction and operation of an “Arena” that comes with a price tag of $180 million?
Enjoy your day.
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Posted by Brutus
Will city council pay attention?
The slide below is from a recent budget presentation made to city council:
The very next slide in the presentation recaps what the public told them our priorities ought to be:
City staff seems to think that streets are at the bottom of the list of quality of place/life issues.
We think that they should be number one.
Our desire for improvements in our parks does not even make their list.
They know what we want. Will they do it?
We deserve better
Brutus
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Posted by Brutus
Max Grossman sent in this note about the children’s museum:
“We need to go to another level to make sure that we’re going to deliver a quality project–and a project of excellence to the community.”
Tracey Jerome, Director of Museums and Cultural Affairs, City of El Paso, KVIA report, 5/22/18
Dear Friends,
$19.5 million were originally earmarked for the Children’s Museum, one of the signature “Quality of Life” projects. That figure has now more than tripled to $60 million, with $20 million coming from the El Paso Community Foundation and the balance coming from the City of El Paso. Thus the City is planning to issue at least $20 million in certificates of obligation to pay for the massive, bloated bond project,without voter approval. This is an egregious act of economic tyranny and it will not be tolerated.
Watch City leaders continue to tell us that we deserve a world-class state-of the-art facility, as our debt explodes into the red zone. I said it before and I’ll say it again: we have the 2nd highest homestead tax rate among the 50 largest cities in America and our City’s portion of our homestead tax, at $0.80 per $100 of valuation, is the highest among major Texas cities. Our tax-supported debt has exceeded $2 billion, which is more than Austin’s! This comes at a time when thousands of El Pasoans are receiving notices that their property taxes are skyrocketing; I got mine, which comes with a 10% tax hike in a single stroke! We cannot afford to expend tens of millions of extra dollars on entertainment projects that are not essential while so many of our roads resemble those of Beirut!
See the excellent report by Aaron Montes on the front page of the current issue of the El Paso Inc.
El Pasoans are watching, and they are not happy.
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Posted by Brutus
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