South by Southwest is coming again in March.
Will our city and county elected officials spend our money again to go to this party?
In the past they have told us that going is good for our economy.
Have they ever produced any results?
We deserve better
Brutus
23 Comments | 
City government, County Government | 
Permalink
Posted by Brutus
One of our readers received this via email from the city the other day:
You are invited to participate in the El Paso City Accelerator Inclusive Procurement Survey because you have been identified as a business owner/associate in the City of El Paso. The purpose of the survey is twofold. It will help the City develop a profile of regional businesses, and it will gather information on business certifications and interest in a future certification program by the City of El Paso.
This survey will also allow the City to identify and develop the infrastructure needed to establish a certification program.
The survey will take no more than 10 minutes of your time. Your answers will be held strictly confidential, and in no way affect your business’ standing. Note that if you have multiple businesses, we would very much appreciate it if you would complete a survey for each business. We encourage non-profit and for profit organizations to exclude themselves from taking the survey to ensure that each business is properly counted when developing the regional business profile and assessing certification needs.
They encourage non-profit and for profit organizations to exclude themselves from taking the survey…
Do they bother to read what they put out?
We deserve better
Brutus
4 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
The February 9-15, 2020 issue of El Paso Inc. had an interview with our first city manager.
They wrote:
Then came … a $44 million ballot item for a new ballpark that more than 70% of voters supported…
The voters were never asked to approve a ballpark. They were asked to approve using hotel occupancy taxes to pay for it. If the voters declined approval the bill would have been added to our property taxes. This is what we voted on:
VENUE PROJECT AND HOTEL OCCUPANCY TAX PROPOSITION
“AUTHORIZING THE CITY OF EL PASO, TEXAS, TO DESIGNATE THE MINOR LEAGUE BASEBALL STADIUM PROJECT AS A SPORTS AND COMMUNITY VENUE PROJECT WITHIN THE CITY IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE LAW AND TO IMPOSE A TAX ON THE OCCUPANCY OF A ROOM IN A HOTEL LOCATED WITHIN THE CITY, AT THE MAXIMUM RATE OF TWO PERCENT (2%) OF THE PRICE PAID FOR SUCH ROOM, FOR THE PURPOSE OF FINANCING SUCH VENUE PROJECT.”
The Inc’s $44 million number is not true either.
Back in August of 2015 we wrote Latest ballpark numbers and showed our portion of the cost to be over $64 million.
The Inc reporter has been around a long time.
Why would he blatantly misstate the facts?
We deserve better
Brutus
11 Comments | Ball park, City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
In 2018 local voters approved a “penny swap” program for EPISD that transferred money from the debt service budget into the operations and maintenance budget.
What would happen if we implemented a “penny plan” with our city budget?
Such a plan would cut real spending by one penny out of every dollar that our city government spent the year before.
We deserve better
Brutus
9 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
In Thinking that money grows on trees we saw that the city spent $750,000 on those things that have sprouted up on Airways.
They call it public art.
Without getting into a discussion about whether we should spend money on public art, or another discussion about how much we should spend (currently 2% of city capital spending), maybe we should talk about how we spend the money that we have allocated for public art.
Wouldn’t our community have been better off if the $750,000 had been broken apart into smaller projects commissioned with local artists?
Let’s say they had broken the money up into ten $75,000 projects.
We would have public art in more places and we would have supported ten locals.
We deserve better
Brutus
15 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
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