elpasospeak

One of the aspects of the public private partnership issue that came before city council the other day concerns city staff not knowing their place.

City employees work for the city manager, not city council.  City council should be deciding issues and specifying direction.

The city manager is supposed to implement the policies of city council if they can be implemented.

In this situation at least three city council members felt that the issue was “sprung” on them as a surprise and that they wanted more information before taking action.

A respected member of the development community stood before council and explained that the procurement process that was defined as part of the request for proposals was not followed.  He felt that he and other competitors had not been given a fair chance.

We don’t know enough about the various offers that the city received to comment on which one should have been chosen.  Evidently at least three members of council felt the same way.

Instead of listening to council’s concerns city staff took an active role in pushing the vote through.  Senior staff from several departments took positions as advocates for taking action.  It looked like at least one of them chose to tell part of the truth but not the whole story.

If things are being run properly they should not have been able to do this without the city manager’s knowledge, thus leaving us with the belief that their advocacy was allowed by the city manager.

We unfortunately have a city manager form of government.  The mayor and city representatives enjoy the luxury of hiding behind that fact.

Has our current city manager decided that it is his job to tell council what to do?

We deserve better

Brutus

The city is entertaining entering into a relationship with some private developers to facilitate the building of a high rise hotel/apartment/parking building in downtown.

This document (caution big but worth looking at)  downtownhighrise was posted as backup material to a recent agenda item relating to the project.

Take a few moments to browse through the pdf.

It would be interesting to compute the percentage of the material that was redacted compared to what was disclosed.  The stated reason for the redaction is that the information is proprietary.  I can see how dollar amounts and approaches might be, but a lot of those pages are not proprietary.

We deserve better

Brutus

The sun metro chart we posted the other day covers up a real problem.

The chart shows that 13,766,000 passengers rode the buses in fiscal year 2017.

It also shows the cost per trip at $3.41.

Most of sun metro’s funding comes from sales taxes.  They get one half of a percent of a taxable sale which they projected to come to $ 43,824,530 for fiscal year 2017.    In 2017 they also expected to get $3,100,000 from riders.

The city’s 2018 budget states that the 2017 sun metro total budget was $69,846,055.

Predictably  they expected to spend every penny that they got.

So with 13,766,000 passengers and $69,846,055  in spending the cost per trip really is $5.07 not $3.41.

They will probably try to tell us that the $3.41 is the incremental cost of each trip, the other money is used to pay the out of town firm that runs sun metro and to pay for offices and other things.

At the end of the day though the cost per trip is $5.07.

With 13,766,000 riders and $3,100,000 in income from the riders we learn that on average each rider is paying 22.5 cents.

Even after basically giving away their service they are losing customers.

Isn’t it time to rethink this situation?

If we need a bus service to help lower income people, can’t we deliver the service more efficiently?

We deserve better

Brutus

Sun Metro’s management continues to provide their board (city council) with goals that they miss.

According to their numbers their cost per trip (passenger trip) in 2015 was $3.13.  They set a goal of $3.00 for 2016.

Their results show that 2016’s cost per trip actually turned out to be $3.44.

Going into 2017 they told their board that their goal was $3.25 per trip.

Their actual number turned out to be $3.44.

They have done the same thing with the projected number of passengers.

During 2015 they reported 15,954,000 passengers (hard to believe isn’t it?) so they forecast 16,500,000 for 2016.

The 2016 number actually came in below the 2015 number at 14,696,000.

For 2017 they lowered their goal to 15,000,000 passengers and only achieved a number of 13,766,000.

We deserve better

Brutus