Back in 2012 the voters in the city approved $473 million worth of bonds for various projects.
Five years later we can see the city’s progress in this chart that city staff presented at the July 11. 2017 city council meeting:
Wow, $29 million dollars in only five years.
At this rate we should look forward to completion in 81 years.
We deserve better
Brutus
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Posted by Brutus
Our current mayor wrote a piece for The El Paso Times the other day in which he said that a letter our current state senator recently sent to the mayor and city council was “factually wrong and unfair”.
After arguing that the city has no intention of building a “sports arena” the mayor wrote “Rather , the city will build a multipurpose, performing arts and entertainment center. In reference to the location of the arena …”.
He might of called it an entertainment center instead of an arena if he really intends to obey the judge’s order and not allow sporting events in the facility.
Later the mayor wrote about the senator’s claims about ballpark financing. The mayor wrote “Also, the models showed there would be a subsidy from the City’s General Fund until the growth in HOT and team revenues caught up”.
A July 7, 2013 article in El Paso Inc. told us:
Originally, hotel occupancy tax revenues were to pay for $48.7 million of the stadium cost with the remaining $4.1 million covered by ticket surcharges and stadium-generated sales taxes – money that would first go into the city’s general fund.
We doubt that the Inc. was lying.
Unfortunately the city is having to subsidize the ballpark with money above and beyond ticket surcharges and stadium-generated sales taxes.
On June 26, 2016 city council passed a resolution that allowed the city manager to proceed with the ballpark deal. When it came to financing the ballpark, the resolution said:
Financing Ballpark Construction. The City Manager is authorized to proceed with the proposed financing plan, which ultimately may be modified to include the possible use of (i) a venue hotel occupancy tax if approved by the voters at a duly-called election; (ii) lease revenue bonds issued by a local government corporation formed by the City; and/or (iii) other debt obligations issued by or on behalf of the City for the construction and development of the Ballpark.
The resolution allowed three methods of financing, none of which included general revenue from the city taxpayers.
In his conclusion the mayor wrote “I respectfully ask that you get your facts correct”.
Either the mayor is misinformed or he is not telling the truth. Either way he does not have his facts correct.
We deserve better
Brutus
4 Comments | Ball park, City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
This came in from an alert reader:
City of EP council agenda for Monday discusses the street CIP and in the middle of the 38 pages talks about the 135 street, $37M bid to go out the 17th.
Interesting that they notified vendors on the TxDOT, NMDot, Arizona DOT about the bid.
It appears they really don’t want a local firm to get the bid nor will they break it up so several contractors might get a piece of it.
And the CSP Evaluation factors will probably be written such that most local contractors won’t be qualified.
Thank you Sam Rodriguez – the new city engineer.
The bid package is expected to come out the 17th.
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You might want to read Neighborhood streets get the axe if you haven’t already.
We deserve better
Brutus
4 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
This post on El Chuqueno sums up our situation as well as any that we have heard.
We deserve better
Brutus
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Posted by Brutus
City council is going to have a special meeting Monday, October 16, 2017.
Evidently in this case a special meeting is one where they want to do something but don’t want the public to know about it or to show up to the meeting.
What they plan to do in this special meeting is to renege on previous commitments to pave neighborhood streets.
It looks like they don’t have enough money to maintain our main thoroughfares and so they want to take the money allocated to neighborhood streets and spend it on the big ones.
This chart tells you what they are up to:
Reprogrammed in this case means taken away from what was promised and spent on something else.
The street paving that is being reprogrammed here takes two slides:
Residents on those streets will just have to wait.
If you are inclined to go down to city council and complain please remember that you will only be allocated 3 minutes to speak and that if a bunch of you show up they will limit the number of people that get to talk.
Doing this in a special council meeting is cowardly.
We deserve better
Brutus
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