Shadow government

February 8, 2013

The El Paso Times (giving credit where credit is due) pointed to something fascinating in their February 6, 2013 edition.  I would post the link here but am incapable of finding the article in their web edition.  To me their site is hard to figure out and unbelievably sluggish.  Things flash around, voice recordings accost,  and searching for articles is hard.

They wrote “After executive session, the council directed the city attorney to draft an ordinance on how the city should handle public information requests”.

I can’t wait.  What mischief are they up to now?  Have they found some clever way to subvert our right to examine the goings on at the city?

They already use many tricks to avoid what Texas state law requires them to do.

“… what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”  Stay tuned!  This has real potential.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Cato

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Posted by Cato

No voters wanted

February 4, 2013

Today (February 4, 2013) is the day that hearings start in Travis County relative to the City of El Paso wanting a declaratory judgment that what it has done to finance the ball park and move city hall is legal.

Declaratory judgment  explains the issue.

City council could have had the hearings in El Paso. The law gave them a choice. Local judges would probably have run from the case, but a visiting judge from out of town could easily have been appointed.

If the hearings were in El Paso we would have had an opportunity to voice our thoughts. The city chose to have the hearings in Travis County so that we would not attend.

This single act shows most clearly that we have a run-away city council that does not want input from the voters.

Shame!

The voting results that show who is doing this to us can be seen here on pages 17 and 18.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Cato

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The El Paso Times on proper governance

February 1, 2013

The post from Brutus yesterday (January 31, 2013) got me to thinking about what the situation is over at the El Paso Times.

The same day as his post the Times wrote an editorial that supported the negative tone of the earlier article Brutus wrote about.

An elected city representative was chastised for bringing a proposal out into the open for the public and city council to consider!

An idea that might be good for the public somehow came to him.  He explored it at a preliminary level to see if it might make sense and be possible.  He then brought it to city council for their consideration.

The Times says that was the wrong thing to do.  They wrote “The rub? Noe apparently went off on his own in negotiating a possible deal with a land developer. Some on City Council said Noe went behind their backs.”

I thought that is part of what he is supposed to do.  Consider an idea.  Bring it out into the open and let council consider it.  Tell council it is just an idea — one way of doing something — that he is open to other ideas.

Could the Times be saying that the way things have been happening at city council is the way he should have handled this?

Does that mean he should have:

  • Gone serially, one by one to avoid the open meeting laws, to each representative and wired together a deal
  • Secretly finalized the details
  • Waited until there would be no time to consider other options
  • Then sprung the deal so that council would have no choice other than to approve it?

Or does it mean he should have kept his mouth shut and let city staff cut a deal with the cabal and then do exactly the same four things?

That is what has been happening in this city.  The Times has chosen not to expose it.  Now the Times criticizes the open, transparent method that a new city representative attempted.

“I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.”

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Cato

1 Comment | City government, El Paso Times, Open Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Double Standard?

January 27, 2013

In an earlier article Efficient, hardworking city staff I wrote about the “Score Summary Form” and how city staff had produced a definitive analysis of a complex project in just one day.  The form boiled all of their hard work down to four ratings, 1, 2, 3, and 4.

I wondered about the consistency of the reviews and about several other things.

Compare that with these two pages (801TexasRanking) that are the comparable documents supporting the decision to award a contract on the 801 Texas building that the city just bought. You should be able to right click on the document to rotate it–sorry.

While the second page indicates that the city expected to conduct this analysis in one day also, the rating was not published for 8 days.    Maybe the fix was not in on the 801 Texas building.  Look at the numerical values (they are on a scale of 1-100).

Why the different rating systems?  Is it possible that in the case of 801 Texas the city was actually interested in doing a rating instead of rubber stamping a decision that had already been made?

I wonder why the firm that got the ball park contract did not bid on this one.  They did bid on the Luther building and got it.  That means that they were good enough to get two contracts but did not even bother to bid on a third?  What gives here?

What would the result have been if the 1-100 scale had been used for the ball park?

I suspect that when the true story finally comes out it will not be a pretty one.

We deserve better

Brutus

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Do they even think about what they are doing?

January 21, 2013

Today’s (January 21, 2013) El Paso Times has an article “Public input needed for charter changes”.  It addresses some of the issues that the city’s Ad Hoc Charter Advisory Committee is considering.  The plan is to have some public meetings and then take their recommendations to city council.  City council will then decide what to put on the May 2013 ballot for approval or rejection by the voters.  According to the article “council has the final say on what to take to voters”.

Cato wrote about the issue in Charter Changes?

According to the city web site one of the purposes of the committee is “making revisions that (1) are appropriate to the Council-Manager form of government …”.

Huh?  How about “proposing revisions to our form of government”?  Why must they be appropriate to the Council-Manager form of government?  Well, they tried limiting a similar group back in Philadelphia a couple of hundred years ago.  Maybe this new group will try to stretch beyond the limits that our local cabal is trying to impose on them.

Go to a meeting.  Express your thoughts about the mess we have.  This is your chance.

The article even indicates you can contribute by sending an email to citymanager@elpasotexas.gov.

Give me a break!  The city manager?  Is that like asking Caesar if he still wants to be emperor?  My namesake (or tocayo locally) took care of that himself.

Would the city manager not be fair and forward all emails?  It does not make any difference.  The city manager should not be involved in the process.

Why can’t the public send in their thoughts to the committee directly?

We deserve better

Brutus

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