Public hearing but not seeing

August 18, 2013

Item 11A on this week’s city council agenda proposes a public hearing and discussion and action to approve the city manager’s proposed budget resolution for 2014.

The backup material does not include the budget resolution.

How can the purposes of a public hearing be fulfilled if the document to be considered is not made available to the public?

I also note that the form used to submit the item for the agenda is not signed.  Neither is the form used to submit the ratification of the property tax increase, nor the form associated with the tax increase ordinance.

Bad sign

Have things gotten so bad down at city hall that the department heads will not sign documents?  Is this a way for them to claim that they were not involved?

We deserve better

Brutus.

Leave a Comment » | City government, Open Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Don’t call me

August 17, 2013

If you take a look at the city web site you can eventually find a phone number for city council and city management staff.

There are also links that take you to pages that let you send your anonymous comments.  This blog has a “Contact the city” button at the top of the page that will give you a list of links.

You might find it interesting that the most junior member of the team, the chief financial officer, does not provide a phone number.  Evidently she does not want to talk to us citizens.

This is the same chief financial officer who has made those horrible financial presentations about the ball park and the move of city hall in front of city council.  She said that the move of city hall would cost $33 million.  We are now over $70 million just using numbers that the city has made public.  When this open records mess is resolved we will undoubtedly see the number rise.  Remember the $50 million dollar ball park.  The public number is now over $62 million.  I plan to post an article soon that will show how even that number is in fact low.  Then as the project progresses we will learn about the money that the city is spending from other funds to build things around the ball park.

Maybe this makes clear why she does not list a phone number.

We deserve better

Brutus

3 Comments | Ball park, City government, Open Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Not Detroit

August 11, 2013

We have been told that the increase in our baseball park bond costs are due to the recent Detroit bankruptcy.

This article is of interest in that regard.  Detroit’s Bankruptcy Doesn’t Faze the Municipal Bond Market

Quoting from parts of it:

  • Strange as it may seem, Detroit’s bankruptcy filing—the biggest ever for a U.S. city—doesn’t appear to have unnerved the $3.7 trillion U.S. municipal bond market.
  • Localities from Washington State to Alabama to Massachusetts planned to sell $8.6 billion in debt during the first full week of August, the most since April.

Other market forces may have had an effect on bond prices since our Downtown Development Corporation decided to sell it’s bonds starting in the first week of may.

Is the Detroit issue a smoke screen being used to cover up what really happened?

Recently a blogger suggested that the delay in offering the bonds for sale was at the request of certain city council members who wanted to delay the bond issuance until after the election.

That does not make sense to me in that if I were part of the group ramrodding this I would want to make certain that the bonds were sold while I was still in a position to vote.

If the blogger is right someone or someones intervened to cause a delay in the sale of the bonds, thus costing us $17 million.  I would like to know who was involved if the allegation is true.

We deserve better

Brutus

5 Comments | City government, Open Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Not yet

August 6, 2013

Tuesday’s city council agenda has an item on it that will allow city council to talk in executive session about the El Paso lawsuit against the attorney general of Texas.

Some former city representatives and current city staff do not want to turn over emails that pertain to city business that were sent or received from their personal electronic devices.  The attorney general says they must.

There is not an item that will allow city council to take action on the issue after returning to the public session.

Something is wrong here.  It seems that the city attorney wants more time.

Why?  What are they hiding?  How bad will it be when the emails are ultimately released?  Are they stalling to have some statutory time limit pass?  Are they stalling to get some other deal finished before some damaging truth is disclosed?

We deserve better

Brutus

3 Comments | City government, Open Government, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Opaque city

July 24, 2013

The Center for Public Integrity published an article recently about public information requests in the state of Texas. You can read it here.

According to the article, in 2011 the city of El Paso government attempted to deny public information requests by appealing to the attorney general of Texas 63% of the time.

63%

That is horrible. The city sought permission to deny 63% of the requests made. Some of the appeals were appropriate, but we know first-hand how the city uses the process to hold up disclosure. The article did not provide numbers about how many times the attorney general agreed with El Paso.

My suspicion is that the city lost the majority of those cases. Texas makes most government documents available to the public. The exceptions relate primarily to personal privacy, not government inconvenience.

The city uses the tactic of appealing to the attorney general regularly. It knows that it will lose, but it is an effective way to stall — generally for about 90 days.

74%

That is the number that I hope that city staff and city council keep in their collective minds as time advances.

We deserve better

Brutus

2 Comments | City government, Open Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »