EPISD–what happens next

August 12, 2017

The money that YISD announced the other day was authorized by section 46.031 of Chapter 46 of Title 2 of the Texas Education Code.

You can read it here.

From what we can understand the money will not come in the form of a one time payment (as was implied by the superintendent and board president in their TV interviews) but instead will be made available every year to help pay interest and principal payments.

The law has been around for some time.

We wonder if the local school districts were aware of this funding when they proposed their bond issues.  It seems to us that local voters would have been more inclined to vote yes if they knew that the state would be picking up almost half of the bill.

EPISD has been silent about this.

Have then been blindsided by this?  Is it possible that they did not know?

We should ask the EPISD board for clarification.

We deserve better

Brutus

Leave a Comment » | El Paso Independent School District, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Worse than credit card debt

August 12, 2017

If you think that the local property tax rates are high, think about the penalties that will be assessed if you are late paying them.

This graphic came from the city’s web page:

Let’s say that the taxes due on your home are $5,000 for the year.

If you are one week late paying the bill you will owe $5,350.

If you cannot pay until December you will owe over $6,200.

In addition the law firm that has been hired to collect past due accounts can charge you up to 20% after four months.

You could end up paying over 43% for being 11 months late.

Yet the city still complains about the high rates the payday loan companies charge.

We deserve better

Brutus

5 Comments | City government, County Government, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Sold into slavery

August 11, 2017

Both the city and county are considering raising your taxes 8% this year.

State law allows the voters to trigger a tax rollback election if they go over 8%.

The rollback process requires that 7% of the registered voters sign a properly formatted petition asking for the rollback election.  The signatures cannot be older than 120 days.

Getting to the 7% number would be difficult.

Even with the difficulty, the cowards that are our local elected officials are afraid to go over the 8% and thus give us a chance.  Their fear confirms the belief that they know the voters are unhappy and might rise up and strike them down.

Our state legislature is currently changing the law.  Some think that they may go as low as 4%.

Word on the street is that city council and commissioner’s court want to get their money while they can–before the 8% threshold is lowered.

We deserve better

Brutus

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

Cement Lake

August 4, 2017

Helen Marshall sent this in:

Just a few more dollars in debt coming up when we have to pay for the damage…

Helen was referring to Will the City of El Paso Destroy Cement Lake, a recent post in elpasonaturally.com

We deserve better

Brutus

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

County bullies

August 2, 2017

We recently learned that our county commissioners will begin charging $15 per hour for open records requests if the requester has submitted previous requests in the same year that resulted in more than 36 hours of work for the county people.

Thats nice

Once again state law kinda gets in their way.  The law reads:

Sec. 552.261. CHARGE FOR PROVIDING COPIES OF PUBLIC INFORMATION. (a) The charge for providing a copy of public information shall be an amount that reasonably includes all costs related to reproducing the public information, including costs of materials, labor, and overhead. If a request is for 50 or fewer pages of paper records, the charge for providing the copy of the public information may not include costs of materials, labor, or overhead, but shall be limited to the charge for each page of the paper record that is photocopied, unless the pages to be photocopied are located in:

(1) two or more separate buildings that are not physically connected with each other; or

(2) a remote storage facility.

The county is trying to punish an individual who is submitting multiple small requests, evidently on a daily basis.

State law makes no provision for combining previous requests when considering charges.

As long as each request results in 50 pages of results or less and the county does not have to leave their main building the most the county can charge is 10 cents per page.

If the request ends up eligible for a labor charge (50 pages or more, or having to look in a separate facility) the requester has the right to ask for a written statement and may then presumably change the request to ask for the right to review the documents in person.

The county attorney probably knows this but as we know governments like to try to bluff the citizens.

We deserve better

Brutus

3 Comments | County Government, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »