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June 6, 2013

City council held a special meeting on Tuesday, June 4, 2013.  The regular city council meeting started at 8:30 AM.  The special meeting was scheduled to start at 9:00 AM.  It actually started at 2:04 PM.

What’s so special?

City ordinance number 17616 established deadlines and procedures concerning city council meetings and their agendas.  The CFO of the city needed to get her agenda item to the city clerk by 12 noon on the Thursday before the council meeting.  That did not happen here.  Rather than wait one week it was decided to call for a special meeting of the city council.  The ordinance requires either the mayor or the majority of council to approve the special meeting.

The posted time of the special meeting was to be 9:00 AM.  That is during the regular city council meeting.

Here once again city staff chose to circumvent the rules and manipulate things so that one agenda item could be heard on Tuesday.  What was so special was that the rules were inconvenient to city staff and so they chose to ignore those rules.

It was still a violation of Texas law.

The attorney general of Texas published “2012 Texas Open Meetings Act Made Easy”.  The following comes directly from the question and answer portion of the document:

17. May a governing body change the time of its meeting without posting a corrected notice
for 72 hours before the meeting starts?

The Act requires literal compliance.  For this reason, a governing body has no authority to
change the time of its meeting without posting the new time for at least 72 hours before the
meeting.47 Nonetheless, it is not necessarily a violation of the Act if a governing body or one of
its committees starts its meeting a little later than the scheduled time. At what point the change
in time would present a legal problem would be a fact issue. Local entities should consult their
legal counsel if they decide to change a meeting time.

They posted the meeting for 9 AM and held it at 2 PM.  I believe this makes any actions taken voidable if someone wants to sue the representatives or the mayor personally.

Deliberations

City council members had a lot of questions.  They were told that the city manager and city attorney had handled the negotiations and contract matters leading up to the proposed contract matters.

Both the city manager and the city attorney were absent.  Council members were understandably upset that they were being asked to take action on an item that was sprung on them as a surprise and that none of the people familiar with the details were available.

Ultimately council declined to do the city manager’s bidding.  Council is upset with the way city management railroads issues, as well they should be.

In this case council stood up to staff.  Unfortunately as far as city staff goes,

We deserve better

Brutus

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

SAT biased toward whites?

June 4, 2013

This comment was posted in response to SATisfied:

The SAT has it’s own set of issues, including cultural bias towards middle class whites.

I have always assumed that to be true but I had a suspicion that looking at the data would show us even more.

CAMPUS % WHITE STUDENTS % ECONOMICALLY DISADVANTAGED SAT AVERAGE SCORE
Silva Health Magnet 6.2 53.4 1034
Coronado H S 18.5 41.9 1007
Franklin H S 17.4 38.7 979
Burges H S 6.4 70.1 976
Chapin H S 16.3 61 954
Anthony H S 2.6 100 934
El Paso H S 6.6 74.4 909
Montwood H S 5.7 55.9 883
Irvin H S 4.5 86.9 881
Austin H S 5.6 80.6 877
Americas H S 9.7 58.3 876
Eastwood Hs 2.5 58.4 874
Jefferson H S 1.2 90.3 865
El Dorado H S 6 69.6 858
Socorro H S 3.5 85.7 856
San Elizario H S 1.2 90 851
Fabens H S 0.8 90.2 849
Horizon H S 3.5 93.8 846
Mountain View H S 1.4 90.6 842
Canutillo H S 4.4 71.2 833
Clint H S 4.1 78.5 831
Bowie H S 0.3 96.4 826
J M Hanks Hs 1.5 67.7 823
Andress H S 14.6 61.6 818
Bel Air Hs 0.3 79.7 809
Tornillo H S 0.5 93.5 801
Del Valle Hs 0.4 88.2 789
Parkland Hs 3.1 76.3 774
Riverside Hs 0.3 87.1 750
Ysleta Hs 0.5 87.9 739

I am not disputing the statement.  It is still probably right. Something else is also going on here.  Look at Andress with one of the “whitest” student populations and one of the lowest SAT scores.

Then look at Anthony with the fewest “white” students, and with 100% of their enrollment classified as economically disadvantaged.

Something is wrong at some of these schools.

We deserve better

Brutus

10 Comments | El Paso Independent School District, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Wrong side of the tracks

May 28, 2013

Last week city council voted to evict our local railroad museum.

Evict!

The city invited the museum  into the Union Plaza transit terminal back in 2004.  From what I understand,  the arrangement has been operating without a written lease.  It’s not that the museum has not asked for one, the city just won’t work with the museum.

Now the museum has two weeks to move out.  This is a volunteer organization that now has two weeks to pack up all of their many belongings and move out.

The museum provides free services to the city.  Among them is that the city is required to maintain historic engine number one under an agreement with UTEP (who owns the locomotive).  Guess who provides the maintenance — the railroad museum.

The city representative who was just elected to the EPISD school board was quoted as saying “We can’t be the sole source of support for that museum…”.

First, the city is not the sole source of support.  Many volunteers and donors contribute to this quality of life project.

Second, the city has just leased 17,000 plus square feet of the train station  to Texas Tech University for $1 per year for up to 75 years.  Maybe if Texas Tech paid a market based rate for the space we would not consider the city the sole source of support on the rent.  The city gave the Albert Fall mansion to Texas Tech for $1 a year.

Why are we supporting a state funded institution with our own local tax money when we will not support a railroad museum or a science museum?  It sounds to me like someone is not kissing the city manager’s ego.

Find the time to call your city representative.  The city still has time to stop this nonsense.

We deserve better

Brutus

1 Comment | City government, El Paso Independent School District, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

He doesn’t get it and he probably never will

May 28, 2013

Our mayor has decided that he should not review the city manager’s performance because the media has become aware of the process.

Let me try one more time.  Mr. mayor, everything the city government does should be public.

Yes details about individual’s lives are exempted from disclosure by state law.  The law does a great job protecting the privacy of individuals.

A performance review is subject to disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act.

The mayor, city council, and the city manager seem to have trouble with this fact.

If the mayor had said that the new mayor should handle the review and left it at that, we would have seen some wisdom that we have not seen during this administration.

We deserve better

Brutus

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

What will he do?

May 21, 2013

Many of us say that this election cycle has been about city management, not the city manager.

Incredibly the city manager has taken action that may make the runoff elections about her too.  This article in the El Paso Times explains a lot.  She is requesting a 5% pay raise above what she currently gets paid, which is about $239,000 according to the article.

This puts the city councilman who is in the runoff for mayor in a strange position.  If he endorses the raise he risks angering the 78% of the voters who did not vote for him in the first election.  If he declines then he is biting the hand that feeds him.  What will he do?  We might not find out until after the runoff.  He should be asked.

The timing of this request is remarkable.  “I want to be in good standing at the time the new Mayor and council take office in late June” was the quote attributed to her by the Times.   One might think that the current city council should evaluate her past performance since the new elected officials will know less about her performance.  Then again you might think that the current city council should leave it up to the soon to be elected one since it will be their job to manage her.

To me the self-centered, selfish nature of this request and its timing are unfortunate.

I would hope that city council would consider her request seriously.  I offer some points that they might want to consider also:

Her request for a 5% raise would give her much more than council gave city employees last year.  My recollection is that some city police officers did get a raise last year, but it was around 1.8%.

We have found no evidence that she has called any citizens “crazies” recently.  Then again many e-mails are tied up in an expensive lawsuit against the attorney general of Texas that the city is paying for with our money.

While redevelopment is important to her, the plan to spend the bond money that she recently had presented to council does not provide anything for a new children’s museum or to replace the vital Chelsea swimming pool anytime in the next three years.  You can read more about these issues in Shovel ready.

Her plan to relocate city departments since city hall was going to be torn down displaced citizens from a popular recreation center with city administrators.  So much for quality of life talked about this shameful act.

City purchasing uses buy-boards to avoid competitive bidding.  One particular board that the city has spent millions of dollars through requires that 4% of the money spent be given to Houston school districts, not ours.  See More of Our Money for Houston.

Her $33 million plan to move city hall is now well over $70 million.  $63.9 million and climbing is the last detailed accounting.  We will have to wait for projects to be completed before we will know the total  We were either lied to or management is incompetent.

Since a small piece of land that the ball park will sit on was owned by the railroad the city had to bend over backwards.  Fireworks talked about how the city agreed to close many railroad crossings through town without consulting with the public or other government agencies.  The resulting inconvenience will be massive.

In her haste to build new city facilities much money was wasted.  The saga continues showed us how the city manager forgot her place and how her new office was to be larger than the mayor’s.  More money was wasted when newly remodeled space that was never occupied had to be torn down so that larger offices could be built for the mayor.

Now the city wants to kick the ground lease paying El Paso Independent School District central office off airport land with a resultant cost to the taxpayers of about $40 million while the city gives an out of town university virtually free use of other buildings.  See Plane wrong.

This list could go on much longer.  You get the idea.

Some will say that many of the items above are the result of city council actions.  That is true.  What also is true is that the city manager gets her way with city council and that she is behind what happened in most of the list.

Please do not post a comment about how I hate the city manager.  I do not.  Council has failed in their responsibility to manage her.  The city manager has stepped over the line and actively creates policy when it is her job to implement what council decides.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Cato

7 Comments | City government, El Paso Independent School District, El Paso Times, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Cato

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