elpasospeak

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 17^th.

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 17^th.

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You might want to read Neighborhood streets get the axe if you haven’t already.

We deserve better

Brutus

This post on El Chuqueno sums up our situation as well as any that we have heard.

We deserve better

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

The residents living around Escondido Drive in west El Paso had their meeting with some of the city’s staff Tuesday, October 10, 2017 at 6PM.

One of the attendees gave us an earful about what happened.

This is what we understood from the resident:

Evidently the meeting started with a city employee thanking everyone for their attendance and then informing the crowd (60 or so people) that the purpose of the meeting was to inform the public about what the city is going to do (in other words the decisions have already been made).

It went downhill from there.

The presenter then told the group that questions would not be taken until the city people were through making their presentation.

The project was categorized as “the restriping of Escondido”.  It was explained that restriping involves considering changes that have occurred since the last painting as well as other things that the staff thinks are a good idea.  Oh, and by the way, staff is required to consider the city’s adopted bicycle plan when restriping.   But the crowd needed to understand that this was really just a maintenance issue and new bicycle paths were just incidental to the project.

That explanation flies in the face of the letter that the city sent selectively to some residents:

Some residents informed the staff that the design that will be implemented is defective and then pointed out ways that bicycles could be accommodated without destroying traffic flow and endangering safety.  City staff evidently argued aggressively with some of the citizens.

At one point a resident asked “How do we stop this?”.  He was told that staff would not stop implementation but that the residents would have to take the matter up with city council.

We deserve better

Brutus

A reader sent this in:

The City Engineering department had an industry call Monday with contractors.  On 10/17/17 they are releasing a bid package to re-pave 135 streets in El Paso – residential and arterial streets.  Total value $37 million.  The bid package will name the streets that will be re-paved.  Contract to be awarded February 2018 and start date March 2018 with a 2-year completion for all 135 streets.  Should be interesting to see how they award this one.  They don’t know if they will award to multiple contractors or 1 contractor.  Not sure if any locals other than  Jordan or Sundt can bond $37 million.

We deserve better

Brutus