EPISD–farming children

August 3, 2017

This month EPISD sold a little over 7 acres of land that they declared surplus to our local housing authority.

State law allows them to sell to another public entity without taking bids.  They sold the property for a somewhat over one million dollars.  The board material indicates that they property was appraised at the value they sold it for.  Who knows what they could have gotten on the open market.

The board was clever in that by selling to the housing authority they are almost certain to ensure that children from the housing complex will attend EPISD schools.  That will increase income since Texas pays the district for every day a child attends school. Enrollment at the district has been falling off dramatically.

Unfortunately EPISD will not get the benefit of property taxes from the sale as they would have if the property had been sold to a developer who then put houses on the land.

Local property taxes account for roughly 30% of the district’s revenue.

We deserve better

Brutus

5 Comments | El Paso Independent School District | Permalink
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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
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UTEP deserves better

August 1, 2017

The Brookings Institution report that we wrote about the other day in UTEP earns public support made some blunt statements:

State governments should take a hard look at the universities in their jurisdictions that neither seriously promote opportunity, nor produce much serious research.

Misallocated investment doesn’t just come at a large opportunity cost, however. Public subsidies for the relatively affluent directly reify existing inequalities by reinforcing the opportunity “choke-point” of higher education, driving up demand (and costs).

They go further and write:

A university education is a wonderful thing. But there are many wonderful things in life, and the government doesn’t need to pay for all of them. That’s especially true for students from the upper middle class, who dominate the current system and enter college with substantial advantages in life already. We are a very long way from the ideal of higher education as the “great equalizer,” with colleges acting as engines of mobility, leveling the playing field for each generation. Rather, public higher education too often provides yet another chance for the upper middle class to engage in opportunity hoarding at the expense of the taxpayer—and even worse, at the expense of students from low-income families.

How about it state legislators?

UTEP does enormous public good in helping lower income students climb the income ladder.

Shouldn’t the state allocate more money to the school that does the best job enhancing social mobility?

We deserve better

Brutus

3 Comments | State Government | Permalink
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UTEP earns public support

July 31, 2017

This month the Brookings Institution  published a report that compared America’s public universities and ranked them after considering access to the universities considering social mobility (enrollment by students from lower income families) and research dollars administered by the university.

We are proud to write that the report placed our own University of  Texas at El Paso at the top of their list, number one.

The authors wrote that the combination of mobility and research funding is commonly used to justify public (taxpayer) investment in universities.

It seems that the people at UTEP have quietly made the school the best achiever in terms of using public money to help lower income students.  The report went so far as to say that UTEP contributes the most to mobility.

The result for our students is that they have more access to working with an actual research project and thus learning practical things than at any other university in the country.

While attracting lower income students may not be unnatural here, what is impressive are the results produced by the research people at UTEP in bringing projects to the students.

Take the time to congratulate someone from UTEP.

This is better.

Brutus

 

1 Comment | State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Stupid bidders

July 30, 2017

Blame it on someone else!

Item 13.1 on the Tuesday, July 26, 2017 city council agenda was a request from city staff to reject all bids for fuel for city vehicles.

It appears that the contract would have been worth about five million dollars a year to the successful bidder.

Why did city staff want to reject the bids?  According to the backup material it was “due to bidders not correctly completing bid documents”.

The city received 13 bids.  Evidently not one of them was smart enough to fill out forms for this multi-million dollar contract.

Could it be that the purchasing department needs to write better specifications?

Or could it be that they don’t like the winning bidder?

We deserve better

Brutus

2 Comments | City government, Purchasing | Permalink
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