Decline into lawlessness

November 12, 2015

DavidK over at Refuse the Juice wrote Let’s look at it this way the other day.

He pointed out that rules and protocol were broken when the city manager and a city representative circumvented city council and arranged to have speed humps installed in front of a local high school.

He wrote:

The safety of children was put before the process and rules for obtaining a traffic-calming device for a street.

His point here was that the children were in danger because of heavy traffic traveling too fast and that getting the problem solved even without going through the process was the right thing to do.

I have to disagree and ask the age old question “does the end justify the means”?

We have a dysfunctional city government.  Bypassing the established rules instead of fixing the dysfunction will only make the problem worse in the long run.

We deserve better

Brutus

10 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Great wall of El Paso

November 11, 2015

I am hoping to hear from some readers that have visited our digital wall downtown.

We have one of only two digital walls in the world and it only cost us $3 million.  If my recollection is correct we sent some of our city staff to Copenhagen to see the other one.

Has anyone seen it?

Has anyone had visitors fly in from out of town to visit this wonder of the world?

We deserve better

Brutus

5 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Rapid descent

November 10, 2015

Passenger traffic at our airport is down 1.9% from last year according to the airport’s monthly activity report.

At the same time we are spending $46 million to build a new rental car facility.

They took away half of our short term parking to make space for the building, making it less convenient for us to use the airport.

Our city’s former chief financial officer (you remember her, the one whose projections were almost always wrong, maybe deliberately) told us that we would pay for the facility because car rentals would increase 1% a year.

Take a look at this report from the airport’s web site:

epia10year

We deserve better

Brutus

17 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Don’t hold your breath

November 9, 2015

Tuesday, November 10, 2015 should have some interesting things happening.

The agenda for our county hospital’s board meeting has these items on it:

10. Receive a presentation from Dr. Annabi and other members of the Mcdical Staff regarding leadership at UMC.

11. Discuss and take appropriate action with respect to appointment of a Transition Committee to oversee the process to identify a successor to Jantes N. Valenti, President and Chief Executive Officer.

12. Discuss and take appropriate action with respect to appointment of a Nominating Committec to oversee the recruitment  and selection of individuals to serve on the Board of Directors for the Bl I’aso Children’s Hospital.

VivaValenti.com has not produced a landslide of support for our hospital administrator.  I wonder if anyone actually thought it could.

Item 12 is interesting at several levels.  Nominating is the process of proposing someone for a position.  Since the committee will evidently “oversee the recruitment and selection of individuals” it is actually a selection committee.  They are trying to hide the nature of the committee by giving it a misleading name.

The executive session agenda has the main event of the board meeting:

17. Discuss and deliberate regarding the Annual Evaluation of  Mr. Jamcs N. Valenti, President and CEO, pursuant to Texas Government Code $55 1.074.

With all of the opprobrium relating to the hospital this year, my personal belief is that he should not get another dime.

I don’t have much hope that the right thing will happen.

We deserve better

Brutus

 

4 Comments | County Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

City blackout

November 8, 2015

We are now in November of 2015 and the last interim financial report from the city is for the period ending April of 2015.

Even the old bunch used to publish the interim reports each month.

So much for transparency.

We deserve better

Brutus

5 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »