The city engaged a group from UTEP to provide this 2014 citizen survey.
The report included this chart:
Schools and education do not come out of the city budget. However the number one thing that the citizens did want that is supposed to be provided by the city was “street maintenance and improvements”. As you can see downtown development ranked just below “other”.
Do we need to survey Van Horn’s residents to see what they want for our city?
We deserve better
Brutus
6 Comments | 
City government | 
Permalink
Posted by Brutus
Some people have amazing skills.
The folks that are charging us half a million dollars a month to run our children’s hospital have found a way to make our county hospital look good!
It seems that the bankruptcy judge that is in charge of the case has taken the children’s hospital managers to task for making unproven claims that the county hospital is overcharging for services.
Even an inexperienced manager would have sought price quotes from vendors that could provide the services. Those quotes would be used to prove a claim that the children’s hospital is being overcharged.
Instead we have learned that the children’s hospital’s claims are based upon the past experience of the temporary managers.
Should they be fired?
We deserve better
Brutus
7 Comments | County Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
We recently learned that the city is planning to outsource some engineering responsibilities to two big firms that have setup local offices in El Paso within the last few years.
We don’t need to worry about them being outsiders. One of the firms made campaign contributions (through their political action committee) to at least two of the current city council members in this last election.
That’s not to say that anything is wrong here. It is remarkable that the city can rush through another contract when it really wants to.
We deserve better
Brutus
14 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
One of our city representatives has now decided to bring the city manager’s pay raise back to the council agenda.
I don’t see how this can help anything. In fact this city manager and any future city managers will now know they might have to deal with the kind of political posturing we will see if council is willing to consider the agenda item.
Whether he deserves the pay raise or not, the manner in which it was foisted on some members of council was disgraceful. It was handled high-handedly by some members of city council. It seems that whenever they bring up something that must be decided immediately they are up to no good.
The fact that she voted on the raise when she had not considered the issue fully is bad too.
Now to bring the issue back by herself is even worse. They should not be discussing his performance in public. They need to be careful.
Word on the street is that the city manager’s family wants to get out of El Paso. I have not heard if Van Horn would be acceptable.
Without regard to what he thinks, it seems reasonable that he will hear “I told you so” at home.
We deserve better
Brutus
12 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
Our city council met back on March 17, 2015 in their special form as the Downtown Development Corporation.
We have written before about them not posting their minutes. Don’t look.
In this most recent meeting they got to look at the 2015 financial projections.
You might recall being told that the ball park would not cost us any money at all. Revenues would pay for it we were told before we voted to increase Hotel Occupancy Taxes.
Then as things started to crystalize we were told that we would have to subsidize the ball park with general fund revenues up through 2018. The only people that can argue with a straight face that those funds are not property tax funds (which they are not allowed to use for this project) are our city officials.
In the March report we now are being told that the subsidies will have to continue until 2023.
The report also shows the cost of the ball park (before financing) at $76,020,750.
How can that be when on June 18, 2013 council made a big show of telling us that our cost would be $64,000,000 and not a penny more? Well, the team coughed up another $12,020,750. That brings us to the $76 million number.
What they don’t talk about is that they actually got $65,073,891 from the sale of the bonds instead of $64,000,000. Then also took $1,857,868 from previous Hotel Occupancy Tax collections making a total of $2,931,759 more than the promised $64 million. They used that money to pay for public art and bond issue costs. Both projects were directly related to the ball park but needed to be removed to maintain their story that we were only spending $64 million.
We deserve better
Brutus
18 Comments | Ball park, City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus
elpasospeak 
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