elpasospeak

I wanted to check up on how the Brio service was doing so I went to the Sun Metro web site looking for the  director’s quarterly report to the board (the board members are the city council members).  The last presentation was at the board meeting of April 14, 2015.  Item 12 on the agenda was:

 Presentation and discussion on the Fixed Route Performance Indicators for FY15 2ND QTR for period ending on February 28, 2015.

Unlike their prior quarterly report presentations there was no posting of the report for the public to view.

I decided to look at the national transit database web site.  Sun Metro is required to submit their information to this database.  Unfortunately their 2014 annual reports have not been published yet so I looked at 2013 compared to 2012.

The web site publishes a comprehensive manual that explains what each of their terms means.  One term that required some research was “unlinked trips”.   According to the manual every time a person steps on a bus the unlinked trips number increases by one.  If someone must transfer from one bus to another in order to get to their destination, that would count as two unlinked trips.

How are we doing?

For 2012 sun metro reported that passengers road the busses for 86,715,454 miles.  In 2013 their number was 65,226,810 or roughly a 25% drop.

Unlinked trips in 2012 were reported at 16,655,904 bus boardings compared to 12,710,270 in 2013.  That is about a 24% drop.

In 2012 their operating expense per passenger mile was reported at $.55 and in 2013 it was $.70 or about a 28% increase in cost per mile.

In 2012 their operating expense per unlinked trip was $2.82 and in 2013 it was $3.52.

You don’t need to be a chief performance officer to understand these numbers.

Maybe someone familiar with the situation can explain to us why they had such a dramatic decrease in their ridership numbers.

We deserve better

Brutus

Our city attorney’s public admission that she has not enforced city council’s agenda rules in the past got me to thinking about her evidently perceived  need to protect council from the public in order to keep her job.

She has done the wrong thing.

According to the Texas Municipal League legal staff’s paper “The City Attorney:  A Reference Manual”:

“While a city attorney may report to and accept certain directions from city officials, it is the attorney’s duty to act in the best interests of the city as a whole.”

The city–that’s you and me–we are the city.

As city attorney/parliamentarian she should see to it that city council acts according to the law.

She is there as an adviser, not a participant.  It is not her place to be an advocate for or against anything on the agenda.  She is there to provide legal advice, not set policy.

She should only speak when asked to do so, unless a law or rule  is about to be violated.

Particularly inappropriate is when she chimes in to help justify some action that city staff wants to have approved.

It would be nice if she spent as much time seeing to it that the rules were followed as she seems to spend as a partisan actor.

This council needs to assert control.  Council meetings are between our elected officials, the city manager and the citizens.

The back bench is where the city attorney should sit.

We deserve better

Brutus

The approved budget of the Westside Pool is $13.4 million dollars. To help pay for this augmented design, City Council directed staff to delay construction of improvements to Westside Community Park and a new park in the Coronado area of the Westside. The development of those projects, also funded by 2012 Quality of Life Bond, will commence after most of the other Quality of Life Bond projects have been funded and only if funds remain available.

In other words the parks will be sacrificed.

You can read the official statement here at the city’s web site.

We deserve better

Brutus