Will the county change the hospital board?

March 11, 2015

Our county hospital and the children’s hospital have evidently decided to try again to settle their differences.

It will be interesting to watch how this happens in light of the fact that two of the county hospital board member’s terms will expire at the end of this month.

hospitalboard

A few weeks ago our county judge and at least one county commissioner were calling for members of the hospital board to resign.

What will happen now?  Will the commissioners start to clean house at the board or will they tell us that we need to keep the current members “for continuity during this critical period”?

We know that talk is cheap.  Let’s see what they do now.

We deserve better

Brutus

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Let’s explore how to waste more money

March 10, 2015

The public art plan for 2015 recently presented to city council was informative.

We plan to spend $250,000 at the zoo Chihuahuan desert exhibit.  The explanation is “An artist to be selected to work with the zoo administators and designers to explore opportunities in the area.”

Explore opportunities.  This money is not even for the design or delivery of a project.  It is going to pay for talking about doing something.

The plan reminded us that they city paid $240,000 for an artist to design the leaves that adorn the Brio stops on Mesa.

Those leaves are not the right ones for the Alameda Brio project.  The city wants to spend $300,000 for someone to design something more Alameda-ish.

And the leaves are evidently appropriate for the Dyer Brio project either.  They want $300,000 to give to someone for a special design for the northeast.

How long does it take to design something like this anyway?  Does the artist sit at a desk day after day and generate version after version of a proposed design?  Would this take a full time effort for a whole year?  At $300,000 how long would most of us have to work?

This thing is evidently going to be placed at the UTEP round-about by April of this year:

utepcloud

No kidding.  All that for only $500,000.

We’re not against public art, but at these prices?

We deserve better

Brutus

 

24 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

How do the charter schools get by without bond money?

March 9, 2015

I’ve  been thinking about the bond issues that the El Paso and Ysleta school districts have been talking about.

Much of the money in question is to handle “deferred” maintenance.  By not performing regular maintenance to our school buildings the school boards can adopt budgets that appear to be balanced but are not.

Of the $451  million that Ysleta is asking for, $303 million will be for maintenance.  The El Paso district has not decided to propose a bond issue yet but their recently finished facilities master plan indicates that there is $504 million of deferred maintenance to be done  as well as the need for $348 million in capital upgrades.

Charter schools

On the other hand we have some charter schools in El Paso.  These schools do not participate in local property tax levees but do get extra assistance from the state.  While the exact numbers differ I am told that the charter schools end up receiving about 10% less funding than our public schools and that’s before the regular districts raise money through bond issues.

Yet somehow these schools manage to acquire their own buildings and operate their schools.

Maybe someone can help us to understand this.

We deserve better

Brutus

 

14 Comments | El Paso Independent School District, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Bus overload

March 8, 2015

Just south of the Glory Road transfer station we have a deluge of buses coming from the west side heading downtown.

The 11 route extends from the Camelot apartments on Stanton all the way to the downtown transfer station.  The bus comes to each bus stop every 65 minutes.

Route 14 covers from Redd and Westwind to the downtown transfer station.  A different bus comes by every 35 minutes.

The 15 runs from the west side transfer station to the downtown transfer station.  These buses arrive every 35 minutes just like the 14.

We also have the Brio that runs on that route every 10 minutes during peak times.

The result is that we have a bus every 6 minutes from near Glory Road headed downtown.

We could do better

Routes 11, 14 and 15 could drop their passengers off at Brio stations and serve their neighborhoods more frequently.

Route 11 would take 15 minutes to run from Camelot to Glory Road (with a deeper neighborhood penetration) if the bus would drop its passengers at the Glory Road transfer station and then head back into the neighborhood.  It could service each stop (one inbound, the other outbound) every thirty minutes instead of every 65 minutes.

Route 14 could drop its passengers at a Brio stop on Mesa at Festival and cut its travel time by 1/2 or double its frequency in the neighborhood.

The only reason Route 15 makes sense to me at this point is that the Brio does not stop at regular bus stops.  The distance between the Balboa Brio stop and the Festival stop is 1.2 miles.  If you live in the middle you have a half a mile hike to catch a Brio.  Between the Monticello Brio and stop and Executive Center you have about 1.5 miles.  Contrary to what the Sun Metro web site says, stations are not “about a mile apart”.  The 15 could turn around at Glory Road leaving its passengers to take the Brio downtown.

Clang, Clang, Clang goes the trolley

When they start building the streetcar lines Oregon street will be a mess.  The river of buses go both north and south on Oregon and a major part of the road will be closed for construction.

Once the construction is over the buses will have to swerve out of their lane in order to pass the streetcars that have stopped to pick up or drop passengers off.

We deserve better

Brutus

9 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Note to the Times

March 7, 2015

A copy of this email was sent to us.  We redacted the email address and phone numbers.

From: Dan Wever [mailto:xxxxx@xxx.xxx]
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2015 2:01 PM
To: ‘Lindsey Anderson’; ‘Bob Moore — Editor EPT’
Subject: Figures you might be able to use from TEA website

Lindsey these are a quick look at what a school brings in and what it costs the district to run it for 1 year.

Questions call xxx-xxxx.

These figures are for 2012-2013 last year available.

Enrollment = 62.884

Total Revenue All Funds, Local tax, State help, Federal help = $590,862,929

Therefore each student is worth $590,862,929 divided by 62,844 which is $9,396 to the EPISD

Let’s look at one of the South side schools  that has been named to close, Beall elementary.

The enrollment in Oct of 2013 was 480 students so how much money did these students bring into the EPISD  $9,396 times 480 = $4,510,117

So how much did it cost the EPISD to keep this school open for this year 2012-2013

This data is for school year 2011-2012 and it is the last year available so the figures are not a 100% a valid comparison but I can assure you that they are very close to the 2012-2013.

Expenditures per Student

                                                                Beall                      EPISD AVG.

Total Operating Expenditures       $7,443                        $8,360

Instruction                                         $5,499                        $5,008

Instructional Leadership                      $63                             $88

School Leadership                               $459                            $501

So we have a cost to EPISD to keep this school open of $3,572,640 or they made a profit of $937,477

Of course we know that the ADMINISTRATIVE costs are not included in the School Report Card (Expenditures per Student) and I guess this profit is not enough, so we need to put these children on busses and send them to a school that makes more profit.

Dw

Xavier share as you like

8 Comments | El Paso Independent School District, El Paso Times | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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