Safety second

February 10, 2015

As we wrote yesterday, these are the  city’s new official goals:

1.) Create an Environment Conducive to Strong Sustainable Economic Development
2.) Set the Standard for a Safe and Secure City
3.) Promote the Visual Image of El Paso
4.) Enhance El Paso’s Quality of Life through Recreational, Cultural and Educational Environments
5.) Promote Transparent and Consistent Communication Amongst All Members of the Community
6.) Set the Standard for Sound Governance and Fiscal Management
7.) Enhance and Sustain El Paso’s Infrastructure Network
8.) Nurture and Promote a Healthy, Sustainable Community
Their number one goal is about money.
Many of us think that the primary purpose of government is to ensure the safety of it’s citizens but in El Paso that will evidently come after the city focuses on money.
How we handle police, fire, ambulance, sanitation and other public safety issues is, according to the city, a secondary issue.
What a shame.
If they think that prospective new companies won’t see this as a problem they are once again wrong.
We deserve better
Brutus

 

 

3 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Best council money can buy

February 9, 2015
One of our readers tipped us off to the fact that the city now has new official goals.
You can read them directly from the city web site here:
Since the city is in the habit of changing their web site to remove our ability to see historical information the eight goals are listed below:
1.) Create an Environment Conducive to Strong Sustainable Economic Development
2.) Set the Standard for a Safe and Secure City
3.) Promote the Visual Image of El Paso
4.) Enhance El Paso’s Quality of Life through Recreational, Cultural and Educational Environments
5.) Promote Transparent and Consistent Communication Amongst All Members of the Community
6.) Set the Standard for Sound Governance and Fiscal Management
7.) Enhance and Sustain El Paso’s Infrastructure Network
8.) Nurture and Promote a Healthy, Sustainable Community

Well developed

I must have missed the notifications of the public meetings where the city sought citizen input on the goals.  If you take a moment to look at a recent city council agenda (hurry, the link may become invalid if the city needs it to go away) you will see that items on the agenda are now attributed to one of the goals.  How nice.  We will give examples in  later posts.

Our number one goal according to our city is to “Create an Environment Conducive to Strong Sustainable Economic Development”.

Growth in other words.  Some will argue that the goal is about improving our job base.  The mayor has certainly made this his priority.  We thank him for that.

Unfortunately this will translate into a continued subsidized land grab with our Public Service Board a primary target.

Our developers need vast new tracts of land in order to continue to make the profits that they want.  Forget infill, it is less profitable than new developments.

It is not as though we have an unlimited supply of cheap water.  Buying and developing agricultural land from farmers children who inherit land and  do not want to work a farm does not seem to be an option the developers want to pursue.  Doing so would help us by making water available for residential use.

None of us should begrudge the right of the developers to make a profit.  In our case however we are not letting the market decide what to do.  Instead the developers have decided to buy city council and control the market more effectively.

We try to keep our posts relatively short.  Stay tuned this week as we discuss problems with the other new goals that have been imposed on us.

We deserve better

Brutus

10 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Andress closure?

February 8, 2015

The board of managers of the El Paso Independent School District tell us that they will not be making decisions about school closures and consolidations.

Rather, they will leave that up to the elected board that should be taking office in May of this year.

Contrary to what the board of managers tell us we have reports from the Andress high school area telling us that they have been told that the last graduating class will be in 2016.  After that the school will be torn down.

The teachers and employees have been told that they should look for other jobs.

When will we find out the truth?

We deserve better

Brutus

2 Comments | El Paso Independent School District | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Getting better grades

February 7, 2015

Our current president has brought forward a proposal that two years of community college be made free to everyone in the nation.

His speech stipulated that the students would have to be enrolled at least at 1/2 time level and that they would have to maintain a 2.5 grade point average.

If we skip over the fact that our constitution does not allow our feral government to be in the education business a troubling possibility comes to mind.

If the student maintains a 2.5 grade point average the tuition would be free.  The community college wants the tuition money.  Would grading become easier?

Of course it would.  That is unless the feds would take control over grading.

We deserve better

Brutus

 

17 Comments | Federal Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Brio ridership numbers

February 6, 2015

As our regular readers know I hope that the Brio works out well for El Paso.

Brio is unfortunately excessively expensive.  The city is planning to build the Alameda corridor next with a projected cost of $35.5 million of our local money.  The project is not backed by feral funds.

If our public policy is to improve bus frequency and availability we can achieve much better results at much lower costs than with the Brio system.  The system uses special bus stops that we are told are about one mile apart and the busses do not stop at regular bus stops.  The first batch of busses cost us $790,000 each whereas our regular busses are $525,000.  To make matters worse the Brio busses only offer 48 seats compared to the 38 seats on regular ones.

Scheduling more of the regular busses instead of installing a whole new system would give us better service without the inflated expense of the Brio system.  This approach would also give us more flexibility and ability to respond to changing demographics.

60,000

The folks at Sun Metro told us through an article in El Paso Inc. that Brio ridership has reached 60,000 passengers a month.

I hope that is true but cannot see how.  Maybe someone will enlighten me.

The way I figure it the busses make about 1,600 round trips on the Mesa route per month.  Each round trip takes 60 minutes.  The busses run on different schedules depending upon the time of day and day of the week as follows:

Monday – Friday 6AM-9AM and 3PM-6PM every 10 minutes.

Monday – Friday 9AM-3PM and 6PM-9PM every 15 minutes.

Saturday 9AM-6PM every 20 minutes.

Sunday no service.

Doing the math, I come to the 1,600 trips I mentioned before.  If we take their number of 60,000 riders and divide it by 1,600 we come up to about 37 passengers per trip on average.  That’s every trip–even early in the morning and late at night.    There are about 20 bus stops on the route meaning that if the passenger load was evenly divided we would see two people at each bus stop every 10 to 20 minutes.  The loads almost certainly are not evenly spread out so we should  be able to see some busses more full than others.

I just don’t see it — literally.  I have not seen many people get on the busses and I have not seen many get off the busses.  I have not seen many people waiting at the bus stops and I have not seen any busses with more than a few people on them.

I hope that I am wrong.

We deserve better

Brutus

10 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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