Balk!

December 10, 2013

According to this article in the El Paso Times,  this Wednesday the city is going to release a traffic study relating to our new ball park.

Wrong answer?

Brutus wrote Planned failure, a post about a ball park traffic study that the city commissioned and then published in December of 2012.

Are we going to see a new study?  If not, why does the article tell us that the city is going to release the study this Wednesday?

Could it be that the first study was unflattering?  Read it for yourself here.  Personally I think that waiting 875 seconds at one intersection while leaving a game is pretty bad.

Say it ain’t so, Joe

Maybe this is a new study.  Maybe it will predict different outcomes.

Maybe the city did not commission the study to try to get a better answer.

Maybe the Times will start researching subjects before just printing whatever the city tells them to.

Muckraker

10 Comments | Ball park, City government, El Paso Times | Permalink
Posted by Muckraker

Dim wits?

December 9, 2013

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately about a lighting display in a local park that a city representative asked for.

His request seems to me to be out of character with his stated position that he only wants the city to be involved in those things that the city is required to do.

This post is not about the political ramifications of the situation however.  Other bloggers seem to think that the political situation is the important thing here.

Competence

City council voted to fund the display.

City staff did a miserable job implementing it.

Did they do such a poor job to try to discredit the city representative?

Did they do such a poor job because they are not competent?

Either way I think that corrective steps should be taken.

We deserve better

Brutus

19 Comments | City government, Purchasing | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Creating a story?

December 8, 2013

Recently there has been talk about a reporter  who did some digging and found a former Bowie student who was evidently kicked out of school as part of the EPISD cheating scandal.

The EPISD superintendent was asked on a local news broadcast how an individual could find students like this but the school district could not.

I think the superintendent’s answer was fair.  He essentially said that the district has several resources dedicated to finding the students but that the district will probably fail to find all of them.  He asked the public to help and to contact the district if someone has information that would be helpful.

A sound clip of the former student talking about what happened to her was played on the air.

What no one commented about was the fact that the said that after she was kicked out she went to Juarez to talk with her mother about the situation.  Is it possible that in this particular situation the reason the student was denied access was that the student was not eligible to go to Bowie?

Denying students access to schools to help improve statistics is horrible.  Those involved in doing this to kids should be dealt with.  However, not all that wander are lost.

We deserve better

Brutus

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

Keep on giving

December 7, 2013

The November 12, 2013 city council meeting had another downtown give away item on it.

As part of the renaissance of downtown the city decided to move Sun Metro out of the Union Depot train station and lease the depot to Texas Tech for one dollar a year for up to 75 years.  Texas Tech will use the depot to house their El Paso branch of their school of architecture.

Having a school of architecture in El Paso seems to me like a good thing.  Unfortunately El Paso’s tax payers will have to pay for it when there is a university system already charged with that responsibility.

The agenda item proposed adding over $202,000 dollars to an architectural contract for design services to add 6,000 square feet of office space to the new facility that we are building to house Sun Metro.  About $16,000 of the addition was for landscaping design.  If that is correct we are spending $186,000 dollars to design 6,000 square feet of office space as an addition to a building that was already designed.  That comes to about $31 per square foot to design add-on space to an existing building.

Construction costs extra

That of course does not include the cost of building out the space.  I guess we will learn about that bill later.  No hurry, we have already committed to the move.  Costs can’t be considered now.

Because of the giveaway

The backup material for the agenda item has this explanation:

Due to the relocation of Sun Metro staff from the Union Depot, Sun Metro has requested to house staff at the Operations Building and an Administration Building  Addition instead of leasing office space.  This will allow them to serve customers more cost-effectively.

Sensible

Evidently someone over at Sun Metro has some common sense.  They have figured out that having their administrative staff in the “Administration Operations & Maintenance Facility” would be a good idea.

Why did the original design not include the administrative staff being in the administration building?

Is this another example of city staff delivering the bad news to us in multiple steps?

We deserve better

Brutus

2 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Pay as they go

December 6, 2013

This El Paso Times article told us that the Times is going to charge for electronic access to their publication.

After reading 25 articles a month from the desktop web site (99 from the mobile facility) we will evidently have to pay to read more.

Breaking news and the home page as well as some other content will not count.  The article goes on to indicate that this strategy can help increase the amount that newsprint subscribers pay and that they might be able to keep up to 85% of the existing readers.

Self absorbed

I have a hard time remembering when I found 99 articles (other than breaking news) that I wanted to read in the Times.  Many days a large portion of the leading articles in the Times have to do with sports.  I guess that they still have sportswriters in their budget.

Privacy

There are a lot of good things to be said about the new electronic methods of accessing information.  Privacy is not one of them.  I do not want the Times or anyone else being able to keep track of which articles I click on.

I would pay

If the Times did a better job of editing those few articles that they do publish in newsprint I would be willing to pay.  It would be nice to be able to believe that the articles were factual or at least accurate.

I’m not talking about their political position.  Please don’t try to dignify it by calling it an editorial position.  They certainly have the right to pick their political positions and to tell us what they are.

Biased reporting is another matter and the subscribers have the right to vote with their pocketbooks.

Muckraker

6 Comments | El Paso Times | Permalink
Posted by Muckraker

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