Opening Day

October 14, 2013

According to this article in the Times opening day for our new ball park will be April 11, 2014.  The Pacific Coast League arranged the schedule so that our team will play the first few games of the season out of town to allow the ball park to be completed.

The October 15, 2013 city council agenda has the latest “Guaranteed Maximum Price Amendment” with the construction company they hired to build the ball park.

Surprise, Surprise!

My initial reading of the amendment yielded these jewels:

  • The ball park will enjoy substantial completion by April 28, 2014.  That’s a little late for an April 11 opening.
  • “Substantial Completion is defined as the Ballpark being ready for a full capacity Triple-A baseball event.  However, this may require code “work arounds” such as fire watch, extra stadium staff for security, etc. which costs will be borne by others.”  I may be wrong but I think that code work arounds are the same as code violations.
  • Final completion of the park is scheduled for August 31, 2014.  The regular season ends September 1, 2014.
  • The document excludes certain things from the price, like:
    • railroad platforms and bridge
    • railroad platform foundations
    • Missouri and Durango street improvements
    • offsite improvements/work (this probably includes the water and sewer work the city is not talking about as well as the pedestrian and road work around the park)
    • special construction provisions required at railroad
    • porcelain/art signage
    • 4 TOPP or 2 TOPP tables and loose chairs
    • aluminum and fabric sun shades

Reasons for increase

The presentation for city council includes a page that offers these reasons:

“Construction commenced before delivery of complete design.  Only recently has the design advanced to the point to allow the CMAR [Construction Manager at Risk] to set GMP [Guaranteed Maximum Price]”

“Project Schedule — Drives costs up due to overtime, expedited materials, etc.”

“Bids have not been as favorable as projected:  Bids have been as competitive as possible; however, many contractors lack the resources necessary to meet the schedule.”

In other words we could have built the ball park for less money if the team played in Tucson or at Cohen Stadium during 2014 and moved to the new ball park in 2015.

We deserve better

Brutus

5 Comments | Ball park, City government, El Paso Times | Permalink
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Legal

October 13, 2013

Take a look at this page on the city web site.  The page shows a few of the legal bills that the city has been incurring.

Four invoices show $199 thousand worth of charges in 2012 from a Dallas law firm.  The bills have to do with “Sports Stadium Analysis/Financing”.

The requesting attorney appears to be a member of our local Paso Del Norte Group even though his law firm’s web page says he is based in Dallas.

I don’t know anything about the complexities or legal challenges that would relate to financing a ball park but am surprised that this would cost so much especially when we wasted $14 million because of timing.

Citizen Supression

Three  different invoices on the same web page show the city spending $49,521.89 with a San Antonio law firm last year to represent the city relating to “Voter Initiative Petition”, “Open Records Requests”, and a lawsuit that I believe was about the voter initiative petition.

You should note that the law firm invoice referred to the petitions as an “initiative” even though our most recent former mayor claims that the petitions were for a “referendum”.

We deserve better

Brutus

2 Comments | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Its not my job

October 12, 2013

The El Paso Independent School District (EPISD) teachers that I have spoken with in the last few years have been universally critical of what they call the central office.  The words “top heavy”, “incompetent”, “ineffective”, and “clueless” are frequently heard.

These teachers generally seem to think that many of the people in the central office are good and are thankful for their support.  The problem seems to be that the teachers perceive that there are far too many people at the central office that are not effective.

I thought I would look into the “top heavy” claims so I went to the EPISD web site.  The district posts its job descriptions online.  What I found was that there were:

474 different professional job descriptions.  These include both teaching and support staff positions. In the 474 there were job descriptions for 44 directors, 9 executive directors, and 15 assistant directors.  There were also 13 different associate and assistant superintendent jobs.  That’s 81 different kinds of bosses at the assistant director level and above.

In the separate clerical area there were 241 job descriptions including 68 different types of secretaries.

There are another 138 “support personnel” job descriptions.

I have no idea how many of these different categories actually have people working in them.  What the numbers suggest to me is that we have a situation where jobs are highly differentiated.

Is that because the employees are out of control and we must have a highly specific job description in order to get them to do the right thing for the students?  Could it be that we have all of these different job descriptions so that salary levels can be gamed?  I don’t know.

What I do know is that it looks like this should be simplified if for no other reason than for operational flexibility.

According to a highly critical 2012 report EPISD had about 9,000 employees in 2012.  Of the 9,000 employees only 50% were evidently teachers.  The report claimed that only 54% of the budget was spent in the classroom.

I don’t know if the report was either accurate or fair.  On the other hand I have not seen any rebuttal from the EPISD.

We deserve better

Brutus

 

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

Bad bets

October 11, 2013

How are we doing with the Hotel Occupancy Tax (HOT) collections that are to be used to pay for the bonds that we have issued to build the ball park?

2 percent growth

On June 26, 2012 the city’s chief financial officer made a presentation to city council that assumed a 2% growth per year in HOT revenue.

I’ll see your two and raise you to three

Then on October 29, 2012 the city’s chief financial officer made another presentation to city council that assumed a 3% growth.

Remember that at that time the ball park was still supposed to be a $50 million dollar facility.  The first $10 million over-run did not become public until May, 2013.

Bad gamble

The numbers for the first six months of 2013 show the HOT revenue down almost 1% from 2012.

HOT revenues have declined, not increased 2% much less the 3% she presented. The city will probably have to make up the shortfall with general fund revenues which primarily come from sales taxes.

I’ll see your three and raise you to 4.3

The 2014 city budget anticipates a raise in sales tax revenue of 4.3%.

The state has only posted the numbers for January through March at this point.

Those numbers show a 2.5% increase, not the 4.3% that the city needed to balance the budget before the HOT shortfall.

We deserve better

Brutus

4 Comments | Ball park, City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Can we find a better way?

October 10, 2013

Why does the El Paso fire department send a pumper or quint along with an ambulance to many medical calls?

Common answers from people who do this for a living are:

  • They often need the extra manpower to lift a patient since the ambulance only has two medics in it
  • The pumper can get to the scene faster because there are more fire trucks than ambulances
  • The extra people perform other services like traffic control

These are all valid responses.  Could we do better?

Look at the physics

The United States department of transportation specifies that ambulances should be able to accelerate two miles per second up to 70 miles per hour.  In other words they should be able to travel at two miles per hour one second after starting and at 30 miles per hour after 15 seconds.

I could not find a specification for fire pumpers but I did see a purchasing specification issued by an individual department.  The requirement was that the pumper be able to get up to 30 miles per hour within 25 seconds.

An ambulance would be traveling at 50 miles per hour by then.

Remember that the pumper is not only bigger and heavier but may also be carrying 500 to 1800 gallons of water.  I have seen pumper units trying to climb up neighborhood streets on the mountainsides of El Paso slow down to 2 miles per hour.

Manpower

Our fire stations in El Paso have different configurations.  Some have pumpers, some pumpers and aerial units, some include ambulances, others have battalion commands or other special purpose units.

A basic station with a pumper and an ambulance has 5 firemen on duty each shift.  Three are assigned to the pumper and two to the ambulance.

All three travel with the pumper.  The rationale is that if the pumper needs to go to an actual fire, it can be ready without having to pick someone up.  There is a movement to put four firefighters on each pumper that has not succeeded yet in El Paso.

We end up with five people and two trucks working the scene once the pumper gets there.

I have heard of a different technique.  Here the department would have to buy an extra vehicle with each ambulance.  The vehicle would be a pickup sized unit that would have the basic medical equipment but not be capable of transporting a patient.

A call would come in and the two medics would get in the smaller truck and head to the scene.  A firefighter would get in the ambulance and drive it to the scene.  The pickup should get there even faster than the ambulance.  The medics could start their assessment and treatment sooner.  The ambulance would get there in the same amount of time as the method we are using now.  The pumper would stay at home.

What happens if a real fire call comes in while the firefighter is on scene with the medics?  This happens on occasion now in that a call will come in while the pumper is at a medical scene.  An officer (manager) must decide whether to leave the incident with only the medics there.  If the pumper needs to go to the fire, the two firefighters that are still in the station head out with the pumper.  The third one gets in the pickup and heads to the fire.

To be sure the pumpers need to be exercised.  Sending them on some medical calls to assure that they are in a ready state makes sense to me.

I anticipate that some criticism to this post will come in.  I welcome learning more about the situation and seeing if our technique can be improved.

We deserve better

Brutus

10 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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