elpasospeak

Muckracker has been warning us about city council hiding a big plan from us.  See Catch me if you can and Suspicion proven.

Now the city council agenda for April 9, 2013 is out.  This article will focus on item 9.

City council is preparing to spend a lot of money and reduce the value of many property owner’s  land.  They need to do this to build the ball park.  Last week council voted unanimously to approve this ordinance on it’s first presentation.  Tuesday the ordinance will have it’s second.

The city has a problem and the railroad is using it to get some things that they want.

The city’s problems

• They don’t own the land that the new ball park is going on.  Council never actually told us they did as far as I can tell.  We just assumed that no competent person would agree to spend $50 million dollars to build a ball park as well as well over $70 million dollars to move into new space after tearing down a building if they did not own the land that they were planning to build the ball park on.
• The ball park will not fit on the city hall site!  They lied to us about this.  Many were suspicious that the city would need to cut a deal with the railroad to allow construction of the ball park to extend over the depressed rail line next to the new park.
• The city must cut a deal with the railroad or else they cannot build the ball park.  This fact comes to light after the city has spent or committed to spend over $120 million dollars on the deal.

The railroad wants

• Note that I don’t say that they have a problem.  They have an opportunity and are taking advantage of it at our expense.
• They would like to speed up their trains running through El Paso.  My recollection is that they currently travel at up to 20 miles per hour.  They have a project named “velocity” that would speed the trains up to 40 miles per hour.
• In order to speed up the trains, the railroad needs about 2 acres of land adjacent to the old city hall cite.  The land will allow the railroad to take a bend out of the line so that the trains can take a turn more quickly.
• The railroad would also like to close as many street level railroad crossings in town as they can.  Those automobiles slow the trains down when they collide.

The deals

• The item on the council agenda gives the city manager the authority to sign multiple contracts with the railroad.  We cannot see those contracts now because they have not been written.  It seems that the details and negotiations have not been finalized but the city desperately needs the land that the railroad owns in order to continue with the ball park.  The proposed ordinance agrees to agree and gives the city manager the authority to decide what to do.
• The railroad will sell 8,684 square feet of land to the city.  The current city hall is on this land and the city needs title to it to finalize the financing and construction of the ball park.  The price will be $27.50 per square foot.  The real estate community will recognize that a small piece of land like that is not worth that much money in El Paso all by itself.   You could not build much on a parcel that size.  What makes it worth that is that the buyer is desperate, so the seller can set a much higher price than normal.
• The city will sell two acres of land to the railroad for $11.10.  This land is immediately adjacent to the $27.50 land but is selling for less than half the price.  Why?  The city has to do this.
• Actually the amount of land involved has not been finalized.  In their mutual rush they have not done the surveys necessary, but the plan is to just let the city manager decide how much to buy and how much to sell.

Public access

• In addition to the buying and selling of land, the city is agreeing to close 8 railroad crossings.  They are:
  • Birch Street
  • Cedar Street
  • Elm Street
  • Maple Street
  • Cadwallader Street
  • Cebada Street
  • Estrella Street
  • Boone Street
• The property owners on both sides of those crossings will lose property value.  There seems to be no provision to compensate them.  The crossings are in what you might call the older part of town and evidently city council does not think that the citizens there have the resources to fight city hall.
• Citizens who use those crossings every day will just have to find another way to get where they are going.

Public money

• The railroad would like to have an overpass for the Delta Drive/Cypress Street rail crossing.
• The city is agreeing to “have the Overpass [sic] placed on the Metropolitan Planning Organization’s (MPO) Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP) so that the Overpass [sic] can become a candidate project for funding”.

More, more, more

• The city would like an option to buy the parking lot that they just leased from the railroad (see No parking zone).
• The 43,800 square foot property is priced at $11.10 per square foot.  That comes to $486,180.
• Previously the city leased the property for ten years for  more than $611 thousand.

Why would the railroad sell something for $486,180 when they had a ten year lease for $611 thousand?  Simple, they will get something in return.  “This option is expressly conditioned upon the closure of no less than eight (8) additional railroad crossings which shall be further described by an agreement to be negotiated between the parties …” is the language in the proposed ordinance.

Eight more crossings?  They will be chosen from a list of 30 attached as Exhibit G.  The candidates are:

• East Missouri Avenue
• East Yandell Drive
• Montana Avenue
• Rosewood Street
• Piedras Street

Those are major thoroughfares.  What kind of inconvenience would those closures cause our motorists?  The remainder of the list has equally important roads, but remember every road is important:

• Delta Drive, Olive, Magnoffin [sic] Avenue, Bassett Avenue, Myrtle Avenue, Texas Avenue (Highway 20), East Mills Avenue
• North San Marcial Street, Grama Street, Copia Street, Concepcion Street, Chelsea Drive, Glenwood Drive, FM 1505 / Clark Road, Lafayette Street, Smith Road, New Haven Drive, Pendale Road, Zaragosa Road, CR / Inglewood, CR / Nevarez Road, CR / Moon Road, Cr Rio Vista, Bufford Street, CR Bauman Road

The citizens are being sold down the river.  Maybe we should change our city name to No Paso, the blockade of the north.

On and on and on

The ordinance has many more travesties to public justice.  In the interest of time and readability I will stop here.

If you care enough to go down to city council remember it is in the main library.  Please do not burn it down, I like books.

We deserve better

Brutus

Earlier I wrote in Slight of hand? about the feeling that some of have that the city may be using the situation over at the fire and police pension board as a diversion — get our attention focused on something other than what city council and the city staff are doing.

A reader posted a comment that indicated that the city manager and a city representative were aware of problems but chose to wait until “later”.

The reader indicated that the information came from an email string between the city manager and the city representative.  The reader was kind enough to send the link recently.  You can left click on the image below to make it larger:

Reading the emails from the bottom up, what you see is an August 14, 2012 exchange that started with the city manager telling the city representative the the pension fund director is a “boozer and partier [sic]” (I guess that the city manager does not feel the need to use spell checking).

No respect

Once again we have the city manager calling people names behind their backs.  It is totally inappropriate for this to happen this way.

The plan

The city manager tells (not asks) the city representative to “Ask them for info on all their operating expenses and travel”.

Then we see that the city representative does not understand.  She inquires “Who’s operating expenses …. the managers or fire?”  She must not be in on the plan yet.  She calls the director of the organization the manager.  She does not know if she is supposed to bird dog the director or the entire fire department.

The city manager responds “The Police/Firemen’s pension fund.  Not the departments [sic]” (I guess grammer  is not important to the city manager either).  Note that she puts the Police first.  The name of the organization is the El Paso Firemen and Policemen’s Pension Fund.  Anyway the city manager is saying don’t attack the city departments, attack the pension fund and it’s director.

The admission

Then comes the kicker.  The city manager writes “Don’t say anything just request it later”.  The city manager obviously has plans to mount an attack later — when she needs to.  We are seeing the results of the plan in the news now.

I still think that the diversion is designed to cover up what is happening with the railroad.  See Catch me if you can.

Muckraker