Ignoring the law

August 13, 2019

The Tuesday, August 13, 2019 city council agenda includes an executive session item (closed meeting) captioned as:

“Briefing from counsel on legal guidelines for communicating with citizens about a bond election”

Why the secrets?

What could the city attorney be telling city council in private that members of the public should not know about?  Is the plan to teach council how to lie to us or otherwise deceive us?  Could it be that the city attorney is going to tell them not to make false promises?

The Texas Open Meetings Act allows council to go into closed session for the following reasons:

  • certain specific personnel matters
  • discussions about the value or transfer of real property
  • discussions about security personnel, security services, or a security audit
  • discussions about a prospective gift or donation to a governmental body
  • discussions about potential items on tests conducted relating to licensing of individuals to engage in an activity
  • discussions of certain economic development matters
  • discussions of certain competitive matters is the city owns an electric or gas utility
  • issues relating to emergencies and disasters

Schooling the council about bond elections is not in the list.

However

Certain consultations with the city attorney are allowed.

Which ones?

Take a look at this:

It looks like the proposed closed session will not be legal.

Shouldn’t the city attorney know the laws and follow them?

We deserve better

Brutus

4 Comments | City government, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Hidden money

August 12, 2019

This is an example of why the voters should not approve massive multi-year bond issues:

The slide shows that EPISD has been selling bonds and putting the money into interest bearing accounts.

This is money that they don’t need at the moment but they sold them early to milk some interest money out of us.  Once they sell the bonds we start having to service the debt (principal and interest).

They then park the money in an account and get a lesser interest rate then what we are having to pay on the bonds.

The result?

According to the slide they have generated 8.6 million dollars using this technique.

Other EPISD documents indicate that they intend to use the money to cover cost overruns.

If the voters decide to approve the almost half a billion  dollars in bonds that the city is contemplating they should realize that even the city will need several years to spend the money.

The city could do precisely the same thing as EPISD.

We deserve better

Brutus

 

 

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

City bond election

August 11, 2019

The city seems to have decided to only include police and fire requests in the upcoming bond election.

It looks like the issue will be put on the ballot as a single item (take it or leave it) totaling $413 million.

The item will be on the November ballot.

We deserve better

Brutus

8 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Open line Saturday

August 10, 2019

What should we be talking about today?

We deserve better

Brutus

9 Comments | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

How much can we afford?

August 9, 2019

Next year’s city tax rate looks like it will be 90.73 cents per hundred dollars of valuation.

That works out to just about 1% of the value of your property.

Of the 90.73 cents 61 cents will go to maintenance and operations.

The amount that we will have to pay to cover past bond issues and other debt will be 29.7 cents.

That means that 32.7 percent of the money we pay in property taxes will go to debt service.

These numbers don’t include the cost of the multi-purpose performing arts center or the cultural center which we have already approved.

I wonder how many of us spend 32.7 percent of our income on our home mortgages.

We deserve better

Brutus

7 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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