Ordaz Asks Questions About Money, Council & City Manager Cant' Keep Story Straight

I purposely waited a while before I posted thoughts on yesterday because I was watching what was happening and laughing to myself. Politics makes strange bed fellows indeed.

Its funny to watch people who aren't really about issues try to find a delicate way to support people they spent the last year talking smack about. Even Hector Montes, my favorite little internet munchkin has come to the defense of Cortney Niland.

But lets back up a minute and call a spade a spade. Representative Ordaz raised an issue about the city losing out on over $20 million in funding.

C-mon all you ball park people, this is your kind of issue isn't it? Oh yeah, it was never really about the money right? That's why you're so silent on this issue.

For whatever reason Ordaz raising this issue has created an alliance between Mayor Leeser, the City Manager, and Representatives Noe, Niland, and Acosta. Lol, just kidding. By "for whatever reason" I mean, they all sit on the MPO and are trying to cover each other's asses over a now almost $50 million screw up.

The city can't seem to make up its mind on which story it wants to feed the public about screwing up on such a grand scale.

Last week city leaders said mea culpa and admitted the problems. Yesterday they reversed themselves and it was all about how it was the fault of the MPO, oh wait, not it was TxDOT and their environmentals, no wait, its because staff is afraid of city reps, I mean no, we didn't lose any money...

So first things first. The idea that the city, and by city I mean you the tax payer, hasn't lost out on any money is flat out ridiculous.

This was a failure on the part of the City of El Paso. Anyone saying otherwise is either lying or stupid.

You know how I know it was the city's fault? Because most of the city of El Paso's delegation to the MPO said so.

"...we did the process wrong. We failed at it" were the words of El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser in this clip below. Those are his words last week during the budget hearings when this issue came up.



During that meeting, Representative Ordaz posted an agenda item about the issue. Since all the city reps have their city mail accounts linked to their phones and tablet devices, just ask Stephanie Townsend Allala, they all got an email notifying them of the item once Ordaz had posted the item. And then bingo, the conversation came up.

Representative Acosta, another member of council who had a different story yesterday can be heard in this video saying "unfortunately we wanted to advance some of them, we just didn't submit the right documentation, we didn't submit the right category". Another admission of wrong doing on the part of the city.



And event the Honey Badger herself, Representative Cortney Niland, says its the city's fault as well in this clip. She referred to the city being the "laughing stock" of the MPO because of the mistakes and said that the "process wasn't followed properly".



Everyone said it was the city's fault last week. Yesterday they all changed their stories.

Until it was TxDOT's fault and their environmentals.

And then Representative Noe said it was because staff was afraid of council members.

And then Noe said it was because Ordaz wants on the MPO.

And then Niland said it was a deliberate effort by some entities on the MPO to undermine the city of El Paso.

But this all started by some implying that the reason the city engineer was retiring was because of the fact that these mistakes happened under her watch. Another high-level city employee is on leave, presumably because of mistakes like this as well.

Tommy Gonzalez acknowledges that some projects were submitted when he got here that shouldn't have been submitted. Later in an interview with Genevieve Curtis from KFOX, she asked him why projects were resubmitted if they weren't ready.

Gonzalez implicated council in his response, "...the process that was in place, council made it a priority..."



Y'all remember Harry Truman. Former President of the United States? He used to have an old saying, "The buck stops here."

This city council apparently knows nothing of that mantra. Yesterday bucks were being passed around you almost had to duck to avoid getting hit by the excuses of why this community lost out on over $40 million.

So the party line with council now is that we didn't lose out on any money. That is a load of shit. Several of the projects ended up being put into a longer-term phase of projects. Those projects do not have guaranteed funding. The process to apply for funding will have to start all over again and there is absolutely no guarantee that there will be funding for those projects at a later date.

The members of council should, in a genuine way, accept responsibility for their screw up. I can guarantee you that had it been other members of council that screw up they would be the first ones to raise hell about it. Especially Representative Noe.

The truth is this is the second time many of these projects were denied because of the incompetence of city staff. Because its the second time, its on the shoulders of the elected leadership that represent the city on the MPO. The buck stops with them.

And seriously, they can't pretend they didn't know about it sooner. I went digging around and found the minutes from the meeting where the vote to deprogram the money happened, May 2, 2014.

Guess who was there and voted for it?

Representatives Noe and Niland.

Mayor Leeser, Representative Acosta, Jane Shang were not present at the meeting.

So now can we get real and stop with the excuses? Because there are some serious problems here and instead of turning the city council meeting into a whine festival, Mayor Leeser, and City Reps Noe, Acosta, and Niland should've spent the time talking about how they should take responsibility for the mistakes and figure out an effective path forward. Instead what they did was try to grandstand in front of cameras.

Especially Dr. Noe. He was more concerned about the city looking bad than the fact that there was a seriously problem that occurred. Your job is to make sure the city is doing a good job, not to make sure the city is LOOKING like they are doing a good job. Constituents count on you guys to find stuff like this and fix it, rather than coming up with excuses so that no one looks bad.

And avoiding looking bad is exactly what they were doing. That is why they tried to have this conversation during an LRC instead of the main meeting. That was a ploy to avoid public criticism for their mistakes.

Its funny to watch the mayor have to work together with at least two reps that were at one time, potential mayoral rivals.

Gotta love El Paso politics.

Its time for city council to fix the problems. The projects that were denied had real problems. That is what happens when staff waits until the last day possible in order to be eligible for the funds to apply for the money.

That would be bad enough if it weren't for the fact that they literally turned in one project 15 minutes before the deadline and all the other projects 1:48 minutes before the deadline, another 1:30 minutes before the deadline, and another 29 minutes before the deadline. 

Up next, the politics behind the MPO and killing stupid talking points...