City of El Paso in Worse Shape Than You Think

So I spent the day at city council hall yesterday because I was looking into something. But along the way an interesting city council meeting sprouted up.

Here is the first thing you need to know as a taxpayer, the city is far more screwed up than you think. It seems like there is always a new revelation about yet another fuck up.

Yesterday it was a park in Emma Acosta's district. And some street stuff. And some financial stuff.

Basically the last couple of months have been a parade of a lot of stuff going on at city government that is essentially failed government.

The funniest part is to watch them try to blame the pervious administration for screw ups because many of the current reps are more concerned with looking good rather than actually DOING good. But that is another post for another day.

The reality is that a lot of them are in a tough spot because they don't want to blame the current city manager because you know, they dropped a big ass raise on him like a GI in a strip club on the 1st of the month. They would have to admit it was a mistake.

On the other hand, several of them were PART of the previous administration.

So its a balancing act that they do poorly.

One thing for sure though...City Rep Cortney Niland and the current city manager Tommy Gonzalez certainly appear to have had a falling out. Things got particularly testy late yesterday afternoon when they were discussing more MPO issues.

Basically the city manager told Niland that she should stop bringing him projects that aren't ready.

I will say this about City Rep Niland, she has certainly become much more assertive over the last few weeks. For months following her narrow re-election she seemed like she wanted to avoid as much attention as possible and was much more demure in meetings. Now, shades of the old Honey Badger are back, for better or worse. She's more vocal and appears to want to wrestle back a leadership role on council.

The question is what is going willing or going to do to essentially come back from the dead? Time will tell but you can most certainly see she is anxious to get that leadership role back. It will be interesting to see if she can become the alpha council person again but I doubt Acosta, Noe, or Limón will go quietly into the night.

But getting back to the central theme of this post, at what point does this council rise above excuses and start looking at solutions?

Kudos to the Mayor, Niland, and Romero for raising the issue of the financial advisors because it was beneficial to have that conversation about where we are financially and were we are going. What is most interesting is that Niland was the only one defending the previous CFO and trying to throw the financial advisors under the bus.

She blamed them for yet another in a long line of city multi-million dollar screw-ups. She vehemently denied any wrong-doing or blame and said that the $20+ million screw-up was the fault of the financial advisors. Apparently at some point Romero thought so too because he asked for them to be fired.

One problem. No one else in the room remembered things going down the same way. That's because that is not how it went down. The current CFO flat out debunked that. The $20 million extra we had to pay was because members of the previous administration, some of which are still on council, voted to delay until after the election. When it comes to big projects, delays almost always mean more money.

At any rate it was sure interesting to watch how the demeanor has changed between the city manager and some of his formerly really supportive allies on council. Now it looks like the only people left in El Paso who still think it was a good idea are Mrs. City Manager and David K.