Float Frivolity

Alright this is the kind of stuff that just drives people crazy and it should. The County Judge pushed forward an expenditure that should infuriate everyone reading this post.

We literally just had the damn budget season, where everyone on Commissioners' Court voted to raise taxes except Commissioner Perez and Judge Samaniego decides he wants to come back to the Court and ask for another $10,000 to build a float for the Sun Bowl Parade.

$10,000!

But the part that is just un-fucking-believable is the fact that Road and Bridge staff were used to build the float.

I happen to know a lot of those vatos and they really do a great job. The reason its so screwed up that they were diverted from their regular work to build Samaniego's float is that they have a small staff and a lot of work to do.

And guess what? It rained last night. Guess what that means? Flooding. Ask people who live in the County how they feel about less pump trucks out to alleviate the flooding because Samaniego wants a  float for the parade.

But there are potentially much worse ramifications for Floatgate.

It is striping season.

For those of you that don't know, if you are doing road construction and maintenance, there is a temperature sweet spot to apply striping to roads. As it is, there is limited funding for road maintenance, when you pile on diverted manpower to build a FUCKING FLOAT, you end up with a really big problem.

There are roads in the Montana Vista area and other areas of El Paso County that weren't able to be striped because of the County Judge and the Court's misplaced priorities.

Obviously no one cares when this kind of stuff happens to the poorest, brownest parts of town - but this is really a big screw up by Commissioners' Court. Except for Perez who was the only member of the Court to oppose the $10,000 float desmadre.

Why?

Because he knows the impact it has.

Take a drive out to the County and you'll find out that once you get off the major roads, its pretty dark out there. Thats because there's not a lot of money in the budget for street lights. So road striping isn't a vanity project like say, oh I don't know... a fucking FLOAT!

Striping could be a matter of life and death. Take Krag or Flager for example.

I take Krag when I pick up and drop off mija.

There's some striping in the middle, but the sides of the road didn't get striping because the crews were diverted to work on the stupid float. In the absence of light, the striping is really the only thing keeping people from veering off the road at night in those areas.

You know, remote areas. Areas that take longer for first responders to get to in case of an emergency, like someone catching the shoulder of a road because there wasn't any striping to warn them where the paved road surface ends.

Actually now that I think about it... I wonder what kind of liability that places on the County?

Don't get me wrong, I love the missions. I live by one of them. I pass by it every day and its my parish.

But the County's job isn't to build floats. There's plenty of other things we could do with $10,000 that would have a more meaningful impact than build a fucking float.

How many stop signs or speed bumps could that pay for? Maybe not many, but at the very least we could avoid the diversion of road and bridge staff and they could actually finish the striping work.

And that could save lives.

Let me be clear, this isn't just on Judge Samaniego's shoulders. I mean it was his dumb idea, but there were three other commissioners that voted for it.... including Commissioner Carl Robinson. He went from never raising taxes to voting for tax increases AND a $10,000 float!

And he represents areas that are outside the city limits. Areas that his constituents would REALLY appreciate some road striping in.