There is a two-headed beast roaming around City Hall these days and it’s after our tax dollars.
Dr. Noe and Claudia Ordaz Perez both have an insatiable appetite to “tax and spend” and won’t be satisfied until they’ve gotten their furry little mitts on as much of our money they require to fund their agenda.
And what is their agenda?
Downtown. The Arena. The $98,000,000 trolley that take people from point A to point B with nothing in between. The investors, special interests and wealthy property owners. Childless Millennials who drink craft beer and rent $1,000 DWNTWN 1-bedroom apartments. The power brokers who fund their campaign war chests.
This two-headed beast has from the get-go been pushing to plant the “bad idea of bad ideas” arena where El Paso’s most vulnerable citizens live...where El Paso’s oldest living historical neighborhood goes on about it’s daily business.
The poor be forgotten and the wealthy be funded (with our tax dollars).
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Let’s talk about their attempt to override Mayor Leeser’s veto of their ultimate plan to issue $44,000,000 in new debt to El Pasoans in the form of Certificates of Obligation.
FYI — A Certificate of Obligation is a cheap trick that lazy and conniving City Councils use to get citizens in debt WITHOUT our permission, WITHOUT our participation, and WITHOUT our vote.
That’s right. Dr. Noe and Claudia Ordaz Perez were trying to put one past us without the majority of El Pasoans knowing what they were up to.
Mayor Leeser knew exactly what was going on which is why he let them know he would veto it as soon as it came up.
So what was the additional $44,000,000 of new debt going to pay for?
In part it was going to make up for some of the 2012 Quality of Life bond projects that came up short because they were poorly and incorrectly estimated.
They needed to come up with a way to get El Paso citizens on the hook for covering their budget shortfall mistakes WITHOUT OUR PERMISSION.
The City breached their Quality of Life contract by coming up short with their promise to provide us with A, B and C in exchange for X amount of our tax dollars.
And now they want us to pay for it. A bathroom or two at San Jacinto Plaza. A fountain park somewhere else in town. Things that should have been covered with the bond in the first place.
Fiscal sanity prevailed and the City Council reps finally got one right and voted 4-2 against Dr. Noe and Claudia Ordaz Perez to override the veto.
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When and if this arena gets built, we can be assured that it will come up substantially over budget. The bond makes no mention of the yearly maintenance costs which will be in the millions. They haven’t figured out how much additional millions it will cost El Pasoans to address the guaranteed traffic and parking nightmare that will result. The loss of businesses along that stretch of overbuilt DWNTWN that will be asleep most of the year.
We need to tame this two-headed beast and it’s blatant disregard for El Paso taxpayers.
It’s hungry.
Let’s starve it.