Dangerous Naivete

El Chuqueño doesn’t endorse candidates. We’ve had our hearts broken too many times.

But anyone who says they can build the arena and hold the line on property tax rates is either dangerously naive or outright lying.

If the City builds the arena (and I mean builds the arena anywhere), property tax rates will have to go up. We can wait to pay off the debt, we can finance it out into the future, but eventually someone’s going to have to pay for it.

When they said, “It’s for the children,” you didn’t know they were talking about the debt, did you?

El Pasoans seem to have a hard time understanding credit. This report from WalletHub says El Pasoans are in the 21st percentile for personal credit scores. Hence the proliferation of payday, hard money, and car title lenders.

And let me remind you that El Paso has more debt per capita than any other city with a population over 500,000 in Texas, despite having one of the lowest median incomes in the United States.

Lemme tell you a secret: the City doesn’t have to build the arena, despite the voters approving it as part of that flawed 2012 Quality of Life Bond Election. The voters were purposely misguided, and our electeds should acknowledge that, despite the fact that some of our current electeds were among the people that misguided us.

Hell, let’s have another election, now that we can smell the coffee. Now that we know that our property taxes will in fact rise, and now that we know that the proposed cost estimates for the projects were way off.

I know that honesty and common sense aren’t prerequisites for holding public office in El Paso. But they should be.

2 comments

  1. ls there a recent poll about the % of El Pasoans that even still want an arena being built anywhere? l haven’t found any such poll. lt makes me cringe looking at the nutty garbage running in my district – district 2. Tolbert, Burgess, and Annello are proudly bragging about how they’re going to piss away our $ on crap that we don’t need, and the other lunitics running in my district are too stupid and lazy to even provide any information on what they stand for. Yuck.

  2. Exactly. Who wants an arena? The only people who stand to benefit are the real estate speculators who invested in Union Plaza, and the City, which makes fifteen percent off of construction management for projects like that. And the taxpayers get screwed.

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