Debt and Taxes

Is your City Council Representative concerned about your property tax burden?

Mine isn’t.

Back in 2019, she sent out a mailer bragging that in the first nine months of the 2019 Fiscal Year, the City of El Paso had already spent 66.8 % more than in all of FY2018.

She was proud of it.

Apparently, the City Manager has convinced City Council that it’s their job to spend money. He has probably convinced them that the 2012 Quality of Life bonds were their license to raise our taxes.

Even though, before the bond election, the City’s Chief Financial Officer promised us that the QoL bonds would only raise our property taxes just a little.

The City of El Paso is already more than two billion dollars in debt. And that number rises with every Certificate of Obligation that City Council approves.

Remember, our last mayor and our current mayor got elected by promising to be fiscal conservatives. I wonder if our City Representatives noticed that.

El Paso’s property tax rate is among the highest, if not the absolute highest, for residential properties, anywhere in the nation. And we are in the top five for all the other rate classes.

Your City Council Representative thinks that you’re okay with that.

Maybe you are. Maybe I’m the only one that thinks that we pay a lot for what we get from City Government.

If you’re not okay with that, you should let your City Representative know. By email, or snail mail, or maybe by leaving a flaming bag of dog shit on their doorstep and ringing their bell.

I’m not advocating that. I’m just saying that might be one of your options.

Alternatively, you could elect someone new as your Representative in the next election, but that’s not soon, and your current Representative could still do a lot of damage between now and the next election day.

You could bring a bunch of rotten tomatoes to the next City Council meeting, but, since the meetings are currently on Zoom, you’d probably only succeed in smearing tomato juice on your computer screen.

Your City Representative seems to think that you’re okay with more debt and higher taxes, and you should let them know that you’re not.

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