The City’s share of property taxes on the median priced home went up 6% this year. You can read about what you got for it here. Basically, the story says that what you got is increased wages and benefits for city employees.
What the story doesn’t say is that you’re also paying for the ballpark, the streetcar, the water parks, the Children’s Museum, the City’s Mexican American museum, and a whole slew of other bad decisions that the City Manager was able to convince City Council to buy into over the last few years.
It’s a poor CEO who can’t manage his Board of Directors, and the City Manager has been playing City Council like a two dollar fiddle.
Somebody needs to explain to our City Representatives that we can’t spend our way out of debt. That the quickest way to get out of this hole is to quit digging. Instead, we keep buying the latest most expensive digging equipment we can find, and dress it up as “high performing government”.
You know, high performance cars are expensive to run and costly to maintain, and a $6,000 used Chevy Citation will get you where you need to go just as surely as a $240,000 Lamborghini, and you can pack kids and luggage into a Citation. Does a Lamborghini even have a glove compartment?
You can extend that analogy to high performing government.
Lamborghinis are nice, but they’re not very practical.
Chevy Citation? Really? You couldn’t ‘cite’ something a bit more real? (pun intended). Either way, once again, you are preaching to the choir over here, Rev. We are being taken for a truly expensive ride by our current form of government, and the manipulators that have been hired to run it.
Did you mean to say that it’s a poor Board of Directors that can’t manage their CEO? I’m assuming Gonzalez is the CEO in the situation and Council the Board of Directors. Seems Gonzalez has done a great job managing his Board, so much so that they’ve forgotten he works for them, and not vice versa. Now, I still think he’s done a terrible job as City Manager. But I think the only reason he’s still employed is his mastery of knowing how to keep his own job.
What I mean is that a lot of the responsibility for the position that the City is in belongs to Mr. Gonzalez, because he manages City Council. Maybe I wasn’t clear.
Agreed. Gonzalez has been a disaster. But does he technically manage City Council? I thought it was the other way around. In practice, it’s clear that he does manage them. He answers to no one because he’s managed to make his bosses (Council) think that they work for him, instead of vice versa.
Mr. Gonzalez controls the flow of information emanating from the City. The Representatives, poor dears, don’t know any better. Seven out of ten El Pasoans know that, and the other three are too busy working to care.
Like I commented to an earlier post, some of the Reps think that only they understand the real situation as they’re led down the primrose path.
Poor them. Poor us.