The people running El Paso are delusional. They’re drunk. Drunk on power and ego.
They latched onto this idea that El Paso needed to improve its “Quality of Life” to attract industry, and now that their experiment in social engineering is failing/has failed, they can’t admit that they were wrong. If it were just their money, they’d quit, but since they’re leveraging their own investments with taxpayer funds, they think it’s worth the bet.
When they say “Quality of Life,” what they really mean is amenities for the leisure class. For some El Pasoans, Quality of Life is money left over after the bills are paid and time to spend with the family.
Yeah, the people who are making the decisions aren’t interested in that. They want ballparks and a driving range with a bar attached.
The fat cats and our “public servants” both have the some myopic problem. They look at the community and think “What’s in it for me?” The riches didn’t want to have to go to a public event and rub shoulders with the masses. They wanted private elevators and luxury sky boxes. Our public policy is about emphasizing the class divide.
How can anyone think that the highest property tax rates in the country and a crumbling infrastructure will attract competent industry? Businesses looking to expand are usually driven by capable businessmen, and capable businessmen can spot bad deals. El Paso is offering taxpayers a bad deal.
We can’t spend our way to prosperity. We can’t buy financial security. Right now a big chunk of our city budget is dedicated to debt service, and that’s forecast to get worse.
(The most galling part of all the tax abatements the City offers to businesses is that the people who benefit from the tax incentives are often the people who saddled us with that debt in the first place, and with those deals, they’re not paying to service the debt.)
I blame our political class, for selling out the community in exchange for campaign donations. Some of them have moved up, and some of them have moved on, but we’re still stuck with some of them, and all of our current elected officials are looking to join the “political class”.
Who would want to move to a community like that?
Exactly. We only wish we could afford to relocate, but it is just not practical for retirees to sell what they have here because we could never find anything affordable elsewhere.
Funny thing… politicians are progressive until it comes to top tier quality of life… Peons? Give ’em a splash park… I’ll be at the city suite at Southwest Park!