They’re Just Wrong

During the debate about the Mayor’s veto yesterday District 1 Representative and reported candidate for Commissioners Court Peter Svarzbein said that the street beautification projects and other quality of life amenities were to help entice former El Pasoans to return.

Come on.

No one with a life someplace else is going to move back to El Paso because we put some yuccas on a median. No one with a wife and family in Austin is going to move back to El Paso because we have AAA baseball. No one with a job in San Diego is going to move back to El Paso for the water parks.

They’ve got a real ocean right outside of San Diego, with real beaches.

And attracting industry to El Paso is a hard sell.

If Mr. Svarzbein has ever been out of town, he’s probably noticed that El Paso is long way from anywhere. For manufacturers, El Paso is a long way from the suppliers of raw materials and a long way from commercial markets.

Of course, transportation isn’t the only consideration for relocation experts. There’s also labor. Rents. Taxes.

Right. Taxes. I understand that taxes are high in El Paso.

The City of El Paso is more than $3 billion in debt. The interest alone on all that debt runs to more than a billion dollars. We don’t get anything for the interest we pay, except maybe a sinking feeling in the pits of our stomachs.

It’s not impossible, but getting a company to move to El Paso is a hard sell.

There are a lot of places in the world, a lots of them have professional sports, and landscaping, and lower taxes than we have in El Paso. Professional sports and landscaping aren’t going to convince anyone to move to El Paso, not even back to El Paso.

And taxes. To get any company to move to El Paso, the City will give them tax incentives. Giving tax incentives doesn’t do anything to relieve the tax burden the rest of us are carrying.

Those people on City Council foisting higher taxes on us need to come up with a better excuse.

8 comments

  1. Well said, el rich boy…but don’t hold your breath waiting for the Six-Shooters to put down their arms and admit error.

  2. I agree, we need more sensible management for the city than we are now getting. Bigger debt just means that our children will end up paying our bills in the future.

  3. As I understand it, the only remedy now is for the people of El Paso to petition the government for an election on the COs.

  4. All I can say is that Peter Starzbein is the biggest idiot ever to be elected to City Council. He is an embarrassment to the voters who elected him. People at City Hall are counting the days he has left in office. The guy is the most confused person ever elected. Remember he was 100% in to get the Street Cars running. As predicted the Street Cars are a huge failure. Nobody rides them. Nobody is paying a fare to ride them. They run empty. The Street Cars are a financial failure for the Taxpayers. Carl Robinson is going to stomp the crap out of Peter. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

    1. “They run empty. ” But it reminds us of who we are, to paraphrase Rep. Svarzbein. They are beautiful in a retro kind of way except they don’t go anywhere. The trolley wasn’t intended to go anywhere; it was intended to create a Disneyland ambience for a property corridor. If it were really a transit system, it would run from the west side to downtown, the border, the medical center and the east side mall. That might actually move someone.

      Of course, if you said this 10 years ago Bob Moore and Joyce Wilson would call you a “crazy.” The crazies are usually right in the long run here because the Powers That Be want what they want for reasons having little to do with the public welfare. Like the trolley.

  5. Meanwhile, after this summer’s rains, those beautiful medians are sporting a new look with weeds growing to yuge sizes. I don’t see a lot of work being done to clean them, either. We are still on the ride we been took on, and no one has the balls to stop long enough to allow for us to get off.
    As for our kids who now live in San Antonio and Austin? Two out of three have married girls from that area, and those women have absolutely no interest in this backwater place. (I would normally have said backward, but this year I think I can get away with backwater).

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