You may ask yourself, “What are we going to do about the direction the City of El Paso is headed?”
Well, not everyone thinks that mounting debt, higher taxes, and welfare for the ruling class is a bad thing here in El Paso. This weekend I exchanged comments with someone over there on David K’s Refuse the Juice blog.
So there you go. If you don’t like being raped by local government on behalf of the wealthy looking for a handout, you can always leave El Paso.
Or, you could vote to change things.
He’s obviously one of those old “America, love it or leave it” types. Used to be a lot of those. I think they all morphed into donnie lovers, so there’s not much hope for them.
He moved here 38 years ago? He uses phrases like “don’t get your knickers in a knot”, sings the praises of Hunt and Foster, talks about El Paso being a “best kept secret”? THAT SOUNDS A LOT LIKE DEE MARGO. I think it’s him using an alias. I wouldn’t be surprised.
Jud. I moved into my present house about 15 years ago. We needed a house big enough for me and my wife and my mother in law so my mother in law could torture me every day for the next 13 years. But hope springs eternal and I walk the dog every morning at day break. There’s beautiful trees and the birds are chirping and my heart is singing songs from the musical “Oklahoma”. I pass by a house and a man is in his front yard picking up the morning paper. I shout out a cheery “Good morning neighbor!” He scowls at me and lumbers back into his house. It was Dee Margo.
tBusch… your nose grows long if you lie. Margo lives in a gated community and unless you’re one of the 1%, you’re not walking by his house. That community did not exist 15 years ago.
Mr. Busch didn’t say it happened 15 years ago. Only that he moved into his house 15 years ago. And if Mayor Margo’s community didn’t exist fifteen years ago, Mayor Margo probably lived somewhere else, I’m guessing.
The problem with wanting folks to vote is that invariably the people who vote in El Paso are largely those that want their rep to get “stuff” for their district. The City isn’t having issues because Foster and Hunt pushed things in a certain direction, it’s because we (as a community) have a really shitty grasp of how to live within our means. Combine that with a really depressing amount of apathy (e.g. the “there’s nothing to do in El Paso” crowd) and it’s not hard to see how we got to this point. I mean just look at City Council meetings discussing the stupid west side swimming pool. Likewise listen to the discussion about the splash pads and even the freaking parks (why do we need to put canopies on all of them?)
I’ve lived in other cities and I’ve seen how much QoL elements can matter to people when they are deciding to live somewhere or continue living somewhere so I don’t disagree with everything that the City is doing to improve our quality of life here, but I do think we are doing a really stupid job of prioritizing things . We have roads in the lower valley with no sidewalks, curbs or gutters and we have some areas of the upper valley and west side bickering over exactly what kind of landscaping, lighting, and fucking art to put in on their street (e.g. all the nonsense wrt Country Club).
Stuff like that isn’t entirely the fault of City Council or anyone on staff, that’s on us for not speaking up and insisting on an equitable distribution of money (equitable != equal) to help bring up all the City to a certain level. Instead we have folks like the DTEP businesses demanding fancy sidewalks and street trees and “paseo del las luces” nonsense while other parts of town don’t get anything even remotely close to that. That’s not on Foster or Hunt, that’s on us for letting whiny assholes dictate where huge amounts of money go without doing anything to help areas that could really use some improvements.
I agree that many El Pasoans aren’t willing to live within their (or the City’s) means. But those people who sold us the Quality of Life bonds are somewhat responsible for that. They really raised the citizens’ expectations. They promised everything to everybody and promised that it wouldn’t cost a lot more than what we were paying in taxes then.
Those Quality of Life bond proponents never suggested that El Pasoans should live within their means. Au contraire.
Also, I don’t think it’s fair to say FosterandHunt or HuntandFoster together all the time. They are individuals with separate motivations. Sure, they’re partners in the sports business, but Mr. Foster is a semi-retired billionaire and Mr. Hunt is a developer. Witness, for example, the sprawl on the west side. I guess you could speculate the Mr. Foster is in on it, to encourage the consumption of fossil fuels, but to me, that’s a stretch.
Then there’s that little matter of Mr. Foster selling that land on Paseo del Norte and I-10 to Great Wolf Lodge (and, reportedly, the City). But that might just be a straight real estate deal.
It’s easy to look at the way things transpire in El Paso and imagine there’s some grand conspiracy taking place, but I think it’s just a bunch of (probably greedy) individuals leveraging their own interests without any measure of control from City Council.
Chuco Geek,
The Paseo De Las Luces project had very little input from DTEP’s mom & pop businesses along S. El Paso Street. Most of these businesses are being negatively affected by the project due to sidewalk/street closures and a reduction in parking.
The Paseo project has two parts: the public and the private. The only “whiny assholes” (your words) who have had a say in the design of the private portion is Mills Plaza Properties which is owned by Paul Foster. The private part is going to be gorgeous. I mean really gorgeous. Those “fancy sidewalks and street trees” on the public side will only amount to a glorified taxpayer funded driveway leading to the Plaza Hotel and private parking garage that is about to be built. Both of these properties are owned by Mills Plaza Properties.
DTEP Business, I had herd that Tanny Berg had been one of the people agitating strongly for the paseo del las luces stuff on behalf of the CBA. I know he’s been quoted in some previous news articles supporting that and I have heard that he’s been one of the people talking about how “unfair” it is that certain things have happened north of Paisano vs south of it.
I don’t really care about who has input on the private parts of the project, but I’ve personally heard folks affiliated with the CBA and other groups strongly advocating for what they want in the public side of things. Just look at what happened on Cincinnati and how some businesses there and in downtown are actually taking public sidewalk space for outdoor patios. I’m not 100% positive that those things are inherently bad, but it bugs me to see how entitled some of those mom and pop and even bigger businesses are about this stuff when the City is paying for it (if they want to pay for stuff privately then they can knock themselves out).
Via EPT:
Population decrease due to migration, 2010-2017: -21,829
•Population change, 2010-2017: +5.1% (804,123 to 844,818)
•Natural growth, 2010-2017: 98,803 births, 36,570 deaths
•Median home value: $119,600