Many El Pasoans continually decry about how the rest of the state and now the nation looks upon the city as nothing more than a joke. Many of the readers to my blog complain about how I write nothing but the negative stuff that is the city. The individuals who complain about how El Paso is perceived should focus their anger on the insane asylum that has taken over most of the city’s government. No, I’m not writing about policy or even political factions, I’m writing about the juveniles running the city.
Frequent community activist Lisa Turner pointed out something and Diario reporter Karla Guevara Walton posted a picture of yesterday’s city council meeting that poignantly points out exactly how your city elected officials are nothing more than juveniles pretending to be adults.
This is what the rest of the world sees about El Paso, children running an insane asylum known as El Paso.
Take a good look at the picture posted by Walton on her Twitter account. As you can see, Cortney Niland is sitting next to Ann Morgan Lilly instead of where she should be sitting – next to Lily Limon. We all know that there was some sort of altercation between Lily Limon and Niland last November. There has been much rumormongering about what transpired but what we actually know was that Niland asked to be moved away from Lily Limon.
As you know, I do not attend city council meetings personally, instead I rely on the city’s online feed of the meeting to see how council deals with city policy issues. Because of that, I assumed that separating Limon and Niland entailed some sort of musical chairs where the city representatives exchanged chairs on the dais. Whether this happened or not, I do not know. However, while looking at Walton’s picture it clearly pointed out to me just how childish the whole thing is.
Notice how the last position on the dais is empty? From the picture, it looks to me like Niland was squeezed in between Ann Morgan Lilly and Larry Romero. Now take that imagery and combine it with the public fight between Limon and Niland and the only conclusion is that this is a childish fight between two adults with the end result being that one child took their marbles with them and sat with the other children in the playground.
To be clear there is only one city representative that is not sitting where she should be. What does this fact say about Cortney Niland? Is she that childish that she cannot act as an adult one day a week to do the city’s business? Although Niland is the one sandwiched in between two other city representatives it is the other elected officials that allow this situation to continue making them all children pretending to be adults.
Oscar Leeser, as the chair of the pretend adults, should have insisted that everyone take the seats that they were assigned to. If two, or more city representatives cannot behave like adults then the appropriate mechanisms of censure and public security should be allowed to do their jobs when there exists a possibility of public disorder. Leeser should let the existing laws deal with it as it does with all adults.
The problem is that Leeser knows he is dealing with children and rather than allow the façade of “it’s all good” in El Paso to be unmasked with city representatives being hauled off in handcuffs he allows this farce to play itself out in the community.
That is the problem with trying to keep lies going – the facts always have an inconvenient way of destroying the lie.
As for Niland, what does that say about the voters that elected her into office?
And some of you still wonder why El Paso continues to be the laughing-stock of the state.