I need your help

I have been asked to dance in the upcoming Dancing with the Stars. The event will raise money for the Big Brother Big Sister program that hooks up at risk kids with community mentors. Big Brother Big Sister does great work in our community, but they need your help. So do I.

Here is the problem. I love to dance, and I love to win. Both of these attributes have caused me to shamelessly and continuously brag to my fellow competitors that I plan to win and I plan to win big.

There were some things that I failed to take into consideration prior to my loud mouth ways getting the best of me. I have a partner. His name is Al Velarde. He is the director of the Child Crisis Center. Alas, having a partner requires a woman to follow. It has been suggested by every dance partner I have ever encountered that perhaps I have not fully embraced my role as follower and that dancing with me is more like wrestling than dancing.

Al and I are dancing the cumbia. I grew up in Central El Paso and in Central the cumbia is pursued with wild abandon, much hip shaking, bent arms, elbows as much a part of the dance as the hips and lots of wide wild steps. Apparently, according to our dance instructor who is trying to prepare us for the event, this is not exactly the way it is supposed to happen at the event. Hers is a tamer version with short steps requiring that I actually follow and elbows and hips are no where to be found. At least not yet. It is taking me awhile to transform my being and my history in order to accommodate the dance. This is not to say that we won’t win. It is only to say that my bragging has far outpaced my actual abilities.

So here is where you come in. There is another way for us to win. You can either win by being the best dancer ever or you can win the old fashioned way by bringing in the most money. Al and I could win by selling the most tickets and raising the most money for Big Sisters Big Brothers. So you can buy a ticket to the event and come and holler loud when we dance making it that much more likely for us to win the dancing portion. Or you can donate to Big Sisters Big Brothers under our name. Either way, the kids served by Big Brothers Big Sisters win. And we win. This is, as we say way too many times at city hall, “a win win situation.”

Here’s how you can help:
Email me at susiebyrd@elp.rr.com if you want a ticket. Ticket prices are $50. The event is Saturday, October 25 at the Scottish Rite Theatre, 301 West Missouri in Downtown El Paso. Cocktails are at 6 P.M. Program starts at 7 P.M.
If you want to donate, go to our donation website and pledge all sorts of money to put us over the top.

Okay, thanks.

A Tus Brazos Otra Vez

To El Pasoans, mariachis are our everyday. They are backyard birthday parties with the brinca-brinca. They are 40-year anniversary parties in big halls with old people dancing close while little kids in their starchy best glide along underfoot and teenagers in clothes too tight and too short smirk from the edges. They are Music Under the Stars with all of El Paso packed in next to friends and family. They are Saturday at the Tap with a plate of chiles relleños and a Tecate Michelada while a moon-eyed mariachi dressed in a powder blue polyester suit dudded up with a whole lot of razzamatazz belts out Volver as if you are the only woman he has ever, or will ever, love.

In El Paso, mariachis are there for our most special days, and they are there to make our most everyday special.

So if you want to tell the rest of the world about what makes El Paso the place to be, better be sure to send some mariachis.

Which is what we did.

And we sent our very best—Mariachis los Arrieros.

At the Smithsonian’s invitation, the City’s Museum and Cultural Affairs Department sent Los Arrieros to the 42nd annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. The festival is an annual event held on the National Mall. Every year, it features the culture, music and food of a particular part of the world. This year, it featured Texas, NASA and Bhutan.

El Paso was front and center at the festival. UTEP's close ties to Bhutanese architecture and culture were highlighted with a Bhutanese temple and traditional dance, music and song and heralded by our own President Diana Natalicio. Avila's Restaurant was dishing out Mexican food, reminding the rest of the world just what they were missing out on when they brave a taco in Georgia or an enchilada in Minnesota.

And then there were the mariachis.

One of the best parts about this Mayor Pro Tem business is that if the Mayor can't make it out, I have to go to DC to introduce Mariachis Los Arrieros to the rest of the world.

Which is what I did.

On a sticky hot evening in July, I stood before a mob of people from all around the world gathered under a big tent on the National Mall to tell them that I had no doubt that they were about to fall in love with El Paso.

Which is what they did.

They had no choice.

Mariachis Los Arrieros took the stage with a brash, full mariachi sound that left us breathless. Los Arrieros is a 15-member band of young men in their late 20s and early 30s. Juan Contreras, the musical director and one of the lead singers, mentioned to me that initially the Smithsonian folks only wanted him to bring out a handful of the group to save on costs. He wasn’t having any of that. It was all or nothing. Their sound is big, and it needs all 15 guys to be able to deliver.

Most of the group comes out of Del Valle, Hanks, Ysleta and Bowie High School. Some of them came out of formal high school mariachi programs. Others were trained classically in orchestra or band and took to the mariachi sound later at UTEP. They came together in 1996 through the mariachi circuit of regional competitions and performances. Of the 15, ten of them are educators in area high schools, teaching the next generation of mariachi performers. They are evangelical about the tradition of mariachi music. Every one of them that I talked to hammered home that their work as a group is more about passing on the tradition and love of the mariachi sound than it is about making money and being rock stars.

Even so, in the world of mariachis, Los Arrieros are rock stars. They have performed for thousands of people in Mexico and the United States. They are one of the top ten mariachi bands in the world. In 1997, they won the Best Mariachi in Texas competition in front of a crowd of 80,000 people in the Houston Astro Dome. In 2004, Los Arrieros became the premier mariachi group for the Chandler Mariachi Conference and will remain as the host mariachi group in the coming years. They have performed with extraordinary artists and groups including; Vicente Fernandez, Pepe Aguilar, Lucero, La Banda Recodo, Guadalupe Esparza, El Groupo Bronco, Marco Antonio Solis, El Buki, and Graciela Beltran.

They perform the songs that we all know and crave and ask for every chance we get: Volver, Cielito Lindo, Guadalajara, the boleros, the rancheras. You name it, they got it. They will play a bolero like Amor Eterno and whether you understand the words or not, you are crushed by the familiar emotion of a yearning heart. But from the very start, Los Arrieros wanted to set themselves apart. This is where Juan Contreras comes in. As the musical director, he started digging up the past, listening to old records, finding songs that weren’t part of the everyday repertoire of the mariachi. He found inspiration from old timers such as Juan Luis Guerra with his song Ojalá que llueve café. It is more of a salsa song so he remade it in their own sound, adopting it to their instruments and rhythms and style. He has taken jazz standards such as Moon Dance and Ojos Españolas, re-shaping the rhythms and the tempos, mariachi-style. And Juan has also written his own songs, such as Llegaron los Arrieros, evolving a tradition so that it continues to have a place in the heart of our culture.

In DC, Los Arrieros played twelve performances. Thousands of people from all over the world heard their music and heard them talk about their home in El Paso. Every time, the crowd went crazy nuts for Los Arrieros. They couldn’t get enough. They loved Mariachis los Arrieros and because they loved Mariachi los Arrieros, they loved El Paso.

The Smithsonian had recruited official male dancers whose job it was to be the shills. They would eye a woman dancing about in her seat and invite her out for a dance with the hopes that a throng would follow. This was a new approach to me since paseños are never shy about taking to the dance floor and don't need involved schemes to get the party started. The dance volunteers did not have to do much convincing with Mariachis los Arrieros on stage. Even with the bruising heat, people pushed themselves to the dance floor.

For several hours, Mariachis los Arrieros crooned love songs. They belted out boleros and rancheras, trading out singers, one a deep soulful base, another pitching a high note, holding it, holding it, holding it, until the crowd had to take a breath. They stomped the zapateado Veracruzana out on the dance floor, moving in and out of the audience, still playing their instruments. They played Niño Perdido, one trumpet player the mom calling for her lost child, the other trumpet player the child hiding in the crowd, losing his mom. We all left exhausted, satisfied.

After the show, several El Paso ex-patriots came to me. They would hug me and kiss me and thank me. They looked home-sick and sad. They had forgotten what they were missing out on. Mariachi los Arrieros reminded them, and they missed their home.

This event and watching the world respond to Mariachi los Arrieros reminded me that as a city our most valuable assets are our art, our culture, our traditions and those, like Mariachi los Arrieros, who are willing to share what is special about us with the rest of the world.

El Paso Gets Ready to Move on Mass Transit

We are a city that is continuing to grow in all aspects. As we prepare to deal with expanding residential and commercial developments and as we are in the midst of revitalizing our city's core, we must also look at how to quickly move people to where they need to be.

On Monday Aug. 18 at 1:00 p.m. in City Council Chambers on the second floor of City Hall, the city council will hear the Mass Transit Strategic Plan, a plan that will open up the possibility for rapid transit programs that would serve all reaches of the Sun City.

This is a very important presentation, so I urge all of you to attend if you can. Whether you are a constituent of District 2, a daily long-distance commuter or simply want to hear how we are planning our community's future, please join us and give us some of your valuable insights.

Two Great Meetings

This Saturday, there are two events that will surely be interesting for my fellow District 2 residents.

First, I will host my bi-weekly community meetings at the Memorial Park Library at 3200 Copper. My guest this week is Mr. Michael Hill, the director of the City of El Paso Health Department. Mr. Hill will be present to discuss his role as leader of the new department and what that department offers to El Paso residents. Stop in, pick up a cup of coffee from Le Squirrel Café and join us for a great discussion on the important city entity charged with your health and wellness.

Next, join me and residents from across the Sun City for the second annual Neighborhood Summit to be held at the Ysleta Independent School District Administration and Cultural Arts Center, 9600 Sims

If you are a member of a neighborhood association, this is the perfect opportunity to meet peers from other neighborhoods and see what projects they’ve undertaken to make their streets and neighborhoods better places to live. If you are not a neighborhood association member, you are more than welcome to attend the event and learn what resources are available to you for anything from graffiti removal, street paving and neighborhood revitalization programs.

So, that is what’s happening in El Paso this weekend. I hope to see you at both of these events so that we can find ways to make El Paso the brightest place to live in the Southwest.

Paper or Canvas, Just not Plastic.

Over the past months, there have been several discussions among residents, elected officials and City Hall staff on the best way to bring forward a policy that would limit and eventually eliminate usage of plastic shopping bags.

As our desert landscape is one of our most precious natural resources, it is sometimes marred by plastic bags blown into trees, cacti and shrubs whenever seasonal winds blow into town. Since the bags are not biodegradable, they remain as unsightly ornaments until they are removed by stronger winds or by the hands of volunteers looking to clean up the mess.

In a few other cities in the U.S., local governments have sought to curb the standard issuance of plastic shopping bags at convenient stores, grocery shops and other retail outlets. Some plans call for the complete elimination of plastic bags at these stores while other municipalities have sought to discourage their use by offering economical yet environmentally friendly options, such as recyclable paper bags or low-cost canvas bags.

El Paso City Council is continuing to study the issue and will again reconsider the item in the coming months.

There are ways to both make shopping convenient for consumers and still help to keep serene beauty of the El Paso desert environment, and with as much input as possible from Sun City residents and consumers just like you, our city’s government will be able to make the best possible decision.

Environmental Services welcomes the public’s input and ideas on a plastic bag ban. They will be incorporated into proposals that Environmental Services will present to City Council early next year.

The meetings are all scheduled for 6 p.m. The meeting dates and locations are:

• Aug. 18: Polly Harris Senior Center, 650 Wallenberg Drive.

• Aug. 19: Memorial Park Senior Center, 1800 Byron Street.

• Aug. 25: Richard Burges Library, 9600 Dyer Street.

• Aug. 26: South El Paso Senior Center, 600 S. Ochoa Street.

• Aug. 27: Judge Edward S. Marquez Mission Valley Library, 610 N. Yarbrough Drive.

• Sept. 2: Carolina Recreation Center, 563 N. Carolina Drive.

• Sept. 3: Father Martinez Senior Center, 9311 Alameda Avenue.

• Sept. 9: Pebble Hills Regional Command Center, 10780 Pebble Hills Boulevard.

For more information the public may call (915) 621-6754.

Get on the bus. Ride your bike. Walk, already.

(Some notes written in response to Sito Negron’s Newspapertree article, The Billion-Dollar Status Quo.)

A couple of years ago, the Mayor and City Council mapped out our strategic goals for the community. One of the five strategic goals is to make El Paso one of the least car dependent cities in the Southwest. For El Paso that is no mean feat. We’re the Ford 150 capital of the world. We love big gas guzzling man trucks. This City Council inherited a broken down bus system that was built and funded to accommodate only those who have no other choice but to get on the bus. All of our land use regulation, infrastructure requirements and public financing favored neighborhood development that practically imposes two-car ownership on every family if they think it is necessary to get to work or go grocery shopping or if they want to hang out at a public park. At the city and regional planning level, most of the thinking and planning and understanding and staffing and political will was about moving 1.1 persons per car on miles and miles of asphalt.

Run away gas prices, the uncertainty about gasoline always being an affordable and accessible commodity, a shallow tax base that demands that we have to get a lot more out of very few dollars, many families who cannot afford car transportation, poor air quality and the awful degradation that car dependence has imposed on the way that we build our city are some of the many reasons that we need to build for other alternative modes of transportation besides just the car.

In his article, Sito Negron asks City Council the billion dollar question. If our strategic goal is to make El Paso less car dependent, how come transit only got 2.5% of a billion dollars in the Comprehensive Mobility Plan approved two weeks ago by City Council and by the Metropolitan Planning Organization? Big giant goal. Seems like approving only $27 million of a billion dollar budget for transit is a status quo response to the big giant goal. Transit got scraps. Asphalt and concrete and the Ford 150 got the mother lode.

Sito assigns this to politics as usual. Big fat cats sitting behind closed doors scheming the future of El Paso. Fact is our transportation priorities weren’t decided last week by the City Council or the Metropolitan Planning Organization. They’ve been years in the making. Southern relief route. The completion of the loop. The Spur. These projects weren’t hatched yesterday, and since they weren’t hatched yesterday no one is going to give them up without a fight. Communities small and large have held endless public meeting and have been jockeying to get their projects in the near term funding plan for ages.

The last go round, El Paso didn’t have any projects lined up at the trough so TXDOT gave our money to communities that were ready to go. Texas Department of Transportation (TXDOT) Commissioner Ted Houghton was determined that this wouldn’t happen again and so hurried TXDOT staff to shake loose some projects so he could shake loose some money for El Paso. It seems to me like the list of transportation projects was fashioned from a realistic view of the politics of regional decision making and what projects were ready to go in a hurry. The unanimous vote at City Council and the unanimous vote at the Metropolitan Planning Organization coming on the heels of an rancorous year-long debate about whether transportation funding should include tolls and regional mobility authorities seem to affirm the rationale behind the projects that were selected.

With the Mayor at the lead, we’ve been pushing the idea of Rapid Transit for about two years now. Some folks think that Rapid Transit is just a prettier bus and there isn’t much chance of inducing more transit ridership with just a prettier bus. The thinking is that those folks that can afford single car occupancy just won’t take the bait. They aren’t switching over until light rail hits the ground. Depending on how you build it out though, Rapid Transit can be much more like light rail, only with wheels. Here’s where I think we need to go with it: dedicated transit lanes, pre-emption of traffic lights, loading bays that allow transit riders to board at grade, a pre-payment system that cuts out the hassles and the time of pitching nickels into a fare box, a high frequency system that doesn’t keep people waiting long and yes, a system designed and marketed as a different kind of transit. Every detail of the system (the way you pay, the way you get on and off, the way that it moves through the road system,) is about building speed and reliability that competes with your commute to work in a car all by yourself.

While Rapid Transit didn’t get much in the scheme of a billion dollars, it got much more than people understand that it got. Rapid Transit has been conceived as five fingers emanating from the connection between Juarez and Downtown El Paso. Mesa, Dyer, Montana, Alameda and North Loop would be the best candidates for moving lots of people where they want to go on rapid transit. Problem is they are all state roads. If we want to use them, if we want rapid transit to have dedicated lanes on these roads, TXDOT has to be on board. TXDOT, like transportation agencies throughout the nation, is making a slow, strained, tense transition from “all asphalt, all the time” to looking at other alternatives for moving people. Two months ago, we were asking them to commit to dedicating transit lanes on these key transit corridors. TXDOT made it clear that we were going to have to do a lot of work to convince them that people would transition from sitting in a car all by themselves to getting on rapid transit. Rapid transit has the capacity to carry many more people than road lanes. A typical freeway lane can carry about 2,300 cars per hour. Typical auto occupancy is 1.1 persons per car. So a freeway lane can move about 2,520 people in an hour. Rapid transit systems that have been built out with designated lanes have shown capacity performance between 7,300 to as many as 19,500 passengers per hour. Even so, transportation agencies like TXDOT aren’t willing to bank on the fact that people actually will transition from car usage to transit usage. The catch being that the only way to really make rapid transit competitive with the car is if you get the lanes dedicated.

So in committing $27 million to Rapid Transit along Mesa and Montana, TXDOT is committing two lanes to transit. That’s miles and miles of roadway that we would have had to acquire and build out if we didn’t get TXDOT on board. Their willingness to work with us on transforming these roadways for transit use is invaluable and historic.

In the history of the agency, TXDOT has never committed their funding to transit in El Paso. It’s mostly been about asphalt and concrete and traffic signalization. The way I see it is “One small step for rapid transit, one giant step for building a city that is less car dependent.”

The other significant change in TXDOT’s and the City's thinking about moving people is that they are beginning to understand that roads shouldn’t just be about moving people in cars occupied by 1.1 persons. All new road projects have to be designed to better accommodate all forms of transportation including transit, bicyclists and pedestrians.

I am committed as ever to our goal of getting El Paso become less car dependent, but I’m telling you right now it is a long and perilous road with not as many allies as one would like. On Monday night, I sat through a 2 ½ hour meeting about bike lanes on Hondo Pass. Except for a few strong individuals who spoke out at their peril, the proposal for bike lanes on Hondo Pass was met with screaming hostility. One of the proposed designs for the roadway did not take out any existing car lanes, added protected parking lanes, slowed down traffic AND added two bike lanes. No matter, it was viewed as an all out assault on the average Joe who was just trying to get by in the world. How dare we suggest that bike riders have as much right to the road as someone in a car?

So in the end, I didn’t ask for more dollars for transit. My assessment was and still is that it was better to move quickly with what transit got and prove up to the public and the policy makers and the funding agencies that if you build it right, people will begin to make fundamental changes in the way that they get from here to there.