El Paso City Manager Set to Make Almost $400,000

Funny how most of my articles this week have a common theme. I've written about the cost of living in El Paso and how cheap it is, but also on the flip side, our taxes are through the roof compared to other places.

Want to know why our taxes are so high? It's because we're paying massive salaries to people like El Paso City Manager Tommy Gonzalez, who is set to make almost $400,000 after a positive review from Mayor Oscar Leeser and the city council. Is the City Manager position one that generally pays that much? Well, the city manager of Dallas makes $406,850 a year. In case you didn't know. Dallas is way bigger than El Paso and even in Dallas they're talking about capping the city employee's pay because they are out of control. City Managers in Phoenix make significantly less though. They're listed at about $250,000 a year.

When talking about the positive review and the subsequent pay raise, Mayor Oscar Leeser said:

We just need to continue to grow as a community. And I think both evaluations were very good. If you saw, the city manager got a 3.81 and the city attorney got a 4.18. Those were both really good evaluations. And if you think about the time of Covid-19 and everything that's been going. There's been a lot of challenging times and both evaluations were very good.

Yes, we need to grow as a community. You know how you do that? You help the people of the city by lowering taxes and stop paying bloated salaries to city employees.