Commissioners approve county manager system, budget department

Buried in Monday’s 3-2 vote to create a chief administrator position at El Paso County was another historic shift in the county’s organizational chart.

It’s a move that one commissioner said catches up El Paso with every other large county in the state.

Budgetary functions were previously up to the auditor’s office, which answers to the local council of judges. But the county Monday created a new budget and finance department, which will answer to commissioners court via the new county manager, who will oversee the day-to-day operations of the county’s ten or so department heads.

“You don’t have a budget officer and an auditor in the same position, because you can’t have one auditing the other,” said County Judge Veronica Escobar. “You’ve got to keep them separate.”

Escobar and Precinct Three Commissioner Vince Perez voted in favor of a county manager system back in 2012.

“We can’t afford to have another just member of the team, because that’s ultimately going to lead to many of the same issues that we have right now,” Perez said. “Having a coach who we can trust to help us get the job done and to help us to win is ultimately what we need.”

That 2012 motion failed in a split decision — with no votes from current commissioners Carlos Leon and Sergio Lewis.

“How much staff will that take?” Lewis asked. “Is this one individual going to be able — for the next five years let’s say, for example — are they going to be able to do all this all by themselves?”

The chief administrator — aka county manager — will be paid about $177,000 a year. The restructuring as a whole will cost the county an extra roughly quarter-million dollars a year — or about 0.08 percent of the county’s annual budget.

“As we’ve seen with the fleet manager, where we funded the position on the front end, he’s been able to basically pay for his own position through savings,” Escobar said. “At the end of the year, it will probably be tenfold. So we’re having the same expectation, or we will have the same expectation of an administrator.”

Escobar said commissioners should make a hire by January.