Good morning.

This is a special meeting of the El Paso Mass Transit Department Board.

Today is Tuesday, February 25th, 2025.

It is now 1005 a.m.

President presiding is Board Chair, Mr.

Johnson, also present in Council Chambers, our board members, Ms.

Chavez, Ms.

Rocha, Ms.

Trejo, Ms.

Limon, Mr.

Acevedo, Mr.

Nino, Mr.

Fierro, and Mr.

Canales.

There's no public comment on this agenda.

There's also no uh consent items.

And we move on to the regular agenda item number two.

Discussion and action on the resolution of the Mass Transit Department Board of the City of Opasle authorizing the city manager to take the necessary actions to address immediate and continuing necessary city responses to the February 11, 2025 fire at Sun Metro Transit Operations Center to include authorizing contracting and purchasing without further action of the Mass Transit Department Board.

Pursuant to allowable exceptions to the competitive bidding requirements under Section 252.022 of the Texas Local Government Code as amended, authorizing city manager or designate to execute documents required in response to this emergency to enable routine mass transit operations to resume.

Is there any public comment on this, Ms.

Ryan?

We do have uh two speakers.

Okay.

Mayor, can we see the presentation first?

Sure.

So that folks know what they're commenting on.

Good morning.

Good morning, Mayor, City Council, Anthony DeKaiser, the director for public transit, Sun Metro.

IT, will you please bring up the presentation for item two on the Mass Transit Department board agenda.

So again, good morning.

Today I'll be uh giving you an update on the update regarding the request for the Sun Metro resolution.

Again, the mission of Sun Metro is to connect El Paso community, and we recognize that serving our public is a reason for our existence.

And that's what Sun Metro does on a daily basis.

I won't read it, I'll just let you look over that for a second.

The purpose of this resolution is to authorize the city manager or her designee the ability in the future to authorize contracting, purchasing, and further action for the mass transit and further action of the Mass Transit Department Board, given exception to the ordinance 16515 and 16736.

This is to exit expedite the preservation of municipal property as well as to assure public transportation.

Excuse me.

Meaning to facilitate the design and reconstruction of our facility to support maintenance operations.

So the maintenance division recovery and stability operations has been a key focus of Sun Metro.

Essential to bringing us back to full service.

Five Sun Metro employees were hospitalized due to the incident.

And later one of our one of our employees succumbed to his injuries, as you know, Ruben Abotto.

The fire remains under investigation, so I can't say too much about that.

I can tell you the affected area of the building was on the east side of the maintenance bay.

If you look at the slide here, that's the portion that's has the red box on it.

Again, the extent of the damage is still being investigated.

I know the east side of the maintenance building will have to be demolished.

The timing of that operation will be driven by the ongoing investigations.

There's several investigations going on, to include the fire marshal, the cause and origin uh folks, the structural evaluation, and some other entities that are looking at the investigations right now.

Once all those investigations are complete, we will also know the structures stability of the and the rest of the building of the rest of the building and how we will be able to proceed for restoration.

It is Sun Metros and the City of El Paso's intent to rebuild and eventually resume uh maintenance operations from the TO.

As you know, following the incident, we adjusted operations to modified to a modified Sunday schedule, holiday schedule.

This was to ensure that service with we could continue service with safe uh buses and also meet federal transit regulations and safety requirements.

Since the incident, Sun Metro has operated for eight days with uh modified schedule.

That's with um all Brio routes on a modified schedule, start but only starting earlier at 6 a.m.

to try to help those individuals going to school and work early in the morning.

And then the routes for Sunday holiday schedule that were fixed routes that we we did, there were seven of them, and those mostly covered the east side to help cover that area.

And then we also ran our Amnestat routes that they help us with because those were 10 routes that helped us with the west side to help cover to help cover that area.

Currently, Sun Metro is set up temporarily part of our maintenance operation down at the Union Depot.

And so we have seven bays that we can do maintenance operations at the at the Union Depot.