Face to face, one on one, District 6 city Rep. Eddie Holguin is one of the nicest people you could meet.

But, and this has needed to be said for a long time, at City Council meetings, he tends to leave his manners at the door.

He can be rude, snarly, accusing and profoundly disrespectful without provocation to the people who, effectively, work for him and with him. I mean plain nasty.

He makes outrageous accusations that are often untrue, or at least unproven. And worst of all, too often he doesn’t do his homework before he joins his colleagues in the public forum as a member of El Paso’s city government.

During meetings, Eddie doesn’t seem to pay attention sometimes. He asks people to explain over and over while other members of council sort of roll their eyes and tap their fingers until Eddie gets it or gives up.

I know, I know, these aren’t the kinds of things a straight up reporter is supposed to say.

But I have been covering city council meetings here on and off since for 25 years or so, calling the games like a sports writer, trying to point out the bad calls, the busted plays and the bad players. It’s not unfair or unprofessional for a reporter to say what he sees any more than it is to report what he hears.

Having said that, I can also tell you that Holguin does have a knack for catching the king with his clothes off, proverbially speaking, and calling him out in public when no one else will.

But he can nullify the legitimacy of what he has observed with one ugly comment that just goes too far. And Eddie isn’t one to admit a mistake.

There were several instances that stood out Tuesday.

One was during discussion of a request for the annexation of 60 acres of property on the fringes of a prior annexation on the East Side. It was a clean up job by Doug Schwartz’s Rancho Real IV, as his representative, Conrad Conde, said.

Though routine, it got interesting when two council members, Beto O’Rourke and Susie Byrd, raised the level of the discussion to a serious policy issue by expressing their general opposition to annexations on the city’s edges and their willingness to deny future annexation requests pending the results of a study of the benefits and costs of annexations.

You can yawn now, go ahead.

But what Eddie observed was that the two members of council who have led the way on growth and development policies and ordinances for the past three years seemed to be turning against the agreements they themselves had agreed to with Rancho Real.

“I just don’t understand you all sometimes,” Holguin said to them. “You really throw curveballs, such that we can't keep up with you.”

Then ensued a quick debate over annexations and the coming proposal for impact fees, which are intended to spare city taxpayers the cost of new water tanks and new water resources by putting those costs on new developments, i.e. homeowners in new areas.

Let development pay for development, the mantra goes.

Cutting to the chase, Rep. Byrd asserts that according to the Public Service Board, 35 percent of last year’s 10 percent increase in water rates was because of the costs of providing water to new developments, particularly in newly annexed areas.

“That’s if you put any faith in the PSB,” Eddie said. “I don’t put any faith in anything they say.”

Some would cheer that kind of comment. Several hundred public employees at the PSB probably wouldn’t.

The question to ask is whether the PSB’s leadership has proven itself to be dishonest and deceitful enough to warrant a statement like that. And whether Eddie knows enough to make it.

Before the stormwater utility fee, many in El Paso and in the utility business nationally saw PSB as a city department that has delivered good water cheap and looked far ahead to address water problems before they have gotten serious for this oasis island in the Chihuahua Desert’s sea of creosote, rock and sand.

Moving on, Eddie asserted that the city would actually lose money by imposing impact fees on new developments. I think I flinched at that, and even though I was sitting in one of the last rows of the council chambers, Eddie noticed, and, near the end of the meeting, pursued me out of the room as I was leaving.

He wanted to clear something up and make his point, and I appreciated that.

There, in the lobby, he made several assertions about impact fees that I thought were surprisingly wrong, coming from a member of council. He said under the proposal for impact fees that will come to City Council in a few weeks, developers will no longer be required to build arterial streets, which are at least four lanes and usually divided, or pay for the cost of water hook-ups.

He also said developers would be relieved of other street development costs as well if the city imposes impact fees, which have been the subject of repeated briefings and explanations on paper in the past year or two.

When I said I thought he was wrong about everything he was saying, he waved a three or four page memo on impact fees at me that Deputy City Manager Pat Adauto had written to council members and said the memo said so.

I scanned it and found no such explanation. I asked him to show me where it said any of that. He could not. But he challenged me to ask Adauto myself.

I waited a few minutes until the council meeting ended and did just that.

Adauto said the city will only be looking at impact fees to cover the costs of water and wastewater facilities that may be outside a particular subdivision development but which have to be built to serve it.

If the City Council approves those impact fees, she said, developers will continue to pay for streets and water lines inside their subdivisions and for part of arterial streets running through them.

“Are there any expenses developers are now paying that they would not pay if the city approves these impact fees?” I asked her.

“I can’t think of any,” she said.

Will developers be relieved of paying water hook-up fees, as Holguin said, I asked.

“No,” Adauto said, adding that developers don’t pay them now, homebuyers do.

At that moment, Eddie came up to us and said, expectantly, “See, I am right.”

I broke the news to him.

“They’re no longer going to have to pay for arterial roads,” he asserted to Adauto, insisting that developers paid the full cost of building portions of Montwood and George Deiter under the current policy.

Adauto politely explained that before 1987, the city would get developers to pay the entire width of arterial streets, but that developers were relieved of the full cost of such roads “when impact fees came into effect” after 1987.

I have to say I was surprised to hear her say the city had approved what could be called impact fees 21 years ago.

But I did know developers have long had to build neighborhood streets and sidewalks and to install underground water and sewer lines. As for major streets, arterials, developers typically put them in but are financially responsible only for a portion of the cost.

That is, the developer will pay for, say, two lanes of a four-lane arterial, and the city will reimburse them for the other two.

What will change with impact fees, Adauto said, is who pays for a water tower needed to serve a new development that happens to go up off the site of a development needing that water.

“Who’s paying for the tank right now?” Eddie asked.

“The water utility, through the issuance of bonds and debt,” Adauto said.

Those are the kinds of costs the PSB wants to hand off to developers, instead of making everyone in El Paso pay for them.

“Why have developers said you can’t charge them twice, and if you do, they’re going to sue?” Holguin asked Adauto.

I didn’t wait for the answer.

Eddie Holguin, as the leader and frequent point man for the loyal opposition, might do himself and his allies more good if he did his homework and tried harder to understand what he hears and reads.

It’s not my place, but I’m way older than Eddie, so I told him that. In my last job, saying something like that to a city representative, whether it was true or not, would have been good for a hot time in the woodshed.

As it was, the Newspaper Tree editor, Sito Negron, said I’d better write about it.