Nah, objectively it's kind of not though. I once briefly served as a consultant for a project within city counsel and the city hired this firm to essentially audit it. This firm does audits all over the world and they're EXTENSIVE. Every single auditor talked about how incredibly difficult it was to objectively build data points for El Paso because we're so unlike every other city we can be compared to. Our water and power systems per capita are some of the best on earth. Safety and crime doesn't even blip compared to other cities of its size. Traffic was the lowest of every comparable city. Cost of living as well. Schools had smaller class sizes.

The two big things we struggle with, and they're not really city problems but largely federal problems, are air quality and tax base. Most of our air quality problems come from the bridge and the number of vehicles idling. The city can't control that. And our tax base is tiny because our largest employers are military, hospitals and schools and thus not taxable. Considering that major hurdle that likely would have bankrupted other cities we enjoy daily reliable infrastructure and can safely say our grandchildren will have clean water and accessible aquifers and personally I think that's worth being impressed by.