The city reported 110 fewer names on its active payroll and about 1.8 million pesos less in pay during the first half of September compared with the previous pay period. The figures followed a tense council dispute over staffing. Yet the employee lists needed to check the change are missing from City Hall’s public payroll archive.
The administration announced the figures Sept. 18, four days after the council instructed its treasury and personnel offices to bring staffing within the approved budget and ordered the municipal comptroller to audit jobs and payments. Vallarta Daily covered the initial announcement. The city’s original 2026 budget set aside 1.407 billion pesos in personnel spending, about 45% of its 3.102 billion peso total. That allocation does not show what City Hall has paid so far.
The timing deserves scrutiny. The comparison covers Aug. 16–31 and Sept. 1–15, meaning most of the period preceded the Sept. 14 council instruction. The drop cannot establish that the vote produced the reduction. Nor does a net decline of 110 active names identify how many people were dismissed, which departments lost staff, or whether the lower payment will recur. City Hall says the changes concentrated on administrative and support jobs while more than 100 operational workers joined service teams earlier this year. The public lists would help test that account.
The payroll page, marked updated Sept. 23, currently ends with July’s second pay period. The council’s public session index shows the Sept. 10 agenda, but no minutes or text of the payroll decision that emerged when the session resumed Sept. 14. The records available to the public therefore do not answer the council’s central question of which positions and payments, if any, exceeded the authorized plan.
Avenida México offered another measure of follow-through this week. An October 2025 agreement with merchants near Parque Hidalgo specified two traffic lanes through the Malecón extension and a six-week schedule to restore normal vehicle movement. On Sept. 2, Mayor Luis Ernesto Munguía described the work as essentially complete, while acknowledging pending storm-drain grates and saying the city still had to decide whether cars would return. Fresh reporting Sept. 22 described excavations near the northern end of the project. The roadway remained closed to vehicles almost a year after construction began.
The distinction between a nearly finished walkway and a reopened street is practical. Shops on that stretch of Avenida México expected vehicle access under the original agreement. Any change to that plan needs an explanation of the earlier promise. A councilor proposed restoring limited access, but the published council archive does not yet confirm an approved reopening vote.
SEAPAL, the municipal water and sewer utility, reported work under way Tuesday in La Mina I and II in Ixtapa. Four water-line extensions totaling 232 meters and two sewer-line extensions totaling 191 meters are expected to reach 160 people. (seapal.gob.mx) The utility’s notice gave neither a finish date nor a price. Households that have sought these services over several years still need to know when the pipes will reach their homes.
Elsewhere, rain on Monday pushed sewage-contaminated water onto streets in Versalles, including Viena, Havre and España. SEAPAL’s Wednesday preparations ahead of Hurricane Polo focused on lowering levels in the drainage system and keeping beach-area pumping stations and treatment plants ready. Those are concrete preventive steps. The notice did not diagnose the Versalles overflow or say when the neighborhood’s drainage problem would be repaired.
The week also exposed the limits of municipal control over the bay. In a Sept. 21 letter to President Claudia Sheinbaum, Munguía requested federal checks on a vessel displaying large illuminated advertisements off the coast. Oceanic Marketing says it has documents from the Navy and port authorities and plans to keep operating. The company’s statement did not supply permit numbers or establish whether those documents authorize the advertising itself. The mayor’s letter invokes a city rule on large screens; it does not establish that the rule reaches a vessel in federal waters. Whether the offshore display is lawful awaits a federal determination.
The next useful records are specific — the late-August and early-September payroll lists and audit findings, a dated decision on Avenida México’s traffic, completion details in La Mina and the federal review of the vessel’s permits. Each would let the public measure a City Hall claim against a documented result.
