El Paso County will kick in $1 million to help advance the proposed Downtown deck plaza, and may become the owner of the park that would sit on top of Interstate 10 as a kind of central park for El Paso.
The deck park, estimated to cost at least $207 million to build, would cap the sunken stretch of freeway Downtown and span five city blocks, from Santa Fe Street east to Kansas Street. The County Commissioners Court approved the contribution 3 to 1, with only Precinct 3 Commissioner Iliana Holguin voting against.
“This type of situation is what broadens our tax base and then lowers the tax burden on individuals or constituents here in El Paso,” County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said during a County Commissioners Court meeting Monday, suggesting the deck park would boost property values and tax revenue from Downtown commercial properties and attract new development.
“We can’t miss that opportunity,” he said.
The Paso del Norte Community Foundation – a charitable organization backed largely by wealthy El Pasoans – has been developing the idea since 2018. The foundation is now seeking to apply for a Reconnecting Communities federal grant through the region’s transportation planner, the El Paso Metropolitan Planning Organization, that could provide $5 million to craft detailed designs for the plaza. The grant deadline is Sept. 30.
If it advances, the deck park would be built around the same time as a planned repair and widening of Interstate 10 around Downtown, for which the Texas Transportation Commission last week approved $500 million. An environmental review of the expansion still needs to be conducted, and public hearings on that project are expected to be held later this year.
Why does ownership matter?
The full implications of serving as owner of the deck park are still unclear.
However, the federal grant application requires a letter of commitment from the deck park’s “owner,” so the MPO and the Paso del Norte Community Foundation have sought to find an entity willing to take on ownership of it. Commissioners Court on Monday tentatively agreed to serve as the project’s owner – with a push from Samaniego – but the details of ownership have to be ironed out in the weeks ahead.
It’s possible that El Paso County takes ownership and then delegates responsibility for operating and maintaining the deck park to the Downtown Deck Plaza Foundation, a nonprofit the Paso del Norte Community Foundation created to marshal support from the public and private sectors. The foundation helped secure a $900,000 federal grant – and put up $400,000 of matching funds – for a feasibility study that produced the $207 million cost estimate the foundation revealed in early August.
At the Klyde Warren Park in Dallas, which covers a major freeway and is the model for El Paso’s deck park, a local foundation pays operations and maintenance costs of about $5 million per year, said Tracy Yellen, CEO of the Paso del Norte Community Foundation.
“We still have a lot to figure out, as we’re very early in this process,” Yellen told El Paso Matters. “Some of the funding sources are requiring us to start answering some of these questions sooner than later.”
Even with the county as the park’s owner, the federal grants set up by recent spending bills will be competitive to win. Last year, the Reconnecting Communities program received 682 applications – including from El Paso – that sought $11.6 billion in funding. Of those, the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded $3.3 billion in grants to 132 communities.
Now, there’s $607 million available for the next year of the grant program, which was established by the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that Congress and President Joe Biden passed in 2021. It’s designed to help communities improve “access to daily needs such as jobs, education, healthcare, food, nature, and recreation, and foster equitable development and restoration,” according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
El Paso’s MPO applied for a Reconnecting Communities grant last year and didn’t win. Eduardo Calvo, executive director of the El Paso MPO, said the application ranked well, and after tweaking it some, El Paso has a good chance of winning a grant this time around.
“We feel confident because of the last proposal that was submitted that scored well, and with additional partnerships we can be even more competitive,” Yellen said.
If El Paso is awarded a grant, it would provide $5 million to produce more detailed designs and a sharper cost estimate. The El Paso MPO would contribute another $3 million in separate federal funds, but stakeholders in El Paso have to put up a $2 million match.
That’s why El Paso County agreed to contribute $1 million. It’s not clear where the other $1 million will come from by the Sept. 30 deadline.
“We’ve been in conversations with other stakeholders, the private sector, some early conversations with the city of El Paso as well, and others,” Calvo said. “We really need to start getting those hard answers so that we have the assurance that the match is going to be there.”
After the county meeting Monday, Yellen declined to say whether her group would ask El Paso City Council for the other $1 million of matching funds.
An aerial rendering depicting what the downtown deck plaza may look like. (Illustration courtesy of Paso Del Norte Community Foundation)
Conceptual images produced by the Downtown Deck Plaza Foundation show the park with numerous features such as a dog park, gardens, a police substation, a performance stage and a sports “fieldhouse,” among others.
Several plots of land in the park were left blank – slated only as “future development” – which brought down the cost estimate. Yellen said Monday that was because it’s not fully clear yet how TxDOT’s project will affect properties along Yandell Drive, on the north edge of the proposed park.
The first phase would involve building the plaza from Santa Fe to Mesa streets at a cost of $105.3 million. The second phase, from Mesa to Kansas streets, would cost an estimated $101.5 million.
Yellen said the section of the plaza from Sante Fe Street to Oregon Street would be a “kind of neon desert-y, music under the stars, very flexible space where you can have movies and concerts.” The segment from Oregon Street to Stanton Street, with Mesa in between, would be “more urban space with potential retail, restaurants on the Mesa corridor,” Yellen said.
The last stretch of the proposed park, from Stanton Street to Kansas Street, would feature a 37,000-square-foot open-air fieldhouse that could host various sports or events, Yellen said.
How the I-10 widening fits in
Although it’s a separately funded project, the work on I-10 Downtown could coincide with the construction of the deck park. Under that plan, the Texas Department of Transportation will repair I-10 Downtown and widen the highway with an extra lane, and pay for and build the retaining walls that would support the weight of the deck park.
Calvo has said the I-10 modernization is badly needed. The pavement in the Downtown segment is decades old and worn out, and the pillars that hold up cross streets above I-10 don’t meet updated federal highway standards, he said.
TxDOT wants to add the lane in the Downtown segment because its long-term traffic modeling predicts traffic will become much worse in that part of the highway in the coming decades, as El Paso grows and spreads out further.
The idea of widening the highway has been met with fierce opposition in El Paso, however, with some local organizers complaining that the stretch of highway Downtown sees little congestion and doesn’t need to be widened.
Opponents have said a bigger highway will likely attract more cars and create more air pollution for neighborhoods near Downtown. And adding another lane runs counter to the city’s stated goals of becoming a more walkable city that requires less driving, not more.
“We’re not talking about the negative effects that a widening of the highway is going to have on this community, and that we’re trying to sweep that under the rug by talking about this park,” said David Stout, precinct 2 county commissioner. “If we really were going to connect neighborhoods, then we would look east of Downtown.”
An aerial rendering showing what the I-10 widening and modernization project would look like without the deck plaza. (Paso Del Norte Community Foundation)
The TxDOT project Downtown is still in the preliminary design phase and the environmental process. However, the Texas Transportation Commission last week approved the so-called Unified Transportation Plan for 2025, which included $500 million for the I-10 work – all but guaranteeing the agency will update the freeway and add a lane.
TxDOT is still conducting an in-depth environmental study of the highway modernization, which will be presented to the public late this year, according to the agency. TxDOT has said it will present its preferred option at a public hearing later this year, which will indicate which buildings the agency plans to acquire for the I-10 project.
TxDOT expects to begin soliciting bids for the work on I-10 next July, according to a spokesperson.
“We’re going to get that highway project. The question right now is not whether or not you want the highway project, it’s whether or not you want a park on top of that,” Steve Ortega, a former city council representative, told county commissioners.
“I think future generations of El Paso will thank you every time they’re going around the I-10 area, and they see green space instead of just a pit,” he said.
Unanswered questions
Commissioner Holguin, who voted against the $1 million contribution, asked whether the county would be on the hook for the project’s construction costs, or if it would have to pay maintenance costs, if the Deck Plaza Foundation couldn’t cover the expense in the future.
El Paso County’s legal staff will have to discuss more what it would mean for the county to take ownership, said Ana Schumacher, assistant county attorney.
“We would be able to submit the letter of support, essentially, at this stage. However, with regard to ownership, we would need to have further investigation review for the county,” Schumacher said. “We would bring back an agreement that fleshes those ideas out.”
Holguin said she was worried about spending $1 million after the county already had to slash spending on capital improvement projects in its budget this year.
“I’m really concerned about the county taking ownership when a lot of these financial questions don’t seem to have an answer yet,” Holguin said.
There’s also a question about collaboration with the city of El Paso. The county doesn’t possess zoning authority in the city limits, so El Paso County, as the park’s owner, would have little power to influence development in the Downtown area outside the park’s footprint.
“It really worries me that we’re getting into this project, and we’re being asked to be the owners, and we’re being asked to put up a million dollars. But we have to work with the city, and over the last year and a half, we’ve had no communication with the city,” Stout said.
“It’s difficult for me to really understand how that’s going to play out if we haven’t really had communication with the city over things that are a lot less complex,” he said.
A spokesperson for the city did not immediately respond to questions about Stout’s comment or whether the city will contribute any cash for the grant match.
Still, Calvo and Yellen said the county can address questions about ownership of the park and how the construction will be funded as the project moves forward.
“I don’t think when other communities apply for these types of grants, they have a perfectly defined plan to build it and who’s going to maintain it and all that,” Calvo said. “There’s a lot of moving parts, and we just need to try to continue working together and figure out the best plan.”
After submitting the application, Calvo said it will likely take the USDOT four or five months to select winners, and another four to five months to disburse the funds.
Support voiced
About a dozen residents showed up to the meeting Monday to express support for the deck park and to urge the county to participate in its development.
“The biggest problem that I face in my job, in my law firm, is recruiting young people. It is super hard to get young people from El Paso to come back here to work,” Mark Osborn, CEO of the Kemp Smith law firm, told county commissioners.
“If we can have projects like this deck plaza, we will be able to attract – not only bring young people back here – we can attract young people who are not from El Paso to come here,” he said.
Others said the deck park would boost property values in the adjacent areas of Downtown. That could lead to more tax revenue for the city and county from Downtown properties and, ideally, eventually ease the tax bills that residential property owners in the rest of El Paso pay.
For example, the value of properties around Klyde Warren Park in Dallas grew from $2.5 billion in 2014 to $5.2 billion by 2019, according to the Paso del Norte Community Foundation.
Joe Gudenrath, executive director of the El Paso Downtown Management District, said Monday that property values in Downtown increased 16% compared with a year earlier. Building the deck park would make Downtown real estate more attractive and increase property tax revenue, he said.
“The creation of a deck plaza over I-10 will support and accelerate our revitalization,” Gudenrath said, “and spur additional private investment in housing, office and commercial spaces.”
The post Who will ‘own’ planned Downtown deck plaza? El Paso County to give $1 million for detailed designs appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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