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On Tuesday, April 14 our City Council will vote on agenda item 32, authorizing the City manager “to sign a Non-Binding Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) by and between CITY OF EL PASO (City), the COUNTY OF EL PASO (County), and the DOWNTOWN DECK PLAZA FOUNDATION (DDPF) in support of an opportunity to incorporate structural elements and future-proofing infrastructure to support a deck plaza (Downtown Deck Plaza) over a portion of the Texas Department of Transportation Downtown 10 project.”
TxDOT is requiring our local governments to spend $43 million for “future proofing” for the I-10 expansion so as to incorporate the structure of the Debt Plaza.
The problem is the City of El Paso is $18,932,000 short of the needed funds and has no idea how to procure them.
An even bigger problem is that the City’s own feasibility study, conducted by Stantec, estimates the total construction cost in 2027 dollars to be $412 million, though the City and County continue to insist the “base cost” is only $207 million.
And then there is the fact that $60 million of the $100 million in grant funding the City applied for has been rejected.
What is more, we recently learned from the “Elevate the Debt” webpage that of the $74.15 million in alleged funding commitments,” $35 million of that figure will be “private philanthropy” for amenities to be built atop the Debt Plaza and will not contribute to the cost of construction!
If that were not enough, two-thirds of Republicans voters supported Proposition 1 in the recent primary election, opposing “the spending or commitment of tax dollars for the promotion, design, or construction” of the proposed Debt Plaza, and the Democratic precinct chairs just voted 60-10 for exactly the same thing.
Nevertheless, our tone-deaf City Council representatives, most of whom were bought and paid for by the Oligarchs and their bankers and attorneys, plan to ignore the math as well as their constituents and proceed with this boondoggle anyway.
Please write to the Mayor, City Council, City Manager Mack, and Karina Brasgalla (Economic Development Director) and tell them you oppose spending a single dollar of taxpayer money on a project that will benefit only developers and contractors while leaving the City and County mired in debt for decades:
mayor@elpasotexas.gov; district1@elpasotexas.gov; district2@elpasotexas.gov; district3@elpasotexas.gov; district4@elpasotexas.gov; district5@elpasotexas.gov; district6@elpasotexas.gov; district7@elpasotexas.gov; district8@elpasotexas.gov; mackdx@elpasotexas.gov; brasgallakx@elpasotexas.gov
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