Many El Pasoans were secretly sold out by city council when they approved the new ball park.
Tearing down Insights and city hall, buying buildings, and remodeling them have ended up costing us a lot more than the $33 million that council told us it would take. The number keeps growing but is now over $70 million. $63.9 million and climbing was the last article where the numbers were detailed. Since then we have seen other costs. We will have to wait to figure out the total. Council and city staff are burying the projects and we will not know about some of them until the paperwork is done.
More recently we learned in Shoes dropping that when we went to the polls and approved the funding for the new ball park we were not told that we did not own all of the city hall site. Imagine — tear down two modern buildings, spend more than $70 million dollars to move, contract to build a ball park for $50 million plus whatever other money they can hide from us — on land that we do not even own yet!
The El Paso Times gave us a peak at what is coming in their rather understated article on March 13, 2013. It seems that securing the land for the new ball park made spending $5 million to rebuild the Carolina bridge and create quite zones “necessary for the city”.
Oh, and by the way, the city will need to agree to close several railway crossings as part of the land deal. Those of you that travel through the crossings today have been sold out by city staff and city council. Public input evidently is not necessary — we know that they consider us to be “crazies” and enemies of progress.
The crossings at Cedar, Birch, Maple, Elm, Estrella, Cebada, Boone, and Cadwallader are evidently eight of the ten crossings they want to close. If this causes you inconvenience, I suggest that you think of the great public utility we will all gain from the ball park.
Carolina bridge will be closed “for some period of time”, but you ought to be able to find an alternate route. Grant Street, Rio Grande Avenue and Arizona Avenue will need to be converted to two-way streets “to ease traffic congestion and railroad crossings”.
“This is just fantastic” one city representative said.
Remember to vote in May.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Why do I feel like we’re being led down a yellow brick road by Scarecrow and the Wicked Witch, whose moves are being choreographed by multiple wizards behind a curtain?
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If they close all the adjacent crossings to Piedras that means increasing the traffic immensely at the Piedras crossing. Sometimes you already have to wait as long as 20 minutes or more. They need to make a bridge or something so the traffice can keep flowing.
That should cost a pretty penny.
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