Before even breaking ground on our new ball park the city is telling us that they need $10 million more to build it than the $50 million they told us it would cost. They also need another $750,000 for design and management work.
Who is responsible for this situation?
Let’s start with the city engineer. A recent headline article in the El Paso Times quotes him as having said “We could not build the project we have designed without it … We would have to redesign it … It would not be the ballpark the community wants. It would not be iconic or state of the art.”
The city engineer said that the ball park that the city committed to could not be built. He was in charge of the technical details. Is he incompetent, or is he a liar? Why rig a bid when you can fool City Council? showed us an example of how this individual plays loose with the truth.
Now he tells us that the street and sidewalk “work would have been done by other contractors while the ballpark was built, but that it made more sense to have the general contract oversee the work for better coordination”. More sense to whom? His job is to oversee the construction. This is a no bid give away. El Paso’s contractors should raise Cain.
Then we have the city manager. It was her job to see to it that her subordinates did good work. The city manager made presentations to council selling a ball park that we now know could not be built. The current decisions being placed before city council must have had her approval.
Demolishing trust pointed out how city staff had found a way to spend $500,000 over and above the $50 million budget building a pedestrian walkway that the ball park needed. Then it told us about how the city water utility was using customer money to provide new water and sewer facilities to the ball park — once again outside the $50 million budget.
Now the staff wants to use $3 million that was to be used for downtown street projects. Another $2 million will be stolen from the 2012 quality of life bonds that we approved for the downtown cultural district. Baseball is not we think of when we speak of culture. Where is the bond oversight committee? What committee? We didn’t promise to listen! gave us an idea what to expect.
Then we have city council. Are they part of this lie? At this point we are in a situation where denying the $10 million dollars could cause the project to fail. Did city staff fail or did city staff lie?
I guess if I were on city council I would ultimately vote for the $10 million. I would only do that after I had the written resignations of the city engineer, the chief financial officer, and the city manager. No resignations, no ball park. We are going to have to spend good money after bad, but we should not let the same people administer it.
The owners
The team owners are developers. They know about sidewalks and streets and how they affect projects. I suspect they knew this was coming. If one of their employees came to them with a $10 million cost overrun on a $50 million dollar project I suspect that some heads would roll.
The Times article tells us that “the $5 million in contingency funds would pay for amenities such as a bar-restaurant or group and party suites “. It sounds to me that decisions have been made about how to spend the money. There is no contingency fund.
Group and party suites will be among the most expensive facilities for the public to buy tickets to. The profits will be higher on these facilities than on regular tickets. Who will enjoy the benefit of this extra income after the citizens have spent $5 million? I suspect that the money will go to the team owners.
The owners have always seemed to me to be good citizens. Yet they seem to be going along with this two-step theft. They certainly have not spoken publicly against it. They benefit from it. I don’t see how we can trust them in the future.
Not done yet
Like most things we will have to wait to discover the full level of deception here. Will we end up over $100 million?
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty
Cato
elpasospeak 
Since we’ve gone way-over budget, it seems fitting to give a 5% REDUCTION in Drama Queen Joyce’s paycheck. She’s so bad at arithmetic, that we’ll tell her that it IS a 5% increase and she’ll probably believe it. Thank God Mayor Cookie da Shnookie wants to keep her evaluation private from us little peons. After all, it’s NONE of our business – well, except for the fact that we pay her salary, it’s still NONE of our business. l do have to hand it to Shnookie, not only did he play a major role in bankrupting this town, but he even bankrupted himself. There’s something to be said for continuity.
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The best indication of blatant dishonesty is that the fact that city management is earmarking $5 million of these “contingency” dollars for party boxes and party event rooms. That is disingenuous and just the kind of move they would make to manipulate and deceive a public that knows very little about stadium economics.
This reminds me of a famous baseball line related to the 1919 Black Sox cheating scandal. A disillusioned kid confronted Shoeless Joe Jackson and said, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”
Both city management and Mountainstar knew from the very beginning that this stadium would require corporate party boxes and a party event room which is important to group sales. Those are almost certainly Pacific League requirements intended to help assure profitability. Shucks, even Cohen Stadium, which they now claim could not be brought up to AAA standards, had boxes and a party event room and it was built decades ago. These features are significant, high profit revenue generators for Mountainstar and other ball clubs. These implied afterthoughts are now adding $5 million in cost which is directly tied to increasing Mountainstar’s revenue and profitability. The sale of party boxes to large businesses, such as banks, are high ticket sales and the annual fees get paid up front before the season starts. Annual revenue just from the corporate party boxes alone will exceed the paltry $200,000 annual rent that Mountainstar will pay for the exclusive use of the entire stadium for baseball and all other events.
This stadium ** call it what it is, a stadium ** is not a public/private partnership as it has was marketed and sold to the public. If it were, Hunt and Foster would be paying part of the capital cost to build the stadium or at minimum they would be paying a higher rent rate more in line with the amortized cost of the stadium. This is income redistribution to benefit the wealthy and to almost totally eliminate the private sector risk for this for-profit venture.
Hotels, which will realize almost zero nights associated with ballpark attendance, along with their customers will be footing the majority of the bill. They built their own hotels, but are now being asked to raise their prices to build a stadium for two billionaires and their families. Local taxpayers will foot the remainder and their surely will be more to pay.
The City Council and Manager knew all along the original budget was not sufficient to fund this project. That is why they made certain that the stadium was categorized as a venue as opposed to a stadium. That enables them to use tax dollars and debt to cover the difference between the HOT tax and the real cost without violating Sate law.
The maneuver to fold the sidewalks for the broader downtown area into the stadium project benefits the downtown developers such as Foster. It also just happens to benefit C F Jordan, which is the local project manager. How convenient.
Mountainstar’s owners never missed an opportunity for media coverage regarding the stadium until they were asked to comment about this overage. Then they balked. They said it was not appropriate to comment, that it is a city matter. The refusal to comment wasn’t even attributed to a specific person, which I will assume was simply a mistake by the reporter. Mountainstar’s refusal to comment was also intellectually dishonest since they have driven this entire stadium process through the city council and management for what we now know was two years or longer. Were we not told by Mountainstar that the Pacific League set the requirements for the stadium and insisted that it be downtown? Wasn’t it Mountainstar that brought the league to the table and shepherded the process regarding the stadium? For Mountainstar’s owners to now avoid sharing responsibility for this budget overage is deceiving and disgusting.
Paul Foster and Woody Hunt both recently the received Conquistador Award, the City’s highest award. The name of the award is appropriate. They have certainly conquered El Paso’s government.
The Hunt family made a large part of its wealth from federal government contracts. Maybe this is just how things are done at the federal contracting level, which might also partly explain why our federal deficit is so high. Are we headed down the same rabbit hole as our federal government?
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
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Well said.
It would be nice if you could find the time to write articles for us.
Your insight is remarkable.
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And by their own shameless admission, they rammed this through without planning. And yet Susie Byrd has the audacty to go out in public and gloss over this and say it was all part of the plan and it’s not really costing more. Talk about still insisting that the emperor’s ass is bare naked even when we can all see his fat, white, hairy, blubbery mass with a crack in front of us!
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