Now that the dust has settled and we have a new mayor and city council, I want to bring up the subject of the children’s museum.
We had the Insights Museum and it got torn down as part of the ball park project. So be it.
We passed a quality of life bond issue with $19.25 million in it for a new children’s museum.
The city’s three year roll out plan for managing the bond spending does not include even preliminary action related to building a children’s museum.
We should each contact the mayor and our representatives. Building the museum is not a matter of raising more money. It is a matter of priorities for the city staff.
We need to ask that the children’s museum be given a higher priority so that it can be built soon.
Eternal vigilance is the cost of liberty.
Cato
elpasospeak 
The destruction of the Insights without a firm commitment and plan for a new children’s museum is truly a story about misplaced priorities. This is a part of the city hall demolition and ballpark story that never received city council meeting discussion or the media coverage that it deserved. Everyone was so focused on city hall that they overlooked this loss, which is more than purely a financial loss. It is also about more than brick and mortar.
The obvious lack of concern about the loss of Insights shows a disconnect between what we, as a community, say and what we do. We continually talk about the importance of education and quality of life and about stopping brain drain, yet we give another sports venue higher priority over a science and technology museum which was intended to uplift and inspire our youth (and their parents).
It now seems that perhaps a new children’s museum was added to the quality of life bond project list simply to placate anyone who might have been concerned about the loss of Insights. It was part of a apparent strategy to cover all the bases and include something for everyone who had an objection to the ballpark.
The bottom line is that too many believe that downtown real estate profits come first. Children don’t even come in second; unless, that is, you believe that filling children’s stomachs with hot dogs, peanuts and cracker jacks and entertaining them with silly team mascots is more important than filling their minds with knowledge and fueling their imaginations with ideas.
What kind of signal does this send to companies and families who are considering whether to relocate to El Paso?
We’ve taken our eye off the real prize — the future of our children.
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It is all okay..those kids can grow up to sell peanuts at the ballpark. They don’t need no stinking science…
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Over 30,000 school kids annually visited Insights and took part in their summer science program. The astronaut and local boy made good, Danny Olivas, credits Insights for his start in a science career. Insights was a private 501c (3) entity that cost the city nothing except its facility.
The city manager waged a war on Insights because the Mountainstar Mob that she represented underestimated its popularity and the community resistance to sacrificing it for AAA. So PDNG went into action and the corporate mindf*ck from City Hall and MS kicked into high gear.
First, the Mob and its CC reps, mainly Niland in whose district Insights existed, put out the story that Insights will be replaced by a children’s museum, except there was no business plan for a childrens museum other than one PowerPoint slide in the QoL deck. So the proposed museum could be anything you said it was and that is what it became – anything that could offset the community’s disgust that Insights was to be demolished for AAA baseball.
Next, the EP Times presstitutes got on the bandwagon and promoted that idea that Insights could relocate to the Lynx facility that the Churchman/Paternoster iparty wanted to sell. Well, Insights was a Smithsonian-certified museum and Lynx is a kind of Chuck-E-Cheese version of science in a facility that would need several million of work to house Insights, but Paternoster had enough pull with the Times to get the story circulated several times along with the kool-aid about the new children’s museum being the replacement for Insights and much more. The Times even printed the story before anyone at Lynx or PDNG had vetted the idea with the Insights board of directors. That’s how orchestrated it was.
Niland actually is on the record at a CC budget hearing saying that her idea of the children’s museum was a place where she could drop off her kids in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon. Lucky kids:)
Then PDNG even recruited a science museum director from Missouri and brought her down as a “consultant” to look at Insights, which had been brought back to financial breakeven and even had several successful fundraisers including its last one at which guest-of-honor Olivas was the speaker for the NASA exhibit and Joyce Wilson sat at his table. Never say that the gods do not have a sense of irony.
The bottom line is that the Wilson, the Mob and CC wanted city hall demolished, a stadium built, and some millions of dollars spread around to friendly parties who had downtown buildings to sell to the city at list price and Insights was in the way of that plan. So, the arguably dumbest city in the US bulldozed its only STEM facility for a baseball stadium.
And they wonder why business won’t locate here. Would you?
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Well said. I have nothing to add.
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Well stated ‘Children Before Profits’…
Badco
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Many teachers, parents, and school children helped to pay for this museum and worked to staff it when paid personnel could not meet that demand. This is how they are honored by El Paso. All of us who have struggled to find fun and educational things to do with our children know where our children stand in this community.
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