Starting with an acknowledgement , I want to say to my good friend who has been telling me that the owners of the baseball franchise were tied to the ballpark construction scheme — you were right, I was wrong.
Word on the street is that the refiner bought out the construction guy. The press release announced a new company, a combination of some of their interests. The timing of this is horrible.
Conflict
The agreement between the city and the team owners gave the team owners input into the selection of the construction company. I wrote in Efficient, hardworking staff how remarkable it was that city staff was able to rate four different offers to build a multi-million dollar stadium and decide who should get the business in only one day.
Now it appears that one of the team owners is either buying the construction company or participating in some sort of merger.
This looks bad.
Circumstances
The former vice president of the construction company has had his guilty plea vacated and is currently out of federal prison preparing for new trials. The case he plead guilty to involved alleged bribes to a former county commissioner in order to get work for the construction company. Some still wonder how the vice president could have acted alone.
The head of the construction company has had his house for sale but has evidently decided to give it to UTEP. Word on the street is that he has moved out of town, actually out of the country. I have not seen confirmation of this so it may not be true.
Rumor, strictly rumor, has it that the city has not been forthcoming with either the owners of the team or the construction company relative to the costs to build the stadium. It may be that the city knew early on that the ballpark could not be built for 50 million dollars.
The press release claims that the old construction company will maintain responsibility for projects started before August 8, 2013. That would include the ballpark. People who have run businesses know that their operations depend in large part upon a continuous flow of business. Severing the new income while winding down old projects is very hard to do. I doubt that it can be done here. Maybe the deal includes a bailout for the old firm.
Financing for the project is still an issue. We know that the city has had difficulty selling the bonds. In fact, I have not been able to find them for sale anywhere. The public does not know how much money has been raised at this point.
The city manager said in public that she would have to stop construction of the ballpark if the bonds were not sold. How the current construction is being paid for is not known by the public The ballot issue limited funding sources to the increase in the hotel occupancy tax and funds generated through the operation of the stadium. There is not enough money from these two sources to fund the construction.
Is it possible?
Risking hearing a round of clucking from my friend I wonder if the refiner is bailing out the construction company. Is the contractor getting paid by the city? Has this turned out to be a bad deal for the contractor? Is it possible that the refiner has done this to bail out the contractor and the city?
New dimensions
While we will have to wait to learn the real facts, one thing that is not so obvious comes to mind. Now that one of the owners of the team now owns the successor to the construction company, any claim the team owners have against the city relative to the ballpark (lateness, cost, completeness …) will be much harder for the team owners to pursue.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Is there no honor among thieves anymore? It’s hard to believe that the city would have known more about the true cost to build the ballpark than would the construction company, but if they have misled the construction company and Mountainstar (who, as I recall, hired their own construction consultants when estimates were being developed), this looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen. We could have a scenario in which both the construction company and Mountainstar sue the city. Mountainstar could even sue to invalidate or renegotiate the terms of the lease agreement. Maybe city management should rethink that proposed decrease in the proposed budget for the city attorney department. One thing we know for certain, however, is that if this deal goes sideways (more than it already has), the only people who will truly be hurt are the taxpayers.
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It is a daisy-chain of greed and lies that keeps getting longer as more if this comes out. The end game will be that more and more of the tax base ends up in the Investors’ pockets paid for by the taxpayer.
This is El Paso’s economic development strategy for the future: Trickle-up Economics. You take from the many and give to the Few in return for hot dog jobs and 70 nights of AAA entertainment.
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Don’t forget that Mountainstar has exclusive rights to the ballpark 365 days/nights per year. You can be assured that they will schedule a number of other concerts and events, most likely through a separate entity which Mountainstar’s owners will likely set up. This will result in a substantial amount of non-baseball revenue and profit for Mountainstar, all for a mere $400,000 per year in rent which will easily be recouped from the stadium naming rights and a couple of nights of ticket sales.Mountainstar’s concerts and events at the ballpark are going to also negatively impact UTEP’s revenues from concert and event revenues..
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How about we get a petition drive going that orders CC to repudiate the stadium bonds? They will ignore it like they have the others but the drive itself will frighten bond buyers enough to scuttle the issue.
Muni investors have enough uncertainty to deal with without lending money to a criminal city that does not have the backing of its very angry voters. FUD will kill the deal, then we can name the empty pit “Wilson’s Hole” and get on with life.
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