It seems that Las Palmas hospital and the residents of the Rim road area have come to a settlement.
The city issued building permits that allowed Las Palmas to build a $67 million dollar facility.
After the facility was built the city refused to issue certificates of occupancy because of a parking capacity problem.
The permits should not have been issued but they were.
Many prominent residents of the Rim road area objected to allowing the building to be opened without additional parking being provided.
The hospital was stuck with a brand new expensive building that it could not open.
The paragraph below comes from a document proposing a settlement between the hospital and the neighborhood association.
Word on the street is that Las Palmas had to cough up some part of the $653,500 in order to get the residents to drop their objections.
At that point parking capacity was evidently no longer a problem.
The issue sailed through city council without mention of the financial settlement. If granting a parking variance made sense it should have been granted without city council helping the neighborhood association to extract the extra money.
The way I see it city council helped the neighborhood to extort the money from Las Palmas. Shame on them.
Word will get around. Companies thinking about coming to El Paso will wonder what the city will do to them.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Wow. You concluded your post by saying, “Companies thinking about coming to El Paso will wonder what the city will do to them.” Ya think?!
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What does the Rim Rd neighborhood association due with its money? These are pretty nice homes.
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Take a look at what that $653,500 is buying for the neighborhood assn…14 bulb-outs (?), 3 monument signs and 3 park benches. It sounds to me like that figure is super-inflated.
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Maybe someone in the neighborhood association owns the construction company that is installing these few items? I hope the money makes them happy – even when their streets are filled with cars full of sick people looking for free parking.
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https://www.independent.com/news/2010/mar/18/battle-bulb-outs/
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Great Wolf doesn’t have to worry.
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The rest of El Paso will pay for the Rim Road neighborhood improvements through higher fees at Las Palmas. These improvements do nothing to alleviate the originally stated parking issues, so the Rim Road residents are being intellectually dishonest and greedy. It’s extortion to benefit a few wealthy homeowners.
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Not true. Las Palmas can charge whatever they want, but unless you are “self-pay”, hospitals get what the insurance companies say they get. Medicare has their fee schedule and so do all of the other commercial insurance companies. Hospitals have agreements with each “payer” where they both agree what they will accept. Some payers are bullies and don’t pay even what it costs to provide care, but the volume of covered lives makes it near impossible for hospitals and other providers to refuse. It has become an industry where the cost of doing business continues to rise, but reimbursements continue to decline.
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And those self-pay patients get overcharged to make up for the providers feeling short-changed by insurance companies.
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