elpasospeak

 This from Jerry Kurtyka:

Game #4 – Shock and Awe (Disaster Capitalism)

“…a military doctrine based on the use of overwhelming power, dominant battlefield awareness and maneuvers, and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy’s perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight.”

• Wikipedia definition for Shock and Awe.

Sound familiar? On June 26, 2012, CC met to consider resolutions for the demolition of city hall and the construction of a AAA stadium in its place financed by the city through an increase in the hotel occupancy tax (HOT). This was supposedly an example of the “public/private” partnership model mentioned in the Downtown Plan, but one where the public had a supermajority of the cost, debt and risk and the private party, Mountainstar, kept a supermajority of the revenues. For many El Pasoans, this came as a shock – out of the blue, so to speak – a political and financial coup d’etat. But not to everyone.

Cindy Ramirez, reporting in the El Paso Times on July 27, 2012, quoted then city manager Joyce Wilson as saying, “The perception is that there was no transparency, and that is absolutely not true,” said Wilson, who added that the possibility of a baseball team and a new stadium had been discussed for about two years. “I believe it’s the most extensive analysis anyone has ever done on any project in the city.”

Clearly, Wilson’s idea of transparency was that everyone who needed to know about it was in the loop, just not the people who were slated to pay for it! The downtown plan several years before that, at least, had a public comment period before it was adopted. The announcement of June 26^th was followed by a publicity blitz and full-court press from the PDNG on local media to support the AAA stadium and downplay opposition to it.

It was like a runaway train as the spin from city hall, the Times, PDNG and the team owners spilled forth. It affected us personally when I understood that Insights Museum was to be demolished. My wife was Insight’s interim director at the time and had recently turned the museum around financially. A smear campaign against Insights unfolded when vigorous local support for the museum surfaced with resistance to its demolition, not anticipated by PDNG or Wilson. Insights was a Smithsonian-certified museum that cost the city nothing and was the only STEM education facility for children in town with over 33,000 students visiting it annually. The El Paso Explorium (Lynx Exhibits, a kind of Chuck-E-Cheese version of a museum) was floated in the Times as a temporary location for Insights until the promised Children’s museum materialized from the proposed 2013 QoL bond issue. The EP Times building was slated to replace city hall and an “appraisal” was done by Russ Vandenberg setting its value at over $10MM. CC did not propose a lower price or question the appraisal, even though there was virtually no market for downtown properties; it was a done deal. The spin said we had to act quickly or risk losing the team.

Joe Meunch of the Times coined the term, “crazies” to describe those opposed to the deal (of which the Times was the largest single beneficiary), a term later picked up on by the city manager and prominent local blogger, David Karlsruhe. The city’s CFO presented a business case for the stadium showing a cost of $48MM and a breakeven level of operation.

Everyone was on message. It was Shock and Awe El Paso style, all in only a month!

Two town hall meetings were held and I attended one at the West Side Regional Command Center where Rep. Niland, Wilson and deputy city manager, Debbie Hamlin, tried to explain the deal. People were furious and a straw poll of the audience showed 90% opposed to the deal (though I don’t think to AAA or even to a stadium; more to how it was done and the loss of city hall). Someone asked Niland and Wilson if they were members of PDNG, which they initially denied, but Wilson backtracked to say they were “honorary members.” It was clear who was running our city government. Even The Inc., that normally sides with the movers and shakers, covered the town hall meetings in a piece titled, “Stadium Rage,” and printed a guest editorial by former mayor, Larry Francis, who opposed the stadium. The opposition couldn’t be ignored any longer.

Like me, many were left wondering how this could have happened. We voted to hire a city manager to bring El Paso into the 21^st century because back room style cronyism had defined governance here for generations. Now, in the irony of ironies, Joyce Wilson orchestrated the biggest backroom crony deal in the city’s history. It would not surprise anyone today if the city manager form of organization is repealed in a future charter election, a fitting legacy for Wilson. At least when we have a corrupt mayor, we can fire him every four years!

It was all legal. Subsequent open records requests revealed a trail of suck-up to the stadium pimps by Wilson, who appeared to literally represent their interests over the interests of the city. But it was all legal; just not ethical.

In April 2013, I was at a conference in Taos and watched the demolition of city hall on my laptop. I asked myself, how could an elected government decide that the city was so lacking amenities that it was worth it to destroy the trust between government and citizen, trash the careers of otherwise promising young leaders (Steve Ortega), and plunge the city into levels of debt and spending it never had before, and which benefited mostly only a few wealthy investors?

It is called Disaster Capitalism: the opportunism we see after a hurricane or earthquake when favored corporations rush into the catastrophe to rebuild and line their pockets on no-compete contracts. Leaders exploit the crises to push through exploitative policies while citizens are too distracted by the disaster to mount an effective resistance. Only in El Paso, we manufactured the disaster. We are our own Hurricane Sandy! Ask yourself, “Cui Bono?” Who benefits?

The stadium was the start of other big-ticket vanity projects, too. The trolley to nowhere will now be built, a soccer team and new stadium are being floated by Mountainstar, and an $85MM downtown arena is on the drawing board. Who will use it, since El Paso isn’t exactly on the stopover list for Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber? None of these projects have a business plan to pay for them. Watch for another demolition, perhaps of the Haskins Center, Cohen Stadium or the County Coliseum. Disaster capitalism is here to stay unless we take back our city government.

Lessons learned? Where are the adults in our local government? It is as if, someone – not an elected rep, but their sponsor- has the Big Idea. It gets legs, and the next thing you know we are spending mega-bucks on it with no plan to pay for it, other than generalities like, “Trolleys have a 10:1 return via increased property values along their route.“ I mean, the city lost $500K on the stadium in its first season and it was a sell-out almost every game! The city’s theory-of-change is that vanity projects will raise property values and sales taxes that will then pay for their cost. Not! Revenues need to pay for projects, not taxes. This town is already taxed to death and it is the poorest large city in Texas. We can’t run the city this way; we need a new direction.

NEXT – Game’s Over (What Do We Do Now?)