Let’s dredge up a quote from Saturday’s story in El Paso’s English language daily:
MountainStar said it wants to have more control of the ballpark’s schedule, project plans and the budget. It also is asking the city to integrate the ballpark into the neighborhood and have the city “facilitate circulation in and around the ballpark” and provide money to the ballpark not associated with its construction.
What do you suppose that “integrate the ballpark into the neighborhood and have the city ‘facilitate circulation in and around the ballpark’ . . .” mean? It’s like, let’s raze these apartments and put in a bar mall.
Here’s how I think that mysterious message happened: drunken email.
That’s right. Josh comes home Friday, a little looped, says, fuck it. Imma gonna tell the O what it’s gonna take to hit a home run. And he fires off a perfectly proper email of appropriate depth and gravity, because he was only drinking vodka.
Josh was right. He reads El Chuqueño like everybody else. That ballpark is not going to be a success unless things change. Someone is going to have to develop the adjacent parcels, which are currently occupied by tax-revenue producing units.
Except on that one side. We have that perfectly good, prime real estate, El Paso Convention Center which hasn’t actually hosted a convention since the Wobblies in 1932.
And the O went public with the email. And why not? It’s not like emails are private anymore, not even private emails. Some intrepid member of the fourth estate was going to FOIA it anyway, eventually.
The problem is that Josh approached the problem from a position of entitlement, and he should have been more deferential. He knows it’s going to take more than nickel beer night to launch El Paso into the not-too-distant past. But he assumed the mayor understood the issues affecting the ballpark as well as Josh did, because he assumed the mayor reads El Chuqueño, too.
No such luck, Josh.
Or maybe not. Maybe he meant we could tear down the Convention Center and turn it into revenue producing properties. Tax-revenue producing properties. Liquor licenses.
And maybe that would convert downtown into hipster utopia. But probably not.
Now Mr. Hunt realizes that emails aren’t the preferred form of honest dialogue. Ever.