Big Ideas from the Borderplex Alliance, Bless Their Hearts

I’ve been reading the Borderplex Alliance’s Regional Strategic Plan 2015-2020, which you can download here, if you’re feeling a little too optimistic about El Paso’s future.

It’s full of Big Ideas. Not new ideas, just big ideas that are cumbersome to implement and likely to fail. An Old West theme park? It was a bad idea when City Representative John Cook came up with it, back when he was a City Rep, and it’s a bad idea now. Oh, it might work, if it were sufficiently financed and masterfully executed. It might work, like it’s got a chance in ten million. I don’t see any private money stepping up to pull it off.

Maybe we could buy our old Wild West theme park back from the guy who bought it when it went broke. He moved it out to Cornudas. It went broke out there, too.

Oh, and let’s change the name of the airport. That should work. The report suggests we change it to El Paso/Las Cruces International Airport, but we might have better luck if we took a different tack. We should call it the Las Vegas International Airport, or Shangri La, or Free Beer. That way we might get some traffic by accident.

The consultants also came up with the clever idea that the region needs a group to do the same thing the people who paid for the study are already doing: regional economic development. That’s a surprise. Since the plan runs through 2020, I guess those people are guaranteed paychecks for the next five years (and wasn’t that the report’s real purpose?). Remember that the Borderplex Alliance took over the job that was previously being performed by the Regional Economic Development Corporation (REDCo). Wasn’t their strategy regional economic development, too?

If I were the people who are paying for the Borderplex Alliance, I’d be pissed. After a little more than two years, all the Borderplex comes up with is a lackluster report that’s long on jargon and short on substance. The road to sustained development is long, but the Borderplex is taking us down the same road we’ve already been down. That road is well-traveled but it doesn’t go anywhere.

But that’s okay, because the Alliance has the solution: Committees. Now all we need are committees, because every good idea ever thought up has come from: Committees. And when you’re out of your element, grasping at straws, committees make it look like you’re doing something, and they can cushion the fall.

Committees. Now there’s a Big Idea.