Surprise!
CBS4Local reports that the City is hosting a meeting regarding the arena at 5:30 today in the large conference room at the Museum of Art.
I know it’s short notice, but I guess short notice was the City’s plan.
From CBS4Local:
The city of El Paso is looking to enhance union plaza, which could include a new multi-purpose building.
The city will be hosting a public meeting to discuss findings of the Multi-Purpose Performing Arts and Entertainment Center (MPC).
The meeting will help the community learn about the preliminary findings of the study for the voter-approved MPC.
Consultants will share their key findings and give an overview of where the city is with the ongoing study that kicked off in May of this year.
. . .
There is no modern facility in the region with 8-10,000 seats that can accommodate the shows that travel through the area, according to [the chief architect in the city’s capital improvement department Daniela] Quesada.
Huh, isn’t that funny.
Here’s a quote from a story on LCSun-News:
The El Paso Don Haskins Center, featuring 11,619 permanent seats, 36 wheelchair spaces, 800 portable seats and 7,000 to 9,000 seats with end-stage seating, is another competing venue
Maybe Ms. Quesada is ill- or un-informed. The City of El Paso wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to close that gap between 9,000 seats and 10,000 seats.
The City wants to build that arena real bad and they don’t care how much it costs you.
Another vanity project which we property taxpayers will subsidize for the rest of our lives….: SIGH. I heard Quesada? presentation at the Council work session Monday 9/13 (minute 3.26+) which can be found on YouTube. She praised city outreach, saying it was all positively received. She apparently didn´t remember the uniformly negative reception in early summer at the city´s civic engagement room (another boondoggle? top floor, Blue Flame bldg) with one exception of ~50 in attendance: Adair Margo.
A lot of the same arguments we heard for the ballpark, like needing to bring people Downtown, and all the wonderful attractions that are just passing us by, etc. Said ‘ballpark’ is not living up to all the promises, so why are we supposed to believe all the promises this time just because we paid (wasted?) nearly 3/4 of a million dollars for the consultants and who knows how much more to “sub-consultants” and maybe “sub-sub-consultants? (Vultures and sharks at the “consultants” feeding frenzy! ) The “irrefutable facts” claim begs to be refuted! Maybe she should’ve said, “This is God speaking, so don’t even try to question me.” So what is so “magical” about the 8000-10000 capacity? If we have venues under, let’s fill them up; if we have venues over, there’s plenty of room for those 8000+. What’s wrong with having a few empty seats? Depending on the attraction, people will come in hoards or not. It’s not the venue’s fault if they don’t fill all the seats or if they fill up the place. I agree with Max that all the honest, objective facts about displacement, crooked real estate deals, ignoring El Paso’s true history were left out of the presentation. Just another dog and pony show, if you ask me.