El Paso’s award-winning, 18-hole Butterfield Trail golf course will be closed at the end of May — another economic casualty of the coronavirus epidemic.
The almost 13-year-old golf course is being closed to save the El Paso International Airport, which owns and operates it, $1 million a year.
That’s how much the course was losing — money that came from airport revenues, including land leases for industrial buildings and hotels on airport property.
. . .
Airport and city officials had hoped the golf course would help attract a resort-style hotel to the site and also help entice companies to locate facilities at the airport’s still empty Science and Technology (industrial) Park, next to the golf course.
Margo said the financial crisis that started in 2007 derailed the effort to attract the hotel and other development to the area.
If his mouth is moving, it means he’s lying.
What “derailed the effort to attract the hotel and other development to the area” was that private investors decided that the path to economic development lay through downtown.
Forget Butterfield Trail.
Maybe it was never that good of an idea in the first place. But it was sexy. Phoenix has golf courses. Why can’t El Paso be like Phoenix, with, you know, golf courses?
And professional baseball.
And TopGolf.
And a Great Wolf Lodge.
And a Main Event. Tommy’s pissed off that El Paso doesn’t have a Main Event.
Oh yeah. That’s right. Phoenix is Phoenix, and El Paso is El Paso.
Lubbock is Lubbock.
Maybe the City of El Paso should get out of the golf course business, and focus on paving streets instead. Maybe we should close that Emerald Springs Golf Course, also. I bet Emerald Springs is hemorrhaging money as well. Maybe Don Pablo can buy it.
Imagine: It took a global pandemic and financial crisis to convince the City of El Paso that we didn’t need to spend a million dollars a year to prop up a failing golf course that no one has promoted for ten years.
City Government is not a responsible steward of our tax dollars.
My favorite line herein about Mayor Margo: “If his mouth is moving, it means he’s lying.”
I have lived on or visited all of the inhabited continents, and I have never seen any city so poorly managed. Name another city where ALL economic development is “planned” for Downtown (or just any one part of the city)???? Maybe it’s not too late to focus some development elsewhere….assuming that we abandon the “Arena” that no one voted for, and rethink the “cultural center” before it destroys the main library…oh, no, can’t use the verb “rethink” about city plans, as “think” was not the initial verb…
The last time l checked, 2007 was a million years ago. l can’t decide what’s more pathetic: having this pile of shit Margo as our Mayor, or that l gained 15 lbs. in four weeks.?
(insert sad, fat, puffy-face emoji)
Great comments, and a timely post, Rich. I think it is at least original for Margo to cite a financial crisis from 2007 as having to do with this latest city failure, but if that were even close to a contributing factor, then how does he explain the subsequent (by some five years!) QoL Bond issues that then led to so many other boondoggles? I think it is interesting to note also the comments from ‘Too Old To Move,’ especially when thinking about the push for downtown development. DTEP began to die in the 1970’s and that was the time to push for saving what existed then, rather than coming along all these years later and trying – unsuccessfully – to revive that dead horse, by beating it up some more.