Context is important in order to understand the underlining causes for the problems the city faces.
Let me remind you about the late 90’s and early 2000 when three politicians came on the scene and proclaimed a renaissance for the city. The three amigos, as they came to be known, argued that they could arrest the “brain drain” and put El Paso back on the road to prosperity. All you had to do is trust in them to implement an aggressive public policy agenda that only they had the vision to understand.
The three amigos: Ray Caballero, Eliot Shapleigh and Jose Rodriguez drafted Susie Byrd, Veronica Escobar and Beto O’Rourke among others and launched the current public policy agenda that has led us to where we are today.
The public policy agenda they implemented centered on the notion that to arrest the exodus of El Paso residents, the community needed “to invest in itself.” They launched an agenda that called for eradicating the culture of the city and remaking it into a new Santa Fe, Portland or whatever the favored city of the day was.
They argued that what the city needed was a grand central park and an economic renaissance centered on the medical fields. The central park fizzled out but it nonetheless drove the notion of downtown redevelopment that resulted in the ballpark fiasco. On the economic front, the medically based economy initiative drove forth the Medical Center of the Americas, the El Paso Children’s Hospital and the transformation of the local community-based hospital district into the University Medical Center (UMC).
All of them were taxpayer funded. Each of them a critical component to the public policy agenda that was trying to stop the departure of the El Paso residents. The citizens that are unable to continue to live in their city because they are being taxed out of the city while job opportunities continue to fizzle away.
You all know the financial state of the University Medical Center (UMC) and you all know about the disaster of the El Paso Children’s Hospital therefore I won’t bother adding salt to your wounds. What about the Medical Center of the Americas? It is nothing more than an empty pretty building that has diverted much-needed funds but has not produced a single verifiable job for a taxpayer that is not well connected to someone driving the public policy agenda.
In other words, fifteen years after the three amigos launched their much-touted solution to the city’s “brain drain” the city’s taxpayers find themselves in a worse predicament then they were when the three amigos promised to save the city from itself.
Throughout all of this push of the agenda, Bob Moore pushed forth the “vision” of the three amigos by selectively allowing certain newspaper articles to be published while not allowing reporters to report on items that detracted from the carefully crafted public relations façade. The three amigos could not allow debate on the merits of the agenda and therefore Bob Moore and the three amigos silenced dissention through attacking, intimidating and ostracizing those that dare to criticize the agenda.
As you can tell from the comments from the “business” [I purposely used parenthesis] community and the absence of commentary from the politicians about the reality that taxpayers would rather pack their bags and families up an go into the unknown than to continue to live in the city where they were born.
That is the sad fact that the “progressives” hope you do not realize. That is the fact that that the “business” community ignores because they are feeding at the trough of the public’s monies. Look closely at who was interviewed by the news media and what their comments are and you will notice a simple connection between them all. They live off your tax dollars and therefore rather than confront the reality they find excuses for the exodus.
The same excuses they used fifteen years ago.
They continue to live in the fantasy that the solution to the exodus is to “invest” in the community. Only that the “investment” is your money that they cash each payday at the bank.