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| El Paso-owned and proud |
Apr. 30 - May. 6
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Flash: Those who engineered and are orchestrating the Downtown Development Plan are scheming to take over the Insights Museum and profit handsomely by building a high-rise hotel on top.
Flash: The Korean community Downtown has been paid off to go along with the plan, which is why they haven’t joined the objectors.
Flash: The plan was devised in secret so special interest groups could work behind the scenes to position themselves for windfall real-estate deals.
Flash: None of the Downtown retailers will ever go along with the plan because most of their sales are on a cash basis, unreported, untaxed and therefore their businesses can’t be fairly evaluated
Flash: The greedy people who are proposing using a real estate investment trust as the mechanism to capitalize the plan stand to make millions when it happens.
Flash: The plan is just class warfare, with rich people devising a new way to strip land from the poor and downtrodden.
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It is disheartening to watch as these and other rumors fly about the streets of El Paso following the March 31 rollout of the Downtown Plan. Worse, some people apparently believe this crap.
The fact is that some of the smartest volunteers ever assembled in El Paso have worked hard to come up with a comprehensive plan to improve our city in a way that will accommodate all of those affected in the best possible way.
Some have reacted in such a vicious and mean-spirited way, they have reduced to tears some of the volunteers trying to address their concerns.
Here’s the real deal: The plan was devised by a national firm. It was done quietly to avoid land speculation. No one who owns property in the affected areas was permitted to participate.
The plan is not perfect and much more work must be done. It is now time to sit down with individual property and business owners, listen to their concerns and figure out the best way to accommodate them. And volunteers are now trying to make that happen.
The city is now involved and seven task forces have been formed to figure out how the plan can be implemented and how individual interests can be accommodated.
Still, that hasn’t stopped the ugly, vindictive and personally directed attacks that are now taking place.
Proponents of the plan have been mostly quiet – so far.
But what absolutely cannot be allowed to happen is that a few loudmouths convince our city reps the whole idea is a bad one, and that it should not be incorporated into the city’s master plan.
I’m hopeful that our current council is a whole lot smarter than that.
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