After my October 21st e-letter, I received more positive responses than I have ever before. “That’s awesome!” “Your newsletters on this issue are brilliant.” “You rock.” “Here! Here! Great work!” These were just a few of the very positive and encouraging messages that I got. I did get one negative response however:
“Jim:
Thanks for including me on your e-mail so I can follow how you continue to insult me and other members of the Public Service Board.
So now you've become an expert on land valuations too? Figures don't lie, Jim, but in your case liars figure.
Warmest regards,
John F. Cook
Mayor of El Paso, Texas
To say that message is beneath the office and dignity of the Mayor of the great City of El Paso just about goes without saying. Warmest regards?
Elpasonaturally has learned that Mayor John Cook has changed his position on the rezoning of land along Trans Mountain. As a member of the Public Service Board, he voted with the PSB resolution not to rezone land in the Northwest Master Plan to natural open space – a resolution which urges him to veto any attempt at rezoning by Council. The resolution was adopted at last Friday’s PSB strategic planning meeting. The vote for the resolution opposing re-zoning was 6-1. Only Dr. Richard Bonart opposed it.
I suggest that all of you email John Cook and let him know how you feel.
You can try emailing him at mayor@elpasotexas.gov but that probably goes to an assistant and not directly to him and probably never will. Instead email him at johnfcook@sbcglobal.net – the email address from which he wrote me his “dignified” message. Better yet, email one address and copy the other.
Remember that the City Plan Commission will take up the proposal at its November 4th meeting at 1:30 p.m. Please send your comments now to Maria Acosta -AcostaMD@elpasotexas.gov. If you can, please plan to go to the meeting. Meeting information is here. You can sign up to speak.
If you haven’t, please also sign the petition and gather more signatures. Go to www.franklinmountains.org to download the hard copy of the petition or ask others to sign online at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/save-el-pasos-franklin-mountains/. There are now 1,025 online responses – and many more hard copy signatures!
Let’s just take a moment to go over what we can expect the “other side” to say about us and what their arguments are:
I had not expected the ad hominem attack of being called a “liar”. Some have however questioned my estimate of the land value and suggested that my estimate was too low. Their statements are certainly reasonable. Even if comparables on the land in question are higher, run the numbers and you still get very little back in the way of public benefit or monetarily as a private rate payer. In fact, it is what you pay as a rate payer month after month that really finances the operations of the El Paso Water Utility. Also, paying down the bond debt can never be done simply by selling land over a period of time. Simply put, bond ratings are not affected by zoning.
But, let’s say that, in the case of the Trans Mountain land in question in the Northwest Master Plan, the rate payer does get something financially significant in return. Two things: First, the City has to increase services to this area and that’s additional tax dollars to support that portion of development that can even run in the red (as seen recently) not to mention all of the additional costs to you as an EPWU rate payer to maintain the infrastructure in the area! Preserving beautiful open space is always much cheaper than developing and accruing ongoing responsibilities for services (you know – fire, police, streets, parks, schools, etc. – all the things you pay for with your tax dollars.)
More to the point is what one of you said in an email to me: any of us would pay much more to preserve this beautiful natural space. Cost of a new water tank and lift station: $6 million. Cost of services: millions of dollars more. Cost of preserving the beautiful Trans Mountain scenic corridor: Priceless.
My comparables may have been low. (Or maybe not. The real value of the land – and we are dealing with averages among commercial and residential properties – is what someone is willing to pay on the day you need to sell.) The beauty of the land along Trans Mountain in the Northwest Master Plan is incomparable!
The PSB will say that the Master Plan preserves arroyos and open space, etc. If that’s a value, then let’s preserve it all. What we get back for sales just doesn’t justify developing any of it. Besides, we have all seen how arroyos get preserved – in concrete! Over a year ago I participated in a cactus rescue for land above Redd Road. We were told not to harvest cacti in one area because the developer was going to keep that natural. What really happened? It all got bulldozed away.
Besides, the Northwest Master Plan wasn’t really derived from a consensus of stakeholders; and, even if it had been, that consensus is now gone and new ways of doing development and preserving natural open space really cry out for revising any plan. That the PSB paid $700,000 for the plan is no reason to pursue a bad plan. (Note that, if all the land is rezoned as Natural Open Space, there will be no need to do another master plan.)
Byrd’s proposal of preserving just 900 acres of the NW Master Plan as NOS is a good compromise. Unfortunately, the PSB is intransigent about giving up one single acre. They want the power to tell us how our land is used – and that power they now cling to.
Expect the PSB to marginalize you and me as misfits and “tree huggers” – not a mainstream of regular folk. I know many of those who have signed the petition and some of those who are on my email lists. Demographics come from all areas of the City, all professions and all political persuasions. Copies of emails written by many of you were included in yesterday’s packet of materials for the regular Open Space Advisory Board meeting. There were emails from PhD’s, business owners, home owners, business administrators, educators, architects, professors, etc. This is hardly a group of misfits.
Expect them to say that they are the only experts and should alone be trusted. What is the adage? Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
A few more of their arguments:
1. It’s unnecessary to rezone any of the land as NOS as their plan preserves open space (as concrete).
2. There will be a $20,000,000 revenue loss (about $1/month/ratepayer over 10 years not accounting for additional costs of infrastructure, maintenance, other taxable services to the tax payer – and this assumes only today’s number of rate payers of 177,000.)
3. Development will go to NM and we will lose $12,000,000/year in taxable revenue (but won’t accrue the higher service costs – besides didn’t NM already preserve all that land north as open space? Also, so what? Where is it written that we must always expand to get more revenue to pay for more services? There are plenty of people who live in New Mexico and work in El Paso. We benefit as they pay sales tax and we don’t pay for additional services.)
4. There will not be water and sewer service for adjacent lands. (Sure there can be – easements for added water tanks and pumping stations can always be worked out without building office buildings, houses, big box stores and more.)
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