Municipal Clerk's Office Counting Signatures

Some of the petition gatherers enjoy a light-hearted pose as they wait for the Municipal Clerk's office to time stamp and copy petition pages.

As most of you probably know from El Paso's other media sources, the Municipal Clerk's office accepted both petitions, time stamped each page, made copies for me and presented me with a receipt for each petition. Through the grapevine I have learned that they are going through the tedious process of verifying whether each signature is from a registered City of El Paso voter and may be finished as early as next Thursday or the week after that. The magic number for certification is 1547. Even as I was walking to the Clerk's office on Tuesday after a brief comment to City Council members, two people gave me more petition pages! I had counted over 1800 signatures on both petitions prior to that. They gave me nearly a hundred extra signatures so I know we were close or over 1900 total for both petitions. That's pretty good padding.

A number of citizens stood behind me as I told the Council my intention to submit signatures immediately to the Municipal Clerk. I told Council that, in addition to submitting, I would be making copies for the Federal Highway Administration which is reviewing the TxDOT Environmenal Assessment for the proposed $85 million Transmountain project. A public meeting for that is scheduled on March 22nd and I'll be posting more details about that meeting and where you can begin submitting your comments.

I also invited Council members to call or email me and I would take them on a hike of the land in question. It is not flat as PSB/EPWU President Archuleta has publicly claimed.

The petitions call for preserving land in what has come to be called the Scenic Transmountain Corridor - a mere 742 acres. It represents a compromise from an earlier suggestion to preserve all the land in the Westside Master Plan. It has been a reasonable suggestion all along but has received the greatest amount of resistance from Ed Archuleta, John Cook and others. Hopefully the petitions will give members of City Council yet another chance to do the right thing. Perhaps now they cannot rezone that land as Natural Open Space. However, they can get a conservation easement, they can dedicate it as parkland, or they can deed restrict it - 3 possibilities.

Stay tuned. For all of you who worked so hard to gather petiitions: a HUGE thanks. One thing that became clear: as more and more El Pasoans heard about this effort, more and more wanted to join an effort to save the Scenic Transmountain Corridor. It's too bad that the City Engineers and their consultant prepared a Traffic Impact Analysis of the area in which all the models point to not building Paseo del Norte through the area and yet they claim that they know better. More on that craziness later.