What's Happening in El Paso Texas??? | May 2023

What's Happening in El Paso Texas??? | May 2023

Hi, welcome to Living in El Paso, Texas. My name is John Peña, and in this episode, we're gonna kind of talk about what's going on in El Paso right now, May 2023,

just because there's so much going on, we figured we'd just kind of do a big kind of news recap. But we are real estate agents here in El Paso, Texas. If you are looking to buy or sell a home,

please consider reaching out to us as we do pride ourselves on being the best real estate agents in this city. And with that, let's jump right into it.

So there's a lot of great stuff happening downtown. El Paso is a growing city. We've been putting out videos, we just did one about the downtown and the renovations.

There's a lot of fun stuff happening in El Paso. Number one, La Nube is going to be basically the new children's museum that we're building. Super futuristic, really cool design.

La Nube means the cloud in Spanish, and that's literally what the building is looking like. Now, there was a construction fire there March 13th. The roof did kind of capture fire.

There were no injuries, but that's all kind of being worked out, and that's scheduled to be completed later this year, so that's super exciting.

Number two, the DeSoto Hotel. This is an old, historic hotel that actually has a lot of rumors of paranormal activities, ghosts, things like that.

This building also caught fire early last year, but renovations are underway on that. They've got a renovation budget that increased from 1.2 million to 2.4 after that fire.

The building is 117 years old, was purchased for $700,000 in 2019. That sounds like a great price, quite honestly. The top three floors are gonna be

a 34-room independent boutique hotel, and then they're looking to put a restaurant on the first floor. There is a boxing mural there.

That's gonna be replaced with a new mural because they have to replace bricks and stuff, and so that's a pretty cool one as well. Another downtown development that's happening right now,

construction is underway, is the Crest Building. We actually did a little video on this a year or so ago, but the groundbreaking ceremony was held on April 27th, just recently.

Basically, it's a former department store building. It's being converted to a multi-use building. They're gonna have restaurants, stores, a spa. This is being spearheaded by Paul Foster and his wife,

and we've got some renderings of what it might look like we're gonna show you as well. So, some other news. Now, this has gotten people in El Paso

a little bit worked up. We have a minor league hockey team called the El Paso Rhinos. Also, where their skating rink is located is next to the El Paso Coliseum.

Both of these facilities are actually in danger of being demolished because they're talking about doing a possible expansion of the America's Land Port of Entry at 3600 East Paisano.

This could mean basically demolishing the Coliseum and the adjacent venues, including the skating rink. This proposed expansion would be in 2028 to 2031, and it would also bring kind of more commercial traffic

into that South Central neighborhood. It's a $600 million project that would come from the federal government's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

So, when news first came out about that, I know there was a lot of kind of uproar, and people are not so excited about that. So, hopefully there can be a workaround

because, I mean, the Rhinos are awesome. The Coliseum's cool. We have concerts there and stuff. So, I think it'd be ridiculous

to demolish those, quite honestly. All right, next thing, Castner Range. So, the area just east of the Franklin Mountains, I've showed pictures of it.

There's trails in there, whether you're running, whether you're mountain biking. It was declared a national monument on March 21st. Basically, it protects 7,081 acres

on that eastern slopes of the Franklin Mountains so that there can't be development there. The super interesting thing about that is that it was used by the Army

for weapons training until about 1966. So, there's actually a lot of unexploded munitions and things like that that are still in that area. And so, they're doing a feasibility study right now

about how they're basically going to kind of make that safe for everybody. But it is cool that that land won't be developed on, so that'll remain kind of a natural area for El Paso.

All right, now, this one's a little bit dry, but I think it's super interesting, and I think it says a lot about the quality of our city government here.

El Paso's bond rating just increased to AA+. Basically, a city's bond raising is comparable to your credit score, essentially. The better your score is,

the more money that you can borrow with less interest, better terms you're gonna get on financial items. And so, a strong bond rating for a city helps us basically save a lot of money on interest,

and it reduces our city's debt. It allows the city to pay less in those interest costs, especially on capital projects. What caused the increase?

Quite honestly, it sounds like our city manager, Tommy Gonzalez, who I've talked about before, whose contract was basically terminated. Basically, in 2014, when he took the job as city manager,

the city was facing 21 external audit findings and a nine-day operating balance, okay? That means they had a budget on hand to operate for nine days.

Since then, since Tommy Gonzalez took over as city manager, the city has seen seven years with no audit findings and currently maintains a 91-day operating balance. So, that speaks to the efficiencies

and the frugality of the city government, which, as we all know, is something that we all want. Everybody gets so upset when cities are just throwing money away and making stupid decisions,

and El Paso is not doing that. And one more here, kind of for our vets and our military. There has been, Congress has allocated $759 million for the construction of a new medical center

that's gonna be built on the 36-acres campus of the new 1.5 billion William Beaumont Army Medical Center complex. So, this is an additional facility

that's supposed to be completed late 2029, early 2030. The VA system's patient load is projected to increase 10% over the next five to 10 years. And so, like I said,

all of these things that are happening in El Paso, I think they're awesome, shows that the city is growing, thriving, continues to be proactive

in our financial responsibilities and things like that. So, I hope this was a kind of interesting breakdown of kind of what's going on in El Paso, May 2023, and we'll see you in the next episode.