Card Tricks: How El Paso’s 2012 “Quality of Life” Bond Election Got Riddled With Flimflam
I’m publishing here, for the first time, a long, investigative piece about an arena scandal in El Paso that I did in 2012 for Newspaper Tree . The piece was never published because Newspaper Tree turned into a money-wasting boondoggle, then collapsed, due to the El Paso Community Foundation’s unwillingness to buck the IRS, as many other non-profit papers were doing when the IRS dragged its heels eight years ago in giving out non-profit status to emerging, online community papers.
This piece is now an artifact of history but, sadly, it’s still timely.
O n a chilly evening back in January of this year [2012], some two dozen El Pasoans gathered at the EPPD Northeast Regional Command headquarters to listen to Leila Melendez, city manager Joyce Wilson’s young executive assistant. Melendez was there to present a Power Point about the upcoming Quality of Life Bond Issue. Its title: “El Paso Tomorrow: A City on the Move.”
As the audience peered at a screen, a slide flashed on, announcing that El Pasoans would soon have a chance to create “new opportunities for bold economic development and quality of life initiatives.” Those opportunities would come in the upcoming November bond election. One of the biggest initiatives, the slide continued, would be “signature projects that would create a more dynamic downtown.”
The PowerPoint was shown not just in the Northeast that winter, but at town-hall- style meetings though out the city. By February, fifty-one such meetings had been held. Attendees were invited to fill out long, white cards. The cards had space to tell city officials what kinds of quality-of-life projects citizens wanted — including downtown.
“What would these projects be?” Melendez asked her listeners at the Northeast meeting. She answered her question: “I don’t know.” She went on to say that the city was “really hungry for information” from the public. She told attendees that the suggestions they wrote on the cards would be tabulated. Then the city would use the tabulation to decide what projects to put on the November ballot. “We want to hear from you,” Melendez concluded.
And she did hear. One man, wearing a leather biker jacket and a grey, Fu Manchu beard, talked about his neighborhood. It had a mountain, but his dogs couldn’t legally walk on it — he wanted a dog path or dog park. Another man hoped the arroyos in his area could be outfitted with artificial waterfalls. Someone else asked for an aquarium. Yet another suggested a mariachi and country & western music hall of fame, complete with wax museum.
But not one person spoke up for a major-league soccer arena or an AAA baseball stadium. Instead, some were frankly hostile to those ideas.
A Mexican-American man in his 40s suggested that the push to build professional sports facilities downtown was an effort by “private interests to hold us hostage as a city.” An Anglo in a polo shirt added his two cents: “Why is the focus on signature projects downtown? Downtown is no longer the center of El Paso.”
The Fu Manchu man echoed the polo shirt. “To hell with downtown!” he yelled.
“OK,” Melendez responded in a flat, clipped voice. “OK. OK.”
A DVD of this event, with all its naysaying about downtown development, was given by the City to Newspaper Tree when we requested audiovisual records of the fifty- one community gatherings. It was the only tape provided, and if it’s any indication, El Pasoans who attended the city’s Quality of Life community meetings were not enthusiastic about funding major-league soccer or Triple-A baseball. Rather, many seemed indifferent, if not hostile.
Yet, at an April City Council meeting at which the November Quality of Life ballot was rehearsed, City Manager Joyce Wilson presented a list, prepared by professional stadium promoter Rick Horrow. Its heading was “What El Pasoans Told Us They Want and Need.” The list which followed included a $150-to-$180 million downtown arena, a $45-to-$55 million downtown Triple-A baseball stadium, and a $100- to-$200 million downtown Major League Soccer stadium.
The city has advanced various rationales for proposing expensive stadium and arena projects.
One is that the Paso Del Norte Group (PDNG) has for long wanted to build a downtown arena and fund it with public and private money. In fall 2011, the PDNG hired Rick Horrow, a nationally known sports stadium and arena fixer, to develop a plan to win the 2012 El Paso bond election. PDNG member Tripper Goodman, who’s also a member of the Downtown Management District, then chose willing government officials and businesspeople to form the private, PDNG-heavy group El Paso Tomorrow. That group’s purpose has since been to oversee Horrow’s proposals and promote them to the city. Working mainly with City Manager Wilson, who is also a PDNG member, Goodman’s group has created a buzz about the community supposedly wanting stadiums and arenas downtown.
The buzz was amplified in April, when El Paso Tomorrow went before City Council and presented a study that it had funded privately. Designed by Rick Horrow and carried out by a local polling firm, the Reuel Group, the study’s “Executive Summary” touted the fact that 75% of El Pasoans interviewed said that they wanted to “invest in El Paso’s future,” and 90% averred that “we need to improve our Quality of Life.” Not only that, 74% supported building a sports and entertainment facility downtown, and 67% said they’d like to see a soccer stadium.
But several little known factoids suggest that stadiums and arenas might be a harder sell in El Paso than promoters and politicians will admit.
Take the Reuel Study. Though respondents sounded enthusiastic when asked directly about supporting taxpayer funded professional sports facilities, they also exhibited strong signs of hostility toward the city government — the entity charged with creating projects such as stadiums and arenas.
The Reuel Study has another section besides the much-touted Executive Summary. It is called the Full Report, and it has not been distributed to the public — Newspaper Tree was told in April that the City did not even have a copy. Newspaper Tree nevertheless obtained one.
In the quasi-secret Full Report, we found large numbers of respondents complaining about corruption among city leaders, including Mayor Cook. City Council doesn’t listen to the people, one person noted. Another cited the city government’s “lack of credibility.” In all, less than half of the 502 of the El Pasoans interviewed approved, even slightly, of the City Council’s work. Such response does not bode well for easy public acceptance of pricey stadium projects.
But what about the information compiled from all those cards that people submitted after attending meetings like the one at the Northeast police station? According to that data, more than ten percent of the almost 5000 people who submitted suggestions said they wanted an arena or a stadium downtown.
But a Newspaper Tree investigation has revealed that the pro-stadium and arena data is largely bogus. We also learned that city officials knew the data was suspect weeks before it was released to the public. Yet, rather than trash the comment project or at least acknowledge its defects, the city promoted it as though it legitimately reflected community support for professional sports facilities downtown.
It wasn’t hard for Newspaper Tree to figure out that the data was fraudulent. When the city presented it to Council on April 18, the figures seemed too pro-stadium and pro-arena to be credible. That impression was reinforced when we attended a Quality of Life town hall meeting three weeks later, held by Rep. Ortega in his district. There, we heard some pro-stadium sentiment, but much more in opposition (“Why can’t Woody Hunt and Paul Foster pay for it?” was a typical comment).
Exploring further, we obtained the 602-page community-response data book from Ortega. He fished it out of his trashcan at City Hall and handed it over. He said he hadn’t looked at the book and was about to throw it away.
The book is an Excel spreadsheet printout. Its hundreds of pages list the names, addresses, and often phone numbers and emails of 4898 people who supposedly expressed their opinions about what kinds of Quality of Life projects they wanted to fund with taxpayer money.
According to the printout, they favor all kinds of projects: everything from a tournament-quality swimming pool to trolley cars running from Downtown to UTEP. Some even asked for a giant park in the middle of town, similar to Central Park in New York City.
In addition, hundreds of responses favor building a stadium or arena downtown.
But over 500 of those favorable comments look fishy, especially when compared to cards favoring projects that are not stadiums or arenas.
The comments having nothing to do with stadiums or arenas appear to be written by thousands of individuals. When they talk about improving parks, building swimming pools, or beefing up museums, their language varies from comment to comment. In addition, many respondents, even people with addresses in poor neighborhoods, include an email address along with a phone number.
Not so with hundreds of the downtown-stadium responses. Over 500 spew a long stream of verbiage: “soccer stadium/arena/for major league soccer/pro team/downtown/ASARCO/Eastside/Soccer stadium/arena” — over and over and over, with no variation at all. Of these hundreds of suspicious-looking responses, virtually none list an email address.
Newspaper Tree filed an Open Records Request to view the original long, white comment cards. Reading them, we saw that most which favored downtown stadiums and arenas displayed the numbing sameness of language that we’d seen in the data book. In addition, we discovered something disturbing about the handwriting on all those 500+ cards.
It appeared to belong to only two people.
To further investigate, Newspaper Tree picked a random sample of twenty-six comment cards. We then made phone calls and home visits to the individuals who’d supposedly sent these to the city.
Here is what we found:
� People who did not recall filling out a card or ever having gone to a community meeting or expressing any opinion whatsoever about stadiums or arenas.
Take a woman the survey database and the cards call Leonor Perez, and her daughter, Alicia Cabral, of Central El Paso.
“I don’t remember ever saying anything to anyone about stadiums,” Cabral told Newspaper Tree in Spanish.
Cabral’s mother, also speaking Spanish, said her first name is Leonor. But her last name hasn’t been Perez for the past five years, she said, ever since she changed it to Hernandez. Leonor Hernandez said there is no way she would have signed a comment card with “Leonor Perez” during the time the city was collecting the cards.
Besides, Hernandez said, she “couldn’t have possibly expressed an opinion” about stadiums. “During the time you say the comments were made, my mother was dying and I was in the hospital with her every day and night. I had no time to do anything but be with her. I certainly didn’t go to meetings or talk to anyone about things like arenas and stadiums.
“Also,” Hernandez added, “I’m against building stadiums.”
• Non-residents of the city of El Paso. One man said he never went to any meetings or took any survey on the web. He does remember getting a call asking if he was in favor of having an arena. He answered that he thought it was a good idea. But the man lives in Horizon City. That’s outside the El Paso city limits, and residents from that area are not eligible to vote in the November bond election. Their opinions should not count in a city survey. Yet scores of comment cards list people with addresses in Horizon City.
• Children. East sider Raquel Cantu has no memory of ever commenting on stadiums, yet her name appears on a card. She is a freshman at Montwood High School and only 15 years old. Anthony Mendez’ name also appears on a card. He is four years old.
• Corpses. Ninety-year-old Maria Sanchez, of East El Paso, spoke virtually no English, her son Hector Ureño told Newspaper Tree, and she had no involvement with politics. She was bedridden during the last year of her life, spoke to no one except family, and died in early October 2011. That was a month before the city began collecting people’s opinions. No matter that Sanchez was dead by then — her name appears on a card that says she wants a downtown arena.
Who perpetrated this fraud? We believe two people are responsible. Here is how we determined who they are.
In June, Newspaper Tree notified the City Attorney’s office about the bogus cards. That office informed City Manager Wilson. An inquiry determined that the fraudulent cards had been submitted to the City’s Community Development Office — who was responsible for collecting them — by District 5 Rep. Emma Acosta. Acosta told Newspaper Tree she had no idea the cards were fake. She said she accepted them without looking at them, when they were turned into her office by a man who lives in her district. He is Mitch Doblado. Doblado is general manager of the El Paso Patriots soccer team.
According to the team’s website, the Patriots play in the “USL Premier Development League (PDL), the fourth tier of the American Soccer Pyramid, in the Mid South Division of the Southern Conference.” They play home games at a small stadium in a warehouse district on Industrial Avenue, just south of I-10 near Cielo Vista Mall. But Doblado and others associated with the team seem to have bigger plans. According to the website of the El Paso Sports Commission, the Patriots’ “long-term goal is to be an expansion MLS” — a Major League Soccer — “City, thus becoming the first Major League Professional Sports team ever in El Paso.”
Newspaper Tree called and emailed Doblado; we also went to his residence and left messages with his family, and notes on his door, requesting an interview. He did not respond.
In addition to Doblado, it appears that Gil Cantu, a former vice president of the now defunct Indios of Juarez soccer team, was involved in the card scam. Cantu lives on the East Side of El Paso, and when Newspaper Tree interviewed people in its random sample of card commenters, some said that they’d been contacted by him. Some described getting calls from Cantu; others ran into him at a church they attend, where Cantu is a member. These people said that Cantu asked if they favored building a stadium in El Paso. The cards that resulted all have the same handwriting.
But that handwriting also appears on cards for people who said they’d never been contacted by anyone.
Newspaper Tree went through the same procedure with Cantu as with Doblado — we emailed, phoned, and rang his doorbell, trying to get an interview. He did not respond.
It’s thus impossible to know for sure the motive for creating the bogus cards. As well, it’s unclear why the fraudulent data wasn’t quickly noticed, or challenged, by the city.
The office which should have paid attention was the Community Development Department, headed until July by Debbie Hamlyn, who has since retired. Hamlyn’s office was in charge of the community response quality-of-life project in the winter and spring. Her staff was alerted early on to the problem with the cards, according to Roberto Tinajero. He is director of UTEP’s Institute for Policy and Economic Development (IPED).
At the Community Development Department’s request, IPED transcribed the responses onto the Excel spread sheet. Tinajero said that he noticed while working with the cards that “they looked strange, they looked alike.” He called the city to alert them. He could not remember whom he spoke with. “But,” he added, “it would have been someone in the Community Development Department.”
Hamlyn says she did not hear about the problem from Tinajero. She said she first learned of the fraud after Newspaper Tree pointed it out to the City Attorney’s office. Long before that, Hamlyn said, the people whom Tinajero spoke with were in the City Manager’s — Joyce Wilson’s — office. Those staff did recognize that many comment cards had identical handwriting. Yet staff said nothing. Hamlyn said it was assumed that the people named on the cards had asked someone for help to fill them out. “City staff had no reason to suspect that this was not the case,” Hamlyn said.
No one else suspected either, because no one really looked.
Rep. Susie Byrd told Newspaper Tree she gave the printout only a cursory glance because, through emails, phone calls and other routine contact with her constituents, she already had a good idea of what sorts of Quality of Life projects they wished to pursue.
Rep. Carl Robinson also barely glanced at the printout. Steve Ortega threw it away before reading it. Mayor John Cook was almost as uninterested.
“To be honest,” Cook told Newspaper Tree, “I didn’t really look over individual responses but just at the summary.” He said he was disappointed that city staff didn’t let him know about the problem when they found out about it. “They should have had the courtesy to tell me.” The card project, he said, “probably should have been trashed.
Instead, it was presented at City Council on April 18 as though it had no flaws. Hamlyn, of the Community Development Department, displayed a slide to the press, public and city representatives, claiming that 546 respondents to the community input project — or a full quarter of all who’d asked for “signature” projects downtown — had requested stadiums and arenas.
But according to Newspaper Tree’s tally of responses in the Excel printout, when the fake soccer-arena cards are disqualified, only 107 people remain who gave pro- stadium/arena answers. That number constitutes only four percent of the total respondents in the survey.
Further — and this is something the City has never made public — 71 people specifically stated that they did not want the Quality of Life bond to include taxpayer- subsidized arenas or stadiums. In other words, of all the people who said anything about downtown development, 40% indicated they don’t want publicly funded, professional sports or entertainment facilities downtown.
Texas law makes it a crime to tamper with government forms. The card used to elicit the Qualify of Life comments is printed with a City of El Paso logo. It’s a government form. But according to the City Attorney’s office, tampering with it does not constitute a crime. Hamlyn said that if fraud exists, it’s immaterial; people will vote in November about which taxpayer-funded projects they want. Those votes, not the comment cards, will decide the issue.
Hamlyn may be right. Legally, the scam Newspaper Tree uncovered may not be prosecutable. Even so, the fraud undoubtedly gummed up the results of a comment process that citizens took seriously and which may have deluded the city itself. Displays of indignation and even rage have erupted throughout town as people voice displeasure at not being able to vote yes or no to a AAA baseball stadium, and at arbitrary plans to demolish City Hall to accommodate the stadium.
If anyone at City Hall is startled by the anger, they might not be if they’d paid more heed to the citizenry, whose voices about stadiums and arenas were — and weren’t — in the cards.
