El Paso County officials may put in place later this year a procedure for thousands of acres sold for development purposes in Horizon City that remain vacant and unused.
Beginning in the late 1960s a company called the Horizon Corporation sold land to investors from across the country, suggesting that the properties in question would increase in value once neighborhoods in the area were established.
For a variety of reasons, those neighborhoods were never built. In 1979 a Federal Trade Commission administrative judge charged the Tucson company with perpetuating what was called a “vicious consumer fraud” by selling “virtually worthless desert land” to consumers.
Two years later Horizon agreed to establish a $14.5 million fund designed to repay those consumers. But in the decades since, lacking any kind of water infrastructure, the land has gone undeveloped.
Now county officials, empowered by legislation passed last year by the Texas State Legislature, are starting a process that will allow them to contact as many of the owners as possible, with the idea of purchasing the land at fair market value.
Before that process begins, it is expected that the county will conduct a study looking at what kind of development is most feasible in the area in question.
A plan for how to proceed may then be submitted to the El Paso Commissioners Court for final approval.
The Horizon Corporation, which launched operations in 1959 in Tucson, and listed the Horizon City acres for sale in lavish newspaper ads primarily in the 1970s, was merged into the company MCO Properties in 2004.
By Garry Boulard
