Nearly two years of controversy regarding the proposed construction of a $180 million multi-purpose arena in downtown El Paso have taken its toll on public support for the project.
According to a survey of more than 300 people in the city, commissioned by El Paso television station KVIA, only 25 percent of respondents indicated they were in favor of the project being built at its proposed site: the Duranguito neighborhood. That location has sparked litigation on the part of residents of the area and community activists. Last year, 21st Civil District Court Judge Amy Clark Meachum ruled that El Paso could not apply Quality of Life bonds for the project if the arena is to be used for sporting events because the original ballot language for the bonds never mentioned that purpose. The City of El Paso has said it will appeal that ruling. The largest group of respondents to the KVIA poll, 37 percent, said they opposed the arena being built in Duranguito, with 36 percent saying they were undecided. The demographic groups most in opposition to the project were people making more than $100,000 annually, and those between the ages of 45 and 54. The greatest support for the project came with respondents making between $35,000 to $100,000, and those in the 25 to 34 years of age category. By Garry Boulard
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Calling for a greater use of public and private partnerships, along with stepped-up state and local spending, the White House has released President Trump’s long-awaited $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan.
The 55-page proposal specifically calls for a greater investment in infrastructure projects in rural areas, as well as a streamlining of the government agency permitting process that could see projects approved in two years or less. The document, Legislative Outline for Rebuilding Infrastructure in America, provides a framework of administrative priorities that it hopes Congress will act on later this year. The proposal also calls for the establishment of an incentives program that would be used to support “wide-ranging classes of assets.” Of those assets, the document lists surface transportation, airports, passenger rail, ports and waterways, and both drinking water facilities as well as wastewater facilities. The incentives program will be funded at the $100 billion level, to be divided up between the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the federal Department of Transportation. Some $50 billion would target a rural infrastructure program, while $20 billion will go for what is being called “transformative programs” which would be centered on new projects rather than rehabilitating older and existing infrastructure. As proposed, the plan is designed to provide parameters for members of Congress to act upon. But analysts say that the odds are small that all of the President’s ideas, during a year seeing mid-term elections, will see passage. By Garry Boulard ![]() The first issuance coming out of the giant $937 million general obligation bonds passed by Denver voters last November could be announced sometime this summer. The 2017 GO Bond, as it appeared on the local ballot, was actually seven individual ballot questions funding up to 460 large and small projects. Those ballot questions, approved by an average of 66 to 73 percent of the vote, called for $431 million for transportation and mobility projects; $151 million for parks and recreation centers; $116 million for cultural facilities; $77 million for public safety projects; $75 million for the construction of a new Denver Health and Hospital Authority clinic; $69 million for library upgrades and renovations; and $16 million for various public facility work. In December, the City of Denver announced it was hiring Atkins North America, Inc. as the program management for the giant bond program. Atkins, with offices worldwide and in Denver, is a design, engineering, and project management consulting firm. The next step in the process is for the contract requests and budget appropriations related to the GO Bonds to go before the Denver City Council for review. Atkins and El Paso city officials will then be tasked with coordinating the issuances, while also working with the various city agencies that will be involved in the many projects. By Garry Boulard A project designed to bring a new look and life to the largest meeting space in Grand Junction, Colorado is about to get underway.
Members of the Grand Junction City Council have agreed to hire an architecture firm for the redesign and remodeling of the Two Rivers Convention Center in downtown Grand Junction. That firm is the Grand Junction-based Chamberlin Architects, which has extensive experience in public facility design. With money coming from the city’s Downtown Development Authority tax increment funding, the project is expected to cost around $6 million. Additional project plans call for building a new hotel which would be attached to the convention center, with a 2021 completion date. Located at 159 Main Street, the 23,000 square foot facility, which was built in the early 1970s, regularly hosts any number of trade shows, concerts, and seminars. Convention center officials have previously said that an updating and remodeling of the facility will attract larger business meetings and conventions. In April of last year, a proposal to increase a local sales tax in order to raise some $30 million for the center’s renovation was overwhelmingly defeated by Grand Junction voters. The renovation work at the Two Rivers Convention Center will include kitchen upgrades, exterior and roof repairs, and an upgrading to the facility’s water supply and drainage system. By Garry Boulard Even though its earnings from 2017 were off, the discount clothing store chain H&M has announced plans to build nearly three hundred new stores this year.
Those stories will either be entirely new structures, or built out in existing retail centers. The news of the chain’s continued expansion comes on the heels of comments made by H&M Chief Executive Officer Karl-Johan Persson, who remarked in a press conference that the stores’ 2017 performance had been “weak in many of our large metropolitan markets.” Persson additionally said the decline “mirrored the shift in the market from offline to online.” Even so, the Stockholm-based company opened 388 new stores in 2017, somewhat less than the 430 it had earlier projected. H&M now has 4,500 stores internationally and is the second largest clothing retailer in the world. Although H&M has not yet announced where all of its new 2018 stores will be built, last month it opened its thirteenth store in Colorado. That outlet, at Denver’s Shops at Northfield Stapleton, measures 20,000 square feet. In September the company renovated a 26,000 square foot space in Santa Fe at the Santa Fe Place shopping center. H&M, whose stores generally vary in size between 20,000 and 25,000 square feet, has seen its presence in the U.S. grow from 189 stores in 2009 to more than five hundred today. Besides its thirteen stores in Colorado, H&M currently has three locations in New Mexico and ten in Arizona. The plan for the company to build the nearly 300 new stores this year comes at the same time that H&M has announced that it will close some 170 outlets in underperforming markets. By Garry Boulard ![]() The New Mexico House of Representatives has given its approval to setting side some $25 million in the next 5 years to fund school facility security enhancements. House Bill 130, which passed 60 to 0 in the lower chamber, would move funding from the state’s Public Schools Facilities Authority to pay for such things as perimeter gates, fences, vestibules, door locks, and campus checkpoints. According to the measure, as proposed by Representative Paul Bandy, $5 million a year between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, would be reserved for “school security system repairs, renovations and replacements.” The measure, with its companion legislation in the Senate introduced by Senator George Munoz, would allow the Facilities Authority to review grant applications from New Mexico’s 146 school districts, with subsequent public hearings being used to help rank the proposed projects. The bill is now before the Senate Finance Committee. According to a study published in December by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, some 38 states currently have established funding sources for school facility security projects. Up to $30 million may be used to pay for the remediation of a brine well in Carlsbad.
That well was shut down almost 10 years ago, owing to fears that it might collapse, creating a massive sinkhole. In turn that sinkhole, according to experts, could cause untold injury and death, let along up to $1 billion in area infrastructure damage. Members of the New Mexico State Legislature are reviewing Senate Bill 226 which would redirect around $10 million every year for the next three fiscal years from the New Mexico State Road Fund to the Carlsbad Brine Well Remediation Fund. Located along U.S. Route 285, the brine well has been monitored by City of Carlsbad, Eddy County, and State of New Mexico officials, all of whom have said it could collapse as soon as 2020. There are only a handful of operating brine wells in New Mexico. They are created by oil and gas companies when a salt cavern is filled with water. Once the water is salt-saturated, it’s pumped out and used in the drilling process. Altogether, it is thought that it may cost as much as $43 million to remediate the Carlsbad brine well, with funding also coming from Carlsbad and Eddy Counties. The remediation funding bill has passed the full New Mexico Senate and is now under review in the House Taxation and Revenue Committee. By Garry Boulard Even though spending for higher education nationally is seeing a 1.6 percent increase this fiscal year, that increase is the lowest reported in the last 5 years.
Those numbers come from a report just issued by the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University. The study reveals that the most recent 1.6 percent growth in funding for higher education facility projects is well below the previous four-year average of 4.3 percent. The most recent fiscal year trends also show 19 states reporting decreases in funding, while some 30 states enjoyed moderate increases of around 2 percent. Only the state of Maine had no changes in reported funding from the previous fiscal year to this fiscal year. The Center for Study of Education Policy survey comes out as the U.S. Census is reporting spending for private higher education facility projects down some 7 percent in 2017 at $12.7 billion, from a 2016 record of $13.2 billion. The drop in both public and private funding for higher education facility spending, according to experts, may prove particularly challenging for smaller four- and two-year schools. In crunching such numbers, Moody’s Investor Service has issued a report saying that any marginal increases at this point in state funding for higher education facility projects would have to be classified as “credit negative,” meaning that continued marginal support could play a role in future ratings. By Garry Boulard ![]() Adding to its existing 107,000 square foot operations facility at the El Paso International Airport, United Parcel Service, Inc., is signaling its faith in continued trade growth between the U.S. and Mexico. The expansion of that facility will add some 42,000 square feet to UPS’s airport location and will be a part of the larger North American Borderplex, a defined manufacturing region that includes Texas, New Mexico, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Like the original UPS operations center at the El Paso Airport, the 42,000 square-foot expansion will be dedicated to moving appliance, automotive, and electronics components, among other items, across the border. Located at a rectangular-shaped site at 28 Leigh Fisher Boulevard, the UPS Operations Center is part of a larger UPS network that includes more than 1,800 operations centers as well as an excess of 5,000 UPS Stores. The Sandy Springs, Georgia-based logistics and package delivery company saw revenues of more than $60 billion in 2016. Members of the El Paso City Council have voted to approve some $1.8 million in incentives, including property tax rebates, for the UPS facility expansion project. By Garry Boulard Public input meetings are expected to be held into May by the City of Denver’s Public Health and Environment Department as it sorts out the details of the controversial Green Roof Initiative.
That ballot question, which ended up being passed in November by a 54 to 46 percent margin, proposed that all new buildings, 25,000 square feet or larger, be required to install a green roof feature. That feature could either be a rooftop garden or solar-powered panels, or combination of both. Proponents of the initiative said such rooftop green projects would stabilize building temperature, mitigating what is known as the “heat island” effect, which creates a higher temperature in urban areas with large clusters of buildings, compared with surrounding suburban or rural areas. The initiative specifically called for the creation of green features for 20 percent of the rooftop space for a structure measuring between 15,000 to 49,000 square feet. The amount of required green features would top out on a building of 200,000 square feet or more with 60 percent of the rooftop space. Developers and builders have said that the initiative will prove a downer on the market, with the green roof requirements adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of a project. Besides the Public Health and Environment Department’s hearings on the initiative, Denver’s Community Planning and Development Department is also in the process of sifting through the requirements of the new law. A webpage for the planning and development department says that it is trying to “harmonize existing laws and policies with this new law and to build its requirements into our permitting and contractor licensing procedures." Exact city planning requirements regarding the initiative could be announced later this spring. By Garry Boulard |
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