Daniela Garcia, candidate for El Paso City Council District 1
Name: Daniela Garcia
Relevant Experience
My professional experience includes working for the City of Austin as an education specialist creating programming and curriculum, for the State of Texas helping medical professionals navigate the software and policy for our states’ health department, the housing industry as a Loan Officer, our small family owned company which has been family-ran for the last 40 years, and in the last year I have been working on land restoration and agricultural sustainability. I am uniquely qualified to understand the private and public sector and move our great community forward toward a path of sustainability and growth.
Personal
I was born and raised here in El Paso, graduated from Coronado in ‘08, and have a bachelor's degree from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, in visual art and innovative education. Aside from my professional life in the environmental and agricultural field, I am also co-captain of El Paso’s Ullamaliztli team, the Mexica hip-ball game dating back 4,000 years, and am the lead organizer in Desert Defenders, a local group standing up against billionaires, fighting to keep data centers from extracting our natural resources and connecting El Paso to national organizations.
What is your position on data centers?
I attended the majority of community meetings and public hearings on data centers and the overwhelming majority of those who attended strongly opposed data centers in El Paso. The Meta/BlackRock data center must be held accountable to its original promises to the city when the tax incentives were given, otherwise the 380 incentives should be revoked; the city employees and representatives that allowed the construction of the data center to continue, despite its divergence from the original proposal should be investigated and held accountable. In the case of the Fort Bliss data center, El Paso Water should not be committing our publicly owned utility and resources to service the facility, Fort Bliss has their own water company and desalination plant, and city representatives should be advocating for its constituents and urging the base to not build their data center across the street from residential housing, as they are doing now.
Hyperscale data centers are exploitative industries, the only jobs they bring are temporary jobs in the construction phase and once running, they will diminish the city’s resources and increase our cost of living. Across the nation, they have left communities devastated, and El Paso does not need to fall prey to that.
As a representative, I plan strong reform from the water utility company to no longer act without proper representation or community feedback; bar any NDA’s; and work with El Paso County to prevent exploitative contracts that target our community and our resources.
What would you do differently to reduce property taxes?
We need to stop relying on our property taxes through tax reform and investment reform. I plan to champion programs that increase community investment so that we become less reliant on large developers and their view of a city that only favors them.
By focusing our efforts in supporting locally owned ventures we can expand our local commerce and tourist sectors at a higher yield of return than investing in outside large conglomerates, especially when they are given such large tax reductions. The decades-long tax incentives to large corporations need to stop and a full investigation is due on how these incentives are authorized and enforced. I plan to support small local businesses, public transportation, sustainable, environmental solutions, all of which have been shown to historically revitalize economies and reduce the cost of living while increasing our quality of life.
What’s your position on the Deck Plaza project?
The reason that I oppose the Deck Plaza is because it is being sold to the city as a mirage. I also want more green spaces and a walkable city, however this Deck Plaza, much like the other park plaza’s that have been pushed in other cities, will at best, go over-budget and over-schedule and lack any local charm. Because it is a cookie-cutter pipe dream, the project has not been developed with El Paso’s unique infrastructure and environment in mind; sooner rather than latter it will be more rocks than green because our climate cannot support the greenery that is planned for it and the structure cannot support native plants, which means a very large investment to maintain, or pavement and rocks, which is what the city and the minds that are pushing this project usually resort to; it is not a sustainable project because it isn’t planned as a long lasting feature, only an expensive one. Rather than pursue these questionable investments we should invest in our local gems, like completing the amphitheater in the Northeast, investing in Keystone Heritage Park on the West Side, creating a sustainable lake/duck pond for Ascarate Park in the lower valley, or revitalize our Downtown. We should be creating avenues for accessible community investment so that we are no longer dependent on projects that don’t benefit our community, brought on by large investors that are only serving themselves.
What are your plans to ensure transparency and make sure you are accessible to constituents?
I promise to lead with transparency, make matters easy to understand and make information available in a timely manner. My first proposal will be to move council meetings, work sessions, public comments and meeting times to the evenings, which would allow for a larger percentage of our population to get involved in city government and make all representatives more approachable. I would also hold community meetings that are community-led and would be responsive to the topics that my constituents want to hear; as it stands now, community meetings are largely led by the representative’s guest speakers who primarily avoid the concerns of those who attend, and I believe this standard is what dissuades people from attending meetings where they largely go unheard.
What makes you the best candidate?
I am from El Paso and for El Paso. I have seen the way lawyer/business owners turned politicians have done to the city for the last 20 years. I’m different. I am asking my district to stop electing the same kind of people and expect different results. I have a wide experience in both the public and private sector to value the knowledge and experience from unbiased experts in their field and, more importantly, to know when someone is lying to us. What I offer are solutions that just make sense, because I am ready for a city that works for us.
