Group urges City Council to increase budget on Hispanic cultural center, make it priority

El Paso City Council on Tuesday started the process to form a subcommittee that will oversee the development of the Hispanic Cultural Center after dozens of prominent community leaders urged the City Representatives to make it a priority, saying Mexican Americans have for too long been under-represented.

The group of 49 individuals calls itself MACI, or the Mexican American Cultural Institute. Members include District Attorney Jaime Esparza, former Judge Alicia Chacon, former Congressman Silvestre Reyes and former National President of LULAC, Belen Robles, among others.

MACI wants to be an active part in the development of the cultural center. “We would like our voices and our ideas to be heard as the process continues,” Esparza told the Council.

MACI also points out the center is severely under-funded. “The funds allotted to this are not sufficient,” said former El Paso City Planner Nestor Valencia. When proposed to voters in 2012, The City of El Paso presented the project with a $5.7 million budget. City manager tommy gonzalez has also repeatedly said $5.7 million is not enough to acquire land, design, build and equip a state of the art hispanic cultural center. MACI urged the Council on Tuesday to increase the center’s budget, either through a private-public partnership and/or reallocation of funds.

Private donors, using the community foundation as a fiscal agent, have set a goal to raise $10 million for the Children’s Museum, one of the other major quality of life bond projects. City Rep. Cortney Niland said the Community Foundation would also work with private donors who’d want to contribute to the Cultural Center.

The City has before proposed combining the Children’s museum and the cultural center to share resources and costs. But both the children’s museum donors and MACI oppose the measure, saying both entities should be stand alone centers. “I think it’s a bad idea. Both projects serve two different needs and each needs to stand alone,” said Esparza.

Speaker after speaker on Tuesday told the City Council said the hispanic center was long overdue, pointing out El Paso’s population is 83% Mexican American yet its one of the only major American cities without cultural center celebrating them.

In a prior presentation, HKS, the consulting firm the City has hired to develop a site plan for the Cultural Center, said El Paso’s Hispanic population stood at 43% — a mistake city officials later said must have been a typo by the company. “We don’t want a design company coming in and telling us what our design company should look like. This is comunidad, this community — people coming together and saying we want to be a part of this,” said City Rep. Lily Limon.

The city council unanimously voted to direct the city attorney to write a resolution -forming a sub-committee that would make recommendations on the cultural center. The city council could then appoint members from MACI to this committee, if they choose to. The City Attorney, Silvia Firth, said she’d have the resolution ready in one week.

Initially, Limon was concerned a sub-committee under the Bond Oversight Advisory Committee would not have any teeth and would be unable to make recommendations. But City Rep. Emma Acosta, who made the motion, said the sub-committee would be independent, its meetings open to the public, and would make recommendations that would be considered by Council.