Acquiring land to complete Montwood a problem for City access to new park complicated
Will athletes have a hard time getting to the new eastside sports complex?
The park is currently under construction and is located at the intersection of Montwood Drive and John Hayes Street in far east El Paso.
At a recent quality of live bond committee meeting, Assistant Director of the Capital Improvement Department Scott Sensanbaugher said ideally the city would like to connect Montwood Dr. to make it easier to get to the park.
But Sensanbaugher said a future connection won’t happen any time soon. He said the land is in the unincorporated part of the county, and there’s scattered ownership. At least 20 different people own portions of the land. Sensanbaugher said not only would it take a long time to settle the ownership, but the city doesn’t have the funding.
The land in question is in Commissioner Vince Perez’s district. But he said the county doesn’t have jurisdiction over it, the private owners do. He said not being able to track down land owners is a problem throughout the county.
“In the 1960’s and 1970’s there were land owners who would buy large swats of land in far east El Paso,” Perez said. “Due to the nostalgia of John Wayne, they would go all across the country and world and say, ‘own a piece of west Texas’. “
Perez said people bought the lots and they’ve since been handed down for generations. He said often times people don’t know they own the land, or some of the owners have since passed away and the records haven’t been updated.
“It’s a problem,” Perez said. “Because you have issues of illegal dumping.”
Perez said illegal shooting is also a problem. While he didn’t know of specific issues at the Montwood location, he said the land behind the SISD Student Activity Complex is prone to illegal activity, and he’s gotten a lot of complaints about it from constituents. Perez said there’s not much the county can do. Since its privately owned land, the county can’t even put up signs warning people not to dump items illegally.
“We could possibly put up signs on easements,” Perez said. “But enforcement is very problematic. It’s very hard to enforce that.”
Sensanbaugher said for now, people will have to take a little longer of a route. The easiest way would possibly be taking Zaragoza to Ventana.
The city is looking at possibly adding signs to the roads to guide people to the complex.
He said for the most part, the streets seen on the map in red do not go through residential areas. Construction for the complex is expected to end in November.
