A closer look at the ballpark budget with El Paso Mayor John Cook

El Paso Mayor John Cook said the City could not add the $2.8 million for art and the sale of bonds on the original projected $50 million ballpark project.

“The number you had to build the ballpark was $50 million so (to add arts and bond sales to that budget) you’d have to start getting rid of things that would not make it Triple A standards but the council should have known that,” he said Wednesday.

The council on Tuesday approved issuing $52.8 million in bonds to fund the El Paso ballpark.

Ten million dollars is for design and pre-construction. Construction is slated to cost $40 million. Up front, this is paid with bonds and it costs $1 million to sell those. That’s because the city hired legal firms that specialize in bonds to put a packet together, plus they pay a fee to sell the bonds.

City ordinance requires council approve 2 percent of a project’s cost for the arts, so $1 million is for art at the ballpark.

The mayor said they spent $800,000 to fend off ballpark lawsuits because their in-house attorneys did not have the expertise to fight the suit and because of the tight deadline.

“You could try to fight it in house but we hired experts who we thought were experts at that particular kind of law. And we moved it to Travis County. We thought we’d stand a chance at winning the case in Travis County. We also had to push up on the trial docket so that we weren’t waiting a year and then missing the April 2014 opening date,” Cook said.

The mayor said the city moved the suit to Travis County because a judge there had recently heard a similar case. Cook also said he’s disappointed in the harsh words council had for project engineer Alan Shubert.

“Remember he works for the city manager,” Cook said. “They can’t do anything without her permission. So when you had people like Alan Shubert being threatened by the council that he should lose his job – I think he’s a good man for the job.”