City answers tough questions about ballpark

As the announcement likely bringing a Triple-A baseball team to El Paso draws nearer, City of El Paso officials have put out a dugout full of information on building a new ballpark in Downtown El Paso in hopes it will answer many of the questions being asked about the deal.

Much like a pitcher in need of some relief, city leaders have been getting shelled by the tough questions about the deal to build this ballpark in Downtown El Paso for several weeks now.

So the City has put a link to all of the pertinent information on the ballpark deal on its website, including the projected cost of demolishing city hall to make way for the ballpark and the cost of relocating or rebuilding City Hall in the future.

There’s even an area, at the click of a mouse, for residents to ask any questions that they can’t find the answers to. All of this follows what has appeared to be a lot of negative feedback about the ballpark deal.

City Rep. Steve Ortega told ABC-7 that the other half of the deal, to bring a Triple-A Pacific Coast League team to El Paso, could come any minute, and once the team is secured, that will likely set off a flurry of activity around city hall.

“Getting the team immediately triggers short term relocation plans for city hall,” Ortega said. “So the schedule is pretty aggressive. We would be moving out of this building at the beginning of next year into a temporary facility or facilities and then we’d have to discuss where we would want to be in the long term. Those discussions and decisions will have to be made very quickly if in fact a team is coming to El Paso.”

Ortega admitted sifting through all of that info on the city web site to get questions about the ballpark answered isn’t exactly an easy task. That’s why Ortega and some other city representatives have put their own answers to the most asked questions about the ballpark on their web sites.

Ortega said he took the top 13 questions he’s been asked about the ballpark deal and provided answers, with documentation, to those questions.

“What we could have probably done a better job on is condensing the information and getting the relevant questions that are outstanding and then have simple answers to those questions,” Ortega said. “That’s what I tried to do.”