City council clears up confusion on ballot item involving Lost Dog Trail

Voters will get to decide whether to keep a piece of land in Northwest El Paso as open space, rather than have it developed in the May 4 election.

The area, which is more than 1,000 acres of land, referred to as Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone 12, was sectioned to help incentivize development.

Preservationists have rallied “all the way back to the year 2000” to keep the space open, centering their open space debate around the Lost Dog Trail.

“It abuts the Franklin mountain state park, it’s continuous with the park,” said Rick Bonart. “There’s 25 miles of trails there, there’s a trailhead. People have been using it as a park for decades.”

El Paso City voted to clear up confusion about the issue on the ballot on Tuesday at a special meeting despite the fact that early voting started Monday.

“Typically, we don’t do this because it is a ballot measure, but there has been several concerns by some folks in terms of the information that is being disseminated,”said City of El Paso spokeswoman Laura Cruz-Acosta.

The confusion centers around the words “yes” and “no,” which are now presented as “for” and “against.”

“The ‘for’ is going to signify those individuals who want to say ‘yes’ they do want to look at preserving approximately 1,000 acres of land including the Last Dog Trail ,and existing trails,” said Cruz-Acosta.

But doing so would mean the city pays $11.3 million “for the preservation of the property,” which cannot come from the city’s general fund.

Bonart said the community has been using the park “for decades.”

According to ABC-7 archives, in 2013 preservationists reached an agreement with the city setting aside 660 acres of land in the Northwest Master Plan, setting aside a large portion of the remaining land for development.

“It does appear that they (preservationists) have changed up their direction in terms of their requests that they want to preserve the land,” said Cruz-Acosta.

That argument, Bonart said, doesn’t matter because original petitioners “might not be around.” He added that older agreements may not even pertain to the same are of land as previously outlined.

“The community has always said ‘please save 100 percent of the land’,” Bonart said.