Alan Serna, candidate for El Paso City Council District 7
Name: Alan Serna
Age: 54
Party: Nonpartisan
Occupation and Relevant Experience: I own a small landscaping firm specializing in Industrial and large Commercial applications in landscape maintenance and installation. I am also an environmentalist who owns a private tree farm that has donated about 1300 trees all over EL Paso over twenty years. I have been on and helped to create three separate environmental tree boards in El Paso since 1992, including The West Texas Urban Forestry Council, the El Paso Green Sweep Committee, and MEG, Make El Paso Green, which I created and ran for 15 years before Covid. It was a memorial tree planting group that staged tree planting events complete with free hot dogs, hamburgers, and event tee shirts for the first 100 participants. At the end of the planting event, a large balloon launch in honor of the person who had passed would be released.
In 2014, I was nominated to receive a Lawerence Enersen Lifetime Achievement Award from the Arbor Day Foundation. Until recently, I used to own three Stihl Power tool supply centers in El Paso called El Paso Lawn and Power Tool Supply. From 2007 to 2008, I was Vice-Chair of the Tourism Cabinet, where I was charged with luring in a theme park-styled coaster park to El Paso. I wrote an RFP and shopped it around up north in several cities in the hopes of bringing in a real coaster park to the city.
In 2015, I graduated with a master’s degree in political science, urban economics, and regional theory. I studied and wrote about using tourism and leisure as economic development. I wrote my graduate thesis on El Paso’s 40-year history of having boisterous opposition groups crush, kill, and destroy every tourism option ever offered to El Paso.
The title of my publication was “El Paso’s Post-Industrial Development: An Analysis of the El Paso Chihuahua’s Ballpark Controversy,” (Serna, 2015). I also have run for this very office two times before, in the last 22 years. I also ran a state-sanctioned parole work release program through my landscaping company and power equipment stores. I managed over 120 parolees in that program for about 10 years. I also have a bachelor’s degree in abnormal psychology M.H.M.R. and did a three-year psychiatric internship with the Texas Tech Pediatric Psychiatry Unit. I was the psychiatric assistant for none other than Dr. Delia Montes Gallo M.D. who died in 2000 of Pancreatic cancer. The library at UMC is named after her. If she had not passed, I probably would have gone on to med school which she was pushing me to do.
I am now a father of three children Alex, Nicodemus, and Hannah, and have been married for 26 years to the same woman. My wife Rebecca is a Registered charge nurse supervisor for a local surgical center. I have also been a local taxpayer for quite some time now, unlike one of my opponents who never owned a home but loves to preach about high taxes. I bring plenty of experience and relevance to this city council besides just being on a school board and helping others with their campaigns or fighting low-income housing in my neighborhood for four years like another opponent of mine and then claiming to be a “community advocate.” And if voting “no” to everything and not playing well with other council members is considered “relevant experience,” then count me out.
I have handled millions of dollars in payroll and program deliverables and maintained the distinction of being a well-respected veteran in El Paso’s green industry, for which I owned and had a hand in every kind of landscape business imaginable including large-scale installation, maintenance, nursery provision, and landscape power tool sales and maintenance stores. I sold and maintained most of the city’s power tool needs for the water, fire, and street departments including Fort Bliss. For example, I worked with the El Paso water utility to enact their turf reimbursement program from 2003 to 2005.
I removed 2,000,000 square feet of turf and converted it to rock landscapes with trees and shrubs. And it's not something that I am proud of, but I believe in full disclosure and transparency. With my extensive business background, civic engagement, and education, I think I have plenty of experience and relevance to sit on the city council. I have accomplished all of that and more, and all from a guy whose friends and family warned that I “wouldn’t amount to anything, if I moved back to El Paso.”
Personal: My personal life is great. I’m a real family guy. I love being outside and working on my tree farm. I try to go to church about three to four times a week. It gives me peace of mind and soul. I sleep well at night and my wife whom I married for her intellect, loves me abundantly. Between my salary and my wife’s salary, we live a comfortable middle-class life.
I am not motivated by money, because I refuse to have it make me its slave and I am far too generous to be miserly. In my life, I have been poor, middle class, and somewhat rich, but I was most happy when I was a poor child in a family of seven kids. I was the fifth of seven and my mother's favorite, until the day she died. It was during the last time I ran for city council that she passed of stomach cancer.
When we were young, we were kind of poor. In the old neighborhood, my mother used to make us kids get in the mulberry tree beside our house to get mulberries, so she could make us empanadas. That is what I meant about being happiest. My mom made up for the fact that my dad was a teamster who was always on strike with a local refinery. It wasn’t his fault, but he was an effective union leader and organizer, who negotiated with upper management.
He hammered out some great deals with plant management and kept everyone from crossing the line. He was a passionate consensus builder and a staunch Catholic. An old Judo Instructor in the service, everybody knew it, and no one gave him lip. In many ways, I am just like my father. My mother died having worked as a handwriting analyst on many legal cases involving forgeries and things of that nature. Over 700 people attended her funeral when she passed. The motorcycle cop told me that he had worked the Paul Harvey Funeral a few weeks back and that my mother’s was larger. He wanted to know who she was.
My family and I like to travel and catch concerts in strange cities, that we've never been to before. Like me and my father are alike, my younger son and I are too. We like the same music, art, books and movies. A few years back my son Nicodemus wanted to catch the Artic Monkeys in the Boston Garden and some music festival in Randolph Park in New York City for his 14th birthday, so we all went to the East Coast for two weeks.
My children are brilliant like their mother. My mother and father-in-law were from Juarez and El Paso and are now retired university professors from North Texas in Denton. My son Nicodemus has just turned 18 and he is a junior at UTEP. He is an art and education major. He is mild-mannered, introverted, and has an introspective soul. He is clever and has an off-the-wall high sense of humor. He loves old 1970s music and yes, we went to San Diego and Dallas to see ELO and James Taylor twice.
Nowadays my wife and I spend our free time catering to the kids and all their activities. I am always supportive and cry whenever they get awards or recognition. I can't help it, I’m just a big softy when it comes to my kids. It's funny, but I cannot ever remember any of my kids crying or making a fuss. I know that someday my kids will leave, and it saddens me. I am a blessed man. How is that for transparency so far?
My house is paid off and I invested almost everything I had into land and now I have about 24 acres to include a nice place in Cloudcroft. We spend most of our weekends up there in our motor home. My daughter Hannah is a freshman varsity cheerleader at Riverside and a straight-A student in the advanced program. She is just like her dad, always trying to over-achieve; not for personal glory because we are both shy, but because we are competing within ourselves and with ourselves. People ask me, who are you running against? I answer, myself… I haven’t had time to consider what the others are doing. I'm not nervous at all this time around and I am enjoying block walking and meeting all these voters from my district. Running for office isn’t about me at all. It's about making El Paso a celebrated and well-respected city. I love El Paso, and I am her best cheerleader. I have been waiting for forty years to exact some justice for El Paso and right some environmental and socio-economic wrongs, that it has had to endure.
It is no longer just about providing basic city services well and on time. The cost of doing the city’s business as usual has also gone way up with inflation, and many cities have come to the understanding that tourism is a viable and very lucrative way to create extra revenue streams. Having a viable tourist economy can create jobs, improve our lackluster reputation, lure in more corporate partners, and help to offset the tax rate with tourism-related revenues. El Paso is quite literally the only city in America that does not engage this development strategy. Because of this, El Paso has one of the highest tax rates in the country.
In the 1980’s, One of El Paso’s mayors gave away an opportunity to have a Six Flags and Sea World to Henry Cisneros and the City of San Antonio. They used those two venues along with their Riverwalk to anchor an incredible tourism economy. Because of those two “give-a-ways, they now make and have continuously made about $19.2 billion a year. San Antonio uses the revenue from that industry to offset the tax rate and continue to grow their city and metropolis into a celebrated and more than respected city that draws 32 million tourists a year. San Antonio’s tax rate is 54.1 cents for every $100 home value.
Austin has also engaged the tourism option over the last 15 years and now enjoys a $8.2 billion tourism economy, that helps to lower their tax rate to 40.1 cents for every $100 value of a home. El Paso which has no tourist economy and isn’t especially known for anything besides disparaging distinctions about our proximity to the border has a 81.1 cent per every $100 home value. The facts are the facts, cities that have tourism economics have greater economies of scale to include better jobs and better socioeconomic gratification.
Website: www.sernafor7.com
Alan Serna is running for El Paso City Council District 7. Here are his answers to KVIA's questions regarding his candidacy.
How will I work with my colleagues in the council to enact change for the city?
That’s easy, I am a guy who inspires confidence in people. I am a consensus builder and a people person to the extent that people know that they can trust me to have their backs and value their friendships, opinions, and ideas. I know how to inspire people and encourage them to aim higher. I have done so with countless employees and others that I have worked with over the last 30 years of being a business owner and even before when I was a quickly promoted salesperson working through high school in retail stores like Macy’s J.C. Pennys and other retail establishments.
The ideas that I have are good ones because they will pay off big, not only for the city but for the taxpayers as well. When a lot of the elderly hear me speak in forums or at their front doors, they know that my ideas are good ones that will work. After listening they understand that the very thing that they have been opposing for years, is the very thing that could lower their taxes.
I am a tenacious, hard-driven, goal-orientated pragmatist who has studied the subject matter extensively. ‘Momma didn’t raise no fool,” as the saying goes. She led by example with love and tender confidence. I owe most of my success in life to her, after God. Her morality strengthens me to this very day, and I can hear her voice in my head whenever I come to a hard fork in the road or a rough patch. I immediately ask, number one, what would Jesus do, and number two, what would mom have to say about it?
My mom used to communicate with me by leaving literature like Ralph Waldo Emerson poems taped to my bedroom door, or she would leave personal notes of encouragement. I worked most nights and frequently got home after she had gone to bed and that’s why she felt she had to leave me notes and articles to help me deal with work-related stress or whatever she thought that I might be going through.
She was an amazing woman who taught me to “always shoot for the stars because you will get a lot farther than if you didn’t try at all.” I have one of those letters framed on my office wall. My mother was a persuasive people person, and I learned how to treat people by the way she treated people, and that is how I will work with the others on the council.
What steps should council take to alleviate the impact of the immigration crisis on El Paso?
We should continue to house these individuals in older schools that we no longer use like Cadwallader or Ascarate Elementary Schools. We should allow them to work in the kinds of jobs where employers need workers like plumbers, construction workers, landscapers etc. As a business owner, I have struggled for several years now to find anyone who wants to do the kind of jobs that these immigrants are asking for.
We should continue to show the rest of Texas that we are bigger than the sum of their racial prejudice and inhumane attitudes concerning immigrants who walked 1,500 miles to become Americans. I do not know any Americans who would walk ten miles for America much less 1,500 miles. This country is getting demographically older and the younger people in America are no longer willing to do the labor jobs that we so desperately need as a society.
There are worker shortages everywhere. We should allow these immigrants to work and contribute part of their earnings to Social Security so that they can continue to provide for older individuals who will retire soon. We should continue to be humane but encourage these people to work and become self-sufficient while they are here or on their way to other cities.
What are your plans to ensure transparency and make sure you are accessible to constituents?
Short answer: I plan to tape every meeting and have it transcribed verbatim and made available to the constituents via the Internet. Transparency is very important to me. The truth is always the best policy. If you have nothing to hide, then you won’t mind operating under a microscope. I am not getting into council to make money or to favor one group over another. I am not an elitist stooge who serves at the pleasure of the rich and well-connected.
I look forward to hearing from my constituents like I do now when I walk their neighborhoods and knock on their doors. That’s who I am beholden to, the taxpayer. That’s who I work for, not the well-connected elites with a specific agenda. If you do not like talking to and listening to people, then you should not hold public office. The general public has a right to have complete and open transparency when it comes to their taxes and their city government.
What are my thoughts on the future of the Multi-Purpose Performing Arts Center?
I voted for the Arena back in 2012 just like 76% of the electorate that voted on that day. I am ashamed and appalled that Max Grossman an outsider to El Paso, could even or should even have the ability to destroy and circumvent the will of the electorate to protect an eyesore that will never equal the value of what a downtown arena would have provided. Durangito is an eyesore. Think about all the people who invested in opening bars and restaurants thinking that they were going to enjoy the economic spin-off that comes with having a venue like this.
It was like the 2007 Billy Sanders development debacle that was the “Save Segundo Barrio” movement. Billy Kim from the Korean Chamber of Commerce’s Land Grab Opposition Group made tee-shirts that said “Save Secundo Barrio,” while they spread a false message that Sanders and other elites were trying to “Demexicanise” Secundo Barrio. Now I do not believe that we need a small arena downtown. What we needed was a large one so we could host NCAA basketball tournaments or an MSL team. Now that we have struck a deal to build a 12,500-seat outdoor amphitheater, we no longer need an arena downtown.
I do not think that we should not return the remaining $128.5 million. The city should use half of that money to enter a public/private partnership to construct a smaller scaled-down version of a downtown tourist mall with a centralized ice -rink and food court surrounding it. On a second level, it could house an arcade for the kids and a few souvenir shops. The third level could house one or two adult bars accessible from the opposite side of the street with proper I.D.
All three levels would have a protective glass divider on each level so the rink could be safely seen from every level. It would be like the one at the Dallas Galleria just smaller and not being anchored by the likes of Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Nordstroms or whatever big box store they have nowadays. With the rest of the money $65 million, I would repave as many city streets as possible and plant as many trees as possible, so we do our part to combat climate change. We are a temperate desert and planting trees here would have the greatest impact than planting trees anywhere else in the country. The one thing we do not want to do is hurt our bond rating.
How will you work to improve El Paso's roads?
El Paso should improve its roads by hiring more grant writers to look for Community Block Grant Development funds at the state and federal levels. There should also be a consumption tax of 1.75% on every tobacco and alcohol purchase in the city. This money would be held in an asphalt fund where we could leverage matching state and federal funds.
What will I do in the next four years to relieve homeowners’ property taxes?
There are a lot of things that can be done but all of them involve having to reduce some services or trimming back on things that mean more to some and nothing to others. Living within our means and placing a freeze on things like fleet purchases in exchange for keeping city vehicles longer and maintaining them more. City employees sitting in idling vehicles with the car and air running with nobody in them also saves taxes. Like I said there are plenty of ways to lower taxes.
Since this is almost an all-new council with a new mayor and city manager, we should have an independent third-party auditor come in and audit every single department to identify and recommend ways to eliminate waste. The idea that I have is to encourage the city employees from each department to take ownership of their departments by actively participating in a program to find and eliminate waste.
In return for their compliance, they will receive 50% of an amount commensurate to what they helped save in the form of a Xmas bonus. The other half would be returned in the form of a rebate credit to the taxpayers. In my estimation, I would be willing to guess that they could find between 10 to 12% reduction in waste. In time, the program will become second nature and streamlined into a model for proficiency and boosting morale for the city employees by way of incentivizing Xmas bonuses based on cuts in waste.
The main thing that needs to happen is to lure in more corporate sponsors to share the tax burden with. Academic research all points to the fact that corporations like to move to communities that are big on curb appeal, quality of life and entertainment venues that promote touristic activities. Tourism as stated above has the tremendous potential to generate huge amounts of money at a local level and that revenue in exchange is being used by cities all over the world to offset their taxes with. El Paso is the only city that I know of that has never really considered the tourism development strategy. It's time it should. If it fails, then at least we know for sure what a mayor once said about tourism venues in El Paso, “we can’t support them or afford them.”
Why are you the best candidate for this office?
I am the best candidate because I am an intelligent, educated individual, who has been at the forefront of making business decisions that impact people’s livelihoods for over 30 years now. I have challenged myself all my life to rise above myself and achieve not only some material wealth but strength of character in the face of adversity. I am not driven by money or any other transitory enticement; rather, I am motivated and self-directed to achieve as much for my community as humanly possible.
My environmental philanthropy has illustrated time and again that I am willing to do whatever it takes to contribute to my city’s status and well-being. I have been waiting for forty years to get into city government, so I can help push it in a long overdue direction. I love El Paso and its people, and this is not a job for me as it is for the others in this race. This council seat would allow me to promote the kind of things that would make EL Paso the celebrated and well-respected city that I know it can become. A greener, cleaner, safer city with a vibrant and exciting tourist economy that would help us lower our tax rates, create jobs, lure in big business, and improve upon our lackluster and impoverished border town image.
I have spent my life in the green industry making El Paso as beautiful as I can with my skillset and businesses that do just that. Few people know what I know firsthand in terms of how to formulate and execute a large-scale plan to produce more urban forestry than we employ today. I would be happy to have the chance to increase my district and city’s environmental and aesthetic appeal on the cheap with the results that would inspire pride and renewal in our neighborhoods, medians, parks and shopping center parking lots that currently do not have shade tree canopy.
I would love to pass a revamped version of the ‘commercial landscape ordinance’ to make sure that establishments have vibrant, clean and well-maintained curb appeal. We must foster and encourage environmental outreach in our community so that we become the envy of other cities. We should set a higher standard in terms of what we expect our city to look like.
