Chris Canales, candidate for El Paso City Council District 8
Name: Chris Canales
Age: 34
Occupation: City of El Paso representative for District 8
Relevant Experience
I have spent nearly a decade working in city government, for the past four years as the elected City Representative for District 8 and, before that, for six years as a City Council staffer. In those roles, I have worked directly on municipal budgets, constituent services, legislation and policy development, land use, infrastructure, economic development, public safety, and many of the other issues that come before the City Council.
During my first term, I have also stepped forward to take on significant additional responsibilities I serve as a trustee of the City of El Paso Employees Retirement Trust and a member of its Investment Committee, serve on the Financial Oversight and Audit Committee, chair the Animal Shelter Advisory Committee, serve on the Downtown Management District Board of Directors, and am the City’s first appointee to the El Paso Continuum of Care Board, which coordinates the community-wide response to homelessness. I also served for three years on the El Paso Metropolitan Planning Organization’s Transportation Policy Board.
Together, these experiences have given me a detailed understanding of how City government works, how to navigate a large and complicated organization, and how to turn constituent needs and community priorities into concrete action.
Personal
I’m a native El Pasoan and the son of an immigrant father from Mexico and a mother from Boston, who met while working in Juárez and decided to make their home in the Borderland. I attended EPISD public schools and graduated from Franklin High School in 2010 before earning a degree in Sustainable Development from Columbia University in New York City.
I worked in natural resources with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation and later for a sustainability consulting firm focused on environmental conservation, resource management, and waste reduction. I returned to El Paso in 2017 with my wife Nora, a museum professional, and we now share our home with our two senior rescue dogs, Wyck and Q, along with a rotating cast of foster dogs from El Paso Animal Services.
In addition to serving on the City Council, I work as a professional soccer official and am an active member of my labor union, the Professional Soccer Referees Association. I have held several elected and appointed leadership roles within the union, including serving on the bargaining team that negotiated my unit’s first collective bargaining agreement and subsequent agreements.
El Paso has always been home, and I chose to return because I wanted to build my life and my family here and contribute to the community that raised me. Public service on the City Council has given me the opportunity to do that every day.
What is your position on data centers?
I do not support data centers in El Paso, especially hyperscale data centers built for artificial intelligence. These projects require enormous amounts of land, water, energy, and infrastructure capacity, all of which are limited resources in our desert climate and should be used strategically. These giant data centers simply aren't the right fit for El Paso.
I believe economic development should be judged by the return El Paso receives on the resources we invest. Hyperscale data centers require an extraordinary commitment of those resources, and I do not believe the economic return to the community justifies their use at that scale. Their energy and water demands also run counter to the sustainability goals and key measures in the comprehensive Climate Action Plan that I helped lead through the City Council earlier this year.
In May, I proposed and the City Council approved direction that the City should not recruit or incentivize hyperscale data centers. I would rather invest our limited economic development resources on industries that are better suited to our region, provide greater long-term benefits to El Pasoans, and align with the sustainable future we have committed to through our Climate Action Plan, as well as on small and homegrown businesses.
What would you do differently to reduce property taxes?
I support responsible measures that ease the property tax burden while maintaining the City's ability to deliver core services. That requires looking carefully at spending priorities, improving efficiency, managing vacancies and personnel costs, eliminating spending on flashy wants instead of needs, and avoiding unnecessary new recurring obligations.
During my term, we have reduced the City’s outstanding debt by more than $300 million, and I believe we should continue reducing debt rather than unnecessarily taking on more. I ran on ending the use of non-voter-approved Certificates of Obligation, a form of debt that was frequently used before my term to pay for ongoing City needs, and I have never voted for any new ones. Lower debt ultimately means that fewer taxpayer dollars have to go toward paying down City obligations and wasting taxpayer money on interest payments.
We also desperately need to address the cost of sprawl development. Every time El Paso expands farther outward geographically, taxpayers ultimately take on responsibility for more streets, utilities, police and fire stations, parks, and other public facilities that have to be operated, maintained, and repaired for decades. We should instead encourage more infill and redevelopment in areas where that infrastructure already exists, allowing us to use our funds to improve what we already have. Growing more efficiently strengthens the tax base without continually expanding the amount of infrastructure taxpayers have to support.
I would continue approaching property tax relief through responsible tax-rate decisions, targeted exemptions, careful control of spending and debt, and sustainable growth of the tax base, while protecting the core services El Pasoans depend on.
What’s your position on the Deck Plaza project?
I do not support moving forward with the Deck Plaza project unless the situation with private and outside funding changes dramatically, and I definitely would not support asking El Paso taxpayers to cover the enormous current funding gap.
Despite multiple attempts, the project has not secured the federal grant funding its supporters anticipated, and only $1 million in private philanthropic funding has been announced. Approximately $16.2 million in state and federal funding is currently available toward a design phase estimated to cost about $20 million. Meanwhile, City estimates put construction of the deck itself at approximately $188 million, plus another $204 million for surrounding infrastructure, with nowhere near that amount currently funded.
Given those numbers, I do not believe it is responsible to commit substantial local taxpayer dollars to the project when El Paso has enormous competing needs, including streets, basic infrastructure, and deferred maintenance throughout the city.
I have also consistently opposed TxDOT’s underlying I-10 expansion project through Downtown, projected to cost $1.3 billion. That state funding could be much better spent improving state roads throughout District 8 such as Mesa, Paisano, and Alameda, as well as enhancing public transportation options. Even if that project does ultimately move forward, I don't believe that asking local taxpayers to spend hundreds of millions of additional public dollars on a Deck Plaza is a financially responsible response to it.
What are your plans to ensure transparency and make sure you are accessible to constituents?
I believe transparency means doing more than making public information available when someone asks for it. I practice what I call active transparency: proactively explaining what the City is doing, how decisions are being made, and where I stand on the many issues that come before the City Council.
I regularly hold monthly community meetings, town halls with neighborhood associations, and informal Café con Chris open-house events at local coffee shops where constituents can speak with me directly. My staff and I have responded directly to thousands of constituent calls, emails, and messages and worked with City departments to resolve individual problems. I am the only City Representative who maintains a dedicated office website, where residents can easily find information about City services, request assistance, and get help signing up to speak at City Council meetings. I send a regular email newsletter and am active on Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit. I also publish materials in both English and Spanish to make information more accessible.
I personally create detailed explainers about complicated City issues, including the budget, utility rates, and major policy decisions, so that residents have the information they need to understand what is happening at City Hall. When an issue is of particular public interest or controversy, I proactively write public explanations of my position and publish them in the newspaper so constituents don't have to guess where I stand. I also make myself readily available to local reporters, because an independent press plays a vital role in helping the public both understand and scrutinize City government.
I will continue being directly accessible to constituents, providing multiple ways to engage with me, and proactively sharing information rather than expecting residents to navigate City government on their own.
What makes you the best candidate?
The things that most distinguish me are my dedicated hands-on approach, my independence from big-money influence, and the depth of experience I bring to the job.
I do an enormous amount of the work myself. I research and develop policy, write my own agenda items and public communications, create the explainers I use to make complicated City issues understandable, and personally engage with constituents. I run my campaign the same way. I have no campaign manager, consultants, communications staff, or designers. It is entirely me, with the help of my wife Nora, and sometimes friends who volunteer their time. The words, ideas, designs, videos, website, and (most importantly) policy positions voters see from my campaign come directly from me. Voters should be able to trust that the candidate described in the campaign literature is the authentic person who will represent them. I also provide my direct phone number (915-247-4749) on all of my materials and encourage voters to call or text me with any questions.
I also care deeply about maintaining my independence from big-money influence in politics. There is no legal limit on how much an individual can contribute to an El Paso City Council campaign, but just as I did four years ago, I have voluntarily limited individual contributions to my campaign to $1,000. I would rather build a campaign supported by regular people giving smaller amounts than become financially dependent on a handful of wealthy donors or special interests.
I am not independently wealthy, and I have never had the ability to simply write a large check to fund an expensive campaign. Four years ago, I was out-fundraised by roughly four to one in a race where large-dollar financial support went to my opponent. I built my campaign differently, through smaller contributions, direct engagement with voters, and a tremendous amount of work done by me and the people closest to me. Winning that race reinforced my belief that authenticity, direct engagement with voters, and clear communication of my plans and beliefs can overcome a large financial disadvantage.
My four years of experience on the City Council plus six years working at City Hall mean that I understand City government in a way that simply takes time to develop. The City of El Paso is a large and complicated organization, with several thousand employees, dozens of departments, a budget of $1.4 billion, and responsibilities ranging from public safety and streets to land use, utilities, economic development, transit, and public health. It takes years to truly learn the ropes, understand how all of those pieces fit together, and know where to dig deeper or ask the right questions. I bring that experience to the job from day one of a second term.
Ultimately, I am asking voters for another term because I believe I have shown that I will put in the work, always do my homework, be accessible, listen to constituents, take difficult issues seriously, and make decisions based on evidence and a clear set of values, free from big-money or corporate influence. I have a strong record of getting things done to help people that voters can evaluate, and there is much more that I want to accomplish for District 8 and El Paso.
