I was headed to NPT, driving this time, even though it's only about a half to three quarters of a mile from Sunset Heights to the Abdou Building. Policemen on motorcycles blocked the intersection at Prospect and Santa Fe just after I went through, and I saw the marchers coming, so I parked next to Insights and started taking pictures.

I've tried to take a bit of a break from covering the Downtown Plan. Each side is doing their thing, the 5-3 vote may have expanded to 6-2, there is a frenzy of financial and legal work happening behind the scenes, and I was just fatigued. So here it was, coming to me, in the form of what looked to be a couple hundred Downtown merchants and employees wearing red shirts, holding banners, led by a flag-waving muralist who has compared his Segundo Barrio neighborhood to the Gaza Strip and said (joking or not, I don't know) that he wants $2 million for his apartment building, in which only he and his mother currently live.

The previous sentence explains why I had Downtown Plan fatigue. Imagine this guy's story multiplied by hundreds of buildings and thousands of people. Multiplied by lawyers, politicians, businessmen, building owners, activists; by legal issues, moral issues, political issues, historical and cultural issues. My hat is off to plan proponents and opponents alike in this regard -- they have been running hard since March 31, and before, trying to wrap their arms around the calculus and develop a winning formula. I mean that in both positive and negative ways: Like everything else about the plan, both sides have strong and honest arguments on some issues, and they also have their political/legal/public opinion operations, and my regard in this comment is for the overall effort, not a value judgment as to the merits of their efforts.

Then there is the question of the “status quo,” whether it’s a description of Downtown business operations or the way the plan was developed and pushed through.

Anyway, it was kind of invigorating to stumble across a good old-fashioned breaking news event, where someone does something publicly.

It was even better when I ran into Vanessa Monsisvais, who was taking pictures, a few of which you'll see here. I slapped hands with Times reporter Ramon Bracamontes, and exchanged friendly banter: "Where you been, the parade started all the way Downtown," he chided me. "When are you going to start covering the Downtown Plan?" I replied. I dapped with Pedro Villagrana of Channel 26, who probably ought to write a memoir. Reporters are a loose fraternity, and while getting them organized -- except for a party -- is like herding cats, the scene at news events is collegial.

I saw Jaime Perez, and asked him if he was covering the march or organizing it. He smiled, with no trace of malice or irony, and said, "Covering it, of course." Jaime is editor of the Border Observer, and also has been a political operator of some repute; he promises that he will be a newsman now, and not use his position as part of any coordinated political action schemes. I wonder if that will be possible, and I’m interested in people’s opinions about how that might be any different from good old-timey newspapers, where the “just the facts m’am” standard comes from but where often the owner-publishers would use them as political weapons -- just look at the El Paso Times and Herald Post from back in the day.

City spokeswoman Juli Lozano was there, smiling as always. She had a bit of a hard time early on as the plan was unexpectedly dumped on her lap to defend, but she has her feet under her now. Debbie Hamlyn, a deputy city manager, was next to Lozano. Hamlyn was wearing her Parliament-Funkadelic sunglasses, with big curved rims studded with stones. Muralist Carlos Rosas, the aforementioned flag-waver, who knows most of the players because he’s a savvy guy who has been around for a while, yelled, “Debbie Hamlyn, I like your shades!”

Ahh, the sun was shining, police were stationed in front of City Hall. They looked, variously, bored, attentive, mean and bemused. They did a good job of directing traffic, and the march was as orderly as could be. I had to smile when a guy walked out of City Hall, saw the marchers, and did an amused double-take and said, “That must be why they have all those cops there.”

So with that little slap in the face, back to reality, here are some of the recent developments to note:

-- Land use plan: What the City Council will vote upon Tuesday (Oct. 31) is a land use plan, which generally sets the stage for what will be built where. However, land use plans often are modified depending on what specific projects are brought forth, and while there may be a big public display pro and con, for various reasons -- including that everyone knows the vote is 5-3, or maybe 6-2, in favor -- the action now has shifted to the implementation.

-- REIT: The vehicle for implementation, a REIT essentially is a corporation that owns property and pays a rate of return to investors. The rules can be arcane; in this case, potential investors are receiving letters inviting them to join. Here’s a sample letter. [link]

-- TIRZ: Another part of the implementation, the TIRZ is a district that sets a baseline for property values, and if those values rise, the taxes collected in the increased value -- known as the “increment” -- are set aside for use within that district, as opposed to going into the city’s general fund. It’s much simpler than it sounds, and if you’re confused go back and read that sentence a few times.

The TIRZ also defines the area within it as “blighted,” so it makes it easier to use eminent domain; without the TIRZ, each property or group of properties required for a given project would have to be declared blighted individually, creating a longer eminent domain process and possibly making projects nearly impossible to develop. The city is required to work with other taxing entities in creating the TIRZ, which the city is trying to do before Dec. 31, so the baseline property values within the proposed TIRZ boundaries are set at 2006 figures. Here are the letters being sent to other taxing entities. [link]

So I’m going out on a limb, stating that the plan will pass City Council Tuesday (Oct. 31), and looking forward now to the discussions that will ensue over the legal issues associated with implementation, and also the specific project proposals as they come in. As always, I’m hopeful that the projects will deal sensitively with what exists currently, finding the value in what Downtown is, and patching the spaces where activity is limited, stitching the whole together into a more economically and culturally vibrant city core.

I’ll be interested to see whether someone comes out of left field with their own plan, and whether smaller players will be given a chance to add their value to the whole.

We certainly do live in interesting times for El Paso.

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Photographs by Vanessa Monsisvais.

Sito Negron can be reached at sito@newspapertree.com.