|
News Article
|
Juárez razes downtown buildings
Controversial plan to revitalize city’s center
By David Crowder
For about four years, the Juárez city government has been acquiring and demolishing properties in the seedy Mariscal district, known for its nightlife, restaurants, clubs and red-light activities.
The area once called Boy’s Town looks as though it has been hit by a slow-moving earthquake, where buildings are continually coming down and empty lots are left once the rubble is cleared away.
Looking over it is the haunting face of a battered pharaoh – all that’s left of Avenida Mariscal’s Las Vegas Club. It, too, will probably be gone soon.
What has hit downtown Juárez is a little understood city and state plan called La Recupacion del Centro Historico, or the Recovery of the Historic Center.
These are difficult times in Juárez. For some, the demolition in downtown is almost too much to bear, especially when combined with the impact of a bloody cartel war, a crippling recession, heightened bridge security that deterred many visitors and new passport requirements.
But others see a new Juárez rising from the rubble.
“Even before the security issue, Juárez wanted to change its downtown,” said El Paso businessman Tanny Berg, a close friend of Juárez’s mayor, Jose Reyes Ferriz.
“If they were ever going to do it, now is probably the best time. If downtown Juárez was hot, they wouldn’t want to,” Berg said.
Historic value
That might explain why there’s been little opposition to the Juárez plan from property owners or others, Berg said, in contrast to protests against the Paso del Norte Group’s plan for El Paso’s downtown.
But there has been bitter, albeit quiet, criticism of the city’s actions in the Mariscal district from some quarters, including the non-profit Plan Estratégico de Juárez and its director, Lucinda Vargas.
“The buildings the city is tearing down have historical value and some need to be designated in an historic district,” said Vargas, who left her position as an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank branch in El Paso to join Plan Estratégico in 2002.
“The citizens of Juárez wanted to see a vital downtown district, but they wanted it to make sense and to be done in coordination with the local, federal and state governments,” she said. “What is happening is just the opposite. Buildings are being demolished without recognition of their worth. There is no master plan, behind it, apparently, and there has been no explanation.”
In 2004, Vargas’s group unveiled plans for the city that were developed after interviews with 14,000 Juárez residents, including government officials, business leaders, academics, business owners, workers and the poor.
Among other things, it called for a more transparent local and state government in which major decisions are made in the open after public participation and input.
Out of favor
But the organization that had the Chihuahua state governor and Juárez mayor among its members and public supporters, has fallen out of favor with City Hall over its criticism of the city’s secrecy, Vargas said.
Juárez architect and college professor Francisco Ochoa said he and others were interested the preservation of the city’s historic downtown.
“We’re working on preserving it, and they’re demolishing history with no evaluation of historic sites or clear understanding of what they’re doing” Ochoa said. “Everything is unfinished and unknown, and I don’t know the real idea behind any of it.”
Juárez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz brushed aside the criticism, insisting that answers about the downtown recovery plan have been available for the asking, though his office could not provide maps or conceptual drawings to show what the plan entails.
“It was widely publicized,” he told El Paso Inc. “We didn’t start it. It was started by the previous administration, and nothing historical has been destroyed.”
He told said there have been no expropriations or uses of eminent domain in acquiring an estimated 90 properties so far, with 30 left to go.
Reyes said the budget for acquisition and demolition is about 300 million pesos, or about $23.7 million.
The planned improvements and renovations will be financed by the state and should cost about 120 million pesos, or $9.48 million, he said.
With the exception of a 16,000-square-foot area owned by the city of Juárez near the Stanton Street Bridge that will be reserved for commercial use, everything else will be public, Reyes said.
“It’s a park, a living space, a public place,” he said. “There’s nothing planned for private use.”
It will include a 5,000-seat renovated arena, to be named El Gimnasio Municipal, he said.
He said there is no scheduled completion date for the property acquisitions and demolitions or a start date for the recovery and construction portion of the project.
But the commercial area by the bridge, to be called Plaza Santa Fe, is moving along.
“We hope to get it through City Council in the next month or month and a half, and it should be ready by early 2011,” Reyes said.
Vargas was, in a word, startled by Reyes’s openness about a plan that she said many in Juárez have been trying to learn about since it began.
“We weren’t aware of any of that,” she said on hearing what Reyes said. “We have approached the state authorities, too, and they have never said bluntly that they don’t want to show us anything. They say, ‘We’ll be providing that information at a later date,’ but when you come back, they just say it’s not ready.”
July elections
But there is reason for Reyes to hurry, she said, noting that municipal elections are in July and that the PRI, PAN and other parties will be selecting their candidates for mayor and additional offices in the very near future. The next Juárez mayor will take office in October.
Carlos Murguia, the cousin of the previous Juárez mayor, Hector Murguia, and owner of the Barrigas restaurants in Juárez and El Paso, agreed the city has not been forthcoming about the details of the downtown recovery plan.
A member of El Paso’s Paso Del Norte Group, Murguia said there have been discussions of linking the plans for the two downtowns. But first, the integrity of the Juárez recovery plan must be ensured through the construction.
“We want to create a master plan for downtown Juárez so that it gives certainty to people who invest in it,” he said. “We don’t want anybody else to be coming in, for instance, any new mayor that wants to sell the properties or do something in a more personal project. We want to do something in the long term.”
The plan, he said, should be developed in consensus with the people of Juárez.
“There’s a plan that’s going to be shown to us,” he said. “It’s not a master plan yet.”
Juárez REIT
His description of the state’s recovery plan seemed different from Reyes.
“We want to have a master plan of the historic properties and to build around them with a trust, with a commission or committee that can decide where this is going to go, not for the next three years, for the next 20,” he said, referring to the creation of a real estate investment trust similar to Borderplex Community Trust operating in Downtown El Paso.
On Wednesday, Murguia said, he and a group of business people will meet privately with Chihuahua Gov. Jose Reyes Baeza to discuss the downtown plan.
“He is going to show us exactly the plan, and exactly what they’re going to do,” he said. “And then we want to decide exactly how we can build that trust so that it can go with certainty to whoever’s going to invest.”
Asked if Mayor Reyes and other city officials will be in on the meeting with Baeza, Murguia said, “The governor is the one that invited us, and I know, for sure, the governor is going to be there and the private sector. And maybe after that we will meet with the city.”
Reyes didn’t seem to know about that meeting, and noted that the governor is spending much more time in Juárez now.
“Usually when the governor comes in, there’s a joint agenda, but with him being here three days a week now, I can’t be on his agenda all the time,” Reyes said.
David Crowder may be reached at (915) 630-6622 or at david_crowder@sbcglobal.net
|
| READER RESPONSE |
|
|
|
| Lisa Degliantoni - posted: 3/12/2010 1:11:49 PM
Listen to David Crowder discuss this article and more today on the Lisa D Show, KHRO 1150 AM, 1-2 p.m. | | Roberto Camp - posted: 3/10/2010 9:33:34 AM
Congratulations to David Crowder for an excellent article. Downtown Juárez has been devastated by these actions, which have included the leveling of the central traffic police and fine office.
In addition, the Downtown fire station immediately adjacent to the Paso del Norte Bridge, and which was used for the annual Shriners Childrens Hospital visits, was demolished.
Over three thousand jobs have been lost in the process.
Only South El Paso Street property owners like Tanny Berg would find a silver lining in all this.
Roberto Camp
Ciudad Juárez
| |
|
|