Photograph by Bruce Berman
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"For Whose Benefit?"
— Interview with Pete Duarte, former CEO of Thomason Hospital and former Executive Director of Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe.
by David Dorado Romo
I'VE LIVED THROUGH numerous downtown development plans. They've always engendered a lot of discourse because the newspapers immediately get all excited about these plans without taking into consideration the people that will be directly affected. Although only a small number of people actually read the local newspapers, many of them form their opinions from these papers without knowing what is really going on in the community. That's the tragedy of what is happening in El Paso. Yet this is the first time that there have been several groups from South El Paso saying “Wait a minute, the people from South El Paso need to be included from the beginning in whatever plans are going to be developed.” Some of us were involved in in the civil rights movement that had an adherence to the idea of self-determination, the right of the people from South El Paso to determine their own destiny.
If I was running a social service agency in South El Paso today the last thing I would do is to try to use the people that I was serving to further the Paso Del Norte plan. When I was the director at Thomason Hospital, the bankers, the financial people, the lawyers and the downtown movers and shakers would invite me to go play golf. I would tell them I'm not a golfer and they would tell me, “That's where we do a lot of our business—on the golf course.” I said, “I don't conduct my business that way.” As a public servant, I'm not going to support something that harms the people. Even the loss of one individual affects us all. Yet with this group of 350 people from Paso Del Norte who put this plan together, that's not the case. With them, whatever affects the little guy doesn't matter. What matters is the big picture. They claim they made this plan because they know what's best for the people. It's very paternalistic.
We're expected to accept at face value that these 350 individuals from the Paso Del Norte Group have our best interest at heart. I'm sure these business people have read Stephen Covey's, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and his advice, “Seek to understand before you can be understood.” Yet they are not trying to understand. They are muscling it. And what we get is those who are trying to be involved in this issue are suddenly “opponents of progress.” There's too much finger pointing. This makes others in the community afraid to express their true views on this issue. Some people have been so marginalized and so beat down that their self image is so poor that if you ask them a question they're going to give you the answer they think you want hear. They are afraid to level with you.
This plan only serves to divides us. The sad thing about this is that our politicians are more concerned about saving arroyos than they are about saving people's lives, livelihoods and their way of life. We have tremendous problems in this community and they haven't gone away and they haven't gotten better in the last 30 years. Take a look at conditions in the colonias where people still live without running water and without paved streets. If you really want to go after some horrible housing situation, go after the colonias. That's so much less expensive and you could improve the quality of life for 70,000 to 80,000 El Pasoans not just 16,000. And you would do it without displacement.
Suddenly the financial elite behind the [Paso Del Norte] plan say they are concerned about South El Paso . One of them cleared the top of the Franklin Mountains to build himself a 14-million-dollar home there. Why don't these financially successful people leave their wills to some of the nonprofit agencies in South El Paso for the socioeconomic improvement of this community? That would be the most humane and neighborly thing we can do for our fellow human beings.
I'M CURRENTLY WORKING on a committee with the City for the reemployment of displaced workers. That committee has asked for information on the PDNG plan for a year so that our own services would not be at odds with the downtown plan. Yet we were told each time that this information was private, privileged and confidential. Our tax dollars paid for this plan yet the information was withheld from a public committee that needed this information to effectively work for the people.
This plan has supplanted other efforts. I've also been been working with the Mujer Obrera for over a year. We proposed an economic development plan called Plan Mayachen that is probably no longer viable because of the downtown plan. We had a hard time finding funding from the City to put this plan together, yet when Paso Del Norte came to the City and asked for money for their plan they didn't have to go through all the hoops that we had to in trying to get money from the City. I appears that unless you have sufficient economic clout with the City, it is going to be harder for you to get support.
It comes back to the question of transparency in government. Nobody is asking where is the transparency in this plan. We don't know the nuts and bolts of this plan. Nobody has told us who are the business owners who will benefit from it. We don't know whether any of these jobs they say they will bring will pay living wages or just be dishwasher jobs, security jobs, maintenance and janitorial jobs. I've heard that the one Paso Del Norte member whose agency is located in South El Paso is asking for these new jobs to assure eight dollars an hour. Yet eight dollars is still below the poverty level guidelines. If all you're doing is giving people another low-paying job, you're not even bringing remedial attention to the problems of unemployment, underemployment and poverty. The Paso Del Norte plan doesn't address any of that.
The thing that is most difficult for me to accept about this plan is that our elected officials want everyone to buy into it without asking any questions. That's a slap in the face. They're telling you that your voice does not count. Shut up and get out of the way so that progress can be made.
But progress at what cost? For whose benefit?
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