Commissioners Court - Regular Meeting

Hola, El Paso! April was a busy month here in the county. From honoring our veterans to beautifying our parks, we tell you what is happening in this month's County Connects. Every day is Veterans Day in El Paso County, and several communities celebrated our heroes in April. First, we celebrated the completion of the Fabens Veterans Memorial at Fabens Veterans Park. The celebration featured a Veterans Resource Fair, a flag-raising ceremony, and a memorial ribbon-cutting ceremony. The Fabens Veterans Memorial honors all six branches of the United States Armed Forces, the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. and stands as a lasting tribute to the service and sacrifice of those who have defended our nation. This project reflects El Paso County's continued commitment to honoring veterans and was identified as a key initiative in the County's Parks and Recreation Master Plan. Thank you to our veterans. Just down the road at Coyote Park in Tornillo, the Local Neighborhood Association, Tornillo Independent School District, and Tornillo Alumni Association held an unveiling ceremony of the Tornillo Veterans Memorial. The memorial features six metal cubes representing each branch of the United States Armed Forces. Each cube displays the branch's emblem and includes a nearby plaque listing Tornillo area veterans who served. The site will also include a Tornillo Veterans Memorial Dedication Monument. This community-driven project, requested by the Tornillo Neighborhood Association and presented by the County's Planning and Development Department, was approved by Commissioner's Court in March 2025 and funded through the El Paso County Neighborhood Improvement Grant. Our voter approved bond projects moved forward in Precinct 1. Montana Vista residents attended the first community meeting for the Ruben Estrella Park improvements. The public was encouraged to offer their suggestions, opinions, and questions throughout the course of the meeting. Residents had an opportunity to share feedback on design concepts and amenities like picnic shelters, restrooms, and lighting. The Estrella Park project is one of 19 park projects approved by the voters through the 2024 Capital Improvement Bond. A popular Eastside park is looking a lot shadier thanks to volunteers who came and planted trees at the El Paso County Sports Park. These trees were part of a total of 155 trees planted across the various parts of the county. These were made possible through a $20,000 community forestry grant that was awarded to the county by Texas A&M Forest Service. This project allows El Paso County to invest in tree planting efforts that improve air quality, provide shade, reduce urban heat, and support healthier neighborhoods. That does it for this month's County Connects. Until next time, make sure to stay connected with El Paso County.

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Welcome to the El Paso County Domestic Relations Office, where we're dedicated to helping families navigate the complexities of family law with empathy, clarity, and a commitment to excellence. As an integral part of the El Paso County civil court system, we strive to provide support during challenging times. We are dedicated to supporting parents, guardians, and children in navigating complex issues such as custody, visitation, child support, and beyond. Whether you are recently divorced, in the midst of a custody dispute, or facing challenges with child support, we stand ready to offer compassionate guidance and unwavering support. Our mission is to assist children and families during what can be one of the most challenging times in their lives, ensuring they have the resources and assistance they need to move forward confidently. We provide services, both in person and virtually, collaborating closely with judges, attorneys, and service providers to address each family's unique needs. Our child support enforcement unit plays a vital role in ensuring that children receive the financial support necessary for their well-being. When a court orders child support, it represents not just a figure, but a commitment to a child's future. This unit consists of a team of attorneys, enforcement officers, financial specialists, legal engagement officers, paralegals, and administrative staff who assist with the collection and enforcement of child support and medical support. Domestic Relations Office attorneys decide what enforcement remedies will be used based on the particular facts of the case. We help enforce court orders by monitoring payments and maintaining accurate records, working with parents who have fallen behind, helping them understand their obligations and options, filing enforcement actions with the court when necessary, and helping parents modify orders if their financial situation changes significantly, because we know life happens and fairness matters. We know that every family's situation is different. That's why our staff works with compassion, confidentiality, and professionalism, helping both custodial and non-custodial parents understand the process, meet their obligations, and keep the focus where it belongs, on the children. Another one of our core responsibilities is through our Family Court Service Unit, where we support the courts in making informed, child-centered decisions in custody and visitation cases. In contested custody matters, when parents can't agree on who should care for the child, judges often rely on our skilled professionals to provide objective and detailed assessments. Family court services social workers, or guardian adult items, are appointed by judges to conduct thorough investigations and provide reports to the court based on the interests of the children involved. Either party may request the appointment of a guardian adult item for their case. In addition, Family Court Services staff are appointed on some adoption cases to conduct evaluations. Our cooperative parenting program provides co-parenting classes which focus on the needs of children and parents in the aftermath of separation or divorce. Topics include parent, children, and the involvement in the court, positive co-parenting practices, Impact of Divorce and Separation on Child Development, Communication, Conflict Resolution, and Anger Management. Classes are offered both in person and virtually and are open to everyone. No court order needed. Co-parents take the classes separately to ensure participants are comfortable discussing the topics. Individuals may register for classes by either visiting the Domestic Relations Office website or by calling the office at 915-273-3533 or by picking up the form inside our office. Class schedules can also be found on the website. Once the registration is received, the individual will be contacted by the program facilitator to discuss attendance and answer questions via email or phone. Class schedules can also be found on the website. Once the registration is received, the individual will be contacted by the program facilitator. Our office is dedicated to providing essential legal assistance tailored to family law issues. We empower parents to effectively enforce and modify access and possession time with their children, ensuring that their rights are upheld. For those seeking to formalize agreements, we facilitate parenting negotiation conferences that transform your arrangements into legally binding court orders.

Live from El Paso County, Texas, the Veterans Capital of the USA. From inside the Alicia Chacon Commissioner's Courtroom of the Enrique Moreno County Courthouse, you are watching the El Paso County Commissioner's Court Meeting.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Today is Thursday, May 21st, 2026. Commissioner's Court is meeting in special open session. Today we are joined by ASL interpreters Tamara Marquez and James Garcia. Would you please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance?

Regents to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty just as strong.

Judge, would you like to make opening remarks before we begin with the agenda?

Thank you. Well, welcome. Thank you for being here at Commissioner's Court on behalf of myself and your commissioners. We welcome you and looking forward to some great topics. As you saw, we're It's going to be a full day, but we thank you for being here. We're always excited about the special session because it gives people an opportunity. We want you to be concise, obviously, but also gives you an opportunity to expand a little bit more than our Monday meetings. And so we're very happy to have all of you here, and we welcome your comments and your thoughts. So have a great day and an amazing, well, I could say almost a weekend. So enjoy. Thank you. Go ahead, Jessica.

Item number three is public comment. We do not have any speaker sign up for public comment. We'll take no action for item three. Item four from the regular agenda for a pursuant to the Texas local government code section 115.021 audit and settle all accounts against the county shown on the attached listing and direct the payment of those accounts.

Welcome, Barbara.

Good morning, Judge, Commissioners, Barbara Parker, County Auditor. This is our normal paid claims item since we don't have a meeting on Monday, and we recommend approval.

Thank you.

We have a motion by Judge Samaniego to approve. Second by Commissioner O'Geen. The voting is open.

I vote aye.

Thank you, Commissioner Coronado.

I apologize. We have Commissioner Coronado online, so welcome, Commissioner. Thank you morning everybody.

Thank you Commissioner Stout. Motion carries. Thank you. Item 4B approve and authorize the waiver of entrance fees to the famous Veterans Park pool on Saturday, May 30th, 2026 from 12 PM to 2 PM pursuant to Texas local government code section 316.004 Commissioner

Thank you, Judge. Court, this is our annual end of school year Fabens pool party where we like to open the Fabens pool for all of the area students for a two-hour period. So I'm requesting if we can once again waive the entrance fee. The entrance fee currently to the Fabens pool is $2 per person. We expect about 100, 150, no more than 200 children. Even if it's the 200, that would mean about $400 in revenue to the Favens pool that we would not be receiving. This is an annual event that we host in collaboration with many of the other elected officials in the area. Representative Mary Gonzalez always participates, Constable Javier Garcia, and, of course, Sheriff Oscar Ugarte and the Sheriff's Office.

Can they go by the memorial as they're coming into the pool?

Oh, yes, you can definitely see the memorial. You can see the memorial from the highway. You can see it from the pool. Yes, it's beautiful.

Hopefully, if you have a chance to see the Veterans Memorial at Fabens, thanks to a big drive from Commissioner O'Gean, but it's just pretty amazing. Yeah, no, it's beautiful. Beautiful. Great idea.

So that's what we're requesting today is the waiver of the pool entrance fee for that two-hour period, and this would be on Saturday, May 30th.

we have a maker yes we'll have a motion to approve by commissioner olguin second by judge samaniego the voting is open i vote aye thank you commissioner coronado motion carries thank you everyone thank you commissioner Item 4C, pursuant to Strategic Plan 2026 through 2031, Goal 5, Cultivate Strategic Partnerships and Community Connections, Action 2, Strategic Planning Roundtable with Partners, Concept Plan Direction and County Actions, receive a presentation from Emergency Service District Number 2 and the El Paso Downtown Management District.

Good morning, Judge. Welcome, Ramon. Welcome. Good morning, Judge, Commissioners. Ramon Bracamontes from County Administration. Today we are continuing with our series of conversations with our strategic partners. You've heard from several in the past in January, February, and March, and today you are hearing from two more. With us are Joe Goodenrath from the Executive Director of the Downtown Management District and Chief Esparza from ESD No. 2. Chief Esparza is going to go first.

Good morning, Chief. Welcome. Good morning, Judge and Commissioners. Thank you for having us this morning. It started, started, got my notes right here. Again, thank you for having us. I am accompanied by Cynthia Ray and Commissioner Santana that are here also to support our initiative that we're having. As you can see on our second page, our mission and our vision mission values One team, one goal. One team working towards the same goal mission, working together to save lives and property in our communities through a well-equipped emergency response and training while being fiscally responsible. Our values, safety, service, integrity, accountability, compassion, teamwork, equity, and continuous improvements. The El Paso County Emergency Services District Number 2 Strategic Plan is a community-driven five-year map that guides our organization's growth and defines our mission, our vision, our core values, while providing a framework to identify key issues and developing actionable strategies to improve our public safety. Our fire and emergency services strategic plan three to five years. The purpose to provide a roadmap to deliver the safe, reliable, and equitable fire and emergency services that protect the life, the property, and the environment. Our strategic priorities, operations, and readiness. The community risk reduction, the workforce training, health, safety, wellness, technology, data, Our facilities, apparatus, finance, sustainability, partnerships and governance. And our guides to this is of course the NFPA standards. Our acknowledgements, El Paso County ESD number two protects roughly 117,000 citizens throughout the county. Currently covers about 658 square miles of El Paso County. the Northwest Anthony, Canutillo, and Vinton, East Montana, and the surrounding desert area to include Hueco, Tangs, and Red Sands, the Lower Valley, Socorro, San Sergio, Clint, Babins, and Tornillo. Of course, commissioners, as you see the population here, I've added about 40% increase since there is a data that says that 40% of the public does not answer those surveys because they either don't want to answer them or they're afraid of repercussions because they might be some immigrants. So 40%, I think this is a more of a realistic number that we have to look at. Our SWATA analysis, our strengths, personal expertise and certification organizational commitment from our command level, our weaknesses, our volunteers have a limited specific window of availability for training and response, and there is a shortage of our career firefighters. Our opportunities grow stronger with ESD2 and build a career and save lives and provide a training to all volunteers via ESD2 Training Academy And you'll see that in our next slide, commissioners. We have been part of our strategic plan is to train our volunteers to the national standard. And we have been accomplishing that. And we will have a graduating class here coming up. Our threads, hydrant inspections, 24-hour shifts, and more career firefighters, and revolving aging fleet. Commissioners, we've had this discussion over and over. Hydrants, as you can see, there's more and more water main breaks happening everywhere else. And we need to really take accountability for how we can address those issues. Strength, strength staff, strong command staff, strong committed ESD2 board, county and committee support, and fiscally responsible ESD. So our weaknesses, our staff and personnel, as you see in 2019, we had 252 volunteers and you see that it dwindled down to 148 173 we're at 217 right now we're trying to get most of them trained career firefighters we start at 12. we hope to be at 38 to 48 by 2026 instead of the 28 that we're showing deputy fire marshals we have seven opportunities to grow stronger with el paso county you see number two Working together and save lives and property in the communities through well-equipped emergency response. Again, our training academy, as you can see here, all our volunteers are being trained to the highest level. You can see that 2023 graduated nine, 2024, four. And this year, 2026, that number actually changed. I believe it's 24. And then we also, once they graduate, we do have stipend incentives for all our volunteers. We're trying to incentivize for them to be there more often. But of course our family lives get in the middle of everything, right? And we're trying to make sure that they don't have to give their family time for just to be there at the station. We do offer different pension health, which you all contribute to the pension. And then our career firefighters are under the TCDRS plan and health insurance that we offer as the district. Our threats, again, hydrant inspections, lack of functional hydrants leaves the community vulnerable to fire. Firefighters may have to shelter water for miles away. And one of the things that we are running into, Commissioners, in Fabens, we have a lot of development up north by the park that's up there a lot of people want to go up there a lot of solar farms where they're they're kind of trying to figure out how to get water up there and this is one of the initiatives that we need to push that you know that's how infrastructure happens they want to build out there they need to get the infrastructure out there and there a lot of people are in the belief that the county has to put that bill and that's not the way it works uh career firefighters a 24-hour rotation station live, they live at the station, full 24-hour shifts divided into A, B, and C shifts. Shifts are rotated to ensure 24-7 coverage. As the call volume increases, the volunteers are being tasked with additional time to having to decide between family and responding Career firefighters will always alleviate the response at times and allow our volunteers to have more time at home with their families. That's our goal. We want to make sure that we have a balance of our volunteers because I think that's what the young generation is having. They have to pick whether it's their family or volunteering. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot that would rather stay at the station, but then there's always those people that, you know, it has to be a happy balance. Our Indian fleet, as you see, every year we try to replace vehicles. One of the things that we are all running into is vehicles have doubled in price. We used to buy a fire truck for $560,000. Now they're $1.1 million. And those are things that no matter what we do, they're aging in there. Whether we use them, whether we don't use them, the water in them is corroding the insides of them. That's why 20-year expectancy is on them. um and we need to start replacing as we go and we have been but i just want to make sure that we see that the aging fleet is one of those issues that we will continue to have goals and objectives the short term goal objective one will be to get the socorro station two in service and that will happen uh we should be going into construction here pretty quick it should be going out to bid Our long-term goals is a two to five year plan is that we need to build another third station in the Montana Vista area and possibly also in the adding an aerial truck to all those, the Clint area for all those warehouses that we're getting built out there. Financial projections, equipment standards, fleet investment, maintain a minimum of a million dollars per station dedicated to essential equipment, maintenance. And that's a difficult one because We can have a million dollars per station, right? We have 12 stations. It's possible to have a million dollars. But realistically, right now, with the cost of equipment, that would be the ideal money that we should be having ready to go. But it's not something you can do. Tax base expansion, residential growth. The tax base is bolstered by new neighborhoods of division, including Horizon Park, Cotton Cove, Florida El Bosque. Commercial growth has also significant revenue increase to project from new businesses development, specifically within warehouse sector in the Pan American Speedway. So those are the things that we need to look at. It's right now, those are just projections that we are gonna be looking at, but we don't know if with this economy, those companies or those warehouses will be going up and running. Proposed staffing. This shows 10. We're actually looking to put 20 new firefighters, full-time firefighters, which will be $1.3 million to put all 20 of them. And this will give the ESD number two 24-7 coverage throughout El Paso County. We need to build a new station in Fabens with a possible hazmat team. Of course, we've seen that the The port of entry in Tornillo has gained a lot of traction. I've gotten a lot of calls from a lot of companies wanting to know if we have fire stations there and hazmat teams. So those are one of the things that we are actually looking into to be able to develop a station there and possibly get a hazmat team going so we can drive those businesses that come into the Tornillo port of entry area. The other thing that I keep saying, the Pan American Speedway, there is an investor that is seeking to build a Formula One type of speedway park up there by Cattleman's. Don't know if it's going to happen, but he's been actively seeking that. The airport in Fabens, as it grows, we also want to drive that airport. I know that I've got several phone calls from Several of you trying to see if we can support more airplanes in there. So that would possibly require an ARF truck. And medical and fire support for the racetrack, maintain staff fire rescue vehicles on site, at least two EMTs, extrication equipment, and fire suppression capabilities if that racetrack ever comes to fruition. Thank you, commissioners. Any questions?

I have a few. Thank you, Chief.

Good morning.

Good morning. So I have just a couple of questions. This was very helpful. I want to talk a little bit about the water infrastructure issues that you briefly went over. And I think that It's surprising for people to hear that there are areas in El Paso County that do not have access to any running water, which means that if a fire occurs in these areas, our only response is to be able to truck water in, which means our ability to fight fires is limited, especially if they're large fires. There was recently a house fire in Montana Vista off of Tangerine Avenue, a family that lost their home. They had been living in for nearly 30 years without any access to water and not a fire hydrant within reach of their home. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges that our responders face when that happens? This home ended up being a total loss. Luckily the family wasn't home but they did lose pets in that home and now having to rebuild from scratch and so I know that they were upset that there wasn't a quicker response to their home. Can you talk a little bit about what that response was like?

Oh absolutely. So what we're trying to do with all these is have absolutely the quickest response we can to all these house fires, right? But one of the things that we run into is when there's a structure fire that's fully engulfed in that area, mobile homes will be on the ground within seven minutes. It typically takes us seven minutes to get from the fire station to any of the calls within the surrounding area. Perfect example, the one in Tangerine, right? There's no hydrants in that area or serviceable hydrants nearby, so we have to truck water. Our fire trucks carry 1,000 gallons of water. If we can't put that fire up with 1,000 gallons of water, there's other trucks coming with 2,000 gallons of water. But then once they dump that water, they have to leave that area, go pick up another 2,000 gallons of water and come back. It's the shuttle system. So we have to continuously do that circles. And unfortunately, a lot of people don't realize that that's what has to happen. And hydrants is the only way to make this work better for the community.

So in that situation, just out of curiosity, when our station got the call about that house fire, did we already know there's no fire hydrants there? Or was it until we were on the ground in front that we knew that there was no fire hydrants there? I guess what I'm asking is, when we're responding to something, do we know? Do we have any way to know if there's fire hydrants?

So a lot of the times the responding station already should know that there's no hydrants in that area. However, that's why we're trying to add paid staff because when it's a volunteer department, you're at the mercy of whoever's picking up the first truck and then the next individuals go pick up the trucks. If we have the full-time paid staff, the different trucks would already be rolling to those areas to ensure that we get the water there even faster.

It could be that it wasn't until the first truck arrived that they realized there's no fire hydrant to plug into. Correct. Thank you. The other question I have is about these battery storage facilities. I'm aware of at least one that's coming that's interested in locating in the county and precinct one. This is lithium iron battery storage facilities. And can you talk a little bit about how your conversations are going with them and what the ESD, what your questions are?

So my questions are, and of course I would like for all of you to take the time to look at the surprise Arizona surprise fire, which caught a lot of firefighters off guard when these batteries are installed without us knowing, right? And how it was detrimental to that fire department. Now they're taking a lot of safety steps to ensure that they have those protections. However, this is one of the conversations that I've had with one of them. They're kind of upset that I'm making them add hydrants. Because, you know, it's going to take a lot of water, but it's electrical. But at the end of the day, once we cut all that power, we still got to put that fire out. We're not going to let it just burn there for days and days and days, right? So their concern is that there's no infrastructure there. And my reply to them is that's how infrastructure gets there. You want to build there, you bring the water to where you need to be.

Do you have that authority to require them to put water infrastructure?

If they want to build, yes. They have to add the water to where it has to be or a reliable source of water for us as the fire department to be able to extinguish their fire.

So they could put a huge tank of water on their property?

It would have to be designed by a fire protection company to say this is the amount of water you would need to build this or put a well.

Uh-huh. So do they have to apply for a permit?

Yes, ma'am.

To your office?

Yes, ma'am.

Okay. Would you notify us when you get those applications?

Yes. Okay. I think we have two or three already.

Okay.

But it's in the beginning stages, and they're all for El Paso Electric.

Ah, interesting. Okay. Electric. Yeah, if you could just if there's a way that you could just notify us so we know if it's coming to one of our precincts because one of my concerns is there the one that I know of would be cited near. Residential communities. And so I don't know if there's a I know that there's not a like required buffer.

I don't think so on that one. I think there was talks they came to talk to us about it, but I don't think it has come to fruition on that because they were trying to figure out. if it's capable of being there. But I know for sure that there's several in the Fabens area. But way up on top where there's nobody there.

But we will adjourn. Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner McGee.

Thank you, Judge. I'm glad to hear, Chief, that you are making sure that they are installing all of the necessary infrastructure with all of these new facilities. So thank you for that. We appreciate that. The more infrastructure you can force them to install, obviously the better for everybody.

It's hard. They will try to strong-arm us into saying, yes, we can do it, but We're not at that point to say yes or no. If they want to build out there, that's part of what they have to do.

Yes, thank you for that. And then I just had a question. I know that there was an issue with, or there were some questions regarding the ISO rating, but I just wanted to confirm with you from my understanding that issue's been resolved?

Everything was submitted. I got an email from them. There's no changes to it as of right now. One of the things that they want to look at is in the past, before I got involved with this, the ISO rating was divided between the county and the municipalities. They'll have their own. There was sections of the county that were already a 10. So all they're trying to determine is if it's better to equalize all of them and say instead of the areas that were 10s will now be 4s, 5s, which is a better rating because they'll equalize the unincorporated areas of the county.

Okay.

But other than that, there's no other changes right now.

Great.

Thank you.

That's good to hear. Just a clarifying question on that. So the ratings that we got many years ago are still the ones that are in place. That's what you mean, that they haven't changed?

They have not changed.

Okay. Okay.

Thank you. Betsy, any on the insurance side of it? You had sent us an email. You want to address that, please?

Right. Yes, sir. So why the public cares about the ISO rating and why we care about the ISO rating is it impacts homeowner insurance. The ESD having an ISO rating of one helps to provide lower cost of insurance. The state then uses it as a rating mechanism, I think, with insurance companies. I don't know exactly how it works, but that is a driver of what the insurance rate is that individuals pay. So hearing that they may equalize and lower some that is an interesting analysis and I would be curious to see what they find because if you raise some and lower some, it may result in overall lower rates for a larger number of people. It'd be interesting to see what they're coming out with. And the Chief does keep us updated whenever there is an update. I shared that with you all recently. And then the Chief also forwarded me the full email, and the State Department of Insurance was copied on that email. So they're aware that it's still, by the company that does the rating, it's still no changes. He's received everything that we've submitted, and no changes at this time, as the Chief reported.

Thank you. Any other questions? If not, thank you for what you do, Chief. Thank you. Will you be staying for the next presentation? Sure. Thank you.

Oh, I have one more question. I'm sorry, Chief. That's all right. It just came to me. Sorry, Chief. Sure, sure. So the ESD was a really critical partner in responding and being present at Red Sands last year during the Fourth of July.

Yes, ma'am.

Are there plans for you all to do that again?

We're having a meeting with the Sheriff's Department to see what the plan will be for that.

Okay.

And I think it's coming up here pretty soon, but we're always looking to better that area. I do have some concerns for our staff there, and I'm going to address those with everybody, but we will make sure that the public is protected.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chief. Judge? Judge?

Commissioner Coronado. Coronado. Commissioner Coronado.

Commissioner Coronado, please.

Yes, thank you, Judge. Betsy, we had, I know the chief and I had discussed last year regarding our hydrant issue and where some of those hydrants are not actually operable for our ESD to go in and use them. Have we, and I know we asked for a report for those that are maintained or that we might be responsible for or we pass off that responsibility to somebody else, either EP Water or whoever, to see what the status of how many of those we have and I know this has been an issue that we've been addressing because of those fires that even when you know, sometimes they don't know whether there's even fire hydrants there. When there are fire hydrants, we don't know whether they're going to be operable or not. So have we, do we have, what's the status of that report?

Yes, sir. We provided it to the court back in September. I can refresh it, sir, and bring it up to you and to the court again. We did do a review of those. The majority of them are on another system. The majority are not county owned or operated. So, it would be up to those systems are statutorily required to maintain them or if it's impossible or there's not sufficient water supply, the volume of water, they get tested and the volume of water that has to be available to come out of that is so many thousands of gallons per second. And if it's not available, they have to mark them that it's not available. so that when a unit responds or a department responds, they know that the hydrant is non-operable and they'll have to do similar to what the chief was talking about in the other situation. They have to go to either the next closest hydrant to refill or to a station to refill.

Yeah, but we know that in some of those instances, those hydrants were not marked and they still did not have the water pressure. I think we need to work with our legislative delegation to see how we can make sure that you know, if there are hydrants out there, that they have to be made operable. And, you know, if it's an issue of funding, we know that the state has now made it a priority. I just saw recently that, you know, that probably to redo our water infrastructure, that's just to redo, and the state's going to cost somewhere between 170 to $200 billion for that. but at least we can get started with the 2 billion that has been allotted. I think we should get with our delegation to see about what we can do in terms of the, give either authority or put some more requirements on whoever's maintaining those, that they have to be, you know, we've gone over this issue that One, there is no funds, the ESD has no funds to make sure that they test these hydrants yearly to make sure that they're operable.

Yes sir, and this is governed and the oversight comes from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. And there is a lack of us having jurisdictional authority over these other water systems. So I definitely think there is some possible opportunities there. I'll make sure that Elisa and our team brings those back when we come back on June 8th with our legislative agenda.

Right, and as far as the report with just the ones that we maintain, can we separate that out to give it to all of us in the court?

Yes, sir.

Thank you. Commissioner, just if I may. One of the things that we've implemented also as part of this whole hydrant issue is that all our career staff is actually going out there and physically touching every hydrant, ensuring that it flows water. Now every five years they have to have the flow test on them. That's the part that gets complicated to do because there's so many of them. But right now we're actively plotting every hydrant into our system to ensure that it's functional or not functional. We do mark it as it's operational or not operational. The problem that we're having is I believe we work under 10 muds within ESD number two, so it's difficult to decipher who's responsible for which one because they're not marked. They're not even numbered. So it's either we will have to go mark them and then somebody else will go change them to what they like since we don't own them. But we are actively testing every hydrant to make sure it flows. And if it doesn't, we do mark it as non-functional.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Chief. Thank you, Commissioner Coronado. Thank you.

Item 4C. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Good morning County Judge, Commissioners, administration. Thanks for having me. Joe Goodenrath with the El Paso Downtown Management District. It's a pleasure to be here. I'll try and lighten the mood a little bit. We're not necessarily a life or death organization like our public safety teams, but we do. We do believe we play a very critical role in our economy, the quality of life, the jobs and opportunities for the members of our community. A little bit about our organization. I'm not a big fan of reading slides to you. I know you're all able to do that, but I just really want to highlight when it comes to our organization, we're not the city, we're not the county. We are a subdivision of the state created under chapter 375 of the local government code. Our organization specifically was founded in 1997. The interesting part is by the property owners. The property owners got together and they wanted to pay an additional assessment. They wanted to pay for additional projects, programs, and services and established a rate based on their valuation of 12 cents per $100 of valuation, which good, bad, hasn't changed since 1997. But fortunately for us, as you know, similar to you guys in challenges with costs going up, valuations of downtown have grown. So that has enabled us to continue to provide a lot of services on their behalf. One of the benefits we have is we can enter into agreements with other entities in the private sector, and I'll talk about that in a minute. In terms of governance, we're managed by a 21-member board of directors made up of property owners, business tenants, residents, and we have the pleasure of having Commissioner Stout serve as an ex-official member of our board, and I appreciate his involvement in the organization. As I talked about that assessment rate as a governmental aspect of our organization, it's 12 cents per $100. You can see where we're at in terms of certified values in 2025. And the good news is you can see, like I mentioned, our valuation growth. has enabled us to maintain that rate and then continue to provide services. To the right of there is the image of the district. It's about a square mile, about 500 and some parcels within the area. And again, all of those property owners pay that assessment, which then goes to fund our operations. We're an organization of about a $1.4 million budget. What I've tried to do over my tenure over the last 12 years is reduce that reliance on the assessment. So you can see it's still the largest part of our revenue generation, but we've really worked to identify other revenue streams, agreements with other entities to really become as efficient and effective as possible. Our general service areas we focus on, as you can read there. And I really wanted to, another effort that I've really tried to implement is recognizing with a $1.4 million budget, you can't be all things to everybody. We need to one, be efficient and very effective in our service delivery. And two, we need to find our role, the role we can play in these larger efforts and the partnerships we need to develop. So when I identify economic development, We're not out there competing nationally for large scale employers to come downtown. There are other entities, the Borderplex Alliance, City County Economic Development, who are working on that. So when we talk about economic development for the DMD, this is about helping our property owners fill their spaces. filling them with businesses that our employee base wants to be attracted to. So same thing with marketing events, infrastructure security, transportation and parking. Again, we really work to find our role amongst those areas to deliver a benefit to the downtown and make it an area for the entire community to enjoy. In terms of our strategic goals, you can see there we're covering areas from just internally, we want to be a resource, having a very closest governmental connection to our stakeholders and our rate payers. We want to be the voice of them all the way to having the information and expertise to represent downtown. So when we're having discussions with the county, the city, external folks, we have the expertise to represent that. Bringing people downtown is the key, and I'm gonna emphasize that here in a minute. It's all about people in my mind. And then we also want, the biggest part of this last strategic plan we sought is to increase residential options. Again, find our role in increasing residential options so that we can add more people to the downtown population. Partnerships, as I mentioned, are critical for us to be able to meet the needs to deliver the services within our budget. Probably the biggest asset we have is our interlocal agreement with the city of El Paso. This is about delivering services within the downtown efficiently and effectively. So this five-year agreement we enter into every five years identifies the role of the DMD in the city and how we're delivering and achieving various goals. These are areas, as you can see there, that we are involved with and in partnership with the city. Sometimes we're doing things on their behalf, sometimes we're partnering to provide a service, and sometimes the DMD is providing that supplemental service we're allowed to that is of interest and of value to the city. We've had a long-term partnership with the West Texas Community Supervision and Corrections Department, which has been historically a huge benefit for the downtown. You cannot have a downtown people want to go to if it's not clean and inviting. And so historically we have worked with community supervision and corrections to be a site for adult probation, community service, for people to pay their community service debt to the organization and serve on our clean teams to go out there every day and help our crews keep the downtown clean. Pre-pandemic, we were at capacity. We have 15 shifts a week for our sanitation crews and we were averaging 12 clients per shift. Things have changed since the pandemic. And so that has dropped dramatically. It's averaging one per shift. So many days we have zero. So what that has done for us is we have been forced to spend more on sanitation because the work level is still there. We just have to have paid staff to do that. So if there's ever any way to improve upon that going forward, I'd love the opportunity to stand in front of you today, identify an area to work on. If there is a path forward there to increase that or assist in another way of improving sanitation or other aspects of downtown service delivery, I'd love to work with the county on that. And then lastly, that kind of the third leg of the stool is the private sector. We rely heavily on them as well for contribution sponsorships and support to do a lot of our events and campaigns and advocacy. There's quite a few bullets here. It's text heavy, but I hope it just shows you that we are having an impact. Probably the biggest accomplishments that I'm most proud about is we did position ourselves to have the second fastest recovery from the pandemic in North America. Very proud of that because as we all know, people were struggling intensely during that period. So to get people back to work, get people back to enjoying life was a very proud moment for us. And as you can see, to me, it revolves around people and the number of these bullets celebrate people. 13 million non-residents visit in 2025. The number of events happening on the streets is increasing. Our ambassadors are meeting people from other countries and thousands of locals as we're out and about welcoming people to our community. We're seeing more and more businesses. Businesses have shifted in terms of where they're at. I don't think we're seeing an increase in the number of businesses. So vacancy rates on first floor have probably stayed steady. They've shifted. But we are seeing some sectors like food and beverage grow. Long-term goals, to me, it's all about people. We want to support those organizations who are bringing people to the area, and we feel that through our services and our partnerships with our local businesses, we can get our share. We can make sure that downtown is a place where people want to go and that there's an opportunity for everybody to enjoy downtown. So those are the five segments of the population that we identify for the long-term growth of downtown. workforce that was part of our recovery from the pandemic people came back to work faster and we added west star tower pretty much soon after the pandemic so that allowed our workforce to grow from the pandemic what the future holds in terms of back to the office yet to be seen so i would i would hope that we can remain neutral in in workforce hotel guests uh we're we're doing well we've added more rooms we're over represented in terms of hotel rooms within our one One mile area with compared to the rest of the community occupancy high rates are high Definitely a huge asset and again it creates a place where new wallets are coming into our community spending their money and supporting our community Residential is the nut we're trying to crack. It's hard to explain other than the economy, El Paso economics make it a little bit more challenging to develop downtown residential to where subsidies and support are necessary as well as some of the sprawl is still more lucrative than it is for infill development. But there's tons of potential there. Every downtown, almost every downtown across the country, downtown residential is growing significantly. So that's an untapped area of growth for us. Entertainment and nightlife doing very well. We continue to see that grow. And then the Mexican shoppers and visitors. This is the north brown traffic from Juarez and the interior of Mexico. That has, I mean, you go back decades and it's probably seen a slight decline. Pandemic hit that very hard for us. I think the potential of bringing that to support border retail is going to be very challenging, but I'm definitely supportive of us growing that connection between El Paso and Juarez as an asset to our downtown. It's uniquely El Paso across this country. So if we want to position ourselves as providing that opportunity experience that other cities, counties, downtowns can provide, that's definitely the way to go. And then immediate opportunities, you know, we could talk about the big projects that are on the horizon for us, deck plazas, you know, working with the city on convention center expansion. But I think whatever the big project is, these bullets here are the way to get there. This is one of those steps, the collaboration and cooperation. I want to tip my hat to the judge and all of you for always being accessible, willingness to talk and have these discussions. The environment with other governmental entities more recently has been spectacular. I want to thank you all. Stabilizing the environment is critically important. So as outsiders are looking into El Paso, and looking to invest their money, they wanna minimize their risk. So having a political environment that is stable, secure, having good plans, solid plans and follow through, extremely important to attracting outside investment. Those public and private investments are possible. The burden can't be borne solely on DMDs, counties, cities. We need the private sector to always step up and be at the table and willing to support and be a part of whatever we want, whatever its quality of life. public improvements, private improvements, and then all of us, whether it's elected officials, myself, my board, or our citizenry, have that vision to grow our community and have that ability and willingness to act. Commissioner Stout and I were on a panel just the other night. Engagement of our community is critical. Whether we disagree on things or we agree, everybody's got to be involved to push this community forward. And then the results, they will speak for themselves. Stronger tax base, bringing in outside revenue, enhance our reputation throughout the world. We get a black eye unfortunately too often because of things outside of our control internationally and people wanted to paint a narrative of our community. But I'll tell you things like BTS and Coldplay coming and showing the world about what a great place El Paso is, it's very helpful. Civic pride, one of the biggest successes of our downtown. I saw it last night, graduation photos in San Jacinto Plaza, Quinceañera photos, running groups, people are proud to be in downtown and amongst their fellow citizens. And then quality of life and the celebration of culture. Our downtown allows us to celebrate who we are and provide that image. Like I said, if we continue these tactics, pursue the big projects, these will be the results that will hopefully benefit our entire city and county. Thank you all very much. I'll take any questions if you have them.

Well, thank you, Joe. I don't think people realize we could put a lot of businesses, but what you've done and the organization of creating the synergism and making sure that we continue to understand that. And I'm always glad when someone like yourself is here because people don't know what's happening in the background, and there's so much things that you do to make sure that we continue. Most communities, it's the bloodline, right, of the downtown, and so we thank you for that. I think the attendance at the Pines in Politics, at the panel, which was Commissioner Stoud yourself and Commissioner Canales, the number of people that showed up really represents the fact that people are very interested in the downtown area and of course the deck. But I think it was the largest. It didn't feel good. The mayor and I didn't get to those numbers and so you guys outdid that and so we thank you for that. But just your work and your openness, I really appreciate that and we're very comfortable with the relationship that we have with you and what you're trying to accomplish. And we're looking for any opportunities to assist. So Betsy, you and I have been sort of involved in discussions with the mayor and the downtown. Any additional comments?

No. I will follow up on the concerns that Mr. Gunraw brought and the request to see if there's anything we can do in that area. But no, no. And on the downtown housing, I think this is something the court has talked about before. Infill, we add those kinds of... Today you'll be hearing about some updates to our economic development policy. We continue to work for infill strategies. The court has incentivized a potential or housing project that is in the works already for downtown that would help bring several units to the downtown area. But I think a lot of things are in alignment with where the downtown management district is going.

Thank you, Betsy. Commissioner Butler?

I just have a couple of questions and comments. Thank you, Joe, for the presentation. It's incredible to see the growth of the DMD over the last 10, 15 years maybe. And I know that all of the hard work seems to be finally like taking root and paying off. That's wonderful to see. In one of your slides, there was a bullet that said overall 5% increase to the tax base downtown. Do you know off the top of your head how that compares to the rest of the city or the county in terms of tax base growth?

You know, I don't. I don't look to your growth. I'm so focused on mine. But, you know, I think the way I always view it, though, is from what I hear and as a homeowner, residential growth over the past few years has been a strong carrier of tax revenue growth city and countywide. I could be wrong. That's just based on mine. So when you look at downtown, and we talk about the lack of residential, this is your commercial base. To have your commercial base growing at an average of 5% every year, I would venture to guess that is very strong compared to the city and the county. And that's ultimately what economic development and reinvestment in downtown plans. That's kind of the non-glamorous side is that you want to drive up those values of these commercial properties to benefit the taxing entities across the county.

Right, right. Yes, absolutely. It's not the glamorous side. And I guess my question is, I'm more curious about the pace of the growth, right? So if the residential tax base is increasing at 10%, year over year, but our commercial is only increasing downtown 5%, right? Are there ways that we could do that and accelerate that or at least highlight that disparity?

Absolutely. Again, I don't have the information in front of me. I think our commercial growth rate is probably surpassing city and county. So the burden is shifting, at least in downtown, to that commercial base. What can we do to grow that? That is our, you know, from facade grants to renovating historic buildings, infilling empty buildings, taking surface parking lots and preparing them for development eventually. Those will all be commercial developments for the most part and we'll be generating revenue on the commercial side.

Are those the main factors you hear from potential property owners or property owners as barriers to growth? Is the facade, the historical improvements, or is it something else?

No, it's usually on the revenue side. These commercial properties are typically investments for somebody, whether it's office space, one-story retail to residential. The costs of the renovation, the costs of construction are similar across El Paso, across the country. Then it's what can I get? How much can I lease that space to the office for? How much rent can I get from that? And that's where El Paso kind of lags behind the rest. So if you're an outside entity looking to bring large-scale residential to downtown El Paso because the demand is there, it's what would they be willing to pay compared to the investment that would have to be made. And so some people will choose other places where the cost, the investment is relatively the same, but the revenue generation is higher.

Because of where the people are.

Because of what the people are willing to pay. Yeah. So for the revenue coming in. And so that's why the subsidies from the county, the city, even the grants from the DMD are so important to try and drive the cost of investment down so that the amount of revenue that can be generated is comparable to other parts of the city, county, and across the country.

Yeah.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner.

Thank you. Thank you, Joe, Mr. Goodenroth, for the presentation. Kind of along the lines of what Commissioner Butler was talking about, I also, you know, at the panel that we were on the other day, you talked a little bit about the, or we talked a little bit about bringing more people to live downtown, right? And the efforts to try to create that, to... increase the amount of people that live downtown um and and and you said something that was interesting interesting to me regarding uh the demand for living space downtown so can you elaborate on that like right now it's pretty much full like every every every single apartment that exists downtown is full and there may be waiting lists for

Yeah, absolutely. So all of the modern market rate and subsidized units that have come online within the past 10 years are, they are typically at waiting lists. So the building managers aren't calling me to, hey, can you help me fill my apartments? They've got people constantly turning in apartments and apartments turn over. That's not a surprise. The benefit is that there's always somebody to replace. So it's just an indicator that the demand exceeds our current supply And the downtown uptown plan that the city did, they talked about infill of 10,000 units. Hopefully that's the conservative side of it, but I definitely see that we've built an area that people want to live, obviously. And so we are not at the saturated, we are not exceeding our supply at this point. So we can definitely accommodate many more, I believe.

Yeah, and so I just wanted to point that out because I really hope that we can continue as a court to support projects and provide incentives for that type of infill. because there is a need. One thing that I would like to see downtown is more people living down here because if you do walk around after 5 p.m. on a weeknight when there's not an event going on or a show or something like that, um it it's still it's still empty um and and we want our downtown businesses to be uh to have to have more foot traffic to have to have more people coming down here to the restaurants to to the to the different um retail opportunities that that exist and you know having somebody live having more people live down here i think is is really a big part of that equation and so I'M ALSO GOING TO SHAMELESSLY PLUG THE HISTORIC DISTRICT. THE MINISTER TALKED ABOUT WAYS TO TRY TO HELP PEOPLE FUND THOSE INVESTMENTS BY CREATING THE HISTORIC DISTRICT AND I HOPE WE CAN PICK THAT UP AS A COMMISSIONER'S COURT AND TRY TO PUSH THAT ACROSS THE FINISH LINE. There are a lot of old historic buildings in downtown and many times what may be prohibiting people from investing and purchasing those things and upgrading them is that it is very, very costly to renovate an older building. And with the historic tax credits that would be made available to property owners within a historic district, it's 45% of the investment or 45% of the renovation costs can be reimbursed by property. the state and federal government, which is, in my opinion, one of the most lucrative tax incentives that exists, right? I mean, when do we at the county or at the city, you know, provide a, you know, a 50%, you know what I mean? reimbursement on, I mean, it's just unheard of. So, you know, I really hope that we can push harder to try to get that district created and then work with our economic development department because another thing that we've heard from property owners is that coming up with the upfront cash to be able to pay for those renovations, is also sometimes difficult and and you know maybe setting up some type of loan program program or grant program that helps these property owners come up with that that upfront cash to do the renovation because they know that it's going to be reimbursed by those historic tax credits and so we can you know try to work on supporting in that manner as well but you know For me, what's happened in downtown has been exciting. When I was on the panel the other day, we talked about this. I remember coming to El Paso. I'm not originally from here, and I would come when I was in college with my roommate who is from here. And his younger sister worked at the McDonald's that was down across from the plaza, and we would go pick her up at like 11, 11.30 at night. And it was just dark. It was gloomy. And it has just come so far. And that's 25 years ago. But still, the comparison of what it was back then to what it is now and the investment in the plaza, the investment in a number of the buildings that the county has also um help to incentivize and help and help to create those those projects uh you know the the streetcar uh which is which is now has has you know 30 000 i think riders a month or something like that which which is growing and growing um there's definitely more opportunity to to to invest in and Obviously we have to be strategic, right? Because we do have a lot of historic properties that we wanna make sure that we talk about preserving, but we need to continue to have those conversations between the preservationists, between the developers, the DMD, the court and the city. And I think that there's just so much more potential and ways to try to keep people in our core that would save the county money in the long run.

Thank you, Commissioner. Any further questions? If not, Joe, thank you so much, and thank you for your partnership.

Thank you all. Appreciate it.

Item 4D, receive a presentation from El Paso Fire Star regarding its operations, services, and medical care provided in El Paso, Texas.

Good morning. Good morning, Justice Samaniego. Good morning, Commissioners. Thank you for allowing this opportunity for us to introduce ourselves and our program. My name is Alex Garcia. I am a flight nurse with Air Methods, and I'm currently one of the nurses staffing our helicopter here in El Paso called Fire Start. And I will allow these ladies to introduce themselves.

Good morning. My name is Leah Castaneda-Munoz. I'm the Senior Account Executive for Air Methods, and I oversee the business development efforts for El Paso Fire here in El Paso.

Good morning. My name is Kimberly Medina, and I'm the Regional Clinical Director, and I oversee all things clinical.

Thank you. Let me sort of put it in perspective. I had the opportunity to meet with them. I didn't know too much about the organization. Betsy and I talked about what do we do with the county, but we didn't see any of the touch points. But I saw some of your challenges, but also saw the fact of improving our emergency response. And so I thought it'd be nice for them to present here and get to know them a little bit better. And so I appreciate that you're here and get the public to know a little bit about your organization. So go ahead.

Thank you for the opportunity, Judge. And I'd like to begin by first giving a little bit of background about our company. Air Methods is the parent company of Native Air. Native Air is the main company that provides air ambulance services in our region. We have multiple bases in the neighboring towns from Alamogordo, Las Cruces, Deming, and Silver City. What has happened is Air Methods and the El Paso Fire Department have come together to create a partnership to bring an air asset here to our community. And so who is FireSTAR? Who are we? FireSTAR is an air ambulance service comprised of an El Paso Fire paramedic and an Air Methods nurse. Now, they have taken an additional layer of training, and what that means is that we are able to bring an additional layer of medical interventions to the scene. These interventions are normally done in the hospital setting, but because of our training, we are able to bring them directly to the patient to the scene of the accident. These interventions, the goal is to establish what we call perfusion. Perfusion is basically saying that we are meeting the body's demand for oxygen. As you all know, the normal process is we breathe in oxygen, our blood distributes it through our bodies, and in the setting of an accident, an emergency response, either one or both of those components are missing in someone who is critically ill or injured. Two of the most important interventions that we bring is rapid sequence intubation. Rapid sequence intubation meaning that we are able to intubate conscious patients. Normally someone who is critically injured, our brain is one of the organs that is most sensitive to oxygen changes. Once we start to mentally decline, we decline so much that we lose the ability to protect our airway. What this intervention allows us to do is we get ahead of the curve. We don't let the patient decline to such a degree. We are able to consciously intubate the patient and we protect the patient from other complications like aspiration, infection, and other factors that negatively contribute to a bad outcome for the patient. Another very important intervention that we do and we are able to provide in the setting of a trauma patient where the patient is hemorrhaging, we are able to bring whole blood to the patient to the scene of the accident. Normally, solutions are given like saline that help mitigate to a degree, but what's best for the patient is to replace what the patient is losing, which is blood. The goal of our program is to establish early reperfusion. If you can see here in our slide, the normal way of events, a patient gets into an accident. First responders arrive on scene and they do what they need to do. They extricate the patient from wherever they're at, they do the initial interventions, put them in an ambulance, and go license sirens to the facility that is capable of handling those injuries. Once the patient gets to the hospital, then they do those interventions and they start the reperfusion process, signified here by the red star. With our help, we can bring those interventions to the scene to start that reperfusion process on the scene. We don't have a lot of time to function without oxygen. One episode of low oxygen status, one episode of low blood pressure negatively affects the outcome. With our help, during the transport process, we keep the patient perfused and minimize those episodes. And not only does it improve the chances for the patient surviving surgery, as well as it improves the outcome once the patient gets discharged from the hospital. We've included a table with different areas of our county. And we're including the average drive time for an ambulance, and we've included the average flight time for us. I'm gonna use an example for Fabence, which is one of the furthest areas away from the hospitals. And as you can see, it takes an average of 32 to 24 minutes, depending on what facility the patient is going to. There are special patient populations, like pediatric trauma patients. Level one pediatric trauma patients can only be taken to UMC, no matter where they're at. And as you can see, we can at least cut down the transport time in half. With the added mentioned benefit, that during the transport process, the patient is getting the interventions that they need during the time. One of the most common topics that pops into everybody's mind when they hear air ambulance, air transport, helicopter is billing. Now it is important to note a few things about billing. First, nothing about our program is taxpayer funded. Everything is paid for by air methods. Another important factor is if we want to talk about billing, we have to talk about laws that have been recently enacted. The main one being the No Surprises Act. Now this is a federal law that was enacted specifically for air transport. And what this law does is that it prevents the patient from unexpected balance billing. Air Methods works with the patient's individual insurance and the cost is set forth by their individual policies. And that is the only method of billing that Air Methods does. So we work through the patient's insurance. And another factor regarding the No Surprises Act is that we have to bill at the in-network rate. Regardless whether the patient's insurance is in-network or out-of-network, we bill at an in-network rate. Firestar is essentially a flying ER, and we are capable of delivering ICU-level care directly to the patient no matter where they're at. So we work together with our first responder agencies to deliver this care as effectively as possible, and we help augment the level of care working together. A non-medical benefit that we also provide because of this is that the units that respond to the scene, they're able to return to their districts much faster. So they are able to return to service and be ready for the next call. So no matter if you're a resident, a visitor driving through our area, we aim at providing better survivability and a better patient outcome. We look forward to working together with our EMS and fire agencies to bridge the gap between definitive care from the hospital and pre-hospital EMS interventions. I myself, I've been living here my entire life. I believe in what we do. God forbid if something should happen to my family or loved ones, I would want the highest level of care for my family. Thank you.

Thank you. Questions? Commissioner Belatis?

Thank you so much for the presentation and for your service. All of you, thank you. You mentioned what happens when somebody has insurance. What happens if somebody is uninsured?

We have a patient advocacy department. Okay. And what that department is in charge of is specifically working with uninsured patients. And they evaluate, they go through a process where they evaluate that individual's financial situation. And they try to come up with some type of payment plan tailored to their financial capabilities.

So it's like income-based payment plans, maybe? Yes, ma'am.

And so if the individual is not able to afford the bill, he just works with the CARES specialist, and then they identify that they cannot afford it, and so the bill is basically wiped away at that point. Our methods has never seeked property or come for somebody. The only individual that we keep sending notices to is the one that doesn't communicate. But other than that, we make sure that we work with every individual, whether they're insured or uninsured.

Okay, thank you. And then do you have like an average number of, of incidents that you respond to, like monthly or weekly maybe?

So those numbers fluctuate. Okay. And so we might get, for example, a hundred requests. in one month, but we might only transport 35 of those patients, and not every one of those patients is a scene call, and a scene call meaning that we land in a rural area or on the side of the street, because we also do inter-facility transports for the patient that has outgrown the facility's needs, so. Okay, okay, thank you.

Okay, thank you.

One of the things I was looking forward to, and I talked a little bit to Betsy about this, is that there's an opportunity to be more collaborative, because at the end of the day, it's saving a life, making sure that somebody's taken properly, and not about who should be financially gaining from that situation. And so that's what I'm really looking for. is that it seemed not as a competition with other services, but an augmentation of saying, in this particular situation, saving that life is more important. And some of the information I got, it was more like, how much is it going to cost? Or it's cheaper to do that. But then there's some misconception that They might take longer to, and they explained that, they might take longer to get there, but then they make up the time getting to the hospital, almost a third of the time. So we'll continue, I'm gonna ask Betsy and I to see if we can continue to have discussions, because we're always very interested in accessibility. And we always know that when you talk about accessibility, the first thing that happens is a cost. and then some people are okay i mean you know they can afford it and others can so they don't have the same accessibility and that's what i saw here it's like you know you're able to be the right the right person the right group to get that person but then there's some other issues that keep you from from being successful so i i need to understand it a little bit better and and i'll work with betsy to make sure we do so Thank you. I know time is valuable for you, but thank you for being here and giving us a little bit more information. I've learned a lot since I met you the first time, and I think there's some collaborative things that we could do.

Judge, can we just ask one follow-up question? Is it somebody on scene that makes the call, whether it's a ground ambulance or an air ambulance or the dispatcher?

Yes. Once the ground crew, the paramedic, the one in charge on scene, by state law, they are the ones that are authorized to cancel us or continue us, depending on what the patient needs, but they have the authority to do that. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Good luck, and we'll be contacting you. Thank you. Appreciate you.

ITEM 4E, DISCUSS AND RECEIVE A PRESENTATION FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO REGARDING THE COMMUNITY CENTERED ENVIRONMENTAL RISK ASSESSMENT THROUGH SEQUENTIAL EXPLORATORY DESIGN.

Michael, thank you. Welcome. Good morning, Judge and Commissioners. Michael McElroy, Planning and Development. Very pleased to be with you this morning. To give you an overview of what you'll be receiving right now, in August of 2024, the court made possible through some ARPA funds, the first of a couple ARPA items you'll be hearing about today. The court engaged the University of Texas at El Paso to conduct an environmental health impact study in selected areas of essentially central El Paso, basically the bridge over the Americas area, I-10, Marathon Petroleum Refinery, essentially that area. That study has been completed. The researchers, Dr. Gabriel Ibarra Mejia, Crystal Trovia, and the UTEP researchers team are here this morning to present the outcome of that study and provide you with some thoughts and potential next steps resulting from their findings. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to the UTEP research team.

Michael, real quick before we turn it over to Dr. Ibarra, I just wanted to give a little background as well, a little further into kind of what you were talking about. But the project really originated during the planning process for the Bridge of the Americas project, and community members asked for a health impact assessment, which is a study that can take millions of dollars over many years. As I understood it, the impact of this study is that it produces evidence of causation, environmental items that produce health impacts on a given population, right? And so obviously we didn't have those vast resources, but we did decide to do what we could with the ARPA funds that were available. And it was driven largely through dialogue between the researchers and the neighborhood association leaders, neighborhoods that are near the port of entry, the highway, the refinery, the railroad refilling yards, and all of those which are major sources of pollution. And the goal was to establish a baseline for health conditions and environmental conditions to begin producing data that's going to allow us as policymakers in the region that are charged with public health and safety to make decisions that are much better informed and address the findings. So I'm really eager for the presentation and to hear from members of the public as well if we have some public comment. I won't be around to carry it on, but I really, really urge the court to consider continuing this partnership. As you're gonna hear, the study provides information that is really valuable now, as well as setting a stage for further much needed exploration. The county has resources that it may be able to contribute, such as access to the public health dashboard known as FIX. and maybe even the Holy Grail of data, which is the information that's held by El Paso Health. And I don't know if such partnerships can be possible, but we would be negligent, I think, if we didn't explore how to use such rich data sources in pursuit of public health at the end of the day. So with that, Dr. Ibarra, thank you very much. Thank you, Commissioner.

Commissioner, please.

Welcome.

Good morning. My name is Gabriel Ibarra. Thank you for the introduction, Your Honor. Good morning.

Good morning.

Commissioners, honored to be here. And I'm also honored and excited to present finally what your funding has produced as an outcome for the voices of South Central El Paso. So can we move to the next slide, please? Here's the button, sorry. So this is where we're gonna do our review findings, so we're gonna go very quickly through all of this, and at the end, I'm gonna offer some conclusions, and what will be the way to move forward with this project. So today, we're gonna present very briefly these three points, the results of these three points. So just as a context, this work was done based on the South Central El Paso area, already considered a high exposure community. This area, this community has long been holding the heavy burden for health associated with environmental factors, most of them associated with air quality. So there are key exposures around all this entire region, but what we try to do is more than anything, Ed, voice out the concerns of the community, not what we thought that was pertinent to research to measure, but what we wanted to do with this project is to voice out what the community's health concerns were regarding the differential pollutions. So this is a nutshell. This is a map of the area. As you can see, it includes, you know, it has Mexico at the south and the I-10 at north, and then at the east, the Bridge of the Americas, and all the way to the side to the Carolinas, Carolina Avenue. So all this, I mean, it is not just a residential area, but the majority of it has a lot of land use differences, like a lot of commercial, transportation, industrial. So it is not only a residential area. So this is one of the key concerns. One of the key concerns is that this community is embedded within several land use areas that most probably will not be you know, concerns for the environmental health concerns that were voiced out in this study. So without further ado, I'm going to pass it to Mr. Chris Villa.

Thank you, Dr. Ibarra. My name is Christopher Villa. I'm a principal consultant at Helix Solutions and one of the people assisting with the project. One of our main components was the The community survey, the survey was adopted or created from community feedback which initially happened in a series of three community meetings that happened in phase one. The survey was open from August 18th and then closed in January. We collected a total of 410 data responses, as you can see here on the map. After data cleaning, those responses were pretty representative of the population. One of the findings I really liked to see was over 70% of our respondents had lived in their neighborhoods 10 years or longer. The survey asked a variety of topics. One of them was they asked people to self-report their health conditions for themselves and anyone in their households. The highest reported conditions for anyone in the household included high blood pressure, headaches, and gastrointestinal issues. When asked about changes in the environmental health risk, 40% of the respondents stated that the conditions have worsened, and 50% stated it stayed about the same, and about 10% indicated that it had improved. The top factors that respondents were either very, or as they say, they were very or extremely exposed included dust, loud noises, and air pollution. Respondents were also asked whether or not they have ever been self-reported that they've ever had a cancer diagnosis provided to them by a healthcare provider. They were asked about themselves, a member of the household, or whether or not one of their immediate neighbors knew about this cancer diagnosis. The respondents said about 11% said that they had themselves had a cancer diagnosis and then 20% of their household members and about an equal share of their neighbors. A sizable share of respondents did indicate that noise was an issue. About 30% indicated that vibrations have caused damage to their homes and roughly about the same share indicated that noise did affect their mental health and well-being. And then finally, about 30% of the respondents indicate that heat was a concern for them as well. I'd like to pass it on to our next presenter.

Hello, my name is Josel Guerra. I'm a master research assistant at UTEP. So I'm going to be presenting about the environmental monitoring. Since the majority of the community's environmental health concerns were related to the air quality, we installed local sensors across the neighborhood measuring five criteria air pollutants, which are among the most common air contaminants regulated by the EPA. So this includes but are not limited to fine particulate matter or PM2.5, which is commonly found in vehicle traffic, combustion in industry, dust from construction and secondary aerosols, sulfur dioxide, commonly emitted by industry power plants and refineries, carbon monoxide found in vehicle emissions, industrial burners and fuel-based space heaters, nitrogen dioxide, commonly produced by fossil fuels combustion and off-road equipment, and ground-level ozone, which is not necessarily directly emitted by a source, but resulting from the chemical reactions in the atmosphere through the interaction of gases emitted from industry, motor vehicles, gasoline vapors, and chemical solvents. Now, in the following series of maps, you'll observe the area of study with a wider kernel density surface. In this specific case, the map reveals the concentrations of respondents' perception that environmental health risk have worsened over the past five years. The clusters in darker shades indicate higher concentrations. Overlaying this map, we have marked the location of the installed locus air quality sensors. The red landmark represents the blue sky sensor that measures the concentrations of multiple air pollutants, and in purple, the purple air sensor which measures PM2.5 or refined particulate matter. The second map shows health symptoms experienced by respondents in the past six months that were self-perceived to be caused by pollution or other environmental factors. This map shows the perceived air pollution exposure from various sources such as factories and industry, utilities and transportation. I would like to highlight that you may observe across the maps that the location of the air quality sensors were strategically placed to capture a combination of areas of high perceived risk and together with some medium to low areas for comparison. The fourth map represents the respondents who self-reported respiratory condition including asthma, COPD or other breathing concerns. The fifth map is the perception of noise affecting their mental health and well-being. And the last map is the density estimation of self-reported cancer diagnosis.

Hello, I'm Valeria Fontes. I'm a research assistant also at UTEP. And I'll show you some of the data we have collected so far from the network that we created. So we analyzed the data from all the sensors we placed and compared that to the nearest available permanent air quality sensor that we had. These were obtained from data from TCEQ. So here we have, due to time constraints, I'm only going to show you one of the sensors and four different pollutants. Here in the left upper corner we have particulate matter 2.5. We see the levels of our sensor in green and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality The EPA threshold is going to be the red line and the gold line is going to be the World Health Organization threshold. So for PM2.5 in this particular sensor, we had lower levels than the ones from the permanent sensors, and with some high peaks as well, but not all the time the EPA, the World Health Organization's threshold were reached. For ozone, we have a different story here. Our sensor capture a much higher level of this pollutant almost at all times during the study or what we have collected so far. And the World Health Organization threshold was passed almost during the entire study so far. For sulfur dioxide, we have much higher levels as well compared to the permanent air quality sensors. And we also had some really high spikes, especially around November. and the EPA threshold was reached several times as well. For nitrogen dioxide, we have very similar patterns among both sensors, and the thresholds weren't reached at all. We were able to embed all this data, previous data and live data from our sensor network and we put that into our research lab website so it is now available to the public and the community to consult it at all times.

Thank you. So we also did a direct health study doing a community health assistant. For this, we have the collaboration of Dr. Juan Aguilera from UT. due to health, who unfortunately was not able to be here. So this phase consisted of screening, conducting health screenings in the population of the community. So in a nutshell, this is what the result we had. We had a total of 73 screening examinations to assess the health burden at screening. So one of the key things is that there was a high prevalence of undiagnosed hypertension, and in general, more than 1 3rd said they had fair or poor health. this kind of encompasses or aligns with the low household income and there are other keys, there are indicators for future health issues that could be like current tobacco use and there's a high rate of uninsured and diagnosed diabetes. So in general, I want you to see these results not as separate because they are all associated. In the past, we have conducted studies and there's a lot of research that actually says that both high cardio metabolic risk and respiratory risk cannot be separated because one can lead to the other. We don't know which direction it's still, but they can be affected by the other. One key factor that we saw here is that this community has a very low cancer screening rate, and that must be addressed. So this falls way, falls the average for Texas. So that is a concern that must be addressed as soon as possible. So in a nutshell, I'm gonna try to tell you what is your investment did for this project. So most importantly that giving you data And I think that the most important thing is that gave out the voice to the concerns of the community, who some of them are present here, about their health concerns and their concerns about the environment, which the majority say that it's actually getting worse. So our recommendations are not based on a single item. This all needs to be interconnected. We cannot address anything that is associated to high metabolic, cardiometabolic risk just by doing blood pressure and doing screens for diabetes. We have to continue monitoring the health of the environment, specifically more the air quality aspect. Yes, there's gonna be high respiratory risk, so this is why one of the things that we accomplished is to establish this monitoring network that is gonna continue working even though the project, the timeline has ended. This in no means that the project is over. We have secured more funding from other sources with the, you know, all this data has allowed us to do this. And in collaboration with UT Health, this has spin off a lot of other projects that not only have to do with air, we also need to continue managing the noise, the vibration, the water, and the soil. And we're going to be collaborating with the partners at UT Texas doing all these kinds of things. regardless, again, of the project timeline has ended. One of the key major things that we need to establish, and this is probably one of the most urgent things, we need to establish a epidemiological surveillance of cancer risk in this area. So the first thing that we need to do is to increase cancer screenings. And that is something that, with your help, probably other entities of the county, probably Department of Public Health, We can do this together. So in no means this should be the effort of just one agency. This is gonna be an effort of agencies, all stakeholders involved, including the community here present. We all need to get involved in this. So we still need to do other things with nose pollution and vibration. We, at this time, because of the time that we had, we prioritized the air quality because that was the majority of the concern, so that we have given that. But again, we already have allocated more resources to study noise, vibration, and pollution, and heat exposure. You know, those famous heat islands that are going to be very prevalent in this region, especially around the east side of the Bridge of the Americas. So we're gonna do all this, again, in spite of the project ending. So we want to thank, I wanna give out, Commissioner Staub for supporting us throughout this project. Thank you for that. But also, I think this was not a one-man show. I wanna thank everyone in the community that was involved. All those that attended those many meetings and actually voiced out their concerns. I think they feel free to voice out their concerns. There are many of them here. I wish everyone could be here. And I also wanna say that it was not just about me. It was all the team effort. And if you have any thoughts or questions, we're happy to address.

well thank you this is an incredible presentation once again want to thank Commissioner Stout but I'm very supportive just the objectivity of having someone like UTEP participating I think you've sound the alarm on us and and there's certain things that we have to do a lot better you've got us as a partner because I'll tell you this this court is When it comes to health, especially in mental health, you mentioned mental health several times. We're very, very, very supportive. And, you know, to us, it keeps our commitment during the pandemic, discovering all the underlying issues and the medical challenges that we had. I don't want to forget that, you know, it's so important. difficult to believe that we go through something we learn quite a bit and then we sort of walk away from it and i know that hasn't happened but i think we have to be a little bit more assertive about what we saw during the pandemic when you have 95 94 of the death were caused by underlying conditions medical conditions it's just something that we have to do and and the other component uh that i'm always hoping that we incorporate is that Juarez was a big part of this relationship. And what happened is we learned something from the pandemic, and that is that you cannot go figure out partnerships when the crisis is right at you. And we found that we didn't have the relationship with Juarez. You know, we were trying to, who do we talk to? Who do we reach? And it was almost like we fell into the trap of believing like that's Juarez, that's us. You know, hey, we've got the same air, we drink the same water, but we weren't very well connected in the area of health. It was very desperate. And Betsy could tell you, we were trying to figure out who's who so we can talk to them. And we built, since then, we've built a lot of great relationships so that we could be more prepared. But obviously, you know, we want the partnership because that's one of our lanes as a county. is the health situation, how do we get UMC, Texas Tech, you know, everybody working together, and I always have a lot of confidence that the best one to be able to do that is the university. uh because you have a a different situation it's not political uh you're able to address things that sometimes we try to address but don't have the same accessibility that you have so i'm very thankful on a personal note i'm very thankful of what you're continuing to do and i'll go back to commissioner stout but betsy anything else that we could add to this relationship

I also wanted to mention on some of the recommendations, like the number, the very first item on the recommendation on the cardiometabolic, that really aligns too with, we just received the report from the medical examiner on the cases that he saw in 2025 that were natural death causes. 71% of the natural deaths he saw were a heart-related, a cardio-related disease or a cardio-related event. And that's countywide. And so I do think going back to your comment, Judge, about the pandemic and what we saw about underlying health issues, this is an area where we need to continue to work with public health. We need to continue to work with FICS on the medical records and make sure this information is getting out to our medical community. And again, really to public health and our promotoras to be advocating for this across the county, but especially in these high risk areas. And you'll recall from some of the fixed data, there's other pockets in the county where there's some higher risk. that we need to be mindful of and address. I think Joel was mentioning that one of the higher risk areas is in the lower valley and around Socorro. So we need to look and make sure the medical community is aware of this and that public health is aware of this.

Thank you, Betsy. Commissioner Steltz?

Yeah, thank you. Thank you again, Dr. Ibarra and the civilian team. I think it's important, Betsy, as you're talking about the recommendations for us to look at those. I really hope that the county in the future, even the city, the health department, UMC can get more involved in trying to create more data points and look at really what we're doing as a community to not just treat the symptoms of all these things, but also mitigation and prevention. Which is one thing that I, why I think, and I'm proud of the county for doing things like challenging Marathon in their emissions and their permit in the contested case hearing. pushing for the trucks to come off of the Bridge of the Americas, which unfortunately right now the Chamber of Commerce is going to Washington, D.C. and hiring high-powered lobbyists to talk to folks at the White House and to our federal delegation about trying to stop the decision to take the trucks off the Bridge of the Americas at the 11th hour after it's been decided upon and they're about to go out to bid on that project. I'm really proud of the county for taking the steps to do something like this, to be informed. And now when we have this data, we need to use it and put it to good use. I do have a couple of questions though, Dr. Ibarra, on the page, the slide that you presented that had the levels of like P215 or the CO2, NO2 and SO2. What do you think is attributable to the fact that the PM2.5, the data that came back from y'all's sensors as opposed to the ones that are the permanent sensors, why was it lower on that one? It just was interesting to me to see that.

It has to do with the positioning. The permanent monitoring stations, they're permanent, they're stationed, they're like top of the, top of the line equipment. So they monitor differently. I mean, the conditions around the monitoring stations are different We positioned this on site on people's households. So that is one of the differences. And we measure at a certain height, which we consider that's human exposure, which is not above two meters from the ground. So what we are measuring here is what is being sensed at ground level. So different than other attitudes or probably using satellites, which is totally different.

Okay, I appreciate that. I also was curious about the cancer clusters based on the self-reporting. What conclusions can you draw from that? And I don't know if the data from El Paso Health or from FICS would help provide new information about that.

Yes, the data that we have, I mean, one of the limitations is that this is self-reported data, and although the numbers could sound an alarm that this is too many cancer cases, we need to know that statistically we need to transform it into other figures so we can compare it to other regions. of Texas and even to other regions, areas here in El Paso. So it might seem a bit high, but we must consider this is overall cancer. So it's not a specific cancer. So we need to look at more in detail at that and see actually what is the actual rate, what the actual rate represents in those numbers.

thank you um and and then last my last question i guess is um uh what do you all think that the county can specifically do to try to keep pushing this area of of inquiry forward i mean uh i guess it's more money to to to to um to be able to invest in these types of uh you know projects to to gather the data uh do you need support for grant applications or

um also you know how can we how can we how can we balance industrial development like the refinery operations highways bridge of the americas with with with public health in your opinion doctor so um okay addressing the first one of course uh any type of funding is is welcome we need we need this to sustain what we already have in place we need to increase our monitoring uh capability uh increase the the the number of sensors that are in our network already and to continue these over the years. Unfortunately, to look at environmental data, we cannot make any type of assumptions or conclusions based on months of data. We need several years. So that's why we plan for this to be on location for several years. Now, Of course, we will welcome any support, and I think we will be asking for the support of the county for future, we're gonna submit several grant proposals, not only at UTEP, but also in UT Health, and we're convincing our colleagues at Texas Tech to do the same, so we can do this all together, because at the end, I think that we're doing very similar things, but one is doing their own thing. But at the end, we're addressing the same issues, so we're trying to coordinate a little bit better how we can go about this as a team. And fortunately, you know, one type of funding can do this. One major type of funding can do this. Now regarding, you know, the industry that's located in that, I don't know exactly what will be the weight of the county in this type of decisions. And once we have the data and then we can suggest, you know, potential sources, I don't know what will be the weight of the, the county court in order to do that. But in the meanwhile, while that takes place, I think that the best thing that we can do is to support the voices that have been already heard by us and just to continue doing the same thing and support the things that we're doing and continuing these efforts at continual environmental monitoring, not only of air, but also other things, especially noise, which is going to be an issue, although it's going to be difficult because the majority of noise issues, the complaints were related to across the border, so I don't know how much can you influence that kind of thing, but other things that can be done, I'm sure that just by supporting and allowing us to bring more awareness to this community is gonna be more than enough support.

Thank you, Doctor, and along the lines of folks who participated and were involved, I do wanna recognize Fred Borrego, I see him back there, and Gabriel Garcia from the San Juan Neighborhood Association. Would y'all like to come up and share your experience with the project and also how you feel we should move forward?

Thank you, County Judge, Commissioners Fred Borrego, President of San Juan Neighborhood Association. First of all, I want to thank the Commissioner's Court for putting up the money. This is the first time that we have any type of health studies in the South Central area. What we do with this study I DON'T KNOW. IT'S UP TO THE EXPERTS. THE OTHER THING I WANT TO SAY, A FEW THINGS I WANT TO SAY IS THAT THIS STUDY NEEDS TO BE SHARED WITH NOT JUST THE COUNTY BUT THE CITY, THE SCHOOL DISTRICTS, AND EVERYBODY INVOLVED IN THIS STUDY. We're talking about or they were talking about noise. One of the things that I wanted to let everybody knows and maybe everybody already knows this is that almost 20 years ago, we started the quiet zone for the train. Commissioner Butler was involved in that. I was involved and it just... It took almost 20 years, and it just happened this January, where the train doesn't blow its horn from Cadwalader all the way to downtown, back and forth. And if you do hear it, it's usually the engineers that forget that it's a quiet zone. So that's a step in the right direction. The other thing I wanted to thank is Dr. Ibarra's team. On the meetings that we had, we were a little bit, well, why are we doing this? Why are we doing that? And then towards the end, we found out that this is why we're doing it. So it's important that this keeps going. Again, I want to thank everybody on the court for funding this. We at San Juan Neighborhood Association is partners with Texas Tech. and what Dr. Ibarra was saying, that we need to find other funding sources, I can probably be an in-between person for that. Also, many times we always complain that we that live in the central part of I'll pass within the city. We don't see any county funding, but I want to again thank this court for the funding for Escarate, for the funding of the Valley Theater, and for the funding of this health study.

Thank you, Fred.

Thank you, Fred. I'm Gabriel Garcia from the San Juan Imported Association. Judge, thank you for allowing us to do this. And commissioners, I want to say thank you again. And I hope that this is not a project that's in vain, that there's follow through with this project. And I've been in San Juan all my life. And I've heard and I've seen studies done, but there's no follow through. So my hope is that there is follow through support financially and otherwise. And thank you to the entire team involved because it doesn't take just one entity. It takes several. So thank you to everybody that's involved. Thank you, Judge.

Thank you both. You know, the proof of the pudding really is when you're residential or commenting and appreciative. I mean, we could all say, you know, be appreciative, but when it's the resident, Fred has been just an incredible, you know, advocate for all of these things. But when you have them pleased at the work and thanking, I mean, I think that means so much. So thank you both for those comments.

Yes, sir. Good morning, Judge. Good morning, Commissioners. My name is Felipe Acuna. I participated in the environmental study. I'm also a retired locomotive engineer. What I want to do is shed light on our problem that we have with Union Pacific. We've been living with this nightmare for this year. mental and health issue for like the last 11 years. Union Pacific at the Alfalfa Yard tore down their old yard office and built their new one maybe 300 feet from our homes. They parked their locomotives, their unattended locomotives, and leave them idling sometimes for hours, days, and even up to a week at a time. 200 feet is probably from that wall, Can you imagine just listening to that all day, all night, going to sleep with that noise, going to sleep with that vibration, going to sleep with those fumes? Those fumes come inside our homes. And I have a little packet, I just got it together this morning that I'd like to share. I'd like to see y'all can look at it. And this area needs immediate attention. And it's so easy because they have rules where they have to shut down these unattended locomotives within 15 minutes. I have the rule book right here. And they leave them running for whatever reason. It's a decision that's made by local management and yardmasters. But it's killing us out there. No other way to do it. We're not rodents in a lab. We need some immediate help. If I could just share this with you.

Can I take a copy of it, sir?

I only have one.

And I'll distribute it to them?

Thank you so much. It's painful to hear this, but we'll be very supportive. Thank you. Thank you.

So, Judge, I just want to see if we can do what Mr. Borrego suggested, which is share this report with... with other stakeholders, with the community, and just make sure that community partners are aware of this and it's widely distributed. So thank you all. Thank you all once again for your support. And hopefully we can keep this ball rolling. and invest more in this really important project information that really keeps us from flying blind when it comes to how we understand what's going on and how we react to what's going on.

Great job. Thank you.

Thank you. And thanks again, Mr. McElroy, for your involvement as well.

Item 4F, receive a presentation and update from Dr. Cynthia Renteria on the status of the ARPA Heritage Tourism Comprehensive Initiative, which include contracts with ALJA, EFO Media, and Destination El Paso. Contract numbers 2024-0971, 2024-0992, 2024-0985.

Welcome, Roberto. Roberto Ransom, director, El Paso County Economic Development Department. Before I pass it to Dr. Renteria, I'd like to take a moment to recognize the work and the progress presented today is the result of a devoted team of individuals working together to advance the vision established by this commissioner's court. The work presented today is a result of collaboration, coordination, and continuous engagement among multiple stakeholders. And I'd like to take just one minute to thank our team, the economic development team, from Veronica Valverde to Corinne Chacon, who moved forward all the checks, who hold the glue together, to Dr. Cynthia Renteria, Sonia Cigala, who are leading this effort, and Mariana Barraza. These updates are truly the child of ideas and direction provided by Commissioner's Court. The effort translate into vision, actual projects, measurable deliverables, instructor implementation strategies that can create meaningful impact for the community. There has been a significant coordination required among accounting departments legal counsel, purchasing, budget and finance, the auditors, external partners to ensure that these priorities continue to move forward. This process has required recurring meetings, constant communication, problem solving, and detailed oversight in order to align implementation with the goals and intent originally envisioned by the court. As with any large scale initiative, evolving multiple contracts, timelines, deliverables, success depends not only on the initial vision, but also sustained oversight and accountability throughout implementation. These projects require continuous monitoring, evaluation of deliverables, coordination with contractors and stakeholders, adjustments when necessary to ensure that the outcomes remain aligned with public purpose and strategic direction established by Commissioner's Court. Today's presentation represents progress made through a collective effort. They also demonstrate the importance of maintaining strong coordination and structure implementation process so these initiatives can continue producing long-term value for El Paso County and its residents. With that, Judge and Commissioners, I'd like to introduce, I mean, I'd like to bring forward Dr. Cynthia Renteria, who will be presenting and introducing each one of the prime awardees.

Good morning, Judge and Commissioners Quirt, Dr. Cynthia Renteria, your Heritage Tourism Coordinator with Economic Development. So we had an initial RFP and this is the scope of the RFP. So it was a pretty thorough scope. It was one RFP and it was awarded to three vendors. And the investment is meant to, of course, jumpstart the recovery of our heritage tourism program after the impact of the pandemic. This is the breakdown of how the deliverables were divvied up among the awardees and the three different vendors. And I think this is an innovative approach that distributed this among three vendors whom we work with one-on-one but also collaboratively. And they are all here today and I'd like to take a quick moment to recognize them. If the team from LJA can please stand. The team from EFO Media.

Thank you.

And the team from Destination El Paso.

Thank you.

So again, it has been really incredible to work with this group of people, professionals in their respective areas, individually and collaboratively. So I'm going to take you through each one of the vendors' projects and provide a status update of where we are within their given scope of work. So this is LJA, and again, you see their scope of work there to the left. So the County Historic Asset Master Plan, or CHAMP, something I believe the court is familiar with and has heard before. This is a strategic plan item that was stalled for many years. This is intended to be a planning tool for us, for the county, for the department. However, our approach has resulted and created a tool that will also be a valuable and accessible tool to the public to use for other historical organizations or heritage engaged organizations. This approach provides a foundation from which to begin conversations and planning about historic preservation countywide. Knowing the many layers of our area's history ensures we are telling inclusive and authentic narratives and stories. Data sources are derived from the Texas Historical Commission, markers, cemeteries, courthouses, national register listings, state antiquities, landmarks, museums, your county historical commission, other stakeholder input, broad research, some of our brochures, and it's still ongoing. The first phase of the CHAMP deliverable will include a narrative as within a GIS map. which will be accessible on our website, which I will talk about in just a bit. We have a second stakeholder session coming up at the end of this month. The first one was in person, the second one will be hosted virtually. The next deliverable still with LJA is the digital content. And this is also very much in progress. We've had at least one year of promotion and digital content creation in the form of social media posts. We've worked closely with Destination El Paso, who is coordinating the tours, events, and workshops, which I'll detail further shortly. We've also worked closely with county communications. We request review and approval before we post anything to our county social media. So this is very much a collaborative effort. Part of the social media campaign is closely aligned with new destination images, videos, short videos, library, a video library is pending this summer or fall, which is connected to work with influencers, vloggers, and bloggers. So really spreading the word about our programs and things happening countywide. LJA was also tasked with our online presence via a website. The LJA team and their subcontractors have worked together to develop a heritage tourism website. The website will incorporate the heritage tourism branding and identity again designed by Destination El Paso. It will also include a link to the CHAMP GIS map. digital experience guides, which are in progress. We've worked to develop experiences countywide in each precinct, so highlighting all our cultural assets throughout the county. This also includes not just historic sites, but activities, tours, restaurants, The website will also include digital versions of our heritage tourism brochures. That is something that that effort for the brochures happened before we engaged in this, right? So we are really good about having paper brochures and our County Historical Commission is very involved in that. And this will bring them virtual and make them accessible to a broader audience. The website will also have hotel information, culture and culinary information, an event calendar, a link to the county coliseum and other county historic sites.

When will the website go live? Do we expect it to go live?

Later this year, yes ma'am. And we can bring a more concrete timeline to you as we progress in our work. So also in progress is the influencer and marketing aspect that this is also still LJA. On the slide, we have a breakdown of the influencer marketing done so far. The reels and carousel posts are still being shared on our social media and the interactions or clicks continue to grow. So once you post something online, it kind of stays on our own pages, right? And people can always go back to them, revisit them or continue to share them. We look forward to the digital experience guide that will soon be shown on our website and social media. As part of this effort, we are also including promotion of events such as our Independence Day celebration, the county's America 250 celebration. So we look forward to bringing those to you and to highlighting when we are posting things in your precinct. Marketing and awareness promotional resources. So this is tying a lot of these efforts together and planning for continuity. So we have digital solutions, traditional media, possibly international media. We have recommendations for sustainability. So we expect to end with a plan where we can continue to coordinate with county communications and continue our promotional efforts. So the last deliverable under destination, I'm sorry, under LJA's scope of work is the museum curation and exhibit design. Now I don't play favorites with any of the deliverables in this project because this is an incredible comprehensive program that is foundational to our work in the Heritage Tourism Division. Roberto had a vision for this project and the scope of work for this project was done when I joined the department. However, he gave me the opportunity to add this section and I'm very excited to initiate this first phase. I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who has contributed to developing the interpretation and experience at our county historic sites, Los Portales and the Old County Jail. It is with the utmost respect that we move forward to build on the foundation that we have developed and update the framework for our historic site museums. We're working with LJA and Able City to engage our community and institutional partners. We held the first round of stakeholder meetings this past week. We want to ensure that we are capturing the many layers of history and connecting local narratives to broader histories, including indigenous, colonial, Mexican, Texas, and United States histories, because all of those are relevant to our history here on the border. highlighting our unique place on the border through culturally rich experiences and stories that connect with today's tourists at all three locations. So again, Los Portales, the old county jail, but also planning for the future activation of Casa Ronquillo. The timing for these discussions is perfect as our division continues to work with Public Works on the restoration of these historic sites. We look forward to bringing you updates as we work on this part of the project, as work on this part of the project continues. Please keep in mind that this is only a design phase, but it gets us one step closer to knowing what we'll need for production and implementation of interpretation and exhibit at these sites. Any questions before we move on to Destination El Paso?

Thank you.

Okay, so now we'll get into Destination El Paso's deliverables and their part of the scope of work. To the left you see what was awarded to them in the RFP. It's the Old El Paso County Jail Tourism. The Old El Paso County Jail Tourism Program aims to grow the audience that visits the Old County Jail by hosting events and workshops. So here on the slide, you see a breakdown of some of the more recent events that have happened at the Old County Jail. Amigo Man had a big draw, but he wasn't alone. We invited his friend, the San Elisario High School Eagle. So we had that local connection and that cross municipal connection as well. We've had candle making events, hat painting, and we still have more events planned for the Old County Jail. I do wanna make a quick note. You'll notice that the Ambassador Program is stricken through. The Ambassador Program, unfortunately, this part of the program did not move forward for a few reasons. However, you have approved an amendment that reallocated the funding for this deliverable to the other three deliverables to enhance the Old County Jail Tourism Program, the branding and identity, and the tours and activities. So here we have more tours in progress. Year to date, as of like last month, in May, we've continued to have events. And so we will bring you more of those numbers as Destination El Paso submits their reporting. This also helps us see what people are interested in, what is getting traction, what we may need to do more often, or what we may need to do seasonally. And here are some photos of the events that have happened throughout last year and this year. So to the left, the photo on horseback, that's horseback riding out in Waco Tanks. There is the tour of the Concordia Cemetery. And the bottom right, two photos, my right, are the mission trail tours. And so I hope this looks familiar as well. Earlier this year, we presented the Heritage Tourism Branding and Identity Concept. We met with you, we received your feedback and implemented it. Thank you for your support in helping us continue to move this project forward. We're going to be finalizing the branding guide. A draft has been shared with our partner vendors to start implementing it to see, to put it to use and see about finalizing and tweaking how the brand is used. We are also going to be developing the county community tiles. We've received feedback from each of the precincts and your staff about our county communities or unincorporated areas. We want to ensure accuracy and inclusivity of the communities throughout the county. And these are items that we've completed. Of course, we are now implementing the approved version on the website on our marketing efforts and promotional efforts. We're exploring the modular and adaptability components of our branding and identity. We're creating brand recognition, which will lead to loyalty, consistency across use in all of our heritage tourism programs. And I think the public will begin to recognize that El Paso County has a pretty strong heritage tourism program. So this of course reflects and communicates the county's values and heritage, reflects the historic and cultural significance of each place. Any questions about Destination El Paso before I move on? Commissioners? So again, here to the left, you see the deliverables that were, that EFO was tasked with. And so they have, the first one is the AI driven reports. EFO provides us with Placer AI reporting, a tool that uses cell phone location data to show where visitors are coming from. And this can be in the form of locations or zip codes. This can be done in real time, but provides a more holistic snapshot of attendance after events conclude. We can see year-to-year and month-to-month comparisons, identify trends and peak seasons, where visitors are coming from, and possibly help us target our promotion and advertising. And they've developed a methodology to format these reports for us. They are also tasked with the heritage tourism collaboration. We cannot have a successful heritage tourism program if we are working alone. Staying connected across the broader fields of heritage tourism is a challenge. There are so many people, and it's like a great challenge, right? Because there are so many people throughout the county working on history or heritage or cultural related programs, and we don't always talk to each other. This really helps us at least stay informed and better connect with each other. There are many events happening almost all the time, lectures, tours, gatherings, gastronomy events, plays, reenactments. And this provides a way for us to communicate and say, this is what's happening this week or this month and share it with our list of heritage tourism partners. EFO built on the list that we provided and has grown it and added more information. We work with EFO to share our events and partner events through a network to help us communicate and across promote our collective efforts. Old County Jail. So who doesn't want to see history come to life? The goal of this deliverable is to use technology within a historic site to time travel and create an immersive experience as part of the permanent exhibit at the old El Paso County Jail. This is still in development, but the first experiences will focus on the folklore and Southwest legends of Billy the Kid and the Wild West legacy that El Paso is very much part of. So our next steps are here on the slide. And so we're building narrative. We're trying to figure out how we're implementing this. We're working out those logistics. We of course have certain challenges like adobe buildings with very thick walls and plaster that also needs repair and timing with our restoration project, but this is very much an ongoing effort. So we will continue to work with EFO on their deliverables, gather placer AI reports, and continue refining and translating and interpreting our historic site via the immersive experience at the Old County Jail, and work collaboratively to reach out to stakeholders for our upcoming engagement session that I mentioned on the CHAMP with LJA. So EFO has done a great job helping us outreach whenever we have events or are needing stakeholder input. And so we're going to continue the content development and production efforts, work with the site restoration timeline, and identify options for installation. And we look forward to keeping you up to date on the progress of this project. So here's a rundown of the reports and collaborations that EFO has helped with throughout the course of this project. And so this follows their efforts of successful completion and ongoing placer AI reports and heritage tourism collaborations. Here is a photo of our first stakeholder engagement related to the CHEMP. And so here you have many of our community members. I'm sure you see a lot of familiar faces, our EFO and LJA vendors as well. Any questions about EFO?

Yes, ma'am.

Will we be able to see all of that data? We're happy to share those. We have some that we've requested and also if there are specific reports you would like to see about specific events, we would just need the dates and location and we can request those reports as well. But we're happy to send those. I think a highlight would be the best way to send those out and share them with the court.

So Cynthia, I think any reports we have we'd like to be able to share, so.

Yeah, so we can put all the ones that we've received so far and share them with the court via highlight.

Thank you.

Okay, so in conclusion, all of our heritage tourism efforts are really geared towards our county strategic plan goal three, be a hub for tourism. And we want to be a hub for tourism. And we are doing this via policy, preservation, preservation of tangible and intangible histories and cultures, programs that be it heritage history, cultural programs, tours, events, and promotion. So it takes all of these things working together to really make that visitor experience and have a strong heritage tourism program. So stronger collaboration, communication, and programming is going to help move this strategic goal three forward. Again, I want to thank our partners on this project, and if there are any other questions.

I think it's pretty fascinating. I think we've done more in these past three years than, you know, we've always thought tourism, but for some reason we thought it was going to sort of happen by itself, kind of we wait, everybody's going to come, and And it hasn't been like that, but I think you're doing so much. But one of the important things is the collaboration with your partners. You know, we knew that if we didn't all come together and had the same vision, it would be really difficult. I feel sort of the analogy would be the bridges before we started hearing about the closing each bridge just worked on itself you know everybody had you know we had one two from the city one from the government one from New Mexico we had ours and everybody was just sort of doing them and we were not getting close to what can happen now if we do a system and I feel The same way that if we're going to, you know, how many times I have to hear that, why aren't we like Messiah? Can you imagine, this is our place and I'm always hearing that comment. And I think it will be surpassed. I think we have more. to offer. There's so much going on and so I'm very thankful and I know the court's very thankful for what you're doing but if you don't mind just I'd like to have them introduce each one of your partners because I don't want you just to stand up and we see you. If you could introduce yourselves please.

And we're here, questions for me or for them as well.

Real quick, can I make a couple of comments? Is that okay? First of all, I just want to thank you, Dr. Renteria, for the great presentation. For me, this is a really important milestone. It's a really important moment. I've really tried to pride myself and my staff on being leaders when it came to looking at how the county can be more involved when it comes to economic development. When I first came into office, we didn't have economic development. And it really wasn't until probably 2015 or 2016 that the county after work that my office did with some local historic preservationists, really decided to get into pushing our historic sites and studying our heritage and getting involved in heritage tourism. And then we got to create the position that Dr. Renteria, She left my office to fill this position. So I'm glad we got to keep her and she's doing great work. But I think this community, we undersell ourselves when it comes to our heritage and our culture. and heritage tourism has proven to be through data, the top money grabber when it comes to any type of tourism, whether it's entertainment, whether it's sports, any other type of tourism, heritage tourism brings in more heads in beds, it brings in more economic, benefits than any other type. And so, I really am so proud of the county and the work that we've done. I'm really thankful to the court and prior courts that also indulge me in my office and the work that we started to try to do more of this. I'm excited about the CHAMPS project as well, which as you said, was kind of put on the back burner, but now we're, back at it again. And, you know, it's just great to see now we have a number of partners. We're also, you know, creating economic development here. Thank you very much to Destination El Paso and the city. Thank you to LGA Engineering. and of course to our media partners, EFO as well. Really, really proud of the work that we're doing here and the continued work. So again, I keep talking about, I really hope that the Commissioner's Court continues to really prioritize this work because we do have one of the most amazing assets, which is the mission trail, right? But we have so many other assets as well, right? All of the assets downtown, the historic buildings, the other pockets that we are going to be looking at to try to promote. I mean, we just have such rich history here. in El Paso and we are finally, I think, getting to a point where we are selling that history and going to bring more people to our community because of that and benefit our community, not just the folks that are coming from outside, but also create more pride locally within all of the assets that we have. And when we're out there being ambassadors for El Paso and people say, well, what's in El Paso? What's there to do in El Paso? what's special about El Paso. This really is, in my opinion, gonna help us to do that. So thank you. Thank you once again. And yeah, let's have introductions from folks.

Good morning, Judge Samaniego, all of our commissioners. My name is Blasita Lopez with LJA Engineering. I am privileged and blessed to be your project manager on this particular project. And we look forward to what's ahead. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning, Judge and Commissioner's Court. I'm Melissa Montemayor with LJA Engineering. I'm a senior vice president with the firm, and I'm also the Southwest Texas region leader. You also have me delivering on your project, and so we feel this is just a vitally important project for LJA and you. We look forward to finishing delivering the project. Reminder, we're just down the street, the Westar building. Yeah, we welcome you to use our facilities at your leisure. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Good morning, all. I'm going to ask my team to come up with me. I'm Ellen with EFO Media. This is Kara and Regina. We're your local collaborators on this, bringing everybody together and doing a lot of data mining. And I'm really happy that Commissioner Holguin asked about the reporting because that's something that is fascinating. Once you get into it and you see where people are coming from. We've also got it broken down by precinct. So you'll be able to see very personally how your precinct is impacted by a lot of the events that are going on in town. And especially most recently Coldplay and BTS and some of those bigger things and how they've affected the city at large. Anyway, we're really happy to be on this piece of business. We're loving working with the county. It's the first time we've ever had a county contract, so it's been a learning experience, but it's also been a really great experience, and everybody's been wonderful. So thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Thank you.

That type of data is exactly what I was interested in. My gosh, you're going to go crazy. Oh, yes. It's wonderful.

Welcome. Hello again. Good to see you all again. Thank you all so much for everything that you've done for us and helping us get the branding part done over the past several months. And my name is Michael Nunez from Destination El Paso. I'm the marketing design manager. This is my colleagues.

I'm Alexandria Costa, strategic marketing manager.

I'm also data analytics and advertising for Visit Live in water parks.

Thank you.

Hello, I'm Nora Ochoa. I'm the senior ecotourism and cultural heritage manager at Visit El Paso and I'm really excited to be working on this project and I can't wait to see for you guys to see what we have planned.

Yeah, this whole thing has been a blessing, as mentioned earlier. It's really nice. Very happy to be part of this. And thank you all for your feedback previously. And look forward to seeing the fruits from all the work that we've done to see all the amazing things that are going to, I believe, come from all of this work.

Thank you. Great partnerships. Roberto, you want to tap it off and see what...

Thank you, Commissioner, and just wanted to let you know that just like you mentioned it, we have a big synergy. At least once a month we're meeting, the county staff is meeting, department staff is meeting with each one of them. And then we have at least once a month a collaborative meeting where we identify synergies and how one primal ward can assist the other one and what collaboration projects we do. A big success of that was the CHAMP, which is right now for sure 60% complete. We also have a 90% threshold that the CHAMP is getting there. And we went from a report that was gonna be analog into a GIS platform. To close it out, just wanted to thank the efforts of Dr. Renteria and the rest of the team. Again, very important because This really works with the talent of every single individual by sending the checks and having our awardees paid to processing all sorts of documentation, budget changes, and also I really appreciate the authority that you gave the department to move line items from the budget because as we move, as we work, as we progress, That authority that you provided to the department, it has been very, very handy not to bring forward every time to commissioners court approval from budgetary items. Again, not impacting the budget, but just moving money around. So with that, Dr. Renteria, any other words to close it out?

Thank you, Roberto.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you, Roberto, and thank you, everyone. I just want to close by saying thank you to the court for your support and for everything that you've done to create this program here at the county. I'm very excited to be part of it.

We're on the right path. Just the fact that we used to separate tourism from economic development. It was sort of crazy, right? When you think about it now, it's so much of, you know, the engine of economic development. So, Dr. Renteria, thank you and thank all of you for what you're doing. Great, great path. So, thank you. Okay.

Item 4G, receive a presentation and update from the Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness on the status of the ARPA Mission Trail Gap Analysis Project, contract number 2024-0994.

Judge Commissioners, Roberto Ransom for the record, Director, Economic Development Department. This next update relates to ARPA Mission Trail Gap Analysis Project being conducted in partnership with the Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness at the University of Texas at El Paso. This initiative represents an important step in advancing the long-term tourism cultural heritage, and economic development needs of the Mission Trail corridor. The Mission Trail is one of the most historically significant corridors in our region and in the state of Texas, spanning approximately nine miles through El Paso Mission Valley. It connects historic communities, landmarks, businesses, museums, galleries, restaurants, and cultural destinations that together tell the story of our region's rich heritage and identity. The project recognizes that preserving and promoting this quarter is not a cultural effort but also an economic development strategy tied directly to tourism and growth and community revitalization. The effort is also focused on understanding the needs and challenges faced by micro and small businesses operating along the mission trail while identifying opportunities to enhance visitor experiences, create stronger connections between attractions, and support sustainable tourism growth through the corridor. With that, I'd like to bring forward Ms. Mayra Maldonado for her to provide an update on this study. Mayra. Thank you, Roberto.

Thank you. Welcome.

Thank you. Good morning, Judge and Commissioners. It's such an honor to work on this project. And first of all, it is important to recognize the leadership shown by El Paso County in advancing the Mission Trail Initiative and continuing efforts, as Commissioner Stout was saying, to creating more pride in the region. with respect to the region's cultural, tourism, and economic assets. The county's commitment reflects a long-term vision shared by many community-based organizations and goes beyond infrastructure improvements by positioning the Mission Trail as a key driver of heritage, tourism, community revitalization, and regional identity. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Roberto Ransom for his leadership on this project and also Dr. Renteria. Next slide, please.

Oh, I have the, sorry.

Okay, so as part of the project, we have six tasks for this project. The first task is with respect to lit review in historic districts. We have completed this task. I'm gonna be talking about it in a little bit. The second one is about mapping main infrastructure and cultural and historic landmarks. We have GIS assets capability to do this task. The third one is the analysis of the map data. We are mapping at the street level all of the tourism heritage and businesses as well. The fourth task is about designing and administrating the surveys. And with that, we are getting input about preferences, needs and challenges from visitors and tourists and businesses. Task number five is about assessing small businesses' needs and challenges. And the final task is about submitting a final comprehensive report. I don't think you're seeing the table here. Me neither, very well. But I want to say that since the launch of the project, several key milestones have already been completed. One of the major accomplishments has been the completion of the lit review, which has focused on historic districts and the Mission Trail's cultural and historical significance. This effort included reviewing decades of plans, studies, and preservation strategies dating back to the early 1980s. Through this process, recurring themes and long-standing priorities have been identified, including restoration and rehabilitation funding, transportation enhancements, pedestrian improvements, tourism development, and economic revitalization. The literature review also included case studies of similar nearby communities to anticipate challenges and identify strategies to incorporate into future strategies. Now, rather than creating parallel initiatives, this project builds upon that long-standing body of work rather than starting from scratch. By reviewing and organizing decades of previous studies and recommendations, the assessment helps identify recurring priorities, areas where progress has been made, and long-standing implementation gaps that continue to shape the corridor today. I want to take this opportunity to share with you that not in the scope of work, but we have decided to analyze all of the programs, plans, events, and summits. And I know that my team is watching me online. They are watching me online, so I thank and I applaud their effort. We have extensive documentation in our offices of all of these plans, since 1980, again, not in the scope of work, across different topics, and well, yes, so it's about transportation, housing, infrastructure, and so many other categories, but this, again, will help us not starting from scratch. letting the community know that their priorities are important and that we have been tracking them down and listening to what they have to say. Now, what are we working on right now? So there are several tasks that are work in progress. Task number two is about mapping the infrastructure and cultural and historic landmarks. The original scope of work included 9.2 miles long of the Mission Trail area and 0.6 miles wide of the area. We have now expanded that into an 11.2 miles in length and 3.2 miles wide, the area. So the geographic scope was expanded to include Rio Vista Farm, located at the intersection of Rio Vista Road and Moon Road. as well as Alameda Avenue in recognition of the area's historical significance and relevance to the project. This expansion also broadens the project scope by incorporating additional businesses into the survey area. We're also making sure that all of the businesses that we have in GIS in our platforms match the reality, right? Sometimes some of these businesses no longer exist, so we go into the field and make sure that they are still there. Another major focus has been a stakeholder and community engagement. Business and visitor surveys were launched in collaboration with Project Vida Promotoras, which have been doing a great, amazing, fantastic work, thank you, to gather direct feedback from residents, visitors, and small businesses along the corridor. field outreach remains ongoing. And early survey activity has shown stronger participation from visitors than from businesses. That's a challenge that we have. There is a survey fatigue in the area. There are a couple of parallel initiatives such as BPGI, for example. This is another one mission trail. So that's what we have been trying to tackle. And Well, in terms of assessing a small business's needs and challenges, as I was saying, we are adding a qualitative research component, not in our scope of work, but I wanted to mention that we are conducting round tables. We are inviting, as part of that matrix that I showed you, we identified around 50 different organizations, associations, stakeholders related to the Mission Trail area. So we are planning to invite them to these round tables and listen to what their priorities are, their challenges are, but also not only these organizations that we are planning to meet with, we are also meeting with policy makers and businesses and the community itself to listen more about what these needs and challenges are. Well, this is again the next steps that I have been mentioning. We will be conducting stakeholder roundtable sessions. Dr. Renteria has been helping us tremendously with this item. We continue the survey administration. We are evaluating outreach effectiveness and strengthen the response rates to ensure that assessment reflects both business and visitor perspectives. As the final task we have for this project is a final report preparation, we have a couple of results. We have been providing those preliminary results to the economic development department. And again, I wanna appreciate all of the support that you have been giving to this amazing initiative. Again, it's about creating pride and it is about to also getting to others know more about our region and the significant assets that we provide, not only to the region, but to the state and to the US. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Do you all have any questions for Maida?

Well, just more than anything, I want to thank you. I don't think there's a critical meeting that requires data that might not be there, that's not helping us in some ways. It's been a foundation of data that has just been incredible. I mean, we depend so much on that, and we thank you, because I know you're relentless at making sure

that we understand the data as it should be not how we might perceive it so thank you so much for everything that you do for this community thank you for appreciating this i actually just had one question maida have you been in touch with the city of socorro regarding the survey so they've been really helpful to us with some of the other surveys that i understand the survey fatigue is a big problem But the city of Socorro is really, really great at helping distribute surveys on their social media, at their meetings. And I was just wondering if you had a chance to connect with them.

We have, and we have been in touch with many other cities in the area. And actually, the picture, the very last picture on that slide was So yes, and it's been great. We are also taking into consideration the tribe activity in the area as well. That's also important. So yes, thank you for that.

Good, I'm glad to hear that. Thank you.

Judge, we'd like to jump to item 4I. Receive a presentation and update from the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce on the status of the ARPA Comprehensive Technical Assistance Training Program for micro and small businesses across El Paso County, Texas. Contract number 2024-0999.

Commissioners, Roberto Ransom for the Record Economic Development. This next update relates to ARPA Technical Assistance Training Program for micro and small businesses representing a total investment of $1 million. This initiative is designated to strengthen the capacity, resilience, and long-term sustainability of local businesses by providing direct technical assistance, training opportunities and business development support through El Paso County. The program focuses on assisting micro and small businesses that often face barriers in accessing professional services, business planning resources, financial guidance, marketing support and opportunity training. Throughout targeted outreach strategic partnerships, this initiative is helping entrepreneurs, micro and small business owners, improve business practices, strengthen competitiveness, and position themselves for long-term growth. This effort also supports broader county economic development objectives by encouraging entrepreneurship, business retention, workforce readiness. By investing in technical assistance training, the county is helping to create a stronger micro and small business ecosystem that supports both existing business and emerging entrepreneurs across urban, rural, and underserved communities. This initiative is directly aligned with Strategic Goal 2.8, Business Outreach and Technical Assistance, by expanding access and training, technical support, and business development resources for micro and small businesses throughout El Paso County. With that, I'd like to pass it to Ms. Cigala to introduce the details of the project, and we have, as well, we would like to introduce the members of the Hispanic Chamber for any questions you may have. Gladys, would you please come forward? Thank you. Yes, someone.

Welcome, Gladys. Thank you and congratulations on taking over the Hispanic Chamber. We really appreciate that. So thank you for being here today with us.

Thank you so much, Judge, for welcoming us and for your kind wishes. It's an honor to be here today and it's been an honor to partner up with you, the commissioners, with the county, Economic Development, Hunt Institute, and Project Vida on this incredible project. We are seeing the results of the work in the workshops and the interaction that we're having with all the different micro and small business owners. So it's been an incredible experience for us. that's what we do the that's what the hispanic chamber focuses on and it's the growth of our small businesses so thank you for trusting us and allowing us to be partners in this project and what i would like to do is pass it on to jessica orozco my programs and events manager who has been working alongside Cynthia Lopez in this project every day so she knows all the in and out and I I don't want to take the that credit from her so she'll get you on everything that we've been doing but I wanted to thank you so much again for this opportunity and for allowing us to be here today thank you for your partnership with all of you thank you thank you welcome

Thank you. Good morning, Judge and Commissioners. Thank you again for the opportunity to present. So really quick, just going into slide two on programs and deliverables. With the technical assistance program and workshops, these trainings have been customized for one-on-one advising, mentorship, tailored to business support services. These services are designated to meet businesses where they are, where they need help understanding like financial documents, preparing for grant applications, learning how to make their business. improving employee management practices, developing stronger internal business systems. The key priority of the program is for countywide accessibility. The program was structured to serve businesses throughout the four precincts, ensuring that support was not just limited to one area in the community. Outreach and promotions were conducted countywide to help reach businesses in both urban and rural areas. Also, we included hybrid options to provide these services when possibilities for them were not available due to transportation, scheduling, or just due to the location. One of the other important deliverables is our data collection and performance tracking. The Hispanic Chamber is responsible for maintaining business files tracking participation. documenting services provided and reporting outcomes to ensure transparency and compliance with the county's recommendations. And this allows us to measure the programs are reached, also identified business needs and support a fair and accountable grant process. Also, this grant includes grant readiness. So with the application support, we were able to assist eligible businesses through the ARPA grant process by helping them understand the requirements and reviewing qualifications to be able to move forward by submitting their application and completing it for consideration. for accomplishments and county-wide reach. So during this phase of the program, we focused heavily on technical assistance, business training, grant readiness support for micro and small businesses. The goal was to prepare the businesses not only to participate in the ARPA grant opportunity, but also to strengthen their overall operations. The program was definitely implemented county-wide across all the four precincts. As part of the grant readiness program, we conducted again a two hybrid grant qualification checklist reviews. These sessions helped applicants better understand what documentation eligibility requirements were needed before submitting their applications. At this point, the program does have a current pool of 7,500 for each grant opportunity. We currently do have 57 applications received out of the 100 slots. This reflects a very strong engagement while also showing that continued application support and follow-up remain important as we move into our next phase. In a performance standpoint, the Hispanic Chamber has delivered 18 workshops. We've served 414 total attendees, and we supported 133 hybrid participants. These numbers do demonstrate both the level of demand for technical assistance and the value of offering flexibility for all businesses in the county. The workshops attended by precinct also show participation throughout the county. As shown on the slide, programs reached businesses connected straight from the judges to trainings and through precincts one through four, and also just the countywide. You'll also notice that throughout all the different precincts, you had a big mix, a big range of people from other precincts participating. So there was people that also came from Precinct 4 to Precinct 1, from Precinct 1 to Precinct 3. They were, the demand for technical assistance is definitely there.

Can I ask before you move on from this? So the workshop attendees by precinct, that total is 133 countywide. So what's the difference with the 414 total attendees in the smaller yellow box?

So that also includes the hybrid classes. Well, the hybrid is 133. So the countywide are the hybrid classes, including the grant qualification checklists.

OK, so that's the 133 in the blue box.

Yes, so the 133 was the two qualification grant checklist and then the two other trainings that we. Added at the end so that it could be a countywide training for the people that had not been able to get to the ones that were in the designated precincts.

OK, OK, thank you.

So on slide four, the implementation, so this slide really highlights what the program has implemented. The Hispanic Chamber with the guidance of the county economic development, we finalized the training topics based on the needs identified among the participating businesses and applicants. based on these surveys. These topics were selected to address practical challenges in small business that small businesses face, including access to funding, employment, management, marketing, taxes, bookkeeping, business growth. Speakers and subjects to the matter experts were confirmed. We ensured that the workshops provided were relevant. They had high quality information. Workshop locations were also coordinated throughout the county to support the areas in all four precincts. So the Hispanic Chamber has continued to participate in biweekly collaboration meetings with the county staff as well as monthly partner meetings. These meetings have been important just to ensure that the program remains in alliance with the contractual agreements, with reporting expectations, and of course the overall county-wide priorities. This ongoing communication has allowed the Hispanic Chamber and the county to address questions, review programs, and make adjustments as needed. In terms of outreach and marketing, the Hispanic Chamber developed a marketing material to save the date notices and direct communication to applicants. Applicants were invited to attend the workshops with their respective precincts and all around the county, and that included hybrid information sessions to make it more reliable and more flexible to them. The program has also moved into the application process review, so phase two. The Hispanic Chamber continues to accept and review submitted grant applications while providing applicant guidance through the process. This includes helping business understanding missing items, clarification on documentation needs, and move towards the completion of the submissions. Some of the workshops and training topics covered a broad range of business needs. Major training categories included access to funding and grants, employee management and workplace culture, business growth and responsible scaling, hiring and employee retention, digital marketing 101, business taxes, rural community marketing, starting a business, small business bookkeeping, and HR best practices. These topics were intentionally selected because it reflects the areas where many micro and small businesses need most support. For example, access to funding and grants Grants helped businesses better understand infrastructure opportunities, financial opportunities, and application requirements. Bookkeeping and taxes related sessions helped businesses improve financial organization, HR, and employee management topics supported businesses. that we're hiring, retaining staff, or building stronger workplace practices. Marketing and growth help businesses think strategically about their visibility, customer engagement, and responsible expansion requirements. Again, this program also includes the grant readiness application support as mentioned. We've been assisting eligible businesses throughout the program process by helping them understand the requirements, review qualifications, and move towards submitting the grant applications for considerations. So during the next steps, during the first phase of the program again, we heavily focused on assisting businesses through training, grant readiness support. The goal was to prepare businesses not only for the participation of the ARPA grant opportunity, but also to strengthen their overall operations as small business and micro owners. This program was implemented countywide across for all four precincts. This is important because the initiative was designed to be equitable and accessible to businesses throughout El Paso County. To support this effort, the El Paso Hispanic Chamber did host workshops and trainings in different areas that provided hybrid participation and increased flexibility to businesses and owners who may not have been able to attend in person. As part of the grant readiness, EPHCC again conducted two grant qualification review sessions. These sessions again helped each grant applicant better understand the documentation and eligibility requirements. At this point, the program has a current pool of 7,500 grant opportunities with about 57 applications received out of the 100 available slots. So again, sorry, I lost my train of thought. Let me gather my thoughts again. At this stage, the next steps at this stage, again, we've worked and conducted all the workshop training phases. The next step includes continuing communication with applicants and county staff, assisting applicants through application completion, reviewing submission and materials, and preparing award recommendations for proposal to the county to review for the EPH to review. And the El Paso Hispanic Chamber will continue helping businesses address questions and finalize required information so that the qualifying applicants can move forward in the process. The ultimate goal is to move forward with technical assistance and readiness into the awarding of the grants and eligible business while ensuring that the process remains fair, documentation and alignment with the county requirements. We just want to make sure that we continue the follow-up. Like I mentioned, we have 57 applications that have been submitted to. We are pulling follow-up calls with everybody that has attended the grant workshops to make sure that if they have any other questions in regards to submitting the application or what's holding them back for the documentation. And a lot of the needs of these is just explaining the documents that are needed to be submitted. A lot of these businesses also don't have administrative staff. So they are the ones that are having to stop from their daily business structure, their business work plan in order to go back and find all of these documentations. But we've noticed that after we meet with them on the one-on-one counseling that they do find better options and are submitting their applications in a promptly manner. So we want to continue moving forward with follow-ups to continue receiving more applications. I don't know if anybody has any questions.

I was so pleasantly surprised at how appreciative the participants were and how open they were about their weaknesses and gaps. And so I think we learned that it's a very important intervention, especially I kept telling them that, hey, we've got a window of opportunity. where a lot of things are happening, you need to be prepared for those opportunities, because I really felt that they were lacking a lot of the technical skills, a lot of the things that... I mean, we sort of understood that, otherwise we wouldn't have the program, but I was very surprised how engaged they were. Did you find it to be that they were engaging and taking advantage of the workshops to improve their business?

Absolutely. We had repeat attendees across all precincts.

The other one is because I think that's going to be important every time that commissioners court proposes something or comes up with money. If we want to do it again, we have to show evidence that there's been a success. Okay, we did X and then you were successful because of your skills. Are we going to be able to capture that, those successes and the businesses that participated? Or maybe, I don't know, that's more of a question to Roberto.

So I'm going to say yes. As you can see here, you can see part of how we've captured some of the information. Out of 18 workshops, you had a total of 414 attendees. 133 did attend hybrid. And it proves that the success is there. We also conducted registration at each workshop. So it shows that, you know, who attended, how many precincts they attended, and it shows that consistency of needing that support with technical assistance.

Go ahead, Gladys. If I may add something, a lot of these attendees are also participating in chamber events, so we can also, you know, if we needed to show, you know, work or participation after, they're they're we're really seeing that interest and that investment in in continuing to grow their business so a lot of what we're hearing is that they just needed to know that there were resources available to them so yes thank you roberto you want to touch on that please

Yes, Judge. So part of when we built the architecture for this and for everything that is business wide, we took into consideration exit surveys and measurables. So they, within the scope of work, they do have a section where they will be providing exit surveys and we're trying to get within the exit surveys, the impact on business opportunities that they have. So it's great that we have an overlap between the membership and the recruitment of these new businesses, because that is a way for us, we have their emails, we have a big database that will be available to the county, to the department, and to every single one of your offices, because at the end of the day, we thought about policy. We thought about how can this help us, the county, build new policy based on the needs. So, yes, to respond to your question, Judge, yes, we have a section for exit surveys and measuring the success.

Thank you so much.

And then just to add on to Roberto's comment about the exit surveys, as we are checking the application qualification, the submission, we are ensuring that businesses did submit both surveys.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for the presentation. I have just a couple of questions on the numbers as well. So on slide three, yeah, it shows 49 out of 100 applicants at the bottom. And then you said 57.

Yes. So this was a pre-made, that difference is within a week. Okay.

So we have 100 slots and we only have 57 applicants so far. Do we have enough qualified businesses to reach the 100?

Yes. Based on our database, we have 150 to 150 some applicants. businesses that qualify so we are doing those follow-up calls and seeing how can we assist them or what is it that's stopping them from submitting their application and then from that point on we schedule a one-on-one with them to guide them and help them fill out their application so that we can submit it.

Commissioner, is your question regarding to the qualification of the grant?

Yeah, just to make sure that we have a healthy pool to be able to fill all those 100 slots.

Please rectify the record. You have so far 57 applicants for the grant, right? Yes. Yes. One of the main reasons, and we're getting to craft plan B in case we don't have enough applicants for the 100 number that we have in the scope of work. One of the things that I have seen personally, and please feel free to chime in and expand, is that this business's number one, the funding is ARPA related. It's not very easy for businesses to keep receipts over three years, and we're asking for businesses to provide receipts for six continuous years so we make sure that we comply with the CFR 200 standards. So having receipts for six years, it's really hard on those businesses. The second thing that we have seen is that there was a tremendous pool of businesses as startups. And this is the grant unfortunately hopefully you know the court considers for the future uh a plan like this but for startups because the the money the way that we received it it doesn't allow startups so again just the hard the hard component of the receipts for six years and the fact that we are not able to embrace those startups is what is really making hard that uh number that reaches out to 100 grant applicants, right? Because you have seen that we have 414. Those means the 414 are the curated lists of business that we have, but that doesn't mean the outreach was for 400. It has been probably double. businesses that perhaps started providing the survey, they didn't respond it, has been doubled that number. So that number that you see is a curated number, and to respond to your question, we're having a hard time with the grant component. And as plan B, we're giving, we need, we're cognizant that we're time sensitive, so by a certain date, we have to just stop the process and coordinate with the administration so we can return the money unfortunately but we're generating a lot of awareness where they're sending emails and phone calls to say hey you know apply this is this is money for you if you have the receipts unfortunately again it's just a little hard it is and especially because a lot of these small businesses like i mentioned don't have administrative staff so they need to take a step back from their business from their day-to-day business to go back and find all of those documents

And the other thing that we did is reach out to CPAs to see if they recommend somebody from their clients, because they will typically have all their information in order. But that's been the biggest hurdle, that they don't have their receipts, is what we're hearing all around.

So if we don't reach the 100 applicants, there's a possibility we would have to return whatever grant funding is left. There's no way to repurpose those funds?

Or increase the grant amount for the folks that actually got the grant? Double the grant amount if there's half the number of applicants.

You could change the grant amount. You could change some of the standards. But any funding on any of the ARPA programs, we have the recapture clause to reimburse ourselves.

for our expenses that haven't been reimbursed that are eligible so we have that as there there should be no arpa funds that are have to be returned um what is the definition of a startup is it anybody who's started the business prior like in the last six years does it have to be six years um we within the

Framework of the Scope of Work, Commissioner, we didn't specify what startup it is. The main guideline within the Scope of Work is you need to have your receipts for, you have to be in business for six continuous years. So we could define startups or any other type of definition, but at the end of the day, what the auditors are asking us because of the CFR 200 is businesses that could provide those receipts for those six years.

So if they were only, so they have to have been in business during COVID, basically? Yes.

Yes, they had to have been in business before March 14th of 2020.

And was that like? Spelled out to the businesses from the from the get go.

When they came to the yes, if we crafted 2 resources to inform the businesses right after right after we brought in those businesses, we explained to them the workflow number 1. and uh the hispanic chamber also had a specific seminar with a specific form that indicated all those uh a checklist with the steps and uh indicating that this is money coming from arpa funding and the arpa funding is tied to cfr 200 and so we have to bring in legal Auditors and come up with a with a form in this form was vetted by them. So that was what we communicated to the businesses.

And we actually did ARPA kickoff sessions last year in all four precincts, including here at the courtroom as well.

OK, thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner. Thank you. The last thing, if I may add, would be that we initially had two members within the department coordinating this. Humberto Lucero is right now in FMLA about to come back. And everything has been coordinated by Sonia Cigala. So I just wanted to recognize that effort to Sonia because she has been working tremendously to make this successful with our partners.

Yes, her guidance is definitely very well, very much appreciated. Thank you again, the County Economic Development Judge and Commissioners. Thank you so much for your time.

No, no. Thank you for the partnership. We've always worked very well. It's your lane and our lane kind of thing. So we come together very well. So thank you. Thank you for all your work. Roberto?

Judge, if we can do one more, please?

Yeah. Okay, we're going to do, just for logistics, we're going to do Project Vida, and then we're going to take a 30-minute break to come back so we can finish some of the other items.

Item 4H, receive a presentation and update from Project Vida and UTEP Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness on the Status of the ARPA Business Preservation and Growth Initiative for El Paso County, Contract Number 2024-1000. Thank you, Sonia.

Excuse me.

Good morning, Judge and Commissioners. Sonia Cigala, Senior Analyst with Economic Development. I am pleased to provide a status update regarding the ARPA technical assistance training program under strategic item 2.8, which is business outreach for technical assistance development and implementation. This initiative focuses on supporting micro and small businesses throughout the El Paso County that were impacted by COVID-19 pandemic. through outreach, technical assistance, business support, services, and data-driven analysis. We are grateful to be joined today by our partners from Project VIDA and the UTEP Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness, who have played a crucial role in implementing this initiative across the county. At this time, I would like to introduce Ms. Terry Craig. She is the Loan Specialist and Compliance Officer of Project VIDA, who will provide an overview and current status update of the Business Preservation and Growth Initiative Program, which we are shortening that to BPGI. Thank you.

Welcome. Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much for seeing us before you break for lunch. Good morning, Judge Samaniego and commissioners. My name is Terry Craig and I'm the interim co-chief of the Economic Development Department at Project VIDA and also the Loan Specialist Compliance Officer for El Paso Collaborative, another organization within Project VIDA. At this time, I would like to introduce Project VIDA staff members who have been involved in the Business Preservation and Growth Initiative Program, also known as the BPGI Program. These were the individuals who hit the ground walking the mission trail, visiting the businesses individually, talking with them over the phone, and doing anything that they had to do to be able to complete the surveys. So at this time, I would like for each one of them to introduce themselves.

good morning my name is sylvia i'm technical assistant and thank you for the opportunity to participate in this project good morning commissioners and judge my name is erica guardia i'm on the interim co-chief of economic development program thank you for the opportunity

Good morning, Commissioners and Judge. My name is Anais Salcedo, and I'm a field coordinator, outreach specialist for Project VIDA.

We're the ones out in the field with the owners. Good morning. Nice to meet you. My name is Norma Davila. I'm a field coordinator for the BPJI. Hello, everyone. Good morning. My name is Amalia Garcia Robles, and I am a team lead from El Paso Economic Development.

Thank you. Welcome.

At this time, I would like to begin the presentation by saying that the total award amount provided to Project VIDA for this program was $342,867, of which $120,000 was allocated to our partner, UTEP Institute, to do the analysis that all of our employees did on this particular project. During the period from April 2025 through March 2026, 921 businesses were visited across all four precincts. 528 businesses completed the BPGI survey during the phase one part of the program. Four matchmaking events were hosted with one event held in each precinct. Matchmaking event attendance included from precinct one, 21 businesses attended, 12 were from precinct one, nine from other precincts. From precinct two, six businesses attended, five from precinct two, and one from precinct three. Precinct three, 19 businesses attended, nine from precinct three, 10 from other precincts. precinct four, nine businesses attended, two from precinct four, and seven from precinct two. During these events, business owners were informed about activities and opportunities taking place throughout the various precincts. Many chose to attend events outside their own precinct. And many of the reasons that they attended outside of their precinct was because they wanted to network with the other businesses and share each other's talents, not only their talents, but also what they could provide for the other businesses. In addition, 65 business owners accepted one-on-one technical assistance from Project VIDA. Eleven business owners participated in accounting seminars. Six businesses were referred to financial institutions for access to capital. So not only did they accept the one-on-one technical assistance from Project VIDA, but each one of these businesses had a different need. So what we did when we met with them was that we addressed their needs. Some of them, for example, may have needed a business plan. Some of them may needed to know a little bit about what permits they needed to work in different parts of the county. As a result of the technical assistance provided, business owners increased their knowledge in the areas such as business planning and financial education, while also gaining access to additional business resources and financial opportunities. The program has not ended yet, but we do have some success stories already. We have one micro business who just recently received a loan, and it was a small loan in the amount of $1,000. And what that's going to do, it's going to help them build their credit. for one, and then it also is helping them to be able to stock their inventory for the upcoming Father's Day graduations. They're a business that sells gift baskets and different types of articles, so the small loan that they were given is gonna help them to prepare baskets for Father's Day, as well as to prepare items for the upcoming graduations for high schools in their areas. We also have one business who went to the networking events and that particular business met two other businesses and right now is working with one of the other businesses to provide marketing services and then also is now purchasing their fruits and vegetables from another business that is located within that area. So they're networking and they're helping each other with different things that they can work on and help each other. What Project VIDA is going to do, we're not gonna stop there. We're gonna conduct follow-up calls and business site visits. We find that sometimes the business owners, there's only one person that's working the business, which is the owner themselves. And so that particular owner may not have the time to attend all of the events that are taking place. So we're gonna go to their business when they can meet with us. So we're gonna make a special time to be able to meet with the businesses so that we can sit down, we can do the phase two, the exit surveys with them. Also, we do follow-up calls. and then we also do anything that we need to do on our part to be able to help out especially the micro businesses or the small businesses. We also work for example with the city of Socorro because we have a good partnership there so we're able to work with their economic development department so that we can help the businesses in the area. We already have a presence in the area of the mission trail so we're already very familiar with some of the businesses in the area, and we also have the trust of some of the owners. And if we haven't met with a particular business, then we're gonna go sit there, talk to them about the program that the county is offering, and then we're also gonna talk to them about what is available to them, especially, for example, any of the technical assistance, any of the grants that they may be able to apply for, and also tell them how it is that they may be able to collect the receipts, and then we also refer them to the Hispanic Chamber. We're also going to continue to do the referrals and business support connections. We're going to let them know what other businesses in the area can help them out. And we're going to complete, like I said earlier, the phase two exit surveys in partnership with the Hunt Institute. Judge Samaniego, as you were saying earlier, The Hunt Institute has helped out quite a bit because all of the information that we collect, they're able to analyze and put it for us, and so we know exactly how many businesses we're targeting, how many follow-ups we need to do, how many tourists or individuals that also completed the survey. We're also going to maintain especially close contact and collaboration with Roberto and the Economic Development Department. We meet continuously with them and to be able to ensure that we're in compliance with the grant requirements and that we have to do everything that we need to do to ensure that this grant is completed successfully. Are there any questions?

not not at this point thank you thank you very much thank you you know i just love the fact that you're the grassroots kind of approach that you have um you know i started a business or a restaurant had no clue like i think i had a thousand dollars and and ten partners and you know it was crazy but i remember there was nothing i mean you felt so desperate and it took so long I mean, I was fortunate that it was successful immediately, but I mean, it was such a difficult challenge. And it's that kind of person that, you know, they're relentless. They just need the technical skills. They need the support. the mentoring, all these things that come with that. And so I thank you for reaching out to that person that's out there that wouldn't have an opportunity, but by your assistance, that person can one day be competitive and have a big business. And I think it's so rewarding to see that someone that probably would never have that opportunity would end up having it. It's not a good example, but because they were already a little, you know, doing well, but they're doing amazingly well because of the support from the county. And I've seen, you know, every time I go, it's growing, but I could see the support that the county has given them. And thanks to the programs with Commissioner Stout on the, you know, the healthy food and I mean, it just makes such a difference. Small things that we might take for granted like having refrigeration or bigger storage really made a big difference for them or a mobile unit to be able to go out there. And so, you know, you're right in our lane and we've said it over and over and over again. accessibility is not only just, we talk about tangible things, but accessibility to success. I mean, we never think about it from that standpoint. Why shouldn't I have the same accessibility to be successful as someone else? And so dig them out, get them out there. They're going to be very successful, but they're out there struggling, and hopefully we can identify them and help them out. So thank you for what you do.

And actually Bodega Loya is who's providing the vegetables to the restaurant owner that I was talking about.

Exactly, that combination. And the other thing you mentioned that sometimes they don't realize is the networking. And you've been helping them by having different precincts and everybody meeting each other. It's something that people wait to do networking when they get successful. It should be the thing that gets you to be successful. But they're so caught up in their business that they don't feel they have the opportunity to be able to network or learn new things. And it's so helpful to be able to pick up the phone and call someone with a similar business and say, hey, I'm struggling here. What do you think? It makes such a big difference. So please continue making that network and them talking to each other. They have a common vision and common needs, and so thank you for doing that. We're very appreciative of Project Vita for that.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Craig, and thank you to Project VIDA and also to the Hispanic Chamber. They've been instrumental in making this program successful. And at this time, we will transition to our partners from the UTEP Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness, who has been leading the data collection analysis and reporting component to this initiative. I would like to introduce, again, Ms. Mayra Maldonado. She is the director of the Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness. Ms. Maldonado will provide an overview of the Hunt Institute's role within this program. They've been doing the survey development. If we're requesting something specific within the data, her and her team will get it to us within a few hours. It's awesome to see the collaboration that they have towards us and also with not just with Project VIDA but with Hispanic Chamber too. So I do want to thank Ms. Mayra Madlonalo and her team. They've been amazing. So I would like to introduce her if she could do her introduction and her presentation.

Welcome, Maida, again. Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much, Judge and Commissioners. It is so rewarding to live here in the region and do research for the region and see these businesses thrive, but I wouldn't be able to share all of this without Project VIDA's help. I have to say that the survey that we designed is very long. It's very exhaustive. It covers a lot of categories, right? But without their patience and motivation, this wouldn't be possible. Thanks to El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce for their great also support, and obviously to the Economic Development Department in particular on this project, to Roberto Ransom, and to Zonia Sigala. Now, the role that we have here on this project, we have been assigned seven tasks, yes, related to surveys, and the first one is the survey design and development. The second one with respect to data collection, and I want to emphasize that it's not only a collection of just data, right? We do have a platform, but we have to clean the data, analyze the data. see if there's any duplication of businesses, right? So there's a lot of work behind it. The third one is data harmonization. Now that we have all of that, how can we analyze data? That's task number four. We analyze businesses, financials, workforce, operational indicators to identify the challenges, opportunities, and areas where support is most needed. Area task number five is with respect to mapping. We have a GIS-based model at the street level where we can see the challenges that they mentioned with respect to, for example, connectivity or transportation. And the task number six comes with respect to data visuals. We translate and digest all of these findings into fact sheets, presentations, and other visuals, and we do have a report to submit. I'm very happy to mention that we have some preliminary results as part of the first phase of the survey deployment.

I'm going to read out loud some of these findings by precinct.

So we are seeing important differences among the four precincts. For example, Precinct 1 shows the highest concentration of businesses lacking membership information or formal business association participation. The data also indicates that businesses in Precinct 2 report low lower levels of workforce support compared to other precincts. In Precinct 3, the analysis shows a very limited presence of healthcare related businesses compared to other parts of the county. Meanwhile, in Precinct 4, it reflects the lowest concentration of emerging or newly established businesses among all precincts. These results are not here on the slides, but they are available in our latest report. We do have more results. We compare all of the precincts in our executive summary in the first couple of pages, and then we go in depth by precinct in terms of needs and challenges. We have the number of responses here on that table. We have 127 for Precinct 1, 133 for Precinct 2, 160 for Precinct 3, and 108 for Precinct 4. We had to drop four responses because we saw duplications or items that were not matching according to our standards with respect to data collection. We have all of these businesses mapped by precinct. We are able to slice this map by sector. So if you like us to say, hey, show us the connectivity that these businesses have or the operational challenges, we can slice it in various manners. But this is the map where we are showing all of the businesses and their responses. and the business type by color. As part of the next phase and upcoming actions, we continue to analyze more in depth all of the data that we continue receiving. We are developing expanded reporting in terms of visuals and targeted insights as we will be providing some business support strategies with respect to all of the challenges that these businesses are facing. and we are preparing all of these reports that we have been sharing on a quarterly basis with the economic development department here. And that's all that I have. Thank you so much. Do you have questions for me? Great job. Great job.

Thank you.

I have a question, Judge. Yes. Hi, Maida. Hi. Thank you very much for all of your work on this, and to all of the partners who helped put this survey and information together. If we wanted to dissect some of the data in our precincts, could we reach out to you?

Yes, of course. As I was mentioning, we have been sharing those reports on a quality basis. And at the beginning, we have an executive summary where we compare the region across the four precincts. And then we go more in-depth by precinct. And we have categories with respect to workforce, operational challenges, financial support, limitations with respect to technology, marketing. So happy to assist with any of that.

And we are gonna get copies to distribute. We're gonna include those in an upcoming report. But then to dive into it further, it would be to coordinate with MITA.

Okay, thank you. Thank you so much.

That will conclude this update. And yes, the last report that we provided to Commissioner Escort was in December. It should be on the highlights archive. We're about to send the latest report via highlights. And yes, if you have any questions, we will be, I mean, you have Midas information. If you need Midas information or if you want us to secure a meeting with her, we'll be more than happy to do so. Thank you very much.

Amazing data. Thank you. Thank you. Okay.

Would you like to go ahead and recess now, Judge? Yes, please. Okay, for 30 minutes, correct? Commissioner's Court will now recess for 30 minutes. It is 12.36 p.m.

Hola, El Paso! April was a busy month here in the county. From honoring our veterans to beautifying our parks, we tell you what is happening in this month's County Connects. Every day is Veterans Day in El Paso County, and several communities celebrated our heroes in April. First, we celebrated the completion of the Favens Veterans Memorial at Favens Veterans Park. The celebration featured a veterans resource fair, a flag raising ceremony, and a memorial ribbon cutting ceremony. The Favens Veterans Memorial honors all six branches of the United States Armed Forces, the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. and stands as a lasting tribute to the service and sacrifice of those who have defended our nation. This project reflects El Paso County's continued commitment to honoring veterans and was identified as a key initiative in the County's Parks and Recreation Master Plan. Thank you to our veterans. Just down the road, at Coyote Park in Tornillo, the Local Neighborhood Association, Tornillo Independent School District, and Tornillo Alumni Association held an unveiling ceremony of the Tornillo Veterans Memorial. The memorial features six metal cubes representing each branch of the United States Armed Forces. Each cube displays the branch's emblem and includes a nearby plaque listing Tornillo area veterans who served. The site will also include a Tornillo Veterans Memorial Dedication Monument. This community-driven project, requested by the Tornillo Neighborhood Association and presented by the County's Planning and Development Department, was approved by the Commissioner's Court in March 2025 and funded through the El Paso County Neighborhood Improvement Grant. Our voter approved bond projects moved forward in Precinct 1. Montana Vista residents attended the first community meeting for the Ruben Estrella Park improvements. The public was encouraged to offer their suggestions, opinions, and questions throughout the course of the meeting. Residents had an opportunity to share feedback on design concepts and amenities like picnic shelters, restrooms, and lighting. The Azarea Park Project is one of 19 park projects approved by the voters through the 2024 Capital Improvement Bond. A popular Eastside Park is looking a lot shadier thanks to volunteers who came and planted trees at the El Paso County Sports Park. These trees were part of a total of 155 trees planted across the various parts of the county. These were made possible through a $20,000 community forestry grant that was awarded to the County by Texas A&M Forest Service. This project allows El Paso County to invest in tree planting efforts that improve air quality, provide shade, reduce urban heat, and support healthier neighborhoods. That does it for this month's County Connects. Until next time, make sure to stay connected with El Paso County.

Thank you.

Welcome to the El Paso County Domestic Relations Office, where we're dedicated to helping families navigate the complexities of family law with empathy, clarity, and a commitment to excellence. As an integral part of the El Paso County civil court system, we strive to provide support during challenging times. We are dedicated to supporting parents, guardians, and children in navigating complex issues such as custody, visitation, child support, and beyond. Whether you are recently divorced, in the midst of a custody dispute, or facing challenges with child support, we stand ready to offer compassionate guidance and unwavering support. Our mission is to assist children and families during what can be one of the most challenging times in their lives, ensuring they have the resources and assistance they need to move forward confidently. We provide services, both in person and virtually, collaborating closely with judges, attorneys, and service providers to address each family's unique needs. Our child support enforcement unit plays a vital role in ensuring that children receive the financial support necessary for their well-being. When a court orders child support, it represents not just a figure, but a commitment to a child's future. This unit consists of a team of attorneys, enforcement officers, financial specialists, legal engagement officers, paralegals, and administrative staff who assist with the collection and enforcement of child support and medical support. Domestic Relations Office attorneys decide what enforcement remedies will be used based on the particular facts of the case. We help enforce court orders by monitoring payments and maintaining accurate records, working with parents who have fallen behind, helping them understand their obligations and options, filing enforcement actions with the court when necessary, and helping parents modify orders if their financial situation changes significantly, because we know life happens and fairness matters. We know that every family situation is different. That's why our staff works with compassion, confidentiality, and professionalism, helping both custodial and non-custodial parents understand the process, meet their obligations, and keep the focus where it belongs, on the children. Another one of our core responsibilities is through our Family Court Service Unit, where we support the courts in making informed, child-centered decisions in custody and visitation cases. In contested custody matters, when parents can't agree on who should care for the child, judges often rely on our skilled professionals to provide objective and detailed assessments. Family court services social workers, or guardian adult items, are appointed by judges to conduct thorough investigations and provide reports to the court based on the interests of the children involved. Either party may request the appointment of a guardian adult item for their case. In addition, Family Court Services staff are appointed on some adoption cases to conduct evaluations. Our cooperative parenting program provides co-parenting classes which focus on the needs of children and parents in the aftermath of separation or divorce. Topics include parent, children, and the involvement in the court, positive co-parenting practices, impact of divorce and separation on child development, communication, conflict resolution, and anger management. Classes are offered both in person and virtually and are open to everyone. No court order needed. Co-parents take the classes separately to ensure participants are comfortable discussing the topics. Individuals may register for classes by either visiting the Domestic Relations Office website or by calling the office at 915-273-3533 or by picking up the form inside our office. Class schedules can also be found on the website. Once the registration is received, the individual will be contacted by the program facilitator to discuss attendance and answer questions via email or phone. Class schedules can also be found on the website. Once the registration is received, the individual will be contacted by the program facilitator. Our office is dedicated to providing essential legal assistance tailored to family law issues. We empower parents to effectively enforce and modify access and possession time with their children, ensuring that their rights are upheld. For those seeking to formalize agreements, we facilitate parenting negotiation conferences that transform your arrangements into legally binding court orders. At the El Paso County Domestic Relations Office, we're committed to helping families find solutions that work. So please visit our website or give us a call today to learn how we can help you move forward.

you

Hola, El Paso! April was a busy month here in the county. From honoring our veterans to beautifying our parks, we tell you what is happening in this month's County Connects. Every day is Veterans Day in El Paso County, and several communities celebrated our heroes in April. First, we celebrated the completion of the Fabens Veterans Memorial at Fabens Veterans Park. The celebration featured a Veterans Resource Fair, a flag-raising ceremony, and a memorial ribbon-cutting ceremony. The Fabens Veterans Memorial honors all six branches of the United States Armed Forces, the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. and stands as a lasting tribute to the service and sacrifice of those who have defended our nation. This project reflects El Paso County's continued commitment to honoring veterans and was identified as a key initiative in the County's Parks and Recreation Master Plan. Thank you to our veterans. Just down the road, at Coyote Park in Tornillo, the Local Neighborhood Association, Tornillo Independent School District, and Tornillo Alumni Association held an unveiling ceremony of the Tornillo Veterans Memorial. The memorial features six metal cubes representing each branch of the United States Armed Forces. Each cube displays the branch's emblem and includes a nearby plaque listing Tornillo area veterans who served. The site will also include a Tornillo Veterans Memorial Dedication Monument. This community-driven project, requested by the Tornillo Neighborhood Association and presented by the County's Planning and Development Department, was approved by Commissioner's Court in March 2025 and funded through the El Paso County Neighborhood Improvement Grant. Our voter approved bond projects moved forward in Precinct 1. Montana Vista residents attended the first community meeting for the Ruben Estrella Park improvements. The public was encouraged to offer their suggestions, opinions, and questions throughout the course of the meeting. Residents had an opportunity to share feedback on design concepts and amenities like picnic shelters, restrooms, and lighting. The Azarea Park Project is one of 19 park projects approved by the voters through the 2024 Capital Improvement Bond. A popular Eastside Park is looking a lot shadier thanks to volunteers who came and planted trees at the El Paso County Sports Park. These trees were part of a total of 155 trees planted across the various parts of the county. These were made possible through a $20,000 community forestry grant that was awarded to the county by Texas A&M Forest Service. This project allows El Paso County to invest in tree planting efforts that improve air quality, provide shade, reduce urban heat, and support healthier neighborhoods. That does it for this month's County Connects. Until next time, make sure to stay connected with El Paso County.

so

Welcome to the El Paso County Domestic Relations Office, where we're dedicated to helping families navigate the complexities of family law with empathy, clarity, and a commitment to excellence. As an integral part of the El Paso County civil court system, we strive to provide support during challenging times. We are dedicated to supporting parents, guardians, and children in navigating complex issues such as custody, visitation, child support, and beyond. Whether you are recently divorced, in the midst of a custody dispute, or facing challenges with child support, we stand ready to offer compassionate guidance and unwavering support. Our mission is to assist children and families during what can be one of the most challenging times in their lives, ensuring they have the resources and assistance they need to move forward confidently. We provide services, both in person and virtually, collaborating closely with judges, attorneys, and service providers to address each family's unique needs. Our Child Support Enforcement Unit plays a vital role in ensuring that children receive the financial support necessary for their well-being. When a court orders child support, it represents not just a figure, but a commitment to a child's future. This unit consists of a team of attorneys, enforcement officers, financial specialists, legal engagement officers, paralegals, and administrative staff who assist with the collection and enforcement of child support and medical support. Domestic Relations Office attorneys decide what enforcement remedies will be used based on the particular facts of the case. We help enforce court orders by monitoring payments and maintaining accurate records, working with parents who have fallen behind, helping them understand their obligations and options, filing enforcement actions with the court when necessary, and helping parents modify orders if their financial situation changes significantly, because we know life happens and fairness matters. We know that every family situation is different. That's why our staff works with compassion, confidentiality, and professionalism, helping both custodial and non-custodial parents understand the process, meet their obligations, and keep the focus where it belongs, on the children. Another one of our core responsibilities is through our Family Court Service Unit, where we support the courts in making informed, child-centered decisions in custody and visitation cases. In contested custody matters, when parents can't agree on who should care for the child, judges often rely on our skilled professionals to provide objective and detailed assessments. Family court services social workers, or guardian adult items, are appointed by judges to conduct thorough investigations and provide reports to the court based on the interests of the children involved. Either party may request the appointment of a guardian adult item for their case. In addition, Family Court Services staff are appointed on some adoption cases to conduct evaluations. Our cooperative parenting program provides co-parenting classes which focus on the needs of children and parents in the aftermath of separation or divorce. Topics include parent, children, and the involvement in the court, positive co-parenting practices, impact of divorce and separation on child development, communication, conflict resolution, and anger management. Classes are offered both in person and virtually and are open to everyone. No court order needed. Co-parents take the classes separately to ensure participants are comfortable discussing the topics. Individuals may register for classes by either visiting the Domestic Relations Office website or by calling the office at 915-273-3533 or by picking up the form inside our office. Class schedules can also be found on the website. Once the registration is received, the individual will be contacted by the program facilitator to discuss attendance and answer questions via email or phone. Class schedules can also be found on the website. Once the registration is received, the individual will be contacted by the program facilitator. Our office is dedicated to providing essential legal assistance tailored to family law issues. We empower parents to effectively enforce and modify access and possession time with their children, ensuring that their rights are upheld. For those seeking to formalize agreements, we facilitate parenting negotiation conferences that transform your arrangements into legally binding court orders. At the El Paso County Domestic Relations Office, we're committed to helping families find solutions that work. So please visit our website or give us a call today to learn how we can help you move forward.

Hola, El Paso! April was a busy month here in the county. From honoring our veterans to beautifying our parks, we tell you what is happening in this month's County Connects. Every day is Veterans Day in El Paso County, and several communities celebrated our heroes in April. First, we celebrated the completion of the Favens Veterans Memorial at Favens Veterans Park. The celebration featured a veterans resource fair, a flag raising ceremony, and a memorial ribbon cutting ceremony. The Favens Veterans Memorial honors all six branches of the United States Armed Forces, the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. and stands as a lasting tribute to the service and sacrifice of those who have defended our nation. This project reflects El Paso County's continued commitment to honoring veterans and was identified as a key initiative in the County's Parks and Recreation Master Plan. Thank you to our veterans. Just down the road, at Coyote Park in Tornillo, the Local Neighborhood Association, Tornillo Independent School District, and Tornillo Alumni Association held an unveiling ceremony of the Tornillo Veterans Memorial. The memorial features six metal cubes representing each branch of the United States Armed Forces. Each cube displays the branch's emblem and includes a nearby plaque listing Tornillo area veterans who served. The site will also include a Tornillo Veterans Memorial Dedication Monument. This community-driven project, requested by the Tornillo Neighborhood Association and presented by the County's Planning and Development Department, was approved by Commissioner's Court in March 2025 and funded through the El Paso County Neighborhood Improvement Grant. Our voter approved bond projects moved forward in Precinct 1. Montana Vista residents attended the first community meeting for the Ruben Estrella Park improvements. The public was encouraged to offer their suggestions, opinions, and questions throughout the course of the meeting. Residents had an opportunity to share feedback on design concepts and amenities like picnic shelters, restrooms, and lighting. The Azarea Park Project is one of 19 park projects approved by the voters through the 2024 Capital Improvement Bond. A popular Eastside park is looking a lot shadier thanks to volunteers who came and planted trees at the El Paso County Sports Park. These trees were part of a total of 155 trees planted across the various parts of the county. These were made possible through a $20,000 community forestry grant that was awarded to the county by Texas A&M Forest Service. This project allows El Paso County to invest in tree planting efforts that improve air quality, provide shade, reduce urban heat, and support healthier neighborhoods. That does it for this month's County Connects. Until next time, make sure to stay connected with El Paso County.

uh

Welcome to the El Paso County Domestic Relations Office, where we're dedicated to helping families navigate the complexities of family law with empathy, clarity, and a commitment to excellence. As an integral part of the El Paso County civil court system, we strive to provide support during challenging times. We are dedicated to supporting parents, guardians, and children in navigating complex issues such as custody, visitation, child support, and beyond. Whether you are recently divorced, in the midst of a custody dispute, or facing challenges with child support, we stand ready to offer compassionate guidance and unwavering support. Our mission is to assist children and families during what can be one of the most challenging times in their lives, ensuring they have the resources and assistance they need to move forward confidently. We provide services, both in person and virtually, collaborating closely with judges, attorneys, and service providers to address each family's unique needs. Our child support enforcement unit plays a vital role in ensuring that children receive the financial support necessary for their well-being. When a court orders child support, it represents not just a figure, but a commitment to a child's future. This unit consists of a team of attorneys, enforcement officers, financial specialists, legal engagement officers, paralegals, and administrative staff who assist with the collection and enforcement of child support and medical support. Domestic Relations Office attorneys decide what enforcement remedies will be used based on the particular facts of the case. We help enforce court orders by monitoring payments and maintaining accurate records, working with parents who have fallen behind, helping them understand their obligations and options, filing enforcement actions with the court when necessary, and helping parents modify orders if their financial situation changes significantly, because we know life happens and fairness matters. We know that every family situation is different. That's why our staff works with compassion, confidentiality, and professionalism, helping both custodial and non-custodial parents understand the process, meet their obligations, and keep the focus where it belongs, on the children. Another one of our core responsibilities is through our Family Court Service Unit, where we support the courts in making informed, child-centered decisions in custody and visitation cases. In contested custody matters, when parents can't agree on who should care for the child, judges often rely on our skilled professionals to provide objective and detailed assessments. Family court services social workers, or guardian adult items, are appointed by judges to conduct thorough investigations and provide reports to the court based on the interests of the children involved. Either party may request the appointment of a guardian adult item for their case. In addition, Family Court Services staff are appointed on some adoption cases to conduct evaluations. Our cooperative parenting program provides co-parenting classes which focus on the needs of children and parents in the aftermath of separation or divorce. Topics include parent, children, and the involvement in the court, positive co-parenting practices, Impact of Divorce and Separation on Child Development, Communication, Conflict Resolution, and Anger Management. Classes are offered both in person and virtually and are open to everyone. No court order needed. Co-parents take the classes separately to ensure participants are comfortable discussing the topics. Individuals may register for classes by either visiting the Domestic Relations Office website or by calling the office at 915-273-3533 or by picking up the form inside our office. Class schedules can also be found on the website. Once the registration is received, the individual will be contacted by the program facilitator to discuss attendance and answer questions via email or phone. Class schedules can also be found on the website. Once the registration is received, the individual will be contacted by the program facilitator. Our office is dedicated to providing essential legal assistance tailored to family law issues. We empower parents to effectively enforce and modify access and possession time with their children, ensuring that their rights are upheld. For those seeking to formalize agreements, we facilitate parenting negotiation conferences that transform your arrangements into legally binding court orders. At the El Paso County Domestic Relations Office, we're committed to helping families find solutions that work. So please visit our website or give us a call today to learn how we can help you move forward.

Thank you.

Hola, El Paso. April was a busy month here in the county. From honoring our veterans to beautifying our parks, we tell you what is happening in this month's County Connects. Every day is Veterans Day in El Paso County, and several communities celebrated our heroes in April. First, we celebrated the completion of the...

GO AHEAD.

COMMISSIONER'S COURT HAS RECONVENED TO SPECIAL OPEN SESSION. WE ARE ON ITEM 4J. RECEIVE A PRESENTATION AND UPDATE FROM THE HUNT INSTITUTE FOR GLOBAL COMPETITIVENESS AND HDR INC. REGARDING THE STATUS OF THE REGIONAL FREIGHT MOBILITY INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPERATIONAL STUDY FOR THE TORNEO PORT OF ENTRY CONDUCTED THROUGH THE CAMINO REAL REGIONAL MOBILITY AUTHORITY. CONTRACT NUMBER 2024-0211.

Commissioner Roberto Ransom for the Record Economic Development. For this item, just wanted to share with you that we have a strategic opportunity to strengthen the regional trade through a study that conducts transportation economic competitiveness in the Paso Norte region. And the counties, in collaboration with the Regional Mobility Authority, the Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness at UTEP, HDR Engineering initiated a comprehensive effort to better understand the operational, logistic, and economic potential of the port. The studies associated with this initiative are designed to evaluate trade flows trade patterns, supply chain dynamics, logistic challenges, and economic benefits tied to a Tornillo port of entry. The effort includes stakeholder engagement through a marketing campaign, traffic modeling, cargo diversion analysis, mapping and distribution centers, and strategic communication intended to position the Tornillo port of entry as a competitive and efficient commercial crossing for the region and international trade. Due to the awareness and outreach efforts conducted as part of the study and as part of this effort in collaboration with regional stakeholders, I'm very happy to share with the Commissioner's Court that the Torneo Port of Entry has experienced a significant increase in personal vehicle traffic, becoming now the third busiest port of entry in the Paso Norte region since the beginning of this year. Collectively, This analysis and study will support the future infrastructure planning, economic development strategies, and long-term investment decisions intended to enhance regional mobility and economic growth. And with that, I'd like to bring forward Mr. Raymond Tellez for him to provide an introduction on the scope and on the companies that are conducting this study. Raymond.

Welcome, Raymond. Good afternoon, Judge, Commissioners. Nice to have you here. Thank you. My name is Ray Mateus. I'm with the Camino Real Regional Mobility Authority. And we have partnered with El Paso County on this interlocal to provide everything that Roberto just laid out for you. So the way that I understand this in layman's terms is is that the question posed is really, how do we make Thornillo more attractive to potential users? And so that's ultimately the question that we're trying to answer. So to get there, the RMA brought on board HDR Engineering and also the Hunt Institute out of UTEP. And so I'm going to turn it over to them. They're going to provide you the technical answer to that question. So first up, I believe, is Mayra Maldonado from the Hunt Institute.

This is nice having you all day.

Good afternoon, and thank you for your patience and for your time. Last one of the day for me, at least. But very happy to be here. So I'm gonna be speaking about the Tornillo Port of Entry analysis that we are doing, but again, I'd like to start by thanking the collaboration from CRMA and from HDR. on this project and also from other stakeholders that are not present here today and that I'm going to be mentioning, as well as the Economic Development Department, in particular Roberto Ransom and Mariana Barrasa. Well, we are going to be conducting a data-driven assessment of the Tornillo Port of Entry. And to do that, we have been commissioned to do five tasks. The first one is the assessment of logistical challenges, in which we are going to be assessing not only the current challenges, but also the future challenges. And as part of the task number two, mapping existing clusters and supply chains, there is currently a reconfiguration of supply chains that is being built from the interior of Mexico, and we are mapping key indicators with respect to these supply chains. Task number three refers to mapping the distribution and industrial centers. We are analyzing warehousing distribution centers across both sides of the border to identify how the port utilization is going to expand given that we are expecting also an expansion at the port of entry of Tornillo. Task number four is with respect to stakeholder engagement and survey deployment in inner Mexico. I'm going to be talking a little bit more about this one in a bit. And then task number five is a final comprehensive report that will integrate all of the research and analysis and will include policy recommendations for the Torneo Port of Entry. part of the completed milestones uh well we have completed our lit review on this port of entry um establishing the historical institutional and strategic context for the study we designed and have launched the torneo port of entry as of now we have done it in chihuahua city and uh in ciudad juarez we have partnered and i thank these partners We have partnered with Mexico Now, Index Juarez, and ANIRM to support the distribution and engagement of all of these respondents. And we have been compiling preliminary foreign direct investment and trade data sets for the El Paso, Ciudad Juarez region, and not only for this region, but across the, along the U.S.-Mexico border. So we want to identify not only the historic trends in the region with respect to traded commodities and also overall trade, but also how that is different to the rest of the border. So in terms of the active work that is underway, we have four tasks. The first one is the assessment of logistical challenges, and we are assessing the number of operational lanes, the number of operating hours in the region, the infrastructure needs for commodities, in particular perishables and temperature-controlled goods. We're actually doing case interviews with those firms that manage perishables across the border. The second task that we are currently working on is mapping existing clusters and supply chains. As I was saying, there are significant challenges right now here in the region in terms of trade. not only at the regional level but also at the state level and at the national level. So we are identifying those trends and that reconfiguration of supply chains that has been occurring since a couple of years ago through the analysis of foreign direct investment trade and commodity flow analysis. The third task that we are currently working on is the mapping distribution and industrial centers. As I was saying, we are mapping distribution centers across the border because once there is an increase in port utilization, we have to understand what the challenges and needs are in terms of additional amenities in the region. And task number four, with respect to stakeholder engagement and survey deployment in the exterior of Mexico, we are planning our next survey distribution in Guadalajara, Durango, and Mexico City. And for that, we have been in direct contact with the economic development department here in El Paso County. And as part of the next phase and upcoming actions, as I was mentioning, we will be having some meetings in some other major cities in Mexico where we will be distributing the survey, and we will be putting together a final comprehensive report with the data collected on foreign direct investment, trade, and more analysis that we are collaborating with HDR. And that's all for this presentation. Do you have any questions?

Roberto, you want to just add some of the dynamics of what's been happening there at the bridge on Tornillo?

Thank you so much, Judge. Just wanted to, before we bring in Alejandro Solis from HCR, just wanted to, again, share with Commissioner Escort how important it is to leverage the competitive advantage of a data center institute with an engineering firm The way that we have been doing the business preservation growth Hispanic Chamber is just by identifying the core competencies of each one of them and combining those competencies. So part of the outreach efforts that MITA is doing, they're based on the information that HDR provided. The outreach efforts of the campaign, they're being driven on data. And that data is based on the trade data. And we're preparing for a scenario where the bridge of the Americas closes. We're getting ready to understand the trade flows from BOTA and what trade flows from BOTA can be diverted without, you know, there's room for everybody and there's plenty for everybody. But we have to prepare. So... Again, with the information that one firm is doing is feeding the efforts of another one. And we have feeding information both ways, the Hunt Institute as well, with the information that they're collecting from those surveys. we're getting a lot of intel on what type of commodities, the frequency, how they cross, and this is very important, because we have to see, Judge and Commissioners, ports of entry as an economic development tool. We are the second largest trade hub between the US and Mexico, and we need to make sure that we understand how to remain our competitive advantage, and if Texas is the powerhouse of ports of entry and by having the number two port of entry that crosses more trade between the US and Mexico and land and understanding the trade dynamics and how we can improve throughput, that is something that could increase not only revenue for the county, but the competitiveness for the region. So with that, Judge, Commissioners, if I may, I'd like to bring Alejandro Solis for him to provide his input on the part of the study.

Absolutely. Welcome, Alejandro.

Thank you, Judge. Thank you, Commissioners. And thank you, Roberto. I hope you guys can hear me.

We can very well.

OK, excellent. Then I will share. I think the idea is that I share my screen so I can start talking to the slides and just to kind of validate some of the things that Roberto was mentioning. So let me just get ready here. There we go. So what I'll be showing to you today is what I'm calling the storyline. It's a little bit of a summary of the upfront part of the study. And then we're going to focus more on some of the findings that, as Roberto mentioned, are guiding the stakeholder engagement that the Hunt Institute is doing and how we're talking to those stakeholders. And then provide a glimpse of those opportunities to increase the truck traffic at Tornillo as a port of entry. And then we'll finalize with kind of the next steps and we'll show you that there's actually a webpage already for Tornillo that it's up and running and it has a lot of this information. So starting with what we know and how we started the study, we first wanted to take a look at what are the current conditions, right? So we started studying the current trade movements by truck in the PDN region just to know what's moving between which states in the US and Mexico through which POEs. uh which commodities are being traded and then with that information we started talking uh in a preliminary basis with some of the users of the ports of entry to try to understand what do they value the most why do they choose one specific port of entry compared to another one you know what are the drivers for them so that's kind of what we started the the conversation with After that, we also conducted what we call the strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, a SWOT analysis of Tornillo Port of Entry. And we were able to assess and then validate with the users that in terms of efficiency, Tornillo has a big strength. It's one of the fastest crossing ports of entry in the region. And there are some areas of opportunity for Tornillo in terms of accessibility, connectivity, crossing infrastructure, safety, and supporting services. There are things that can be improved in the future to be able to attract more of those truck traffics. So again, we kind of pinpointed the strengths and opportunities for the port of entry. Once we kind of understood all of that context, we said, well, based on what we see in the data and based on what we have collected through stakeholder conversations, what are some of the benefits that we hear that torneo has and we put them into these three buckets that you see there in the slide efficiency convenience and security and i'm going to spend a little bit of of time on those ones because it's it's part of the message that it's trying to be conveyed as part of this kind of campaign to to attract more traffic to tornado So let's start with efficiency. We looked at travel times and mileage and fuel costs. And what we did is we understand that at some point, as Roberto mentioned, boda will be close to truck traffic. So with that in mind, we said, well, what would happen to those flows that are currently going through boda? They're going to have to choose a new port of entry. What would be the natural alternative? Well, Isleta. Well, let's compare Isleta to Tornillo, and let's break down the type of flows that go through Boda right now into flows that are originating in Ciudad Juarez proper, in the urban core, if you will. versus flows that are coming from within Mexico or the inner Mexico, right? Chihuahua City and further down or further south. So we used a highly technical model, which is kind of the standard of the industry, to try to get a feel for what would happen if we compare these two alternative routes, either using Isleta or switching to Tornillo. So we found that if there is cargo that is originating in Ciudad Juarez proper and it's trying to cross to El Paso, then using Isleta normally represents an advantage in terms of cost of fuel, even though in most cases, Tornillo, it's a faster route, even though it's a longer route. But because of the short cross time, border crossing times at Tornillo, it's faster, but because of the distance in miles or kilometers, it's more expensive from a standpoint of fuel. Even when we take into account the wait times at Isleta, etc. So still, the market for industries that are located within the core of Ciudad Juarez is not that promising. Now, when that moves into the future, if we fast forward to 2050, then Tornillo becomes much more attractive than right now. So there is some glimpse there of a chance in the long term that congestion could be so high at Isleta that then Tornillo becomes more attractive, even for those flows that start within Ciudad Juarez. Now, we did the exact same analysis, but for flows that are starting in Chihuahua City or further inland in Mexico, right? And because of the existence of the bypass of Ciudad Juarez, then actually some of the – well, most of the traffic that comes from those directions is actually – Tornillo is a more competitive option, and there are – fuel savings and time savings on some of the destinations on the US side of those trips. So again, it seems that from the analysis of this model, that really the traffic that Tornillo could be targeting more would be from the interior of Mexico. And again, if we fast forward to 2050, then the attractiveness of Tornillo just becomes much greater because of the potential increase in congestion at Isleta once we have more flows in the future years. So we kind of found a little bit of niche markets that Tornillo could be targeting now. Then in terms of convenience, we also documented that Tornillo has a very streamlined customs and inspections process that actually caters to very specific industries, in particular, high volume and bulky type of commodities. And the quintessential example for these is automobiles. It's the number one commodity traded through Tornillo. Whereas in the other ports of entry, it's not the top traded commodity. So automobiles seem to be kind of in that sweet spot for Tornillo because of the way the POE is built, because of the geometry and the processes. So that's the convenience part that some type of industries will find a natural niche to go to Tornillo because of these characteristics. And then finally, when it comes to security, we also documented that Tornillo has some really advanced features in terms of security, screening technologies, LED signage, etc. that are not available in all of the ports in the Paso del Norte region. And then the other advantage in terms of security was that for that traffic that is coming from the interior of Mexico, using the bypass, basically it's a safer route because the bypass is built to higher specifications than the local roads that the other ports of entry used in the region. So again, you can look at it from the standpoint of security at the port of entry and then security in the network around the port of entry. So those were kind of some of the highlights we found in these benefits. So with all of that in mind, we said, well, what are some of the opportunities that Tornillo could try to leverage in the short term and the mid and long term to increase trunk volumes so we found that it at the short term there's two potential um actions or two potential uh situations that attorney you could explore and one that is more mid and long term so i'm going to go into the details of those also beginning with the short term, we did an analysis of the different businesses that are located in relative close proximity to Tornillo. So basically outside of the downtown core area of both El Paso and Juarez. And we said, let's just see how much business activity is happening between that boundary and Tornillo. So what you can see there in the map is a heat map of the businesses that are located in relative proximity to Tornillo. And then in the tables you have basically the production or the sales volumes for those businesses. So there is a growing market. outside of the downtown areas that could potentially be using Tornillo if Tornillo had certain conditions that make trade through it attractive to those businesses. And we found that if Tornillo were to capture about 15% of that market, then basically the number of trucks crossing through it would double. So again, there is a market in relative close proximity to Tornillo. The second opportunity that we looked at was the closure of Boda. As we all know, truck traffic is going to stop at some point through Boda. And we said, let's run the analysis again using that very sophisticated travel demand model or trade model. and understand what could we expect? What is the model telling us would happen if BOTA were to close? So what we found out is that in the immediate future, the impact of the additional trucks through Tornillo would not be that much. Most people or most businesses, according to the model, will use Isleta. So not a lot of diversion to Tornillo. But as the time passes, again, Isleta becomes more congested and therefore Tornillo becomes more attractive to those businesses. So we see a significant increase by year 2050 of the number of trucks that could divert, if you will, or move away from Isleta and into Tornillo. And, of course, this brings the issue at Tornillo that the port of entry might not be ready right now as it is today. accept all of that additional volume and therefore the delays at that port of entry will increase. But we also took a little bit of a look at what could help mitigate those potential increases in crossing times in the future. And we have a solution for you that we'll be presenting it. But basically, if we can mitigate those increasing border crossing times, then Tornillo can be working closer to capacity and still be able to absorb additional flows in the future. In order to kind of try to articulate this a little bit more and say, well, but what do we mean exactly by these additional trucks that we expect that are going to be using Tornillo once BOTA closes? We did an analysis of what are the goods that are traded through BOTA right now and which are the states that are using BOTA to trade both in the US and Mexico and what type of commodities they're moving. So we found out that the main users of boda in the recent years have been Texas, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan on the U.S. side, and they are connecting or they are trading with Chihuahua, Mexico City, Estado de Mexico, and Jalisco on the Mexican side. So what you see there in the map, it's basically all the lines of trade between these states.

There's a problem with the sound.

One second.

Sure. Okay, go ahead, sir.

There you go. Okay. Thank you so much. The lines you see there are the connections between the states in the U.S. and Mexico that trade through boda. And we have a list of the commodities that are traded. And those are there. It's electrical machinery, vehicles. or automobiles, mineral fuels, computer-related parts, cereals, and plastics. And the ones that are highlighted in bold in that list are goods that are currently traded through Tornillo. So, in other words, these are kind of low-hanging fruit commodities that could switch to Tornillo in the case that BOTA were to close right away. The good news is what it's been traded through BOTA is also being traded through Tornillo. So there's no need to change anything radically for the majority of the cases. Cereals and mineral fuels are a slightly different case. They require different infrastructure to be able to be processed through the POEs. But the rest of the commodities, Tornillo is basically doing the processing already. When we look more long-term, mid and long-term, we identified that there's additional origins and destinations in Mexico and the US that are trading a subset of these goods that are moving through BOTA that have a lot of potential that could be moving through Tornillo. So, for example, we have the first box there in blue on the left top that you see, it's about plastics. So, we identified three origins and destinations that are currently trading through the Paso del Norte region that could consider diverting to Tornillo in the future if Tornillo were to offer certain things that made it more attractive. So we have flows from Michigan to Guanajuato, from California to Estado de Mexico, and from Michigan to Puebla that maybe some of those flows are already using Tornillo, but not all of them. So there is more room for Tornillo to grow in these, at least in these four big categories. So we have identified those flows that, again, in the long term, if Tornillo made some improvements and became more attractive, could be adding these type of flows to their throughput. And when I mentioned that in order to make Tornillo more attractive in the future, we did a little bit of an exercise and said, well, what would make it more attractive? So we came up with this very high-level list of potential improvements that should be considered and further analyzed, but they kind of provide a hint of what could make the flows improve at Tornillo. And it basically... breaks the broken down into roadway network improvements that are close to or around Tornillo, and then improvements at the POE itself. And the roadway network improvements basically have to do with the expansion of MX2, the Carretera Porvenir on the Mexican side, and then some connectivity between the port of entry and I-10. And then on the Mexican side, just segmenting the traffic lanes so that the trucks and the passenger vehicles don't have to interact when they're going into the Tornillo. And then improvements at the PoE itself The introduction of trusted travel programs, facilities near the POE that can help trade, like custom brokers offices, etc. Maybe revising the hours of operation to account for more traffic that is long haul coming from inner Mexico. All of those things could be ideas that would improve the processing rate for trucks and therefore make Tornillo more attractive. um so those are kind of generally the the high level uh preliminary results that we have an additional comment we wanted to make is that as part of this contract um we are helping the county stand up a um a revamped web page for tornillo where a lot of this information and testimonials and other things will be featured so i don't think it can be seen here but um There in the slide towards the bottom left, there is a link that you can click on, and that will take you to the homepage. And this is a work in progress, but it's coming along pretty nicely. So it's a shameless plug about go and visit the website, please. And finally, in terms of the next steps... LIKE MAIRA MENTIONED, WE'RE WORKING TOGETHER. JUST A SECOND, ALEJANDRO. YES, SORRY.

ROBERTO WANTS TO COMMENT.

ALEJANDRO, COULD YOU GO BACK AGAIN TO THE WEBSITE? IS THIS DYNAMIC OR IS IT JUST PART OF THE PRESENTATION? OH, OKAY. OKAY. YEAH, THERE'S A LINK. OKAY, I'LL SHARE IT WITH COMMISSIONER SQUARE. I THOUGHT YOU COULD NAVIGATE. YOU'RE MUTED, ALEJANDRO.

SORRY, I WAS GOING TO SAY I CAN CLICK ON IT AND THEN LET'S Let's see it live. I think you can.

If you could just walk us through real quickly through the functionality of the website, because we're responding, Judge Commissioners, to every single one of the requests that we're getting from the public. Like, what are the hours of cargo? What are the hours of POVs? What is the hazmat capability? How can we connect somebody? I mean, there's a website that is called Reporte Puentes, and For us, we don't show up on the Reporte Puentes, but Fideicomiso de Puentes is in there. We have established a great partnership with, oh, if you could hold on over there, Alejandro. We have established a great partnership with Coconal. with Fideicomiso de Puentes. We have their cameras already in the website. We even have a quote from Textron Bell Inc. saying that they use Tornillo, why they use it, the advantages that they find. And all of this has been thanks to the multiple engagement sessions that we have been doing together among the different partners that we have. So right now, I mean, we have here three of them, but we have partnerships like with Coconal. I don't know if you recall, Commissioners and Judge, that we put together six months of a billboard ad campaign. We partnered with Coconal and they completed the year. So that is true collaboration and true partnership. So just wanted to highlight a couple of the wins that we have had with collaboration. And back to you, Alejandro. Thank you, Roberto.

Thank you. Thank you, Roberto. um and well just finally as i was gonna um uh mention uh we're partnering with the hunt institute they will be putting the final report for kind of the combined um work and so we're documenting what we just showed you in a little bit more detail uh and uh and we'll we'll kind of we're taking the information that the Hunt Institute is collecting through the stakeholder engagement and to Roberto's point, kind of validating some of the findings that we saw through the data that were presented here. So, so far, it seems that the stories are aligned. What we hear from the stakeholders is what we see in the data. So that's a very good thing. So we're just going to start wrapping those things up and putting them into a unified document that can be used by the county. And that will save it. I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Thank you. Any Commissioner Butler?

Thank you. Thank you, Alejandro. I'm not sure if this question is for you or for Maida with the Hunt Institute, but I'm curious about I guess the challenge or the potential challenge of commercial traffic shifting from the Paso Norte region to other places along the US-Mexico border and if that was studied at all. So by closing BOTA commercial, is there identified businesses or even industries that instead of trying to shift to Tornillo, there's a potential that they could just shift to Tijuana or Laredo, and is there a way for us to target those proactively? Yes, Commissioner.

Part of the scope of work that we commissioned to the Hunt Institute addresses that particular question in knowing if the Paso del Norte region is gaining a trade or is losing trade. Mayra, could you share some of the details?

Yes, and I think there's the data part and also the engineering part, so I'm going to be covering the data piece. We are analyzing the historic patterns of trade flows along the U.S.-Mexico border. And as I was mentioning, there's reconfiguration of supply chains from the interior of Mexico. We are assessing that through the foreign direct investment. So that will help us know where the investment is going into. And through the trade flows, we are also assessing whether there are any changes. And I'm gonna let Alejandro talk a little bit more about the state to state trade flows. In fact, we are working with HDR on that. But that other piece will also help us assess whether historically there's been a change and there's a projected change going on as well.

So as part of the long run opportunities or the long term opportunities, what we looked at was trade. through the entire US-Mexico border, and then honing in on the commodities that move through the Paso del Norte region, just to understand which are the ones in which the Paso del Norte region is more competitive. It's almost like we call it revealed preference, right? If you choose a spot to cross, it means that it must be advantageous to you. But we opened that up to other regions and said, okay, what else is being traded and what is the composition of that trade between the different regions of the U.S.-Mexico border? So we are conducting that analysis, and part of those industries that we found in the future that could potentially divert to Tornillo are actually flows that most likely are not currently moving through Tornillo or through the PDN region. I think I mentioned one from California to Ciudad de Mexico. you know, there are other routes and they're probably taking other routes right now. But what we're trying to do is what would make Tornillo more attractive so that we could actually maybe convince them to use our our, you know, our port of entry here in Tornillo. So it kind of goes both ways. It's really hard to to to predict that with certainty. But what we're looking at is the flows that have certain common traits, regardless of where they're originating or going in Mexico and the U.S., and then trying to see if those would be potentially shifting to us. But yeah, so we're looking at a broader spectrum of where could THESE TRADE MOVEMENTS GO THESE TRADE MOVEMENTS GO THESE TRADE MOVEMENTS GO IN THE LONG RUN. IN THE LONG RUN. IN THE LONG RUN. OKAY, THANK YOU.

OKAY, THANK YOU. OKAY, THANK YOU. I HAVE ONE MORE QUESTION. I HAVE ONE MORE QUESTION. I HAVE ONE MORE QUESTION. SO YOU MENTIONED COMMODITIES, SO YOU MENTIONED COMMODITIES, SO YOU MENTIONED COMMODITIES, AND THEY'RE LISTED AND THEY'RE LISTED AND THEY'RE LISTED IN THE PRESENTATION IN TERMS OF IN THE PRESENTATION IN TERMS OF IN THE PRESENTATION IN TERMS OF WHAT WE SEE BEING GOING ACROSS WHAT WE SEE BEING GOING ACROSS WHAT WE SEE BEING GOING ACROSS THE BORDER. THE BORDER. Is there a list of industries that you are looking at? Alejandro, you just mentioned maybe future industries. They're not listed in the presentation, but perhaps that's where I think the intersection between the port of entry and economic development is. So if there are industries that are identified as more prevalent than others using our ports of entry or there's a forecast for growth in certain industries, shouldn't our economic development strategies reflect, you know, trying to root some of that economic development here instead of just being a port of entry? Okay.

I think I may comment to Commissioner Butler's question. Commissioner Butler, yes. Part of the entire objective of having this study is what is crossing, who's crossing, how frequent they're crossing, and the commodities that we're crossing. What we had on the long-term vision is when we're looking on the U.S. side, and Commissioner's Court may ask me in the future, Roberto, what do we need to set up on the U.S. side? I have to respond to the question on who's crossing, what is crossing, how frequent. So yes, we also had in mind that particular aspect on the commodities, and Alejandro can respond to that information based on sources that we have from different federal agencies. But as well, the beauty about this study is that we're taking the bulls from industry through surveys. And the surveys are providing us who they are, what industry they serve, how often they cross, and why you're not crossing through Tornillo, if that is the case, right? So yes, the final report should be able to address that question. Mayra, Alejandro, I don't know if you want to add additional details. Alejandro, go ahead.

Yeah, I can add a little bit on the data side. So what we're looking at is those trade flows that I was mentioning and showing in the maps, because of the way they're collected, they are aggregated to a certain level, right? There's a certain amount of disaggregation that is possible to identify origins and destinations. And then the deeper you go down that disaggregation, so let's say plastics, right? You can disaggregate that into probably 200 categories. The further down you go, then the less granularity as to where it's is starting from and where is it ending, because then you can basically identify specific suppliers or companies. The data set is very sensitive to not releasing potentially confidential information. But we understand those big buckets, right? And we know what is inside each one of those big buckets. So again, plastics is a big bucket, but we know that there's manufacturing of plastics and other things. So what we're trying to do is complement that with the Hunt Institute surveys where we actually ask individual companies, and then we can place those companies into those buckets and say, well, we talked to Mattel. Well, Mattel is toys, but they're plastics, right? So they belong in these buckets. So let's understand what they are saying, why they're using Tornillo, and then you can start deriving certain conclusions for the behavior of the businesses that belong in each one of those buckets. So that's how we're trying to go about it. Because again, there's certain data limitations, etc. But we're trying to complement those two to try to understand first at the macro level, what are some opportunities and then from the micro survey level, understand, okay, what do they need to be able to shift and then kind of putting the two together.

Yes, thank you. And just as a final comment, because I don't have any much to add as part of the Hunt Institute, I think that Alejandro and Roberto covered it, but we are also assessing the additional infrastructure that these industries need, right? It's very different, the amenities that perishables need, for example, that semiconductors need. So that's also part of the recommendations that Hunt Institute is providing in the report, and we will take that into consideration, the industries. Thank you.

you thank you judge thank you commissioner anything else roberto it's a great uh great presentation one of the things and i mean sometimes it's hard to highlight uh giving ourselves credit but the minute that we uh we started meeting with gsa it would have been very easy just to see let's see what happens but we created an option independent of what was going to happen with boda we gave an option of improving it we recognize that we're going to be one of the biggest hubs the best hubs entry into from mexico to the united states and i don't think we would have discovered that if we hadn't really made every effort to say well what can what can the county put on the table And, you know, I think some great things have been happening, great relationships with the Fideicomiso and the individuals from Juarez, from the Juarez site. So I think it's a lot of, you know, when we talk about economic development, it's one of the few times that I really believe that we got ahead of it a little bit and that it didn't come on us, you know, and then try to figure things out. And I always say that if that bridge, if Tornillo weren't there, and we were under the same circumstances, it would be cost-restrictive to be able to provide another port of entry at the cost that it would be now compared to the cost that it had. I mean, we got a little bit of criticism about how much was spent, but what was spent then and what would be spent now is just... So thank you, Roberto, for taking advantage and optimizing everything that we can to be part of that formula and part of the success of the systematic. We want a system. We don't want five different ports. We want one system that allows. And you've said it every time, and I hope people realize that. We're not competing. If it goes to Santa Teresa, man, we're happy. If it goes to us, they should be happy as well. But I think we're positioned to be one of the best port of entries in the country. And so thank you, Maida. And I love the data-driven. I mean, you know, we always talk about that. You know, we have to make decisions based on data. And thanks to the UTIP hunt, what you've done, Mayra, and given us that information. And you, Roberto, since you've been part of that situation for a long time, you've been able to understand the importance of taking the data as what's driving our initiatives. So thank you all for that. So, Roberto, Mayra, were you going to comment or anything?

The commissioners and you judge and Roberto for all the support that we have been given. Again, as I've been saying, we are at a very particular moment where we need to take advantage of all of the information that we have and having this collaboration across these three entities of CRMA, HDR, and the Hunt Institute makes it great in the sense that we can start from providing all of the data, plus all of the infrastructure needs, plus policy recommendations. So that's what we are doing, and let us know if we could do anything else for you. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Maida. Any other questions? No? Thank you. Great presentation. Thank you. Raymond, thank you for being here as well. Do you feel better being here under other circumstances? I think I should do this more often and come with other projects. Thank you. Thank you.

Item of 4K, receive a presentation from El Paso Electric regarding regional electricity infrastructure planning and capacity considerations associated with continued economic growth and development in the region. And just for information, we have two speakers for a public comment on this item.

Judge Commissioners, just wanted to provide you some background information about this presentation. This presentation was the result of the direction provided to the department in order to invite El Paso Water to discuss how decisions are made by El Paso Water.

And El Paso Electric.

And El Paso Electric that might impact unincorporated areas of the county. The importance of ensuring the county has a direct role in voicing infrastructure decisions. and the need for greater clarity regarding the infrastructure planning and broader regional impacts associated with future projects. With that, I'd like to pass it to our folks from El Paso Electric.

First of all, thank you for being here. It's really good. The timing is perfect for us.

Thank you. Judge, commissioners, good afternoon. Daniel Perez, Director of Regulatory and Government Affairs. So just allow me to introduce some folks that we brought along. I kind of promised them you guys wouldn't call them up here, but they're here in case you guys have really very specific questions. It's really the core folks that would address questions in regards to what we've been talking to your economic development team about, large loads, system planning, things like that. Behind me, I have our director of economic development, Eric Montgomery. Lily Bustamante, who's our director of transmission and substation. I also have Alex Castro, who is our supervisor of system planning and compliance. Walter Guerrero, he is our manager of key accounts. And that used to mean anybody larger than 600 kilowatts. And that's funny now, but that used to be a large load in our world. I've got Cynthia Ortwine, who's our director of business development, and then folks from my team, Ivan Mejorado and Grecia Lopez with our government affairs team.

You're welcome to come to the front, so if you need to speak or anything, you're very welcome to join us. Yeah, come on. They want to feel the support a little closer, too.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, so real quick, so in regards to our approach to growth, right, so our vision and mission statement, very much see ourselves as a cornerstone for our regional growth in every aspect, right? In everything and anything we do, we're always prioritizing affordability and reliability. That is what our customers tell us that is what's important to them. We internally also try to balance affordability and reliability with sustainability, of course. So we're trying to, again, build the infrastructure that's needed as we're supporting increased demand And then that we're ready, right, for what we're seeing coming down to our region. And that's approaching us. And that takes an interesting balance, right, because being in the regulated structure that we are, right, we can't make any investments or move forward unless there are customers, right? So sometimes it feels like we're playing a little bit of catch up, but again, we're always trying to plan ahead as best we can and be aligned with our economic development partners such as the county's team, right? So what's driving that growth? A few years ago, we were pretty much an anomaly across the country in that we had sustained what we called organic growth. We would have about 1.5% growth year over year, which other utilities up until the current status of the industry and the hyperscaler growth, Other utilities across the country, we're seeing a constant decrease in their demand, right? So we were consistently at 1.5%, and we are now approaching double that. So again, we went from being a utility with a constantly growing customer base to now a utility with an even faster growing customer base, right? Obviously sustained residential load, it's easy for anybody to see, right? At both extremes of the county, you have, or actually all extremes of the county, you have new subdivisions, residential subdivisions being built as fast as they can be built. That's a lot of distribution. infrastructure on our behalf, right? And that along with some of the increased commercial and industrial activity recently that we're seeing in some of our industrial parks, you know, that places electrical, that places pressure on our electric system. So, again, we have to grow and be ready to power both our existing customers and our new customers reliably and affordably, right? And it has to be, going back to what I said earlier about we're in a regulated construct, it has to be intentional. We cannot do any investments unless there is a specific need and or customer for those investments. Just to simplify it, I know we sometimes get lost in electric utility speak, and so as we're all, we love to champion how we have quite a variety of generation portfolios. How we generate the power, so we have our nuclear percentage ownership of the facility out in Arizona. So the Palo Verde Nuclear Facility, which up until recently was the largest nuclear facility in the country. El Paso Electric owns 15% of that. And even though it's only 15% ownership, on a power delivered basis, or what we actually sell to our customers, it roughly makes up half of the power we deliver to our customers. So that allows us to have, again, you know, a very low carbon footprint and it's insanely reliable. It's more than 600 megawatts coming to our system all day, every day, 365. And then obviously we have our natural gas facilities along with our solar and now battery in some instances and then obviously market purchases. So that's our generation fleet transmission-wise, right? So our transmission lines, that's us moving power across the region at a higher voltage, and so it's more efficient to move power at higher voltages. And so when we're trying to move power across long distances or a substantial amount of power at longer distances, Those are those taller, larger structures, if you will, that you see along the interstate and those types of areas. And then substations, which is where you basically change the power's voltage up or down, whether it's coming in or you're sending it out from a power plant, for example. A substation, all it does is these transformers change the voltage of that power down to where now you can distribute it through your distribution system to your customers. And so that's just, again, a very gross oversimplification of our electric system. And I'm going to turn it over to Eric so he can talk about what our current process is for interconnecting folks.

Thank you.

Thank you, Judge. Commissioners, Eric Montgomery for the record with El Paso Electric. So all of this, as Daniel has been presenting, is part of an interconnected system that has to be planned well in advance. Infrastructure investments follow load, and so Our process in tackling any new load is already a very prescribed process, very regulated, open and transparent. What we have done recently is documented for particularly large loads, what is the process that they enter into as they're looking at our region. This is already a federally prescribed process through FERC, which is the Federal Energy Regulation Commission, and it specifically, through that process, requires us to do a number of analyses in order to see if a load is coming onto the system, how does that impact the system and all other customers so that we can attribute costs and upgrades to that specific customer or user. This was a system that was initially established in order to attach generation into a transmission system on a national grid. So if somebody wanted to interconnect with us and sell us power, they would have to go through this process. If they are connecting into our transmission system, to send power to California or other locations. It's the same federal process and it applies to anybody that is at 20 megawatts or higher. And that's electric speak, ballpark, a megawatt powers about 150 to 200 homes. That varies depending on consumption but in our neck of the woods relative to a home that has refrigerated air, 150 to 200 of those homes. The reason that this process is in place is because we need to make sure that there is reliability for the system as a whole. We don't want one particular load or user to quickly come offline the system and then we're funneling power to that location. and it causes a cataclysmic event. So we actually have to do a series of analysis to see how does the system break, what do we need to upgrade, what do we need to implement as new infrastructure in order to prevent a scenario like that from happening. and then how do we buffer the rest of the system so that other customers are not affected or impacted by that. Once we have gotten through those analyses, then we are able to get a cost and itemized list of that infrastructure, and then are able to enter into agreements with those customers in order to, one, allocate the costs to them of that new or enhanced infrastructure, but then two, actually purchase long lead time items, and I missed a step in this. We require an application and deposit process, and that's critically important because the application and deposit actually triggers a whole section of accounting processes. We have to set up work orders, create a special line item. We assign teams that then use those work orders so that when our engineers are doing the initial studies and work, all of those costs, any resources that are attributed to this particular project are then itemized and applied to the money that's been put down on a deposit. And I'll also state that as a regulated utility that is required to show necessity in every step that we take, we have an obligation to serve any customer that comes across our doorstep. It doesn't matter who the customer is, whether it's a business, residential, we have an obligation to serve because of our position as a regulated utility. This is not done in a vacuum. For many years, El Paso Electric has done and produced plans. On our website, every year we update a 10-year plan with our transmission system that is open and available to the public to look at what are we seeing as future enhancements that need to be made based off of growth that we are seeing. I'll highlight as Daniel pointed out that up to this point our growth on the system has principally been through residential developments. In fact that accounts for roughly 90% of our customer base and so as we build we are really at this point responding to residential growth and development. We've already talked about the engineering studies that are required. What I'll also highlight is that we do not take steps with projects until we have contracts in place. The contracts then define the scale, what materials we'll have to use, timelines in order to build the infrastructure required for those projects. and any other nuanced complexity that may come with the project, such as a dedicated generation resource or other needs around that, certain redundancy or reliability standards that the customer may be asking for. It's because of all of that that we are really asking and requesting that those that have higher level power uses, again above that 20 megawatt level, that we are getting introduced to those conversations as soon as possible. We are still subject to long lead time items in our supply chain as are all utilities. across the US and for us to be successful as we are having economic development conversations today, the long lead time items are the most critical piece. But we won't place the order for those items until we have a contract in place and we've done the measured studies for the projects. As Daniel had talked about, with these large load processes, the reason that 20 megawatts has really been a point up to today, though FERC is discussing changing some of the guidelines and we expect to have some new rules probably within this year that may adjust our internal processes. Generally, we have to do a lot of transmission planning because it's about flowing power around and through our system. And so we do a lot of transmission upgrades. One of the upgrades that we recently did was that we converted a lot of transmission poles from wood to steel. Yes, that's a more expensive investment. Yes, it does last longer. But one of the critical reasons why we did that was around wildfire management. So this last year, we actually completed a project where we were replacing over 300 transmission poles in the Gila, which pulls some of the power that Daniel was talking about earlier that comes from our Palo Verde plant, it provides a baseline of power for our system as a whole. Shortly after making those upgrades to the system, there was about an eight mile portion of that area that was actually hit by wildfires and so the concern would have been if we had not made that conversion that we wouldn't have had some of the resiliency in our system and ultimately that line could have been knocked out by those fires. Planning is not something that is so much locational anymore. We used to be able to develop our substation plans and say, okay, this one is getting close to capacity, so we need to put one. near adjacent to it. We now have to look at tremendous growth patterns that are happening, particularly on the east side of El Paso, and work to chase that. As you all are talking about Tornillo Port of Entry, would I would encourage you to look at CBRE industrial development reports because what we're seeing is that a lot of the industrial development trend whether you look at the US side or in Mexico the majority of new industrial construction that is happening throughout the border plex region is in the Far East side and that will require us to chase that load with additional transmission enhancements out to that area. You'll also see continued residential growth that continues to go out that way. We will have to deliver power to those new residential areas, which is why we have done things like the East Loop and other substation developments to match the growth that we are all seeing out there. This is part of a long-term sustainability plan in order to make sure that we have resilient power resources that are being delivered to those growth areas while also maintaining our core area and our existing customer base.

Like Eric mentioned, right, so we have really, when he was talking about the transmission system, so we had essentially a loop, if you will, on the eastern part of El Paso. And now as we push that growth further and further out, we now kind of have to encapsulate and provide redundancy and reliability further out, right? So we're essentially constructing another loop out there. And along with that is, you know, substations, right? And substations are necessary. wide variety of different areas but but more specifically right there where where the power is being distributed because you again you need to step that powers voltage down and for for what it's necessary therefore in that in that specific area so um we're having like i said earlier we're having growth of all kinds obviously residential subdivisions uh you know commercial spec buildings um and and and obviously the the industrial uh large load that we've been discussing. And so we are building, we went from roughly one to two substations a year to now 10, something like that, depending on the year. But that is a drastic change for us, obviously. That only it only happens if there is a need for it right there, there is no in our in our again regulated construct we can't do any speculative investment, so if we're building a substation is because we were already approached by. A customer or some entity that that is telling us that there's going to be some type of activity in that specific area so. Just real quick, substations, all they do is transformers step the power up or down. There's no generation. There are no generation units. There's no turbines. I know that that might be an oversimplification, but I know at times we've been asked if there's power generation happening at substations. There is no power being generated at a substation. So this is a pretty wide, a bird's eye type of view of some of the projects that we have planned across the region, and like we said earlier, right, mostly on the eastern part of the county. And so if you look at the colored boxes, if you will, It's where the lines could possibly go from one substation to another, right? So the green points is where substation is, and we're going to try to connect lines from one substation to another, and it's kind of the scope of that transmission line segment, you know, where would we... where we could possibly send those lines through. And again, we have lines of several voltages, but our transmission system is mostly 115 kilovolts or 345. You might have heard throughout the state of Texas, there are plans for a 765 line. That's in the ERCOT world. But I do bring that up because in regards to how the industry is having to build at larger voltages now because of the... credible demand now needed to power everything we're all doing. So EPE's largest voltage is 345. We do own a small portion of a 500 kV line in Arizona right by the nuclear facility. And again, it includes some substation builds where it's new substations, but some of the substation projects are expansions to existing substations. Just kind of touching points that have come up in our conversations with Roberto's team, there's no such thing as a discounted or preferential rate. The Public Utility Commission is adamant of requiring folks to pay what their true cost of service is, meaning what it costs the utility to serve them. There are two exceptions to that, and they are required by statute. One of them is to the military base, required by statute, and the other is to the universities, again, required by statute. That that I did want to again put a point to that that there is no such thing as a discounted rate. Rates are, as I mentioned, they're they're based on on the cost of service principle, and that is what we presented in our most recent rate case. There were some adjustments made there, but again that was based on the Commission's decision to to adjust it to where. they didn't want us to increase the specific type of customer class, the percentage that it would have increased had it been true customer service across the board. There was another question that came up in regards to folks building their own generation and selling us power. Nobody other than rooftop solar customers, nobody is selling us power. Other than the residential rooftop solar customers, we do not have a single customer right now that is selling us power. So nobody has onsite generation. And if they do, they're not selling it to us. So I did, again, want to stress that nothing stops someone from coming to our region, buying a piece of land, and generating the power that they need themselves onsite. That is something that can be done hypothetically. But again, nobody other than our residential rooftop solar customers is selling us power. And then another point that, again, keeps coming up is in regards to if we're making investments that are specific to one customer, that specific customer is paying for those investments. That is as simple as I can put it. The only costs that are spread across our entire rate base are those that we can demonstrate some type of benefit to the entire system. But if a specific customer requires us to build them substations, transmission lines, distribution lines, generation even now, I mean, that customer will be paying for those assets. And I guess just in summary, again, have a lot of growth. We've always been proud to report that our region has had consistent growth, but now it's at a faster pace. And again, we went from the world where somebody would approach the electric company and would say, you know, I'm going to build a car wash or I'm going to build a shopping center or something I'm going to need. maybe a megawatt and so you know our team would look at the substation in the area and say yeah that substation can accommodate it we'll get you hooked up here in a few months type of type of situation and again maybe a megawatt or less whereas now we're in a world where people show up at our doorstep and say hey i might need a gigawatt how fast can you give it to me, right? So 1,000 megawatts, if you will. So it's a whole different other world. Now it requires us to look at, like Eric walked you all through the process, not just what that specific substation in that area needs, but rather, Okay, now let's look at the entire system from a generation, transmission, substation, distribution perspective all together and do the analysis in that manner. More planning driven, right, as I was kind of describing. So again, that doesn't mean our focus ever changes from affordability and reliability. And we're just trying to, you know, stay in line with what our partners in the region, the city, the county, and the other municipalities we serve and folks we serve across the state line as well, right, is what they're signaling to us are priorities and that we're in alignment with them. So I think that that's it for the presentation, but we would love to take any questions you all may have.

Well, thank you. Eric and Daniel, thank you so much. You know, I was just thinking back how much has changed. You know, back in 2019 when I started, we were so isolated. And as we would do everything to bring a company in, like Schneider Electric or Amazon or whoever it was, a lot of the Taiwanese companies, and then we would sort of engage them, and then we'd figure out what you needed to do, what the water, El Paso water needed to do, then we'd go to Leila and say, what kind of workforce do we need? And it seemed like we were doing everything backwards. And so I thank you for being here because I think the public expects that we understand the impact that things have, that if we decide to bring a company in, then we're able to talk to you before that and say, hey, this is a company, this is what they need. I think the best example was when we visited Taiwan and we brought the Taiwanese company that they already understood what was available, what wasn't available, what were their limitations, and so I saw a tremendous difference. But I think the public, you know, it's very easy for you not to have to be here, right? I mean, you're here because you want to be here. SO THAT'S A GOOD SORT OF SHOWING THE COMMUNITY THAT WE ARE TRYING TO WORK TOGETHER, THAT WE ARE TRYING TO DO THE BEST. THE BALANCE BETWEEN BRINGING COMPANIES IN BECAUSE WE NEED TO INCREASE REVENUE AND OF COURSE THAT INCREASES OR LOWERS OUR TAX BASE FOR PROPERTIES. But the public doesn't feel that collaboration between us. So we're very thankful that you're here so that we could understand. I think one of the main questions that I would have is, and I'll give an example. When Mehta was gonna come in, I think I've gone through three different mayors from when we started those discussions, right? From Margo to Lisa to Johnson. And everybody was extremely happy. And everybody's excited because they were coming in. But then we had more companies come in. And obviously, that all of a sudden, what seemed very positive now seemed very challenging. And so I tell them, give us a break. We didn't know. that Ford Bliss was gonna have one and that Jupiter was gonna come in. So sometimes it's hard to understand the future of business, and that's why this collaboration is so important. But I think one of the questions that I think you answered it, but if maybe more to the public, if you would speak to the public, and that is that at what point is there a saturation point for you to be able to say at this point we can't bring another data center, we can't bring a company that's gonna take, are we in that, is that a possibility that we could have those discussions because we want to cooperate with businesses coming in, but we also want to cooperate that we're not taking anything away from our residents or increasing the rates or anything like that. So those, you know, being able to sit at the table and have those discussions are going to be extremely important. I don't know if you could address that, Daniel?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, again, and Eric touched on it, right? We are required, you know, our certificate area, our certificate of convenience and necessity, which is, again, you know, runs from far west Texas to southern New Mexico. So anybody that moves to that region, we have an obligation to serve, right? That being said, It's an obligation to serve reliably, and therefore, as I said earlier, like that example I gave of somebody opening up a business and needing a nominal amount of power for your average restaurant or something, Obviously, for us to be able to handle loads of several gigawatts, that doesn't happen overnight. And so from a timing perspective, it's really us being very transparent, not just with our regulating bodies, our customers, but also the community that we will not interconnect anybody unless we can fully serve them. And therefore, that means we're talking, you know, five maybe longer years out into the future, right? And so it's really us, again, always doing an analysis to say, can our system handle this and when? And sometimes the answer is you're talking significantly into the future. And I think, you know, I don't want to speak for any other industry, but sometimes that might be too long for them, right? But again, we have to do it in a very analytical and technical manner, and that nothing happens just because we, on a whim's notice, we think that this might be something that should happen, right? It has to be studied, analyzed, and approved by our regulatory bodies.

Thank you. Any questions? I have a lot of questions, but you can go first.

Okay. Are you sure? I've been going first all day. It's fine. Okay. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you for being here and presenting to us. I have questions right now specifically about power stations, substations, and transmission lines. daniel you mentioned that one of the reasons that these transmission lines are necessary is to meet the demand the growing demand in the region so um as you know because we've had several conversations there's a lot of these new transmission lines that are being proposed to go through precinct one and specifically through residential areas in Montana Vista. And so my question is about, is twofold. One is would these transmission line upgrades and new power substations be necessary at the scale that we're seeing and on the timeline that we're seeing without the data centers and hyperscalers coming into the region?

So, yes, so the, as I was describing earlier, I mean, really the transmission lines, yes, they do move power across longer distances, right? But they are also necessary, sometimes in shorter distances, but to move quite a bit of power. And so that's what we're seeing, like I said, in the eastern part of the county. And to your question, specifically in your precinct, because we are seeing so much expected growth, or not expected, but it's basically coming as fast as we can build it. And therefore, we're having to build more redundancy and build additional lines to now incorporate areas further out east. But yes, absolutely. I mean, they're part of our... I don't know if I mentioned it earlier, but we function on... we model and do analysis and submit reports as to what we're doing on a 10-year basis. But internally, we'd look at it on a 20-year basis. And so it's really just our transmission planning in action, right? And because it's... I guess, coincidentally, this whole hyperscaler boom, if you will, across the country or really globally kind of happened with the... quite a bit of organic growth that we're seeing, right, and we separate the two out. When I gave you all that statistic about how we were one and a half percent growth, and now we're almost at double that, that's totally separate from any, because again, today we do not have a single data center on the grid. I think we just now have finally a meter at the meta site, but I don't know if they're even pulling power yet. But other than that, there are no data centers hooked up to our grid. So I hope that answers your question.

Well, I think just to be a little bit more specific is Can we attribute any of these new these new transmission lines that are being proposed to the hyperscale? Build out that we're seeing now.

No, and thank you for asking that because I do want to specify that and remind everybody that our rate case that we are almost fully done with, does not include any single dollars or cents tied to anything in regards to any of these hyperscalers, because again, it's looking backwards, right? But yes, this is just us planning just regular system growth.

Okay, on a related note, I'm wondering if El Paso Electric at all evaluates the cumulative infrastructure burdens on local communities with power and utility infrastructure. So as you know, in Montana Vista, we have a power plant, we have at least one substation that's gonna grow. We have already high voltage transmission lines and we're projected to get more. So especially in unincorporated areas where the county does not have zoning authority, right? So we can't decide where industry goes or where these large load customers go. Does that factor at all into El Paso Electric's decision making in terms of where this infrastructure is sited? Because what we're seeing is areas like Montana Vista are becoming overburdened with this type of infrastructure.

Our regulated process includes very much a community engagement component, right? So as you know, for our transmission lines, there's quite a bit of community engagement. There's public meetings, there's public notices, there's letters sent out to any landowners remotely close to the project. And in regards to your point about, I guess, general infrastructure and substations, those substations wouldn't get built if the need for the power there was not there. I mean, it's really just that specific area apparently is going to have a new, again, shopping center, residential subdivision, some apartment complex, what have you, and that's why we're there. if the growth wasn't there, we wouldn't be building it. And again, the transmission lines, that's why there is quite a thorough process that begins with a community engagement process before you even file your CCN at the commission. So we've had, I think somewhere in the neighborhood of seven or eight public meetings these past few months for those transmission lines. And then now starts the process where we are barely going to submit those applications to the commission starting, I believe, next month. And then that involves, again, another, you know, fully, you know, open process where anybody who has any comments or issues or any landowner, anybody has any issue with the, you know, tens of different routes that are provided as options to the commission, you know, it can be evaluated. Right. And so we just propose options and then the commission makes a decision. But but yes, that's that's why, again, our regulatory construct has that built in. But to your point, and we have had several conversations, we appreciate the opportunity to discuss that with you and to hear what your concerns are representing your precinct.

Thank you. And I think this goes to a little bit of what the judge was mentioning in terms of coordination and communication early on. And I'd like to know, and maybe it's something that we can talk more about in the future, is how El Paso County, as a county who has limited regulatory authority and zoning authority in unincorporated areas, can coordinate more closely with El Paso Electric, both in transmission planning and the large load infrastructure coordination. Because from what I understand, most times you all get the first notice of a large load customer coming into the region or being interested in the region, right? And so if that's being cited in unincorporated communities, knowing the county does not have zoning authority, How can we be more involved in the discussion about what power generation will look like in the communities that we represent? Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. No, I hear you. And I'm not exactly sure who gets the first call if it's the economic development folks the county or the city or you know our economic development organizations like the chamber or or borderplex or who right but yeah you're right i mean i think anybody who's looking to move to our region um i'm sorry and i apologize if it sounds like i'm tooting our horn right but you know we have a very reliable very affordable grid um and and and they One of the first checks they do is they call us and say, hey, I'm exploring moving to this region and how quickly could you service me type of thing. But again, I mean, everything and anything El Paso Electric does is under the... the lens of multiple regulatory bodies, every municipality we serve, several states, FERC, NERC, I mean, and to your point about where we set generation facilities, air permits, right? Air permits are, as you all are fully aware, we have very public processes for air permits, and so that involves, again, everybody's at the table and everybody can intervene or comment on anything that we're doing. But yes, absolutely. I think to your point about maybe at this point, but at this point where we're seeing these types of quite a greater speed of... of entities looking at our region that maybe we should have a little bit more coordination than what was historically being done.

Daniel and I just I just want to compliment what what Daniel was saying with excuse me an added point of as we discussed earlier we we have an obligation to serve anybody that comes in so that's more of a reactionary approach and I think what the county is doing today the great partnership that we have as a company with the economic development department, Roberto and his team. I think what that points to is a broader strategy as we talk about partnership and planning and how do we approach this. A broader strategy that can be implemented around both transmission sighting generation availability alongside the specific industries that we're looking at and recruiting to El Paso County. And so I think leaning more into the proactive approaches will help us in dealing with what appears to be more of a reactionary.

Yes. Thank you. Thank you. And you mentioned there's an application and deposit process for the large load customers. Do you know how many are in the queue right now, in your queue?

Seventeen, but not all of those have deposits. So 17 are in an interest queue, have expressed interest and wanted information within on our system and our region to have placed deposits.

How much is the deposit?

So a deposit, we went through a change on some of that. So the initial deposit was $250,000. Now what we do is the initial deposit is $275,000. That gives a quick internal look and assessment on the system using our engineers. If a company feels that they would like to move the process forward into a formal process and also keep in mind not everybody's coming with their engineering drawings and diagrams that would be necessary to do a full true system impact analysis. And so that initial process allows some time and gives them an introduction to it. So should they wish to advance to the more formal process with the deeper level of analysis, there's an additional $250,000 deposit that is placed to be able to do that.

Okay. And you mentioned earlier in the presentation that the FERC guidelines are going to be changing soon, perhaps?

Do we have a timeline?

Do we know what those anticipated changes are?

We are expecting some guidance to come out from FERC sometime in June. We're not exactly sure when that's going to be. At this point, we don't have a firm grasp on what FERC is going to come out with. There's a lot of different regulatory environments across the country. PJM operates completely different from the portion of the grid that we work in, and so there's been a lot of focus on PJM. Some of those rules may not apply, so it's up in the air for what the consistent rules will be across the country.

WHAT ARE THE GUIDELINES AROUND, GENERALLY? WHAT DO YOU ANTICIPATE THOSE GUIDELINES BEING GEARED TOWARDS

Good afternoon, Alejandro Castro, supervisor of system planning and compliance. FERC is currently working on the east coast with the PJM and SPP on some of their new large load interconnecting agreements and processes. Some of those processes occurring right now that SPP has come up and shown to the public, right, FERC is public, you can get into the meetings and watch. they have actually introduced their large load internal process and their large load process, their generation load, to be a combined process. And right now, FERC has said that they're gonna be coming out with some kind of rules and guidance on how to look at the large loads when they come into a process. This is still, again, new for the power system out in the West Coast more, so that's what FERC has stated so far. And out of the guidance on those regulations, they haven't given us any sense yet of what they're looking at.

Okay. I'm thinking about what we've seen from the federal government down even at the state level where they're trying to streamline processes, remove what they call regulatory barriers. So is your anticipation that that's going to be part of it? Is removing some of the requirements that currently exist?

I don't see that there's gonna be any removal of guidance. I think there's gonna be more clarification on guidance of how utilities should be structuring their process development for this large load. And again, I'll use the word that Daniel, boom, because it is a boom. We are being asked several times and we're being shown, hey, there's a want for this need of you to give us some kind of process. And that's what is coming out from FERC, that they're actually taking the time to now say that this is something we need to bring to the forefront.

Okay. And then one last question, maybe for now. There was a mention about the commission statute on military bases. Was that FERC or was that the POC?

That was actually a local effort at the time BRAC was happening. And so at that point, there was an alignment by... Several of our elected bodies, both our state delegation and our federal congressmen. And so it was put in statute.

What does the statute say exactly?

I'm not going to try and say it by memory, but it's something along the lines of we provide the military installation a 20% discount, and it's covered by our customer base. It's on everybody's bill.

Would that apply to the data center that Fort Bliss is planning on building?

I don't see. Without concerning anybody, I don't see how that would happen. We would have to keep that fully separate because this was again done at the time of. the community was trying to ensure that the base stayed here. I think there would, I would hope that there would be a consensus that there is a, one of the questions that would come up is who's our actual customer, right? Would it be the base would be our customer or would it be this, this facility, because at that point, that would, in a sense, take care of itself, but I do think that there would be a consensus that, you know, it's very different to have, you know, a base that's at a consumption nowhere near the scale of what a data center would be at. Therefore, that, you know, that isn't there to serve the purpose. The discount was there to, again, it was our community saying we really would like the base to stay here and grow because of what it means to our economy. But in this new scenario we're in, I don't see how we would be able to And so, again, it's in state statute. Again, that's something that I would leave to the policy folks to make a decision on. But, again, I think as El Paso Electric, we firmly believe that that should be kept aside and not for this new scenario if a data center, if and when a data center gets built there.

Um? So potentially, unless we were able to like amend state statute, we could be subsidizing 20% of this. This data center build out that they're planning.

Without looking at the statute in front of me, and I'm not an attorney, but I don't want to speak to it because I think that, again, it was put there for a different situation, and so it really depends on who our customer is because, again, right now, Fort Bliss is our customer, but there is a scenario where this data center on base could be our customer directly, right? And just to clarify, one thing to point out is we serve for Bliss at the transmission level. Their distribution on base is handled by a different company, and so it could be a setup where we are powering a facility there on base at that transmission level and the base not be our customer, right? But no, it is something for all of us to keep in mind, right? That does exist.

And then just one more question on the transmission. So, yes.

Hi, Cynthia Pina with El Paso Electric.

I just wanted to answer that question about the Fort Bliss potential data center. So the entity would be separate from Fort Bliss and they would not be subject to that military rate rider. They would be subject to El Paso's large load tariff, which was just filed. And the purpose of that tariff was to make sure that all large load customers, data centers, or anyone else that has the same load profile is paying their fair share, whether it's for dedicated facilities, infrastructure upgrades, or energy, but that is completely separate from the military rate.

Okay, and then, so I understand kind of like the best practice is for these large load customers to bear the costs of power generation and interconnection themselves, but at what point does that extend to the broader transmission system upgrades that El Paso Electric is planning, right? So we can't, I mean, it would be great if we could keep them in a bubble of their own, but if they're going to connect to the wider system, wouldn't it be fair to assume that they should also bear some of the costs of building out that transmission system?

Yes. So once those costs are identified, so like, for example, as Daniel was saying, we only right now have one data center under contract, and we have done substantial studies over the last four years, and the power that they're going to be using, for example, is gonna be co-located, so on their site, so there's no transmission build-out needed. They're also paying for their own three dedicated substations. So in the scenario that our system planning engineers do studies and identify, like, okay, well, we need to upgrade this line in order to serve them, we need to upgrade this in order to serve them, then those costs become allocated to those customers. But until that point in time, we allocate the costs that we know are dedicated to them.

Okay.

Thank you.

Real quick, Commissioner Butler, I did want to touch on the FERC question you had. Another component that will come into that is the states, especially the state of Texas, is kind of very much looking as to what they're doing. And some states really don't want the federal government kind of you know jumping in into how they regulate and so it'll be interesting to see what happens with that guidance but yeah I don't like to other condos point I don't think there's any world where it's it's it's pulling back it's rather here are guidelines here's what you should be doing okay okay Commissioner Stout

Thank you. Thank you, Daniel and team for being here and for providing us with information. I have a couple of questions. So just generally, do we know what percentage of the growth in demand that is due to residential and how much is due to commercial growth?

So right now our existing, again, today our existing customer base is more than 90% residential. So by far our current growth is almost exclusively.

So it's developers building houses in the unincorporated areas of the county? Okay, just wanted to point that out because again, that's another burden I think on, so if I live closely downtown, am my rates gonna go up to help pay for that generation?

No, so if a developer, if somebody is developing a property somewhere on the outskirts of the county or what, El Paso Electric charges that customer for that development.

So their rate's higher than mine?

Why higher?

Because it has newer transmission lines. It has newer, I guess... No, it would be...

So a developer would approach us and says, hey, I need... I'm going to need distribution infrastructure in this specific area, right? And so they would pay for it up front. They would build that into the cost of the home and that would eventually be sold to somebody. But no, it doesn't get socialized. Like you... Again, back to the principles of we try to keep it and we always propose it, that our customers, regardless of what class they fall in, that they pay what the true cost of service, what it costs us to serve them is.

So if the rate case goes through and I, as a resident of downtown El Paso, have to pay 20% more, what is the 20% more that I'm paying for going towards? Then if all of what you're talking about is not socialized and it's not spread across the rest of the rate payers, what exactly am I paying for? Because you're not upgrading my system.

We are in some cases. we're having growth again all across our system, right? So we are having, even in our existing customer areas, we're all throughout our service territory on an individual basis, everybody's consuming more, right? And so we do have all of our energy efficiency programs and everything that we try to get our customers on. But that being said, I mean, we'll be, we'll get an entire, you know, neighborhood where somebody gets refrigerated air, and then the neighbor says, hey, I want some, and then it goes like that to where an entire street, all of a sudden, you know, the infrastructure we had there, the transformers we had there are no longer adequate, and we have to upgrade that. So it's really across the system. And then, again, across the system, there's higher demand, therefore we need higher amounts of generation, and therefore more linemen, more... you know, more labor, more equipment, so that's where it's a system-wide approach, right?

Okay, I mean, I understand what you're,

Not to mention the folks, I mean, you guys see it on social media, right, Hoff and folks, and this is me just reminding people, because I know sometimes I guess people, it's funny in some instances, right, there was a sign placed on one of our poles that kept getting hit on the west side, but Every time somebody hits our infrastructure, that's a cost to all of us, right? If a car hits one of our poles, runs into our substation, that's a cost to all of us, right? So again, that's something that happens. I mean, you guys look at social media, it's probably every weekend, if not nightly, sadly, so...

OK, it's I'm just trying to un muddy the waters, right? Because I. I think it's very complex and even I don't fully understand how things are working and you have a lot of folks in the community that are talking about how, especially industrial and larger commercial operations that may be coming online, not just data centers but other factories and manufacturing outfits and such, right? that the regular ratepayers is gonna be burdened with those costs, as well as the costs of expanding housing, right? Like we were just talking about. It's just, I mean, how do we better explain to, you know, somebody who, for example, in my neighborhood, who hasn't seen El Paso Electric come in the last eight or 10 years and redo their wiring or, you know, You know there's there's all kinds of I mean I look in my alleyway And there's just like all kinds of wires hanging off. It's not it's not new right so You know like how do we like how does that how do you explain that to the public that? That they're gonna be paying another $30 a month for their for their power and and You know they're not they're not actually seen in

I'm not sure where you're referencing your $30 or what the numbers are, but I'll say in regards to cables hanging, if any of our cables were hanging, that's a safety issue, so you're probably talking about telecom concerns. But again, we have projects all throughout our service territory, central, east side, west side, I mean, you name it. be hard pressed to be driving around any part of town without our trucks visible somewhere, right? I mean, and again, I'm not going to try to go off of projects that I've heard of or I know of off of memory, but I mean, we, I don't know, we did some substantial work at the Clardy Fox substation last year, and that's, I believe, at the heart, you know, pretty heart of Central. I mean, there's, I could, we could get you those specifics, but work is happening across our system all day, every day, right? And so to answer your question in regards to the cost, so our most recent rate case, right, it was pretty much broken down So it was a third into distribution, a third into transmission, and a third into generation, right? And so, again, it's a system-wide cost allocation process. And you're right, it's not simply, it's not that simple to understand. And even as we try to simplify it the best we can, cost allocation is really kind of the focus of the regulated industry, the regulated utility industry model, right? But again, all of our customers, the only cost that they are paying for is a service that's provided to them. Therefore, again, from a cost allocation perspective, and Commissioner Butler touched on it in regards to transmission and things like that, unless there is a benefit to the entire system that is not spread out to the entire customer base.

What's the threshold for that, though? Because that's kind of a very nebulous, to me, concept, right? What's the threshold or what is the indicator for what a benefit is, right? So if the... I'll give you an example. If electricity is going to go across those transmission lines and through that distribution, that's going to go to whatever operation that is, if five houses are going to be able to tap into that?

I'll give you an example. Is that the threshold? So if we're building a substation specifically for one customer, we do have dedicated substations that are only utilized by one customer. The entire cost of that substation is paid for by that specific customer. But if we build a substation that is utilized by that customer and also might provide redundancy to that area, that's a different analysis. Cynthia covered an example of if we're building generation for somebody on their site, there's no transmission, that generation is going to be paid for by that customer. If in the future there was additional transmission built to that generation facility to where now we could utilize that generation for other customers, then that's how that would be socialized. But it's really a cost allocation principle that it's only if you are receiving any kind of benefit from that asset. If you're not, it doesn't get socialized.

Is there a way that the electric company could provide to us some type of accounting or a list of the new operations that are coming online? And if this is going to be the case where, I mean, just the differentiation between which projects are going to be paying for their own stuff and which projects are going to be paid for by socialization. Absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, all of our filings are obviously public, but yeah, absolutely, we could show, I mean, again, you know, like the McLeod generating station, which is specific for one customer, or I don't know, I'm thinking about substations that are for some of our other larger commercial customers, but absolutely, we can provide you with that.

And when that does happen where the full cost of the new generation is not being borne by the client or the one rate payer, what is the division of the cost? I mean, is it then socialized across all rate payers across the county or is there a percentage of it that you know is going to be going towards that entity and so they have to pay for a percentage of it and then the rate payers... it's socialized 20%, 80 or 20 or something like that?

If that were to happen, to answer your question, in the future it would require a very complex process where, again, we would propose something to our regulators. and say, okay, we believe this asset, a percentage of it is utilized by this specific customer, or if not, our entire customer base, and then our regulators would decide if they agree or disagree, and not just our regulators, but any interveners and everybody who would be at the table. But that is only if we decide to include that in our entire rate base, right? Right now, I think the project you're referring to is exclusively for one customer, and that one customer is paying for it.

Okay. I had a couple more questions. Hold on one second. I think that may be it, but. Is the electric company able to ensure that under the current agreement with Meta and any future data center agreements that they're going to make sure that they bear the full cost of the construction? or what kind of protections? I mean, so you kind of answered a little bit of that question in your last answer, but you'd have to include into a rate case if you wanted to charge some of that.

So we can't make any changes to any, so again, any filings we've done up to this point, as they work their way through their process, right, if we wanted to deviate from that, we would have to restart the process all over again with all of the folks at the table.

Are there any protections for rate payers and consumers of EPE if, for example, like one of these data center projects failed or was canceled or was stopped or, you know, what? And you've already built out, you know, and it goes under after a year or something like that, what?

Absolutely. So we have, we just filed our, I'm not going to try to use a new acronym, but the large low tariff, and Cynthia, feel free to come up, but we just filed a large low tariff and it includes all sorts of protections to make sure that our existing customer base and our system is fully protected if something like that were to happen. But I don't know if you wanted to add anything, Cynthia.

So in our contracts and in the large load tariff we have contract terms and so the customers have to be willing to provide security for the value of the term of the contract. So for example something were to happen and the term of the contract is 20 years and after five years they go out of business or they decide this isn't the territory they want to be in or they want to scale down or whatever. EPE will have a security to draw on for that amount of the remainder of the contract to make sure that other customers are insulated from any of those costs.

Okay. And how long do these contracts typically last?

So when we were looking at the market, they ranged. At the time, the longest one we had seen was about 10 to 12 years. The one that we just executed is for 20 years.

Okay, and so the, if it's meta, right? So if they have a contract that's 15 years, then they're gonna be able to pay for the cost of all their generation within that 15 years, or can you explain that to me? What the parameters of the contract are, and if at some point when the contract runs out, are then regular rate payers gonna be paying for upgrades to their generation if, you know?

Right, so those are two separate things. So one would be the security for the value of the contract is related to the estimated electricity costs annually that that customer would be paying. And so what we're doing is, as everyone's aware, all of EPE's costs are basically bundled into your electricity rates. So we do an estimate of what we think the total value of their electricity costs are gonna be over the 20 years, and then they provide a security for that amount. Now separate from that would be for any dedicated infrastructure. So for their three substations or for their dedicated generation, that is completely separate from their costs or the value of the contract. Yeah, so that, for the dedicated infrastructure, they have actually paid upfront. So we send them invoices quarterly saying, okay, we think we're gonna need to buy this equipment to upgrade this or to upgrade that. And before EPE spends any of the money, they pay us for it. And then we start buying the long lead equipment and things of that nature, again, to make sure that none of our customers are on the hook. And I think as Eric had talked about earlier, that process starts from the beginning. So the $275,000 application fee is steep, it's a steep fee and we did research and talked to other electric utilities to see how much they were charging and we purposely made it steep because we wanted to make sure that one, the customers who were engaging EPE employees to take our time away from other customers are serious and two, so that EPE employees charge their time to a dedicated work order and making sure that no other EPE customers are paying for their for any time spent on these large load system studies or anything like that. And then at the end, once we provide the studies and our estimates to the customers, if they decide not to move forward, if there's anything left in that balance from their deposit, we give it back to them. So at every point in time, we have tried to do everything we can to make sure that our customers are insulated from these large load interests.

Judge, I don't think I have any other questions.

I did want to go back to you again to Cynthia's point about, or Eric's point about, I think the number 17, right, but the numbers speak for themselves of only two have actually paid for it. And that doesn't mean that the two are actually coming that means that they're just doing the hey we want your your staff your engineers and everybody to do this therefore but that doesn't mean that they're actually coming right so I just want to because you hear so much again about the you know several high hyperscalers and from where we're standing we've got one in Fort Bliss not have anything under agreement or anything, and I hope I'm not misspeaking, but we don't have anything in regards to that one.

So you haven't been in a communication with Fort Bliss about providing?

They've told us of their intentions and stuff and what they're working on, but again, we do not have anything to point to.

Permits have been applied for?

We don't have any agreement that says this is what our part is in that. We're in conversations with them, right, but that's as far as we...

So just to summarize real quickly, so we're walking away kind of like with a clear picture, at least for myself, is that the increases in the rate case that's going through right now have nothing to do with any mega users.

It's all just... past four or five years now.

It's traditional growth that happens when we have more houses being built and need for electricity.

Increased demand, yes, sir.

In those areas. And then... Mayor Mrakas, Great payers regular repairs won't be won't be burdened with the cost of of meadows project. Mayor Mrakas, And and it's still I guess remains to be seen with other projects if they're built in somehow. Mayor Mrakas, provide a benefit to the Community.

For our system, one thing we do, again, back to the residential component, right? We are 90% residential and very much like the judge mentioned, very much like our tax base. It's exclusively at the cost of the bulk electric system. It's almost exclusively on the backs of our residential customers. So we need more industrial and commercial base. And when you're going to have a large customer like that, it will take now a very significant portion of those costs.

Who gets prioritized when the grid, you know, if it's too hot and the grid's overloaded, would the data centers and these larger entities be prioritized over residential?

I don't think there's any scenario where that would be the case. I don't know if anybody wants to add to that, but I don't think there's any scenario where we would prioritize anything above our residential customers.

Okay, thank you. Thank you, Commissioner.

I just have one really quick question. The substation that's being built in Clint or near Clint off of FM 1110, do you know what the timeline is for that?

I'm going to go with that's North Loop sub. Is that right?

It's near North Loop, yeah.

What's that?

It is near the North Loop.

That's Bovee. I have the dates here for... We're targeting to energize that. I have that as early 2027. Yes. Okay.

That was my question. Thank you.

Judge, we do have a public comment that's on Teams.

I still, sorry, Judge, I have a couple more questions, if that's okay. I don't know if Commissioner Coronado has any either. Just two more, I think. So, as El Paso Electric is, I guess... trying to manage this growth of the grid and the system with Meta and potentially other hyperscalers. Are there discussions about additional power generation that's needed? And if so, what are those discussions, like what types of power generation is being contemplated within El Paso Electric today?

Absolutely so and thank you for that question because I think we haven't brought up. I mean Whether you're adding to Commissioner Stout's point adding a house to car wash or hyperscaler to our system, it will require more generation, period. And so we are in the process of building, bringing online somewhere in the neighborhood of about one gigawatt of renewable, or $1 billion worth of renewable, as fast as we can build it. but it is important to point out that there is no way from an engineering perspective right now to power a facility with that high of a load factor, meaning that needs power all day, every day, pretty consistently throughout the day with just renewable. Therefore, we will need more dispatchable facilities because, again, renewable right now, once we're getting close to sunset, and then as we add, we're adding battery storage as fast as we can, but, again, the industry standard is still four hours from a length of time, right? But, again, if a facility needs power at a capacity factor at, you know, 85%, 90%, meaning they need power all day, every day at a high point, you need dispatchability and right now the most cost efficient is natural gas facilities. Natural gas. We, other than the Enchanted Rock facility, we do not have anything else currently. under works or planning for, but it is important, again, being very transparent and upfront that there is no way to power a facility that has that type of power demand with just renewable.

Sorry. I was just gonna ask, to dovetail on that question, what makes it prohibitive? I mean, is it just the cost? Like, you know, the cost of batteries to, like, the cost to build out, like, the solar infrastructure and have batteries to maintain during the night? So the...

From an oversimplified perspective, it's really just the time, right? So again, our grid right now, we peak now after 6 p.m. We're about to start peaking at night because, and our peak is getting narrower, right? So picture a typical day, day like today where, you know, folks get home, turn on their AC, start doing a load of laundry, whatever. I mean, that's where we're peaking. And so contrary to popular belief, right, our solar fleet, and same with rooftop solar, its most productive hours are somewhere between 1 to 4 p.m., somewhere like that. At that point, their production starts dropping off, right? And so we would have... loaded up or or charged if you will the the battery fleet but again then you run into your window is only four hours and you're still not in daylight the following morning and so having an additional just that much more in in battery to cover that it would be a cost prohibitive approach versus a just from an engineering perspective, it would, our system, it wouldn't be an engineering, it wouldn't be technically, I don't know, I don't want to say beneficial, but it would be horribly inefficient, right? I hope that answers your question. It's really just as batteries get further and further developed to where their time span gets longer and longer and longer, it might allow for that, but right now, really, the industry standard is four hours.

I have one more question related to the Fort Bliss data center, and I understand you don't have any formal agreement in place, but it's also my understanding that if anybody would provide power to that data center, it would likely be El Paso Electric.

I mean, I don't know who else it would be. I don't know if there's any.

They're not connected to another grid right now, right?

Correct so so there that being said that doesn't mean that they couldn't bring their own generation on site that would be provided by by the developer, right? I mean, there's there's all sorts of scenarios with on site generation where it wouldn't include us.

If they did approach El Paso Electric to formally start that process because they're on federal land and a military installation, would they have to go through the same application process as everybody else? Or do they have a different process?

Yes, that would be the exact same. And I think in all fronts, I mean, there's again air permitting and all sorts of other, I mean, everything is just as we would with every other situation.

Even though it's on federal land?

I think one example of that would be the Buena Vista solar. That's on state land, but we have other solar installations that could be on BLM land. They would have to go through the same interconnection process. So regardless of the ownership of land, the federal process is still prescribed and still supersedes that.

And at what point in that process, say Fort Bliss or Carlisle does formally come and start the application with El Paso Electric, at what point in that process would we be notified of that to say El Paso Electric is going to provide power for this project?

I think as soon as we were to be approached, that that be the official route that's going to happen. I mean, I think they were pretty open and pretty upfront about, you know, they had their listening session and we're, you know, I believe most, if not all of you were invited. But that being said, I mean, from our perspective, right, we can't do anything without doing a very public process. All of our, anything we do requires public filings of all sorts, right? So that's, from our perspective, we'd have to let everybody know pretty quickly.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Commissioner Coronado? Thank you, Judge and Commissioners. Daniel, just to reiterate, anybody who's applying, for example, these high-energy industrial or commercial users for extraordinary energy usage from your company, they have to go through obviously the exact same process as anybody else, is that correct?

I'd say a more extensive process, significantly more extensive and thorough process.

Okay, and whatever their needs are, specifically to their own generation or requirement for energy usage, that never gets passed on to regular consumers in terms of residential users.

That's correct. So any cost that is caused by that customer will be paid for by that customer.

Okay, because there's been some people out in the community saying that eventually residential users are going to bear the cost of the infrastructure that even that's being built by, for example, Meta out in the Northeast.

Yeah. So, and they think you touched on it already. I mean, um, and I think it's, it's pretty public now at this point about how upfront they've been with their, um, with, with paying for the infrastructure, for their substitutions, for, for those types of components that are already under construction. Um, you know, and again, they, like Cynthia said, we send them an invoice and they pay it and they pay it pretty darn fast.

Okay, and the more commercial users you have that are here locally on the grid, on our grid, does that reduce the cost of the rest of our usage?

Yes, so I think I was explaining to Commissioner Stout, so the cost of our system, I mean, think about it as it's a pie, right? And if all of a sudden you have one customer that that is taking on a significant portion of those costs, it will essentially take off some costs from the rest of our customer base. And so we are, prior to this, we were, we still are right now, right? But as we go into this, we are just a very residential primary residential customer base, and so it's something that our system has been in need for for quite some time. If you compare us to East Texas or some of the other non-ARCOT areas, let's say where Entergy is, where they have I don't know how many refineries and things like that on their system right that can saddle look the portion or a significant, if not the majority of the cost of the bulk of the bulk electric system, but in our situation it's it's our residential customer so yes. Once a large customer like this shows up and takes on a very significant portion of that pie, then it means the rest of our customer base will not be paying for that.

So it's kind of like a parallel between, for example, the ad valorem taxes that are paid here locally by commercial properties versus residential properties, right? Kind of has like, to me, has the same analogy in terms of the cost, right? The more commercial users, the more commercial properties that you have here in the community, the less that residential customers or residential owners are paying. Kind of similar to that. Is that correct?

Yeah, exactly, I mean, in that there's a lot more commercial and industrial taxpayers than the residential customer base is in paying what they previously were, right? So I think it's a benefit to, again, have those types of facilities here. Again, any commercial and industrial activity in our region would cause that effect.

which is similarly to what the economic development policies have been being followed by here, our local government entities to attract these commercial businesses so that they can pay more of the taxes or a greater percentage of the taxes rather than the residential owners.

That's correct. And I mean, the county judge touched on this right when, when, when this project, when everything was first brought to, to El Paso electric, I mean, again, it signaled when, when our city and our county provided incentives for, for, for these types of projects, right. That signals to us that this is what the community wants. Right. So we're, we're just, we're again, and we've said it throughout the presentation several times that we were, we're just providing service to folks that moved to our region. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Commissioner.

Thank you, Judge. I just wanted to make a comment based on what Commissioner Coronado said, and I think he's right. I think that in a lot of the economic development incentives that we've seen here at the county, the goal is to increase that commercial industrial tax base and reduce the burden on the residential tax base. I think that's the long-term goal, but I've often wondered when does that scale start to tip? How can we project when our residential customers will start to feel the impact of this commercial industrial growth? And I think that's a really good question, especially now that we're seeing these larger projects for us to try to answer. But the same question I would have for El Paso Electric, right? If there's a net benefit to the community for having large load customers, and I've read the studies and I've heard it all, redundancy and resiliency of the system will benefit us and they pay for it. But at what point will the rate payers see reductions on their monthly bills? And will it take 10 data centers for them to see that? Or do you have a way of projecting where that threshold is to say, now it's going to benefit you. You're going to see lower electric rates on your bills every month because we have these large load customers.

So we're currently exploring how to quantify that, to be able to communicate that almost immediately. Because we do want to make it abundantly clear how, okay, this is the percentage of the cost that are now being paid for by this customer. So we are in conversations of that to make sure we communicate that, and it's gonna be pretty quickly. And how to best communicate it and within our regulated structure right to where like can we call it a credit or things like that. But yes, we are very much in those conversations right now with our regulatory and our rates team.

Thank you.

Well, thank you. I mean, tough questions, but Daniel, thank you so much, and I hope you also appreciate the professionalism from the commissioners. We get a lot of pressure, but the way they handle the questions, the way you addressed them, we want to thank you for that, because I think our community needs to see that we're collaborative, we're talking to each other, and also encourage them to also, when they have questions, to either ask us or ask you because there's a lot of things that were cleared up here today that even at our level that we're trying to understand is we had questions. I'm sure the community has a lot of questions and a lot of maybe misconceptions about a lot of different things. We thank you for the relationship, as we've said several times, to you and Eric and your team. We thank you for being here. I think it's going to be more customary to ask you on a quarterly basis to see if we could have these discussions. But in between that, thank you, Roberto, thank you for bringing them together, but also that we continue these discussions, not just when we have a meeting, but that we have this relationship with the... It's so important, and we're going to be hearing from El Paso Water next, and it helps us to be more successful, so hopefully our questions also help you to be more successful in what you're trying to accomplish.

No, thank you all, and we're very happy to be here, literally across the street. So I know Eric was complaining about his heels walking over, but no, seriously, literally across the street, we're happy to be here any time you guys need us.

Come to Luby's once in a while. We had Luby's at lunch. I don't know how they're still awake. Thank you, Daniel. Great job. Thank you.

Judge, we do have a speaker for public comment on this item right now. Do we have Ms. Veronica Carvajal?

We still have public comment.

Veronica, if you can unmute.

Would you mind staying? One second. Would you mind staying? Because we have a public comment. So we have Veronica Carvajal. Hi, Veronica. Welcome.

Thank you.

We're trying to get you back on there, but we we got the team back here if there's any questions or anything that they want to comment on. So thank you. Cedar, you want to explain the rules on public comment, please?

Yes, speakers are limited to five minutes. We will be keeping time.

OK, thank you. Welcome Veronica.

Thank you. Hello, county judge and county commissioners. I'm Veronica Carvajal, an organizer with Sembrando Esperanza Coalition. Our members participated in the health study that you learned about and that you funded. And so we're excited that we will be able to use those data points in our organizing. And we're also really excited at your response to the results. We hope that you understand that health and the environment cannot be divorced from each other. We also want to emphasize today that our water and our energy also cannot be separated. We're very grateful for slide 36 on the presentation by El Paso Water, which I will quote, large industrial users like data centers could significantly increase water demand and alter the contract assumptions. This is in reference to the Lower Valley Water District. THIS STATEMENT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, AND WE ONLY WISH THAT IT HAD BEEN MADE PRIOR TO WHEN THE META AI DATA CENTER WAS ACCEPTED BY THE CITY, THE COUNTY, EL PASO WATER AND EL PASO ELECTRIC BACK IN DECEMBER OF 2023. AS YOU KNOW, IN DECEMBER OF LAST YEAR, WE SHARED OUR GUIDE WITH YOU ABOUT THE META AI DATA CENTER AND OUR CONCERNS. SINCE THEN, WE'VE BEEN ORGANIZING AGAINST ALL OF THE AI DATA CENTERS IN OUR DESERT. Just last week on May 13th, Mayor Bernard Johnson invited Sembrando Esperanza to present to the rural mayors. At that meeting, which you were a part of, Judge Samaniego, the city of Socorro, as we mentioned, passed the first ordinance in the county that limits data centers. And all of us in the county share the same water, the same electricity provider, the same air, and the same dreams of a sustainable future. El Paso Electric is the number one non-residential user of water in the county. They didn't mention that in their presentation. In 2025, they used 7 billion gallons of water. So when we turn on the lights, we are using water unless we're using solar energy and a battery. And El Paso Electric, as we have been asking for years, needs to move into renewables which do not use water. Instead, they're inviting data centers. And if you go to their website, you will see that. and they're condemning us to higher electric bills, more greenhouse gas emissions, and expensive water infrastructure. Instead of moving in a direction we would like them to, they've applied for the McLeod facility to support ETA. We have outlined our opposition to the facility in the comments that we gave to the Utility Commission of Texas, and each of you received a copy this morning. Thank you, Commissioner Stout and Olguin for sending letters to the Utility Commission. Our Congresswoman, our US Congresswoman, Veronica Escobar, State Senator Cesar Blanco, and State Representatives Mary Gonzalez and Vince Perez did as well. We invite Commissioners Butler and Coronado and Judge Samaniego to do the same. We want to emphasize Commissioner Stout's letter, which does discuss the possible conflict of interest when it comes to JPMorgan Chase being so heavily invested in natural gas and having a built-in bias against renewable energy. The way that El Paso Electric Supplies delivers energy cannot be borne on the backs of the most vulnerable in our community. We should not inherit the McLeod generators in five years, given their high cost of nearly half a billion dollars and their short lifespan of five to nine years, as well as the high pollution emissions they will produce. And most importantly, we do not need the McLeod facility, META does. Please note that the transmission lines that are mentioned in EPE's presentation will go through people's properties. And that is also why we oppose the Pine McLeod transmission. As we noted in our comments to the Utility Commission, Sembrando Esperanza was the first to alert El Paso Water about MEDA's upcoming usage of 1,000 megawatts that will be generated through power plants like Montana Vista and Newman that already consume too much water. And this will happen as soon as they transfer out of McLeod. We are people of the desert, all of us in this space. We all know that our water is not only precious, it is also very expensive. As our members have told us, we have not been saving water for over 35 years for these billionaire tech companies and private electric companies to take our water and profit from our investments. We need you to protect our water and we need you to prioritize our people over private profit. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Veronica. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Okay.

And the second public comment will be for the following item. The second public comment will be for the next item along with this one.

This completes this item.

Thank you. Thank you.

Item 4L, receive a presentation from El Paso Water regarding regional water infrastructure planning and its potential impacts on unincorporated areas of El Paso County. And we have one public comment for this one.

Judge, Commissioners, before I bring in the CEO of El Paso Water, just wanted to remind you that this is also part of what the Commissioner's Court requested to the department to bring them in to provide information on the impact of unincorporated areas and how this is impacting the growth in these places. So with that, Mr. Bailey, go ahead. Thank you.

Welcome, John. Thank you, Roberto. Thank you for being here. Greetings, Judge, Commissioners. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. So I am going to give you a presentation. I'm going to kind of slide through the first few slides and then get into the meat of the water supply issues. But we're going to talk about the governance just a little bit and about how we safeguard the future of the community through our water supply projects. Now, in terms of the governance, I want to just make one point here, which is the autonomy of the board allows us to do long-term planning. And I think that we excel at that long-term planning. And we've done very well at it. And we do have projects that do involve the county. And I'm fortunate enough to have been around a long enough time to remember this part here. And just in the way of historical perspective, I always like to give historical perspective. That the, the idea about a passive water expanding services into, into the county at that time. It was a very painful process with a lot of angst and whatever. But we are now to the point where the public service board embraces the idea of providing first time water and sewer services to customers in the area. So there's no longer a pain point at all. We work very well together. As I pointed out to Commissioner Butler and Commissioner Coronado, when I've been at these ribbon cuttings, it's my favorite thing to do is to go out into the county and start up a first time water or wastewater service project out in the county. So we have an outstanding example, which is the Montana Vista Wastewater Project. Where we have over the years put in water services and now come back, follow up with wastewater services. And that's a model that we continue to do, continue to work on with the county. Now one of the key parts that unlocked this particular project was the work of Representative Mary Gonzalez who got essentially the reauthorization of the EDAP to provide money to the Texas Water Development Board, which provided money to fund these types of projects in the community. So I'd like to just point out that these projects are a cooperative between us and the county and the state and a lot of times federal agencies as well. So we have recently, when I say recently, these are in the last few years, completed a number of projects in the county, either wastewater or water service projects. And we have more projects coming up. So we have about six projects that are specifically water or wastewater. And then we have water or wastewater projects that are tied to transportation projects. So these are your big street projects that are taking place on the eastern end of the county. There's water and wastewater line extensions that go along with those. So let me talk about planning. So the way the planning works in the state of Texas is through regional plans. On January 22, the Water Development Board approved the 2026 regional water plans. And so this is all the plans in Texas are rolled up into the one plan. This is the sixth time this has been done in five-year planning cycles. And so each five-year planning cycle projects the demands and supply for the next 50 years. So it's essentially a decadal system where we update it every five years. And any project that's identified in the plan is eligible for grant funding or low interest loans through the Texas Water Development Board. If a project is not in the regional plan, it is not eligible for that funding. So it's very important for any sort of project to be in that plan. And the planning begins during the next year for the 2031. So even though we do this on a five year basis, it pretty much takes us the entirety of the five years to do the process. And so we're already beginning the next five year iteration. And I'd like to thank Commissioner Butler for being the representative of the county in this planning process. So the region is described here is that you see I think there's seven counties here. So the basic premise is you assess the population projections. And this particular iteration, the population projection has been a very big part of what we're doing because it's different from prior cycles where the population was always seen as going up and now we have different things to look at. So we assess the population, and from that, that creates a demand, and then we assess supplies. What supplies can you bring in to meet that demand? And then that identifies shortages, and shortages have to be met with projects that are included in the plan. So we are here, which is the end of the 26th cycle. We're getting ready to start back at the beginning of this particular process so again demands are estimated the demands then generate what kind of supplies do you need to meet the demands and then strategies to come up with those supplies i'd like to point out because we're going to talk a little bit about the strategies that the way El Paso Waters' philosophy is in dealing with this is we not only have strategies to meet the demands, but we have alternative strategies waiting in the wings in case something goes wrong. So let's say in one of our strategies, if there is a problem that happens, let's say a necessary permit can't, or a piece of real estate can't happen, then we have an alternative project that we can cycle in that's already part of the plan to be able to meet the demand and to be able to continue moving forward without any delay. Now, I mentioned a little brief snippet about the population. So if you look on the right-hand side of your screen there, the predicted population, so in the 2021 plan, That is the population growth that we were forecasting. And so those yellow bars represent the population per decade. Now the blue bars that you see there, that's the current growth of population that is being forecast. Now when we talk about the population, we are talking about an official number that we get from the Texas Water Development Board that I think comes from the state demographer, but anyway. So you can see the blue population projections, very little growth throughout this cycle. Much more gradual. There is still growth in there. But it's much different from the previous iterations. And I'd like to point out, if you look at the map of the state there, where there is growth, obviously your big Metroplexes, the Dallas Metroplex, the Austin and Houston Metroplex, but also El Paso is part of the area where we continue to forecast growth. Our growth has always been relatively slow and steady. We know at any given month how many new customers, and when we say customers, that's meters for us, are installed. And we'll do, for the course of 2025, I think we did about 1,700 customers, which is not out of the ordinary. We do between 1,500 and 3,500 customers in a typical year. 3,500 might be a big BRAC year for Fort Bliss. $1,700 is not something that's unexpected. Okay, so current water supplies. The current water supply consists of this. The Hueca Bolson, 57%. Now, that includes the brackish water portions and the freshwater portions. The Mesilla Bolson, about a third of that, and the Rio Grande, about 6%. Now, the Rio Grande right now we're forecasting only 6% in a normal year, that is to say a non-drought year, that would be pretty close to 50%. So this year is what we are forecasting to get from the Rio Grande. So in a Those numbers there are in acre feet per year. So in a full release of water from the Rio Grande, we would get about 62,000 acre feet. And so we're forecasting about 10,000 acre feet. So you can see the impact of the drought on our supply. So when that happens, we have to make that up primarily through the WECO and Maceo Bolson sources of supply, which is what we'll do. Okay, the Mesilla Bolson aquifer is on typically the west side of the mountains, the Huaca Bolson on the east side. Both of these aquifers extend from New Mexico through Texas into Mexico, and in the grand scheme of things, Texas considers these minor aquifers of the state, so these are smaller aquifers. They're very important to us, very important to New Mexico, and very important to Mexico as well. Now in terms of surface water, when I say drought, I am referencing snowpack in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Right now, what we're looking at is very limited snowpack. Fortunately, hopefully fortunately, we are anticipating an El Nino, a strong El Nino as they're calling it. And it has snowed in the last couple of days in the Colorado basin there. So we may have some additional supplies that come in, but it's not gonna be drastically different from that 10,000 acre feet. Now, even though I talked about the small population increases, relatively small population increases, when it comes to each, each of these decades, we have to have additional sources of supply that come into come into play every single, every single year. We have to have additional sources of supply, millions of gallons per day. And so we have these things lined up. So. Looking at the population demand that we have to deal with, the new estimates, we have the existing supply. That's shown what we can produce today is the blue bar. And then starting in 2030, which is right around the corner, we have to have additional sources of supply. That's the yellow bar. And so by the time you get out to 2070, 2080, the magnitude of that yellow bar is about the same as another Rio Grande coming into the community. So it is a good amount of water. And we do have strategies in place to be able to meet that demand. Okay, so strategy number one, water conservation. And this is the same number one going many decades into the past. Recommended strategy, water conservation. Water conservation saves water for the future. It helps the customers by minimizing the impact of rate increases. And through the scale here that you see, we've decreased the per capita consumption about 40%. We're down to 126 gallons per person per day from a peak of about 220, 230 gallons per person per day back in the late 70s. Our goal Not in 2030, but in the following decade is 118 gallons per person per day. We think that's a very achievable goal. We're gonna continue to have water conservation plans in place and able to do that. But the number one water conserving tool that we have is rate increases. Because when you raise the rates, the consumption of the, of, of the product goes down. And so the dips that you see in this, in this chart correspond to rate increases. As a parenthetical statement, we don't increase rates for that purpose. That is a byproduct of. We build our budget and rates to meet the demands of the system for the next year. Strategy number two, and this is going to be the first time where this has come out as a recommended strategy in the system, and that is water loss reduction. So an expansion of water loss audits, increased proactive pipeline replacement and assessments, augmented leak detection. So we're one of only two cities or systems in the United States that has a full leak detection, permanent leak detection system. We have 12,000 microphones in the system mounted, monitoring for leaks continuously. With the new meters that we're installing, each meter is capable of listening for leaks as well. And so that information then has to be correlated to find out whether that leak is in the customer's house, in the customer's service line, or is it our part of the service line, or part of the main? So we're getting the information, but we still have to filter it, and then we do the fixing either way or notify the customer that they have an issue. Also large diameter valve replacements that makes it easier to open and close when we have an emergency that we have to respond to. And to do concrete reservoir lining. We have some reservoirs in the system that are concrete, have a concrete floor, our oldest reservoir in the system. which is at the corner of Brown and Schuster streets. It's been there since 1922. Big concrete reservoir. We need to look at, again, and it's been rehabilitated many times over the course of its life, you know, do another renovation of that. Okay, number three, expansion of the Kay Bailey Hutchison plant. So this plant is a key part of our Wekabosone strategy where we take the brackish water portion of the Wekabosone, treat it, produce drinking water from that. Currently, the plant is at 27.5 MGD. We have completed two phases of an expansion and the next phase is this addition of the sixth treatment unit. We did receive funding from the state and federal grant funding. So that was 11.2 from the federal and four from the state, I think is the mix there. That will allow us to do the final piece of the KBLA-Hutchinson expansion. So if you've been at the plant and you see these systems right there where it says Water Warriors, that's one of the treatment units. There's five that exist there right now. There's a space for a sixth. This funding will allow us to put in the sixth skid that will bring the funding to 33.5 million gallons per day. The fourth strategy, which is well under construction, we'll have this completed in year 2028, and then it's going to take us almost a year commissioning exercise with state oversight. And that will give us 10 million gallons per day of a safe, local, drought-proof water supply right here in the community. We got a $23 million grant from the federal government to start that project. We have the opportunity for another, I think it's $17 million grant, which the application process just opened up. And so we are doing that as well. And then thanks to the efforts of Senator Blanco, we received from the state $14 million in seed funding for a project to add surface water to the upper valley. So in the Vinton area, we have a, a water plant that right now is exclusively ground water treatment plant. It treats ground water for arsenic removal, treats the ground water, the ground water goes into the distribution system. This seed money would allow us to put in surface water there. So we would enter into a contract with El Paso County Water Improvement District to receive surface water at that plant, treat it, combine it with the treated groundwater and put that water into the system. Now primarily this is not, there's gonna be an addition, there's gonna be a component of additional supply, especially in the summertime. But on an annual average basis, the basis behind this is to lower the amount of groundwater pumping that we do at the in other words, to extend the life of the aquifer. Now, we have as a recommended strategy, importation. We have two different areas that we can go to. We have this, this particular one here. This is the northern Huntsville County strategy where in the Del City area on both sides of the highway, highway 62 and 80. We have ground water, land. We have a right of way coming into town. At some point in time, we have, we will start a project and the idea would be to deliver water in 2050. And this first phase would not require desalination. There would be future phases that would require desalination and would provide additional water. But even though it seems like right now 2050 is a long way away in terms of how these projects are put together in terms of funding and the equipment and who does it and how we operate a system 100 miles from here, that does take a lot of planning effort. It'll take some time. Now, as I mentioned briefly, and the only reason for showing this slide is just to show you that we do have these alternatives. So an alternative strategy is a phase two to go ahead and move forward with a much larger importation project that would require desalination. And both of those could be done at the same time conceivably or as we show there. In this one, I'm happy to say that not only do we have an alternative strategy, but we're already constructing the alternative strategy, which is essentially a water bank. That is an underground facility where we can capture water when we have excess water, and then it produces water when we have excess demand. Now, even though we are going through these cycles of drought on the river, there's going to be times when we're going to have more then we have demand in the system at that point in time, and we can store it underground. We can store reclaimed water and storm water as well in the aquifer at that point in time. We have received $15.5 million in state and federal funding. We're anticipating some additional funding. And as I mentioned, phase one of this is, is done. Phase two will be coming up shortly. Now, groundwater sustainability is going to be the central focus, is the central focus of the next regional plan. Now, I'd like to point out in this graph here, so the blue bars represent the actual withdrawal of water from the Wicca-Belsong going all the way back to 1967. So if you look at the period of time from 1967 to 1989, there was an upward trend there that was unsustainable. And so during that timeframe, starting about 1976, the Public Service Board started implementing strategies to intercept that in terms of water conservation, reclaimed water, including the Fred Hervey plant. And so you can see they were successful in intercepting that long-term uptick in Wekaboson pumpage. and we're now operating at what we see there is that post-1991 trend, which is a slight downward trend. But what we want to do is we want to move down to that preservation level. So let me kind of explain what's going on here. So when, in 1981, we used to get an enormous amount of water out of the Rio Grande. There was a lot of water coming out of the Rio Grande project. And so we had treatment plant capacity built to treat that. And at that point in time, when you're forecasting, okay, how's the workable sown gonna work out? We're primarily gonna treat all this Rio Grande water, use the workable sown to balance when we have the need. But what we've experienced is, and you can see the high peaks on these graphs post 2003, or starting in 2003. Each one of those peaks above the The preservation level represents a drought situation. And so you can see we have a repeated drought situation for a 20 plus year time period. And that's putting more and more pressure on the Wicca-Belsone. So what we need to do is to move back down to a preservation level on the Wicca-Belsone. And what that means is that we need to implement strategies to reduce further withdrawals from the wakeable zone. That just provides a wakeable zone that will be available for our children and grandchildren going forward into the future. And we'll continue to have that resource to draw on, but we're not going to stress it. Now this is the converse of that graph. So this is Rio Grande water production in acre feet. So, and this graph starts in about, in the early 90s, and that's when, in 1993, the Jonathan Rogers plant, our second ground, second surface water treatment plant, started up production. And so the, Max of this system is 58, I think it was actually 62,000 acre feet from our combined surface water treatment plants. But you can see that there's periods of time there in 2003 and 2013 and 2026 will be a very similar bar where we get very little water out of the Rio Grande. But when we get water out of the Rio Grande, it's very important that we take as much of that as we can, because that is a renewable source of supply. It's drought impacted, but it is a renewable source of supply. So we're gonna continue this strategy as well. Okay, now I wanna talk a little bit about providing service to the lower valleys. So in the county, We have different situations in terms of service. We have some direct retail customers, but most of our customers in the county are through some sort of wholesale agreement. The Lower Valley Water District is the biggest one of those wholesale providers. And so I want to talk a little bit about that. So the The agreement was entered into in 1989 and it governs both water and wastewater services. So we treat their wastewater and then we also treat their water. So it's not a normal wholesale services agreement where we agree to provide them a certain amount of water for a certain price. The contract involves them gathering water rights. Assigning the water rights to us, we treat the water and then we supply it back to the lower valley water district. So it's a treatment contract and then a services agreement for the wastewater services. When we have plenty of water in the Rio Grande system, this works perfectly fine. Very smooth and it has been that way for a while. But let me just show the impact of a drought situation in particular as it pertains to the lower valley. So the blue line at the top more or less is the water that is provided from the lower valley to El Paso Water Utilities for treatment. And so you can see when that dips down, that is a drought situation. When it goes up, it means there's plenty of water. So in 2013, there was a drought situation. So when the red line is higher than the blue line, that means that the El Paso water is net providing groundwater into the lower valley system to maintain their source of supply. Likewise, in 22, we had a similar situation where they were identical. But as you, if you can imagine going forward into the future, Other drought cycles are going to put us in a similar situation because that red line is climbing. There's more growth in the lower valley water district in terms of water consumption than there is in the city of El Paso. So as that graph, that red line trends upward and we have these dips that happen because of the surface water availability, then there's going to be times in the future where it's going to be more challenging to be able to provide the lower valley with groundwater, and that is something that we'll have to deal with. When I say more challenging, we have limited ability in terms of the pipes in the ground right now to do that, and so that will have to be addressed. We have to protect our groundwater supplies. We have to make sure that our groundwater supplies, especially the Waccable Zone, is preserved into the future. That limits cost impacts not only to the El Paso residents as stated there, but to all of our customers. In particular, this slide here is referencing the lower valley water system, not things in general. So large industrial users such as data centers in the lower valley water system could significantly increase the water demand and alter the contract assumptions. So if I could slip back, if you see that red line could trend up significantly higher than the current trend. This current trend that you see here is just residential growth in the system. But if there was significant growth and there was an uptick in that line, and there was a downtick in the Rio Grande, and those two things corresponded together, then that is a problem area. Now, on the wastewater side, the agreement limits flows to six million gallons per day at the Bustamante plant. And that is again, there's, there's not only a limitation in the contract, but there's a limitation in the capacity of the Bustamante plant in order to take that water. So we're planning for a new contract. This, the current contract expires in 2032. We've already been working with the lower valley water district. They're, they're doing everything that they need to do in terms of planning and analysis. and they have already committed to do these studies. They've already initiated the studies. So we're well underway, and I wanna make sure that you understand in your leadership positions here that there is no problem, there is no conflict between us and Lower Valley Water District. We are working together to make sure that we all have the system at hand to be able to supply the needs of the county going forward into the future. So thank you, and I'll be happy to answer any questions. Well, thank you, John. Any questions?

I do have a question, just on these last few slides regarding the Lower Valley Water District. So you said that these slides really are just, they only pertain to Lower Valley, to the district. So, and the slide with all the different colored lines. So we're talking about if data centers are built, or I guess maybe the next slide with the narrative, with the text. If data centers are built in the Lower Valley Water Districts area, then that will affect the contract with the Lower Valley Water District, but not data centers that are being built outside. So for example, the Meta Data Center, that shouldn't have any effect on the contract with Lower Valley Water District? Correct.

Correct. It would not have any effect on the Lower Valley. Okay.

But there would be impacts on the Lower Valley Water District the next time it's up for renewal, like normal impacts. If there was nothing else, no other factors, obviously when you all renew your contracts with Lower Valley Water District, just like when you do with the county, it's a renegotiated contract. So even when there's no other developments, there's potential other impacts.

That is absolutely correct, yes. So in terms of the data center impact inside El Paso, it would not have any effect in Lower Valley. But there are things, just in general, and the main issues that I pointed out are Availability of Rio Grande water, and then the physical limitations of the connection, of the connections between us and Lower Valley, that might have to be, we might have to invest in construction to add new points of connection. And then the red line there, the slope of that red line. Those are the three primary variables, and those are not really impacted by things that happen in, in El Paso.

Okay, thank you. Mr. Butler?

Thank you, Judge. Thank you, John. I appreciate the presentation. I've seen a lot of this before because I was part of the Citizens Academy, so I'm going to make a shameless plug that anybody who's interested in that should definitely participate. Is it still going on?

We still have the current one going on, yes. And we'll have another one coming up, so let us know if you want to participate.

Can you explain a little bit related to the Bolsons, the role that brackish water plays in that? And then I have some questions on the desal plant expansion too.

Okay. So if you look at the Hueco Bolson, for example, between the Franklin Mountains and the Hueco is the Bolson. And from the ground surface where you're standing down to the water is about 400 feet of dry material, and then you get to the water table. Where the fresh water is produced, it sits on top, and that is really between that 400 feet and let's say 1,200 feet. But more or less 700 feet to 1,000 feet is where we do the pumping. Now when you start getting below that, you enter into the realm of brackish water. And so from, let's say, 1,500 feet down to maybe 9,000 feet, which I think is the bottom of the Wekaboson, there's either brackish water, salty water, or a solid layer of salt. But that brackish water layer is significant in terms of its thickness and its capacity, and it is being recharged. So to the northeast of El Paso, somewhere perhaps in New Mexico, brackish water moves in to replenish the brackish water that's being withdrawn.

So when you talk about our reserve levels, are you talking about just the fresh water or is it all of it?

Just the fresh water.

Okay. So that doesn't take into account the brackish water, which I'm assuming there's more of?

There's more of, and since it is being recharged, we're not really thinking about that in terms of a finite source. But the fresh water, we need to preserve that. We need to actively work to preserve that.

Okay, and so does expansion of the desal plant help us tap into more of the brackish water?

Yes, that would allow us, let's say if we added that 4 million gallons of capacity to the KB La Hetchison plant, we can reduce the pumpage of the fresh water in the Wakabosan by 4 million gallons.

Okay, and do you think that's significant for the conservation efforts, or is that like?

Okay, that's a very good question. On a peak summer day, we might put 155 million gallons of water into the system. So we're talking about 4 in 10. It doesn't seem like much. But where that becomes important is if there is no water at all in the Rio Grande, the difference between the city and the county functioning as normal and having to enter into some kind of emergency is 10 million gallons per day. So it's a very small window. If we got just 10 million gallons per day of water out of the river, then we can operate just fine. So that is the margin of safety. And so when we add four at the capability hydrosupply, we add 10 at the pure water center, we add some at the aquifer storage and recovery, we're increasing our margin of safety to 20, 25. And that's important.

Thank you so then. Can you talk a little bit about capacity of K Bailey? And and our obligations to Fort Bliss from that water.

OK, so that's a good question. We don't have an obligation per se to provide water to Fort Bliss. What we have is. A. a system where we have many points of connection to Fort Bliss and we provide the demand that is placed on us. There's no specific number, but right now we provide 26% of their supply. So they are producing the bulk of their own water. We supply 26% of their water supply. And that number has not grown over two decades probably.

Where do they get their water from?