Source: El Paso Times
El Paso may make its first foray into hotel-resort development Tuesday, when the City Council is expected to approve construction of a $9.4 million golf course on El Paso International Airport property.
Pat Abeln, the city's director of aviation, said that if the contract is awarded to Golf Works Inc. of Austin as proposed, the 18-hole, 180-acre golf course should be finished by summer 2006. The designer is Tom Fazio, who is regarded as one of the premier golf-course architects in the country.
The course would be built north of Montana Avenue and just west of Yarbrough, and next to it would be a dedicated hotel site that Abeln thinks will be snapped up.
"It's a resort concept," he said. "If you put a golf course and a hotel together, you'll end up with weekend stays and you'll build a conference business and having business meetings that don't normally take place in this city right now."
The new course may have an impact on the city's two other public courses, Cielo Vista and Painted Dunes, but not much, he said.
"We're not looking to take golfers from Cielo Vista," he said. "We're looking for the person from Detroit who's not spending the weekend here but leaving on Friday. We want them to stay here over to Saturday to play golf. We're also looking for people who have a meeting in El Paso on a Monday to come here on Saturday, so they can golf next to the hotel on Sunday."
In other business Tuesday, the council will consider a "dark-sky" lighting ordinance, which John Peterson said has been bouncing around City Hall for five years.
Peterson, director of the El Paso school district's Gene Roddenberry Planetarium, said the ordinance would require future lighting installed by the city, businesses and billboard companies to be shielded.
"Shielded light uses less energy and shines down on the area it's supposed to illuminate," he said. "What we have is a lot of sideways light or glare that makes it harder to see where your going and gives the city a cluttered look."
Light that shines up, as the illumination on many billboards does, increasingly obscures the view of the stars, which is why Peterson became interested.
El Paso is one of the last larger cities in the West without a dark-skies measure.
Neighborhood groups support the ordinance and the inclusion of measures that have been pulled out of it, while some businesses and developers oppose it.