EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) — The El Paso County Commissioners took an item about the management of the El Paso County Coliseum into executive session, but did not discuss it and plan to talk about it next week. <\/p>\n
They were presented with the quarterly update from the Coliseum during Monday’s meeting, but director of events for the venue Antonio Rodriguez pivoted the conversation after the presentation. <\/p>\n
He said that he has heard from 4 separate organizations that UTEP had been “promised” the contract for managing the Coliseum. Rodriguez works with the El Paso Sports Commission, who currently manage the venue. Their contract ends in September 2027. Rodriguez spoke to ABC-7 and said he just hopes for a fair process. <\/p>\n
“We want to continue doing it. We’re showing it. We’re bringing new things that that haven’t been here. I mean, it’s like you’re telling us to do something. We’re doing it. What’s the problem?” <\/p>\n
County Commissioners Iliana Holguin and Sergio Coronado both said they had heard that UTEP was interested in managing the venue last year from the county’s cheif administrator Betsy Keller. They said this was the first time they’ve heard of any update or “promise” of the contract to UTEP. <\/p>\n
Rodriguez and the sports commission presented a 30 year contract to the Commissioners. They promised $12 million of their own money towards improving the venue, as well as working with the El Paso Rhinos to build a new ice rink and field house next door. <\/p>\n
“The county judge during the strategic planning session said to bring more combat sports to the Coliseum, we’ve done that,” said Rodriguez. “We brought boxing, TNA wrestling, AEW Wrrestling. We’re going to get ESPN. MVP is coming… I get it. UTEP’s doing great with BTS and Coldplay. They are not going to play at the Coliseum. That’s just not going to happen. But we’re bringing those events that you can’t get anywhere else.” <\/p>\n
ABC-7 reached out to UTEP for comment but we have not heard back at this time. <\/p>\n
On April 20, ABC-7 filed an open records request with several county leaders\u2014including Chief Administrator Betsy Keller and Executive Director of Operations Melissa Carrillo\u2014as well as all county commissioners and the county judge\u2014seeking communications between them and Jorge Vasquez, executive director of the Office of Special Events at the University of Texas at El Paso, and Heather Wilson, president of the University of Texas at El Paso, pertaining to discussions about the management of the Coliseum and sports tourism.<\/p>\n
On May 1, the County sent ABC-7 a letter seeking clarification of its request, asking whether it was seeking all information on the topic or only communications between specific individuals.<\/p>\n
ABC-7 responded that its original request was clear and that it was the information being sought.<\/p>\n
So far, we have not heard back on that request.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ABC-7 also filed a similar open records request with UTEP.<\/p>\n
The item will be discussed during next week’s meeting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) — The El Paso County Commissioners took an item about the management of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[138,140,139],"class_list":["post-279198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}