Hawkins Bar Drama - Political Dreams = Taxpayer Nightmare

Disclaimer - everything you read below is simply my opinion and is all an assumption of what may happen in the future. If you'd like to sue me, remember that you can't defame someone in the future otherwise your high school guidance counselor would have been in court far too often to tell you that you'd amount to nothing in life.

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I'd like to thank the many people who have been emailing me all the inside info on the Cielo Vista Neighborhood Association (CVNA) and how the city took the wrong path at every fork in the road. I did not realize that the CVNA was such a closed group representing literally only a handful of very bored people who just happen to have one very big advocate within city government. What a download of knowledge this past week has been.

The sad part is that the more the more I learn about all of this, the more I think it could have all been avoided. There were definite warnings from David Cooper about how he'd respond if certain folks didn't back off. If anyone thought he was full of shit, he is easy to look up on the internet and if you did that you'd know that this was one bull that shouldn't have been messed with.

We've got a lot to get to, so go to the bathroom now and get yourself a snack - this is going to be good.

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We all know that Emma Acosta wants to be mayor. We also know that she can't win. Her past is known to the right folks in town who would make all of what they know public if she was even within spitting distance of that position. Former federal inmates, disgruntled former employees and a whole host of others would come forward and tell their stories and none of those stories end with Acosta as a heroine. She doesn't have a chance, which makes what I'm about to relate sting even worse - considering you're a taxpayer.

Way back when Acosta was first elected she was threatened with a recall. It was the CVNA folks who were behind that threat. They wanted Acosta to hunt down the owners of the Three Legged Monkey, capture them and then publicly burn them at the stake as a warning to anyone else who would think of trying to open a business they didn't approve of. Just kidding! Kinda…

Acosta, in an odd moment of clarity she has yet to replicate since, felt that she was vulnerable to a recall. Instead of telling the people to "mind your own business before I spend the rest of my days helping the owners of that bar sue you for everything you have plus whatever your kids have," she threw reason and sanity to the wind and became their biggest advocate. That poor decision will now cost YOU, the TAXPAYER, millions of dollars in legal fees.

You see, Acosta figured incorrectly that the CVNA would be her ticket to the mayor's office. Somehow she thought a few shut-ins with nothing better to do than harass private business owners would help her politically. Little did she know that she'd actually be getting herself and all of them sued while building the political future of someone else.

Even if Acosta wasn't damaged goods going into the Mayor's race based on her 20 plus previous years of shenanigans at the city, she'd still be spoiled produce after earning this latest lawsuit that taxpayers are going to be forced to foot the bill for. To be mayor of El Paso you need some kind of business support and nobody is going to support a candidate who is so anti-business that she got the city sued over it. Taxpayers, also known as "voters," aren't going to support a politician who seeks out opportunities to get the city sued. The price tag of those suits have quite a negative effect on voters as Acosta will soon find out.

As Acosta drowns in her deep pool of bad moves and bad ideas, CVNA boss Mark Benitez is all packed up and ready to go on one hell of a power trip. Benitez has done himself quite good by scaring Acosta into her role as his personal enforcer at the city. Not that Benitez really needed Acosta to carry his water since fellow defendant Irene Borunda had a family member employed at the city in a perfectly position to wage war on their behalf. It matters none, though - Benitez is set to stomp Acosta into the ground and it's all her fault.

You may have noticed that Benitez has been everywhere lately - TV, newspaper and... well, that's "everywhere" in El Paso. After an expensive and oddly timed ad came out in the times from the CVNA giving approval of the development of the old Farrah site, Benitez was on the evening news touting the beginnings of "new construction" at the site. From what I saw it looked like it was dust control and the mandated maintenance of the property in accordance with their Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan (SW3P, SWPPP), but I'm not there, so I don't know.

What I do know is that Benitez is very much acting like a guy who wants to run for office. How the CVNA could afford an ad in the El Paso Times is beyond me, but it sure makes me think that suing the neighborhood association should be on the table for the owners of the respective bars given that it appears they have money. When he's not shopping ads in the paper, he's on TV cherry picking what businesses he will allow to operate on his turf. In this case he has sided with the owners of the Farrah property and it's pretty obvious why - future campaign funds.

Now I'm not saying that Paul Foster is going to give this guy any money, nor am I saying he paid for the ad in the paper. I'm thinking Foster has done neither and probably doesn't want to. What I'm saying is that Benitez is angling for a donation with his sudden love of businesses and the riffraff they bring to his neighborhood. And “about face,” if you will.

Benitez also landed himself a spot on the quality of life bond oversight committee. He's tremendously outclassed and is serving only as a puppet for the PDN, which will be reflected in his inability to obtain meaningful funds for any project that isn't an arena downtown. I'm willing to bet not one single meaningful dollar will go to Benitez's neighborhood even as a "thank you" for being a well behaved pet of the PDN. He will probably see some campaign money going his way for his cooperation, but it won’t matter (more on that in a minute).

There's no doubt Benitez used Acosta as his stepping stone to public office. Once Acosta comes to grips with the fact that she can't be mayor, she's got to try and retain her seat and when she does that, Benitez will be in her way. Because she gave him immense power over what she has done in office and how she's done it, he's in a great position to smash her in a race for the seat. How is she going to debate the guy who has been pulling her strings from the beginning? So in control of Acosta is Benitez that he had her get herself sued over a bar that hadn't even opened or served one customer… How do you defend/justify your actions against a business that hasn't even turned the lights on yet? I guess we’ll see them try.

So we know that Benitez will be the death of Acosta's political career because she can't be mayor after being a party to getting the city sued over something idiotic and she can't beat him in her district because he owns her.

So, what about Benitez's real chance at holding the seat? It doesn't look good.

Problemo numero uno for Mr. Benitez is that he's being sued personally over something he could have come before him while serving on council - he'll be unable to ethically participate in the many regular agenda items and executive session items pertaining to anything dealing with Patriot Place, real estate contracts anywhere in the city, alcohol licenses/business licenses and zoning cases, the lawsuit itself and just about anything else you can associate with bars, business and real estate. Any subject mentioned above and a myriad of others I haven't even thought of could pose a conflict of interest for him and hinder his own case in defense of himself and the city's case defending its many named defendants. I could make a case of conflict over just about anything since he's facing a lawsuit of the kind he's facing. Smarter people can, and will, do it better than I. For his constituents he'd be a spiteful little man with no vote just taking up time and space on council.

That's why there's already three other people looking into that race and it's early. They want Acosta out and they want Benitez out. These aren't your run-of-the-mill ankle biting activists with nothing better to do, we're talking about business and industry folks who are well connected in that community and in others. These are the kind of people who don't need the money and are sick and tired of the Acostas and Benitezs of their district turning the place into a rundown retirement community. Granted, all three of these people disagree with me on the quality of life bond issue, but they're way better than Acosta or Benitez and nobody but Norma Chavez is perfect, right?

(Hear that sound? That's the sound of Norma slamming her finger into the F5 key reloading the comments section to see if anyone says anything about her. I'll have 5,000 page views from her alone!)

We can forget about all that if the city quickly hires outside councsel and they find that there was shenanigans going on with Mr. Cooper’s bars that the public wasn't previously aware of. Hell, the stuff we are aware of is enough to win their case - and that comes from the mouths of El Paso attorneys who have no skin in the game and contacted me just to explain how insane the city was acting throughout this whole ordeal.

Outside counsel will probably tell the city to settle the suit and that means the media would have to report to the world (El Paso is actually technically a part of the "world" - I looked it up) that the actions of Benitez, Acosta and others led to taxpayers paying Las Vegan, David Cooper, millions not to open a bar in El Paso. That would not be good for their political careers. And I can guarantee if the CVNA as an entity gets named in a suit, which they should have been in the first place, Mr. Benitez will find himself with very few friends and even fewer sympathizers.

And I can tell you really quickly here that if Cooper's attorneys put the new city attorney in a spot where she's going to have to go through the kind of deposition I think she's going to have to go through - she'll be screaming "SETTLE THIS SUIT NOW" as her advice in executive session faster than you can say "consanguinity." Not that she did anything wrong at all - it just doesn't look right from the public's perspective and God knows it doesn't get prettied-up during a deposition.

Basically things don't look good for anyone but David Cooper here and I can tell you that I "googled" the guy on the advice of someone familiar with him. The guy is beating the pants off of Clark County Nevada on what appears to be zoning and business registration law that he didn't like a few years back. You might know that Clark County is where Las Vegas is located and I can tell you that they are a hell of a lot more sophisticated than El Paso when it comes to this type of fight. If he's smacking them around, he's going to have no problem with the defendants he named in his suit.

How could all of this have been avoided?

First of all, Emma Acosta could have nipped this situation in the ass a long time ago. A quick conversation with any police officer or firefighter who worked in the area would have produced an interesting report - many of the calls made to 911 about the Three Legged Monkey were labeled by responding officers as "Malicious, mischievous false call, or other incident found." That means they went to the scene and found that there was no problem as described by the caller. In simple words - 911 abuse. One of the people who was making these calls just happened to be related to a tenth floor employee at city hall. Which makes me wonder what happens to people without relatives on the tenth floor if they make calls to 911 deemed "Malicious, mischievous false call, or other incident found" by the responding officers ever Friday and Saturday night.

I've seen the police reports of the 911 abuse calls and it's interesting that the cops note that the people calling were at, or near, Three Legged Monkey video taping people as they entered or left the bar. And when the cops did talk to the people who were calling 911 it appears that the reason for their call would change when approached with the news that the bar wasn't over crowded as claimed. The complaint would turn to people jaywalking, which isn't a Three Legged Monkey problem.

All of these frivolous calls cost taxpayers money and slow down response times for actual emergencies. Because police and fire can not ignore calls about over crowded establishments (it’s an issue they take very seriously and always respond to do the threat of a mass casualty situation) they must respond every time. How many people were without fire and police services while these people where phoning in frivolous calls to 911? Despicable.

If Acosta had done her homework she would have found that members of the CVNA were prone to inventing problems where there were none and it was well documented by many city employees, advisory boards and the general public. Instead, she helped put one of the alleged 911 abusers into a special volunteer position at the police station! You can find her picture in the lobby.

Acosta showed tremendously poor judgment in not digging for all of the facts surrounding the situation first. She was thinking with her "political brain" and we all know that the "political brain" doesn’t consider facts and instead only functions in making decisions on survival. Often the decisions made by the "political brain" are wrong and that results in “political brain” morphing into "political brain in post-political career denial" - i.e. Norma Chavez.

So... Acosta messed up and she'll pay for it dearly, but she wasn't the only one.

Somebody at the city - at the senior staff level - should have blown the whistle on the whole thing a long time ago. Everybody knew the names of the people involved here because they were/are chronic complainers. Giving them attention only encourages them. It's like feeding a stray cat - they'll keep coming back as long as there's food and they’ll poop in your garden as a thank you.

What happened in this situation is what happens all too often at the city - they'll do anything to stop the complaint calls and that apparently includes preempting someone from doing business based on what might happen in the future based on the opinions of people with an agenda. Let me be clear, though - nobody should be punished for a crime they might commit. Not that Cooper was going to a commit a crime, but he was punished for a nuisance that did not exist. Anybody with an ounce of cover your ass experience would have let the guy open up with a warning - "if the things happen that we think are going to happen here, we're going to be on you like a fat kid on a cookie."

What happened instead is the city doing everything they could to stop the complaint calls including allegedly violating this guy's rights (I use “allegedly” here lightly since I believe they did). It happens all the time at the city and I have seen it from experience. Having worked in construction on city projects I can tell you that they'll shut you down and make you open roads THEY ASKED YOU TO CLOSE FOR SAFETY REASONS because they don't like complaint calls. I didn't mind - it's called a construction delay and every contractor in the world loves them because the city pays you not to work because they can't stand up to bitchy shut-ins with nothing better to do than pick up the phone and bother people.

Believe me, when these bitchy shut-ins aren't bothering the police, fire or city hall, they're at the local supermarket bitching about the tomatoes being too red and the milk having too much lactose in it. Because the local supermarket can not sacrifice profits on the account of bitchy shut-ins they learn to deal with them by telling them to take a hike. One former city council ankle biter from the west side was banned from a store because they got tired of his shit. Somebody over at the city might want to spend a day with Joe the Grocer and call it "professional development."

I can only guess that the fact that one of the main complainers had a family member inside city hall on the tenth floor that this issue got a lot more attention than it deserved. It's suspicious at best once you find out that the city's allegations against Cooper were proved false at every turn. You also have to wonder how the scrutiny applied to Cooper was never applied to the many other establishments in town that have much worse problems than his short-lived nightclub had - a nightclub that apparently didn't do anything wrong given the raids turned up a smattering of stuff that never went anywhere past a funny story in the El Paso Times and subsequent retraction of many elements of that story by the El Paso Times. Again, there's an issue of fairness here that someone on city staff should have raised before it came down to a lawsuit.

And finally - my previous sentence a good segway - COOPER TOLD YOU HE WAS GOING TO SUE YOU IF YOU CONTINUED TO HARASS HIM!

I once dared someone to sue me and guess what - they did. As cool as all of you thought it was and how much "street cred" I gained from it, it was a bad experience. Because Texas didn't have a "slap law" at the time I had to spend a little money and pride to make it go away. Nowadays things would have been different and I wouldn't have learned the lesson that I did - which is that the judicial system in many ways completely broken.

For any of you hoping that the lesson I learned was going to be about exercising my First Amendment Rights, you're wrong. However, I still seek to establish my own religion and petition the government despite some people’s best efforts to stop me from doing so (some of you will get that, others of you are stupid).

Where was I? Oh, warned he was going to sue...

So I looked back in the press and everywhere else I could find info on this case and sure enough, Mr. Cooper told everyone he was going to sue them if they didn't back off. Nobody listened to him and he sued everybody. I'm sure they were running a "ten defendants for the price of one" special at the law office so Cooper got a deal when he came in with this bag of legal gold. I’m kidding, but the lawsuit is no joke. Try and remove yourself from it all you want, but YOU will be paying the city’s part of this debacle starting the day they sent this out to outside legal counsel (if they haven’t done that yet, lord help them/us).

How much YOU are on the hook for is unclear right now. It’s going to get expensive. Depositions are a $200 an hour type of thing and that’s before you add in the cost to have all those attorneys sitting the room for hours upon hours. And with an entire building full of potential witnesses, thing could get seven figures expensive very quickly. If it makes you feel any better there’s a slight chance they’ll let us see the depositions after we’re forced to pay Mr. Cooper several millions bucks for his troubles… so that’s nice.

I’m out of breath and you probably need to pee, so we’ll stop here for now. I have been receiving new information the entire time I’ve been crafting this digital piece of toilet paper I call a “blog post,” so I'll have to follow this up with new info later.

Please discuss below and refrain from using any manners – I wouldn’t want to get a better impression of any of you at this point.

Ps. Norma stop refreshing this page - it's messing up my stats.

Comments

[Tim Collins]

Wow F5 key - didn't know that one. Thanks

Is there an F5 key to refresh elected officials for new ones?

[reader]

You can't knock Norma, her name increases your traffic from the interwebs!

[Carl Starr]

I think your over hyping lawsuit David at least against City, the city gets sued all the time...ive not followed all this case but it looks weak, for one there must be a contract, unless i missed it i am not sure there was...a right to contract is a different claim than interference with a the contract...all Coopers pre stuff is weak compared to post damage claims, preempt is always weaker to post, to say for example here's the gun, here's the body and here's how damaged...the suit is not plead well and needs amending...it also as i recall does not allege ultra vires to overcome immunity, even if there was a contract the city has a 'legal superior right' defense also.

[hahaha!]

if norma increases traffic, norma, i mean, "reader", it's only because you have an itchy trigger finger when it comes to dk's and jaime's blogs and can't resist the f5 siren call!

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

(chicana, latina, xicana translation - jajajajajajajajajaja!)

[Allen]

Carl, your seventh grade English teacher would be slapping your hands with a ruler if she read your post. Since you are obviously using a computer, please, please, please use the spelling and grammar check. I mean, I understand that you are a true El Pasoan but for Pete's sake. You comment on every post in this blog and run two or three fifty-cent words together like you have some higher level of intelligence. Truth is, you are sounding like a stereotypical moron that resides somewhere near the corner of Hawkins and Edgemere. Your insight to legal matters are rarely more than a synopsis in a shit-house lawyers manual that was picked up in a stack of paperbacks at the Goodwill. "Legal Lingo for Dummies"? You really don't have much of a clue about much of anything, do you? Hell, you don't even suspect. In short, being a free country and everything (I read that somewhere) feel free to continue posting your inconsistent ramblings...but try and utilize your fifty cent words in an appropriate context and learn the difference between "your" and "you're". The latter is a contraction combining "You" and "are". That it is my final free English lesson.

Everyone else, I hope you enjoy this blog as much as I do. It is an opinion of mine that if you are the smartest man/woman in the room, you should find a new room. I am certainly not the smartest in this room, but thanks to Carl Starr I am not the dumbest.

[Carl Starr]

Allen I think if spelling was a requirement here there would be no anonymous post nicks either...Since David is a layperson also and does not have dibs on the law and your post offers no legal argument then I feel I am free to comment here being that my pro se suits resulted in 26 documents unsealed in the FBI Corruption cases, a policy change by El Paso County re Sheriff Enforcement of Immigration law, a settlement where now 'all persons are considered innocent until proven guilty in court of law' placed on EPPD DWI website, a Judgement re Dept Of Homeland Security and the right to film federal buildings and protests, a $500 settlement against a EPPD LT, SGT and CPL and more. For a dummy its not a bad record no? Thank you, I hardly doubt my posts have anything to do with few postings here, check EP Times and there are few posts there to and I don't or rarely post there.

[Texaswoman]

Allen

Carl a bit more then you want to tangle with. He knows what he is talking about.

[Local Lawyer]

Carl has no idea what he's talking about. I read this blog all the time and see carl try to play lawyer and he doesn't do it very well. Somehow carl thinks that he's the only person who has ever sued the county/city/state/federal government and got anything out of it - he's wrong. He dismisses every suit mentioned in the media against those entities because he has an ego problem that won't let him understand that he's not the only one who can sue the government.

For the average person out there his cutting and pasting of briefs he incorrectly thinks apply to his point may seem intimidating and thus correct. However, they are usually from left field and have nothing at all to do with the actuall issue - he's simply doing key word searches and posting cases that contain those key words.

Anybody who spells as bad a Carl does, shouldn't be looked to for legal advice of any kind. Spelling is easy to look up and get right, the law isn't.

[Carl Starr]

Last I checked the law is for all not just those who play lawyer...All suits settled are dismissed...I think you know that.

Each side finds their best case law...if it does not win, at least it helps mitigate.

I think everyone who uses Lexis or Westlaw uses keywords besides knowing which keywords and phrases to use there is some other tips and tricks that helped my record.

Nice try local lawyer/esquire.