Rising tensions on El Paso’s City Council came to a head last week when representatives and Mayor Renard Johnson took the rare step of reversing a decision made an hour earlier.
One council member said the reversal was vengeance over unsuccessful efforts by three city representatives to reopen the city’s decision awarding incentives to Meta Platforms Inc. for a data center in Northeast El Paso.
Caught in the middle of the vote reversal is funding to maintain homeless services after federal funding expires in August.
“The meeting devolved a little bit in terms of how the conversation was going, and there seemed to be some interpersonal fighting that maybe triggered some of the council members to change their votes,” city Rep. Chris Canales, who co-sponsored the plan to spend $430,000 from next year’s budget to keep open the Welcome Center in South El Paso, told El Paso Matters. “To me, that’s devastating. I’ve been working on this for months.”…