City of Anthony NM Municipal Complex

The city leaders are not helping the town. They don't want more housing and yet want growth, but who would want to live in El Paso or Las Cruces to own a business in Anthony? Just about nobody. They don't want housing (they mentioned this in a meeting), so if you have family in this town you have no option but to move away. They're causing an aging demographic, inadvertently planning a ghost town for the future.

The Dos Lagos development plan is already failing before it's starting because half of it is to build more city buildings even though the current ones work just fine. A quarter of it is a medical building leaving the last quarter actually useful to the public. The original plans looked promising; it was walkable and had a lot of housing. But once they had public approval of the project, they altered out over half of the housing and added redundant city owned buildings and a ton of asphalt. Most of the land is being turned into a parking lot.

To make up for their poor budgeting, they tried raising taxes from 0 to 7 percent without notice. Citizens were mad and many petitions signed. But instead of understanding why people were upset, they made a plan to lower slowly back to 0. The problem was that it was too much too fast, people would agree to pay taxes if they have the chance to plan for it. We do want a better city.

But the city council lack the critical thinking ability and knowledge needed to improve this city. They have the perfect opportunity to create a unique "down town" and are wasting it. I don't expect anything here to get better in the next decade, in fact, it seems it might only get worse.

The images attached show the original plan and revised plan. You can see the revised plan has much less housing (on the right half of the images) and is replaced with the redundant government buildings in orange.