Remember when the director of capital improvement for the city told council back in August the hope was that the San Jacinto Plaza would be ready to open around “the holidays,” and El Paso rejoiced at the possibility that it would be completed in time for the Downtown tree lighting ceremony?

Well, stop me again if you’ve heard this before, but it appears there is yet another delay.

This time it’s “issues with some of the welds regarding the shade canopy,” per city spokesman Martin Bartlett. Bartlett did not specify what exactly those issues were, saying only that the engineering department was “creating a plan to rectify those issues.”

However, City Representative Cortney Niland, who represents the Downtown area, announced during Tuesday‘s Council Meeting that she had recently learned “the welds on the canopy need to be redone.”

Niland told the El Paso Times this latest setback would probably add another four weeks to the project.

The shade canopy, which will cover the “Los Lagartos” sculpture, was the reason for the previous delay. One of the 36 cables that will hold up the 40-ton structure turned out to be damaged and had to be returned to the manufacturer in August. The replacement cable was going to take about six weeks to manufacture and ship back from Germany.

On the upside, the cable has since arrived. The bad news is, cable or not, it’s looking more and more like the plaza will not be ready this Christmas season either.

More From 93.1 KISS FM