It happened during the peso devaluation years when sales taxes and bridge receipts went down in the 70 and 80s. And it's happening again.
You're not imagining that you're seeing more code and traffic enforcement in Brownsville. There are checkpoints popping out all over the city. Now we know that the city is facing budget shortfalls: the missing revenues have to be made up somewhere.
During the 80s, when Tony Gray (now Rep. Rene Oliveira's spokesperson) was just a budding reporter with the Bravo's Valle en Ingles section and he covered the city as well he could. He came into the newsroom once and said that the city was struggling to make do with lowered revenues as a result of the peso devaluation.
How were they going to do it? It was all right there in the new proposed city budget. There were more hires for health and building code inspectors, traffic cops, and the sundry other inspectors at the different departments that feed the city's budget.
The projections, curiously, were just enough to make up the budget shortfall.
There is something fundamentally wrong in using law enforcement to enhance a city budget. Stepped up enforcement is merely a smokescreen for making cops fee collectors and taking the shortfall out of the hides of the city's residents, who after all are already bearing the brunt in the form of higher property taxes.
Friends of our have noticed the increased traffic enforcement and have graciously compiled a list of the more obvious places where motorcycle and traffic cops have stepped up enforcement. Below is just a partial list of places where these have cropped up like mushrooms after a hard rain.
----The usual stretch between Coolidge and Security Drive along 14th St. (past 123 Lounge)
----Owen Road (of course) between Boca Chica and Southmost Rd.
----(new) Roosevelt St. between the railroad tracks and 13th St. by Victoria Elementary. This merits a note: The cops are there just as the kids are being let out of school and hang there for a couple of hours.
----(new)Pablo Kisel heading north past Morrison Road before you get to Alton Gloor.
----(new) On Coffeeport Rd. between Old Port Isabel Rd. and Paredes Line Rd. (The motorcycle cop will park on the drive leading to a subdivision on the north side of the road and can't be seen by motorists maneuvering the curve heading west toward Paredes.)
There are probably more sites our readers have run upon these checkpoints. If you have more, please alert us to them. Until then, drive the limit and decrease your vulnerability.
Happy motoring.
5 comments:
Thanks for the blog.
The cop trap between the highway and BISD bldg. The Traffic cop is there in the mornings before work and during lunch time.
On Morningside right after you turn onto it going west on Southmost.
man, they were all over 802 in front of chem pruf the other day!!!
----The usual stretch between Coolidge and Security Drive along 14th St. (past 123 Lounge)
----Owen Road (of course) between Boca Chica and Southmost Rd.
----(new) Roosevelt St. between the railroad tracks and 13th St. by Victoria Elementary. This merits a note: The cops are there just as the kids are being let out of school and hang there for a couple of hours.
----(new)Pablo Kisel heading north past Morrison Road before you get to Alton Gloor.
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