WOOD STIFFS COMMISSIONERS WITH TAX CHECK; BENAVIDES IS CLUELESS

“Every one of the commissioners had agreed that the tax hike was the only thing left to do to get a balanced budget. Then, at the last minute, those two pull this stunt," said a commissioners court insider.

By Juan Montoya

In what must rank as one of the crassest displays of political expediency and underhandedness, Cameron County commissioners John Wood and Sofia C. Benavides went back on their word to their fellow commissioners and voted against a penny and 1/3 property tax increase without offering any alternative to the tax raise.
And Benavides, who has voted on three annual budgets during her tenure on the court, showed that the basics of the budget process continue to elude her when she suggested to County Judge Carlos Cascos that the commissioners adopt the unbalanced budget and hope that more money will come in during the coming year to make up the deficit.

“You can’t adopt a deficit budget,” Cascos responded, incredulous.
“Why?” Benavides asked.
“Because it’s illegal,” said David Garza, commissioner for Pct. 3.
Insiders say Pct. 4 commissioner Edna Tamayo was livid because the court as a body had gone over every line item in the county’s budget before deciding that the increase was the only way that the county could achieve and pass a balanced as required by law.
“Edna was livid,” said an insider. “Every one of the commissioners had agreed that the tax hike was the only thing left to do to get a balanced budget. Then, at the last minute, those two pull this stunt. Nobody wanted to raise taxes. But it was the only thing left, and they knew it.”
Cascos said the commissioners had made all the cuts that could be made, including doing away with process servers by having the constables step in to handle the service, increasing bridge tolls by a quarter, reducing the jail maintenance and operations budget, and trimming every department budget to the bone.
“Before the meeting I thought we had built a consensus after three months of working on this budget,” he said. “I thought this was too good to be true, and sure enough, it was.”
Wood and Benavides proposed taking $1.3 million from the Road and Bridge fund to balance the budget. But since their two precincts contain less than a quarter of the county's roads, it would have meant taking the funds from precincts 3 and 4, who have some 80 percent of the 1,300 miles of roads to maintain.
"Since they have less than a quarter of the roads, why don't they consolidate their office into one and have one assistant instead of two and cut their secretaries to one and a half?" asked a county worker after the meeting. "As it is, even with their smaller number of roads, they have the same staff as the other two precincts with most of the roads. If they're looking to cut somewhere, why not there?"
Wood, eyeing a run at the Democratic Party nomination for county judge, has consistently aligned Benavides’ vote on most issues before the court. After her election campaign for the Democratic primary, she admitted that she had made a mistake in voting against an indigent health contract with Wood, but did not justify her vote. This despite the fact that the contract would have benefited her constituents more than any other precinct. She later joined the rest of the court in voting for it.
And one observer remembers that a newspaper ad by her opponent in that election pointed out that a local bank had foreclosed on one of her driving schools because she defaulted on a loan payment.
"This is about par for her," he said.
Apparently, voting for a tax increase just six months before the primary– no matter how necessary it may have seemed – may have been too politically risky for Wood.
“His opponents would have probably beat him over the head with it,” said a county worker. “So instead, he enlisted the aid of Benavides and did the politically expedient thing even if that meant going back on his agreement with the other commissioners.”
“The residents of our county should remember this,” said Cascos. “Do they really want this kind of ‘decisive’ leadership that John is offering? It’s something to think about.”