BEHIND THE VENEER, LONGORIA CAN'T HIDE NAKED AMBITION

By Juan Montoya
When the voters of District 1 that includes the Southmost area voted in Ricardo Longoria in 2003, they expected a defender of their rights and an advocate of neighborhoods.
At least that's what he sold himself as when he hit the hustings squeezing his accordion and singing his personal praises to convince the voters to let him represent them.
Now nearing the end of his second term in office, the picture that emerges of Riche is not the prototype Horatio Alger one would expect from a barrio product and a Porter High School graduate.
Instead, viewers of the city cable channel will see a sniping, devious schemer who fairly screams out that he would dearly love it if the voters of the city would somehow see their way to elect him mayor of the entire city.
If this picture conveys a vain, arrogant, and self-centered individual, it should come as no surprise. After all, despite his protests, he is a politician. And as a teacher, he's probably used to being the only voice in the room to be heard. Ditto for his DJ business, where he holds a monopoly on the microphone, sharing it only with the likes of Pedro Infante, Vicente Fernandez, Patsy Cline, and other legends and musical luminaries.
Longoria was basically handed the District 1 seat during the first election using the city's single-member district scheme. Former county commissioner Lucino Rosenbaum Jr. took the then-29-year-old under his wing and supported his candidacy urging his longtime supporters to back the fledgling barrio candidate.
But when Rosenbaum tried to make a comeback against commissioner Pete Benavides, and later his widow Sofia, Longoria behind the scenes supported the Lion of Southmost's opponents.
"I really don't want to talk about that," Rosenbaum commented recently spitting out the words. "I even invited him to join the Southmost chapter of the Lions' Club that I started so people could get to know him. It's a strange kind of payback."
When Longoria did have an opponent – Catalina Presas-Garcia – he tried mightily to have her candidacy declared void by the office of the Brownsville City Secretary where one of his partners in the DJ business worked. Then, after that effort failed, he threw a tiff and threatened to pull out of the race if he didn't have his way.
He claimed she lived outside the district but she claimed she was taking care of her elderly mother and still lived in the family home. When the office of the city secretary at first rejected her signatures, and then – under scrutiny from the city administration – accepted them, he blew a fuse.
"I'll drop out of the race," he fumed. But then, like Paul on the road to Damascus, he saw the light and cooled off. By the time he got to City Hall, he'd changed his mind and said he'd run after all.
After she lost, Presas-Garcia, thank God, ran for a position as a trustee on the board of the Brownsville Independent School District and has acquitted herself as the voice of the people against the rampant corruption in that vast (and rich) bureaucracy. Her performance in the short time she has been there will far outhisne Riche's even if he holds on to the District 1 seat for a lifetime.
But I digress.
It has been said that changing her mind is a woman's prerogative.
Judging by his past performance, it is also our little Riche's.
During a public debate in the 2007 campaign against Presas-Garcia, he promised the Herald's Emma Perez Trevino in front of a college audience that he would stop taking city benefits that were not called for in the city charter.
Later, when the reporter pressed him on the matter, he reneged saying that he would continue to receive the $300 monthly stipend, the life and health insurance coverage and cell phone "on the advice of his attorneys."
By then, the 2007 election was over and he and some of his fellow commissioners continued to milk the city for the benefits until his old nemesis Robert Sanchez, gadfly Moses Sorola and Eddie de La O brough the matter to the fore by filing a citizens' lawsuit against the commissioners and the city to stop them from awarding themselves the taxpayer-funded goodies without authorization by the city charter.
(True to form, Longoria had appointed Sanchez to the PUB board, but then withdrew his suport when the PUB chairman started taking steps that threatened entrenched interests by suggesting lowering utility rates and increasing the impact fees on developers. In fact, Longoria voted against funding the study that would make rising those impact raises on developers a possibility.)
While fighting the citizen-initiated lawsuit, Longoria and his fellows had no choice but to follow the order of the state judge, but not before they ran up a $40,000 legal bill to Marc Sossi, who was later appointed as city attorney by a vote of the majority of the commissioners, including Longoria's.
Interviewed by the Herald after Mayor Pat Ahumada's hyper-publicized arrest for DWI, Longoria smugly told the newspaper that he was neither a thief nor a drinker, implying that Ahumada was both.
He conveniently forgot that the mayor had been declared innocent of theft in the $26,000 city vendor's check fiasco.
Yes, the picture that Southmost voters had of a fresh-faced teacher and young family man representing them against the faceless bureaucracy is fast wearing thin. This is now a cunning, scheming man with naked ambition who can't hide the fact that he would be our mayor.
About a month before the 2007 election, with Presas-Garcia making hay about the pothole-pocked streets and drainage problems in District 1, Longoria and his fellows on the city commission suddenly "found" $1 million in reserves to undertake an "emergency" effort to fix the streets.
His campaign literature proudly boasted of the "68 streets" in his district that had been paved during his term in office. Southmost residents and residents in the other district where another incumbent was also running for re-election woke up to suddenly find city crews and contractors busy at work fixing their streets after months of inaction.
And, of course, they also saw the incumbents, hard hats perched on their heads, personally inspecting the fine work that the crews were performing.
Has Longoria forgotten the scrubbed-faced kid who promised his constituents that he would be there for them defending them against conniving politicians who used the public treasury for their own political well-being?
"My priorities have changed; my outlook in life and my outlook on generally everything. It's part of the growing process," Longoria told the Perez-Trevino in an interview in 2007.
How true, Ricardito. How true.