WILL WISHY-WASHY WOOD PULL ANOTHER BUDGET ENCORE?

“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. (Sept. 17, 2009)

By Juan Montoya
Will it be, as Yogi Berra used to say, deja vu all over again for Precinct 2 Cameron County Commissioner and wanna be county judge John Wood and his sidekick Sofie Benavides, commissioner for Precinct 1?
Once again, Cameron County is facing a budget shortfall with revenues totalling $62,006,911 and expenditures estimated at $69,600,407.
County Auditor Martha Galarza told commissioners that with the additional $4,293,345 needed to open the new addition to the Carrizalez-Rucker Detention Center in Olmito plus other transfers in and transfers out and the end result is a $4,941,463 shortage.
With only County Judge Carlos Cascos, Wood and the hapless Benavides present to hear Galarza's presentation, the auditor asked for direction from them on where to go to cut to balance the budget.
For Cascos, raising taxes by a penny and 1/3 cent per $100 valuation as the court did last year is out of the question.
For the other two, silence is golden.
If you remember, the court was faced with almost the same situation last year.
Then, in what must rank as one of the crassest displays of political expediency and underhandedness, Wood and Benavides went back on their word to their fellow commissioners and voted against the property tax increase without offering any alternative to the tax raise. And Benavides, who had 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, incredulously at the time.
“Why?” Benavides asked.
“Because it’s illegal,” countered David Garza, commissioner for Pct. 3. Insiders say Pct. 4 commissioner Edna Tamayo was outraged 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, facing bridge income shortfalls and declining revenues had all the departments institute cuts, 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, now the Democratic nominee for Cascos' position, has consistently enlisted 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. Apparently, she is quite comfortable with deficits.
Now, with the county in the same position, observers are predicting that Wood will again align Benavides to side with him in voting against any cuts or increases and letting the rest of the court take the heat.
"This is about par for Benavides," the worker said.
"As for Wood, apparently, voting for a tax increase just four months before the election – no matter how necessary it may have seemed – is too politically risky."
“The residents of our county should remember this,” said Cascos at the time. “Do they really want this kind of ‘decisive’ leadership that John is offering? It’s something to think about.”