CAMARILLO (!) STANDS UP FOR BROWNSVILLE ON REGIONAL COUNCIL VOTING PROPOSAL

By Juan Montoya
Put it in your "Who Would've Thunk?" column.
Guess who stood up for good ol' Browntown against a Cameron County commissioner and a host of small cities and interest groups at a recent meeting of the Lower Rio Grande Valley Development Council?
Would you believe our own Brownsville City Commissioner and mayoral candidate Eduardo Camarillo?
Don't bother looking it up in the Herald. The story it carried is so sanitized you wouldn't know the city got the short end of the stick again.
Camarillo, the city's current District 4 representative and normally one of the more sedate members of the city commission, cast his vote last Thursday in favor of a McAllen proposal that would have given the cities a bigger voice in the distribution of the LRGVDC'S 2011 $19.9 million budget.
Those of you familiar with this blog will know that we have not exactly been big fans of the portly Camarillo in the past. But in this case, with no one else standing up for the city, we must grudgingly admit he has a point.
Joining the opposition and voting against the measure was our own commissioner Sofie Benavides, whose Precinct 1 covers burgeoning southeast Brownsville and South Padre Island. In her case, that's about par for the course, though.
The LRGVDC represents all the municipalities in Hidalgo, Cameron and Willacy counties.
Currently, each of the 26 members on the LRGVDC board has one vote.
Under the McAllen proposal, voting power would have been weighed to reflect their population. If the proposal had passed, Brownsville and McAllen would have had more of a say-so in the distribution of resources and funds in the region's jurisdiction.
The smaller cities and the two members representing education institutions, the two representing special purpose districts, the three “at large” members and the one “grassroots” member have the same voting power that does Brownsville and McAllen, who make greater financial and contributions in resources to the council's operations.
In his presentation, McAllen City Attorney Kevin Pagan pointed out that the nine largest cities in the Valley represent 85 percent of the population. But at the board level they have only 44 percent of the votes.
The proposal would have given more power to members representing cities with populations over 25,000.
Pagan and Camarillo's motives for supporting the proposal are obvious. According to a report in the Rio Grande Guardian, Pagan said past appropriations of resources have been disproportionally distributed without logic merely because of the lopsided representation of the small entities on the council's board.
“There was some funding last year related to a law enforcement grant," he told the Guardian. "It was split up between all member cities equally no matter what the population.”
He also cited, as a more recent example, the LRGVDC’s distribution of Hurricane Dolly recovery funding. “Brownsville did not get one penny, not one dime because a certain voting bloc on the board of directors took it upon themselves to divide it up otherwise."
In fact, the only board member to support McAllen’s proposal was Camarillo, representing the Brownsville. Among the members to speak against McAllen’s proposal was Benavides, representing Cameron County.
After the meeting. Camarillo said while he understood the rationale behind the "regional concept" voiced by the majority, he felt that the city had been shortchanged by the smaller members who "ganged" up to deprive it of some funding it badly needs.
"I don't see anyone else standing up for us on this," he said. "If no one else will, I guess it's up to me to do what I can to try to correct this situation. God knows we need it."