LOCAL OFFICIALS IN SEARCH OF ROYALTY, IMMORTALITY

By Juan Montoya
What is it about public officials that after two or three decades in the same position think that the public owes them something aprt from their fat paychecks?
Some, Like UTB-TSC President Juliet Garcia isn't satisfied with earning an obscene $345,000 salary, having school named after her and getting nominated to be everything from Hispanic Woman of the Year to Most Despised Higher Education Administrator of a Brownsville University.
She even has school named after her in the Brownsville Independent School District.
And, always one to return the compliment with taxpayer funds, she in turn names buildings on the campus after the likes of Mary Rose Cardenas, no academe but always a Garcia supporter since the days she hijacked the TSC presidency.
This is endemic in local government.

In the days just prior to the election of the second term of Tony Garza as Cameron County Judge, Port Isabel's Baldemar Port Isabel declared himself a candidate for the Democratic nomination. He used to sit in the commissioners court and point to a spot above the picture of Judge Dancy and say "That's where the nail is going to be where my picture is going to be hung when I'm elected county judge."

Alaniz was slightly more flamboyant than most Democrats. At 26 the youngest mayor ever elected to office there, he moved to rename Second Street after himself and was nominated to receive the Bum Steer Award by Texas Monthly for that bit of self-aggrandisement.

Alaniz liked to wear a $20,000 diamond ring, a $6,000 watch, drive fancy cars and live n a house that sort of looks like, and as he described it, the White House of South Texas. He sought a special look with silk suits, big cigars and Stetsons. He earned a living administering $2 million in estate interests for an Oklahoma oil and gas heiress.

What does that have to do with the current batch of high-flying elected officials?

The recent brouhaha involving the naming of the Cameron County San Benito Annex after Cameron County Clerk Joe River and District Clerk Aurora De la Garza and the consequent controversy that erupted after the pair posed for photographs the at a cost to the county of $2,450 are just the latest wrinkles to the continuing massaging of these political egos at public expense.

It is true that the county routinely pays for photos of past county judges and members of the judiciary to place in the courts where they served.

On any given day you can walk through the various courtrooms and see Adolph Betancourt, Menton Murray, even Diego Leal, peering at you from their portraits hanging in the courts.

Pictures of Ray Ramon, Tony Garza and even Gilberto Hinojosa were hung over the county commission next to a mediocre painting of Dancy.

However, and this is true, the purchase of these photos and paintings went through the regular purchasing process: You find out if there is money in that line item in a budget, issue a P.O., give that P.O. number, in turn, to the vendor, who, after he delivers the product, invoices the county using that P.O.

In this case, the process was sidestepped. The order for services to the vendor was given, no P.O. was requested or issued, and the county found itself in the embarrassing position of owing a vendor a service after the goods had been delivered.

Now, don't get us wrong, there is always a section in the county meetings where the auditor's office representative – for whatever reason – comes before the commissioners requesting payments for services ordered without P.O.s. Let's say the sheriff's department experiences a sewage overflow at Carrizales over the weekend. If the department were to wait for the P.O. to make its way through the process, there would be a serious health emergency.

Likewise, if heavy rains tore up a road and handicapped students lived there, Public Works could order caliche to patch the road in an emergency to allow school buses to pick the students up.

And, since the county already has vendors who bid at the beginning of the year for the service contracts, it's understandable that they be called to deliver the goods.

However, those "emergencies" have nothing in common with ordering professional photography services from a vendor. Understandably, professional services are usually not placed for bids. But, if county purchasing niceties are to be followed, Requests For Proposals should have been put out.

Other entities are just as guilty. City contract attorney Mark Sossi decides which local law firms get the city gravy. As others have pointed out, it has usually been his former law firm to which he owed a settlement.

And Dan Breeden has a lock on the Charro Days drawings which invariably feature a little white boy with a painted mustache dancing with a Mexican morenita. Now, that man knows his what the customers want!

The only thing that highlights the Rivera De la Garza debauchery is the fact that the county had to move money from elsewhere – in this case money for travel for continuing education of coutny employees – to pay homage to these two luminaries.

It's not like they have donated their services to the county for the last 62 years. If we average out their salaries over that time to $50,000, they were paid more than $3.2 million for being our public "servants."

Shouldn't that have been enough?