TAKE MY CITY'S LAND AND MONEY, PLEEEEASE!

By Juan Montoya
Why id City of Brownsville Mayor Tony Martinez falling over himself trying to give away our city's assets to the Juliet Garcia's University of Texas at Brownsville?
Yesterday, after it was revealed during the city's regular meeting that Texas Southmost College and the University of Texas were negotiating to rent or lease buildings for the new and improved Super-Duper University of the Americas at Brownsville, the item he had placed on the agenda to rent the Cueto Building to UTB for administrative offices was pulled from discussion.
In this past two weeks Tony has had a slump. It was only last week that the city administration had to pull off another item dealing with city real estate being leased, rented or just "transferred" to the UTB. This time – even though he would be the last to admit it – he was trying to his damnest to give away City Plaza, the heart of municipal operations.
It's bad enough that he has gotten the tacit acquiescence of the rest of the city commission to give away "donate" 58 acres of prime real estate to the oil-and-gas wealthy UT System so they wouldn't move away from downtown. That was the justification he has used to rush (and take the rest of the city commissioners) into a binge of real estate speculation that has seen the local taxpayer be encumbered with at least $3.2 million in debt through the issuance of Certificates of Obligation to make the purchases.
As a local wag has said, he is spending other people's money like it was other people's money. We couldn't have said it better ourselves. And what for?
As a fellow member of Juliet Garcia on the United Brownsville shadow government, he has not realized that she has been relegated to the backwater of higher education and Brownsville made a satellite campus to the administration in Edinburg's UT Pan-Am.
As the devout catholic believer that he seeks to portray himself as, he should take his faith's tenets and "stop praying at the altar of a dead idol."
That dog, as a more secular Texan would say, won't hunt no mo'.
The tabled agenda item deal with entering the UTB and city into a The four-year lease that would grant the University of Texas Board of Regents the Cueto Building and the adjacent Lucena House for general office and educational use beginning Sept. 1. The Lucena Building is now occupied by the offices of the United Brownsville executive director and staff. The Cueto Building is now housing the UTB's Center for Civic Engagement.
According to the local daily, "In lieu of paying $10 per square foot annually in rent, the terms of the lease stipulate that the tenant will make parking lot improvements to the property adjacent to the leased property. The lease also dictates that there are four one-year options included in the lease, each with a base rate of $10 per square foot annually or about $92,580 per year."
This is very enlightening because the city is currently renting the property adjacent to the Cueto and Lucena buildings at $2,500 per month for three years, which means that it will pay the renter $90,000 after those 36 months. The rental agreement with the owner stipulates that after the three-year rental is over, the city has an option to buy at a fair market value. But now that the city wants to let UTB have the property in return for them paving the parking lot, this means that they thought the UTB parking lot paving and the rent the city pays would be a wash.
Unfortunately, Tony will have to wait until the dust clears this Thursday when the final TSC-UTB bargaining for rental or sale of TSC buildings is over before he can fall over himself to give the store away.