MILLIONAIRES LIKE MARTINEZ GORGE ON PUBLIC FUNDS

By Juan Montoya

When Tony Martinez was running for mayor of Brownsville, the thinking went like this:
He's a millionaire, a self-made man who we can trust and believe in because he doesn't need the money. He won't steal.
Millionaires, the thinking went, had no need to dip into public funds. We can trust him.
But since Tony Martinez has held office from May 2012 to today, he has been the main force – aided and abetted by the United Brownsville Gang – to drive its citizens into debt by hundreds of millions in dollars they will have to pay through property and revenue taxes.
Not only did he go along with the Brownsville Public Utility Board to issue $325 million of debt on an that already overburdened budget ($200 million), but he voted to approve rate hikes over the next six years tnhat saw the bond ratings for the once-healthy municipally-owned utility slide into "negative."
Instead, everyone on the city commission applauded and voted on the BPUB's request to issue the natural-gas bonds that would pay for construction of the 800 MW plant and a natural gas and a water pipeline from up the Valley.
 But even before the announcement of the plant's construction and PUB's "investment" in it, the city commissioners had already approved the rate hikes that would make the investment possible. No one – not one – commissioner spoke up against the massive debt being undertaken on the backs of the PUB ratepayers. And no one questioned how far down the road  it would be before the bond-rating agencies would begin to worry about the ability of the 80 percent of ratepayers in the nation's poorest city could stand the constant surge of rate hikes.
Those "small" increases (which by the way the Herald never reported until recently) were approved by commissioners in December 2013 during a special meeting. They adopted upwards rate hikes that will see city residents pay a 36 percent increase in electric rates over the next three years, a 20 percent increase in water rates over the same period, and a 6 percent hike in waste water costs over two years.
Under the plan approved by both bodies, electric rates went up by 14 percent by October 2013 and will go up another 22 percent by October 2016.
That has been the modus operandi that Martinez has imposed upon the city commission and administration.
Nowhere did Martinez make it clear to the citizens of this city that the reason the rates were being hiked was because he was committing the city to subsize one-quarter of the construction of a gas-powered electric plant for private energy producer Tenaska.
On top of the $325 million encumbrance on PUB ratepayers through revenue bonds, Martinez has also been the driving force behind the encumbrance of city property tax payers since he came into office in May 2012.
A request for information to the City of Brownsville yielded the total of Certifictes of Obligation issued since Martinez has been in office. The graphic at right shows that under Martinez, the city commission has approved $21 million in new Certificates of Obligation bebt to be paid through the property taxes and landfill fees and airport taxes. And that's only two years into his term. With this pattern sset, what can the citizens expect for the rest of his term? (Click to enlarge)
And what did he buy with some of these CO's that the city passed earlier this year?
The graphic below shows his most phenomenal downtown real-estate specualtion that favored a few of his friends, notably his law partner Horacio Barrera's neighbor Abrham Galonsky. Barrera negotiated with the city to buy La Casa del Nylon from Galonsky, one of the largest downtown real estate owners for $2.3 million, ostensibly to hold on to it temporarily until the UTB would take it off their hands and buy it for their campus.

There was only one hitch. The UTB has never wanted it and the building remains unused. That sale stillr rankles many in the city who say it amounted to a back-room deal to favor his buddies. That the seller's legal representative was his law partner who was in effect negotiating with him personally doesn't seem to have raised any conflict-of-interest red flags in Da Mayor's mind.
And just as he has been profligate in spending Other People's Money (OPM), Martinez has also taken advantage of the fact that the city allows the city administration to spend up to $35,000 without going through the commissioners for approval.
This has given Martinez his chance and he has used this clause to turn the city general fund into his own slush fund, personally approving expenditures on his pet projects without having to account to anyone. A few examples:
– In July 2012 he had City Manager Charlie Cabler authorize the payment of $1,500 to one R. Steven Lewis, a licensed architect and self-described "UTB Relocation Consultant." In a previous email, Lewis had said that he would just require payment of his air fare from California and his room at the Marriott Courtyard for "Mayor Martinez." Then, just five days later on July 31, Lewis apparently had a change of heart and Cabler received another email invoice from Lewis, this time for $4,500 for his "UT Brownsville Relocation Consultation." Martinez ordered the city staff to pay it.
– The Complete Streets Workshop" held May 16 featured Kevin St. Jaques, a member of the Complete Streets Speakers Bureau which was held at the mayor's initiative and which required the Brownsville Community Incentives Corporation (BCIC) to fork over $5,000, of which $2,300 was paid to Freese and Nichols, of Ft. Worth, to have Jaques tell us that our things as they were in Browntown left much to be desired.
–  Gil Peñalosa, the executive director of the 8-80 Cities, of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, came on Tony's behalf and told us on August 28-30 at a conference at the Cueto Building that we should be ashamed of ourselves for having such bad streets, sidewalks and phantom bus shelters. Almost a month (August 1) before Peñalosa browbeat the citizens, city administrators and local bigwigs over the condition of our infrastructure and lack of sidewalks and shoddy streets, the city meekly approved payment to him for $7,974 that included $6,500 for professional services, $988 for air transportation, and $485 for accommodations and meals in good old "American dollars," as he requested, not in discounted Canadian currency.
– The  building communityWORKSHOP of Dallas which includes four principals of Design/Program and another four support assistants have been working for Tony on his UTB proposal to entice the Hidalgo County-bound UT System to "please stay in little old' Browntown and we'll give you all kinds of land to do it (to date, about 80 acres)."
buildingcommunityWORKSHOP has made Tony's pipe dream an industry. It's first invoice for the ongoing work for Tony's UTB proposal cost us a tidy sum.
Their first invoice landed on Cabler's desk with a thud. The hit for putting together a Request For Proposals which could have been done in-house by a planning intern was not cheap. Would you believe $27,803.12 which included round-trip flights from Dallas to Harlingen for its principal at a cost of $541. 20 (Sept. 21), $347.20 (Oct. 3), and $535.20 (Oct. 8)?
Among the items in the invoice for the $475 monthly rent on an apartment (Sept. 21) needed to house the group's principals.
In the mayor's RFP to the UT System, he not only offered to sell huge tracts of publicly-owned land to the UT System at "fair market value," he also offered them other "incentives." Some of these were as follows:
* Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation - $2,500 to $5,000 for every University job associated with UTB's location downtown
* Brownsville Economic Development Corporation - BEDC will contribute tax revenue from increased sales, mixed beverage, and parking meter taxes to UTB for public realm improvements downtown
*Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation - BCIC will provide funding and/or subsidies for "quality of life" projects, including cultural and athletic amenities in greater Downtown Brownsville
* Brownsville Metropolitan Planning Organization and BCIC - MPO and BCIC will increase bicycle infrastructure, including the extension of city hike and bike trails to better connect the UTB facilities with surrounding downtown neighborhoods and amenities
* Public Utility Board - PUB will provide reduced utility rates for new UTB buildings that are built to LEED accreditation standards
* Brownsville Metro - Brownsville Metro will increase their bus coverage area to better serve UTB's campus and to increase service frequency to UTB campus facilities.
But wait Gargantua hasn't had enough. Not quite yet, anyway.
The straw that broke the camel's back was his almost exclusive spending of a more than $3 million settlement between the city and the the city and the American Electric Power Texas Central Co. The mayor and administration, flying under the radar with purchases under the $35,000 limit after which they have to bring them before the full commission, has already tapped into it and only $2.6 million is left.
Among some of those "public expenditures" were the $45,000 that were spent to move Charles Stillman's "love shack" from Corpus Christi to the Cueto Building and then to the Linear Park. Oh yeah, why would millionaire heirs of Don Carlos need public money to salvage that eyesore?
That prompted commissioners John Villarreal (co-chair of United Brownsville) Jessica Tetreau, Deborah Portillo and Ricardo Longoria to ask administration (City Manager Charlie Cabler) to bring all items spent by the mayor and city administration before them and before they are spent.
Like we said at the beginning, Tony was the millionaire we could trust and believe in. He has no need to take public funds like the ones before.
I guess we were wrong, weren't we? Por algo son millonarios los sinverguenzas..