WISHING MARIO VILLEARREAL A SPEEDY RECOVERY

By Juan Montoya
One of our favorite people in town has always been former Brownsville Navigation District trustee and a charter member of the Public Utilities Board staff Mario Villarreal.
His father also worked for PUB and was one of the people – along with Mary Yturria – of constructing the signature Washington Park fountain that at one time pumped colored spouts of water that made it seem like a vertical rainbow.
Mario had been feeling some discomfort last week and underwent a series of tests that determined some cloggage in his own pump. Further test revealed that angioplasty wouldn't do the job and he was submitted to a surgical intervention. Eventually, he underwent a quadruple bypass.
Villarreal – a former Army officer – was able to survive the ordeal but now must convalesce for a few weeks before resuming his daily chores.
Mario is a member of that generation that wakes up before the break of dawn and are at their places of work before many of us are up and about. He is also a repository of local information about politics here and across the Rio Grande spanning many generations. Until the cartel terror descended on Matamoros, the Louisiana Restaurant and Lounge there was one of his favorite business lunch places.
He has – through the dint of labor and the sweat of his brow – he has managed to become a major supplier of parts and services to the maquiladora industry there.
Mario used to recount the early days of PUB when the city decided to place the utility on a sound financial basis regardless of whose toes they stepped on. His story of how that happened is reposted below.
"Believe it or not, when the PUB was created in 1960, many of us felt that by separating the board from the city, politics would be eliminated from hindering its operations.
Boy, were we mistaken!
Those of us who worked on the very first PUB administration after the board's first meeting on July 15, 1961, inherited a system lacking in some basic requirements of a municipal utilities system. The electorate had just approved the creation of the board by a mere 38 votes (2,741 to 2,703) that would be responsible to the city commission and to the voters of the city.
The membership of that first board reads like a Who's Who of Brownsville history. Former Mayor Ruben Edlestein, Kenneth Faxon, Barry Putegnat, and Gus Peña were the voting members. Mayor Dr. J.C. George represented the city commission on the board and was a nonvoting member barring a tie. George Weir, the manager of the existing electrical plant, was named PUB's first general manager and given the daunting task of bringing PUB up to par to meet the challenges of the mid-20th Century.
First, the board had to deal with $250,000 in uncollected utility bills. At the time the collection rate was hovering near 65 percent, a drag on the entire system. Additionally, rigged meters and tapped electrical lines were in use, resulting in electric losses that reached about 30 percent.
I was assistant to Weir and set about to make the necessary improvements to make the utility competitive with the privately-owned utilities like Central Power and Light. For many years, CPL and others had tried to buy the utility from the City of Brownsville – but the voters of the city had rejected all offers that would take the ownership away from the municipality.
Hard-nosed business decisions and changes in policies to help PUB survive in the dog-eat-dog world of the utility market generated controversy and resistance from many quarters. Yet, in a very short time, the utility could report to the city that its finances were on solid ground and that transfers to the city – which continue to this day – could be made to the city's general fund.
At that time we operated out of a rented space atop the old Majestic Theater on Elizabeth Street. The staff consisted of myself, a Mrs. Medrano as executive secretary, Weir, and perhaps one or two engineers. We didn't have the luxury of having the palace that PUB now occupies. Still, in a short period of time we had consolidated the water ans sewer operations and integrated them with the electric generating facilities. From there we moved to rented space at the airport, until subsequent boards made the move to PUB's present location."
It is clear that Mario was one of those people who has helped to make Brownsville the utility-independent city it is today. That others may have come along and tried to negate that is not his responsibility.
We wish Mario a speedy recovery and convalescence and hope to see him behind his desk at his 700 Levee Building soon. Saludos, Mario.