CAMERON COUNTY PUBLIC WORKS BACK TO NORMAL, SNAFU; DON'T LOWER THE RIVER, RAISE THE PIPES

By Juan Montoya

Ernie Hernandez is gone as commissioner for Cameron County's Precinct 2, but if you judged by the way some of the help the new commissioner inherited is acting, it's as if Ernie hadn't left.

Remember when everyone, even some commissioners, were prohibited form using the county vehicles to drive home because the budget was strained and the commissioners court ordered everyone to pinch pennies?

Well, apparently, that's all over with and the county is flush with dough. Now everyone and their brother is taking the county vehicles home and using them as their personal vehicles to and from their residence to the work site.

And it's not just administrative assistants and higher-ups. Even at Public Works, workers like Daniel Anaya who lives in Santa Rosa, on the county's northern fringes, is said to drives his vehicle home.
(Update: We have learned from the county administration that Anaya drives the county vehicle from his precinct job to a central point in San Benito where he car-pools it with other county workers to Santa Rosa. The practice of allowing county workers to take their vehicles home apparently is a holdover from Hernandez, the previous commissioner.)  

The same goes for Jose Sanchez, of Olmito, who drives his county vehicle each day to and from his crib to the job.

If that want the meeses are doing, imagine the Big Cats.

We have pondered mightily to understand why it is that City of Brownsville Public Works reject Santana Vallejo leads a charmed existence. He was sent packing from his city gig when there were reports that building materials from the city's sidewalk building program were somehow disappearing and ending up in the hands of a private contractor who made a pretty penny building sidewalks and driveways for private customers.
Then, when he ended up with Cameron County, there was an incident involving some workers in the county colonia unit selling discarded driveway pipes to private citizens in the rural areas. One of these was Vallejo, who escaped any consequences.
We saw the reports filed with the sheriff's department of county workers selling culverts, driveway pipes and caliche to colonia residents and keeping the money for themselves. When the charges were made, the residents who purchased the pipes were visited by defense attorneys who frightened them by threatening to accuse them as accomplices in the crimes.
Then a former county commissioner steps in to put in a good word with the sheriff department investigators and the then-Cameron County DA and allowed them to get off on a technicality and the case just sort of goes away. The accused were then allowed to return to work and avenge themselves with the county workers who made the report to law enforcement. Vallejo returned as crew supervisor.

We thought that it was all over.

But now we see the results of keeping these same sujetos and of letting them loose on Cameron Park laying drain pipes from Rancho Viejo Road to the resaca behind  the colonia. That in itself is not a bad thing. The Resaca has long been stagnant because of different entities dropping the ball  on removing obstacles to its flow. Still, the levels of the Resaca rise abnormally during a heavy rain because the water is blocked from the rest of the Resaca system. It seems that no one downstream wants to see that water passing through their part of the resaca.

Well, the intrepid Vallejo places his compadre Ruben Gonzalez as foreman in charge of the crew placing the drain pipes. No one ever accused Gonzalez of being an intellectual heavyweight, much less a civil engineer.

He had the workers dig the trenches for the drain pipes and they end up being lower than the level of the resaca so that water is flowing up to the street from the resaca instead of down from the street to the water.

This reminds us of a comedy with the title "Don't lower the bridge, Raise the river."
This is not Gonzalez's first brush with smallness.

He, after all, was the foreman who ordered workers into a Cameron Park ditch trench with the protection in case the walls collapsed. Guess what? The walls collapsed and one worker was seriously hurt and had to be hospitalized. The county ended up paying the tab for Gonzalez's negligence.
Only after photos of county workers continuing to work under those hazardous conditions appeared on this blog was there an effort to find out where the wall-collapse protection equipment had disappeared. Then Public Works workers found it covered by weeds in the rear of a warehouse in San Benito.
Now, with more storms on the horizon, just imagine what's going to happen to the streets nearby when the water in the resaca rises?
How do these people continue to be placed in positions of authority when they have demonstrated themselves to be lacking in skills or leadership? We understand that once a month – at the end of the pay period – Vallejo goes around soliciting "voluntary" donations from the lowly workers to fete the new commissioner and other elected officials to some carne asada compliments of the workers.
To be fair, the new elected officials inherited this motley crew from the previous elected officials and since they are under civil service protection, it will take extensive disciplinary documentation for them to answer to their obviously unacceptable performance of their public employment. That, we have been assured, will be pursued if evidence of lackluster performance warrants.

That aside, can anybody explain how work of this caliber of performance can continue to be endured by the Cameron County Public Works Department?
The entire Cameron Park colonia would like to know.