LAKE TETREAU: SQUEEZING AND SUCKING THE PUBLIC P.R. $$$

By Juan Montoya

We were riding past Portway Park today and noticed a television crew from Channel 23 filming a segment with someone in front of it.
The nosy media types we are, we doubled back and gawked at the shooting. It turned out to be no one else than city commissioner Jessica Tetreau-Kalifa announcing for the television-watching public that she was hosting an Easter Egg Hunt at that very spot for the little children of her district for whom she had fought the good fight to get the improvements there, including a splash park.
Well, that just warmed the cockles of our hearts to no end.
We remember hearing that most road repairs (and boy do we need that right about now after the weeks' rain) were programmed for just before the city elections in the past. Maybe this is just more of the same to kindle the civic spirit in the voters of District 2.
The commissioner is locked in a hard campaign against opponent Sergio Zarate and now it appears she is pulling out all the stops to use city assets to promote her reelection. I bet the folks in Washington who disburse the Community Development funds never knew that the feisty commish would be the beneficiary of their largess.
The improvement were actually done in the summer of 2013 at a cost of $200,000, but as the shoot took place today, it seems like there might have been some drainage issues overlooked.
If the weather persists, maybe they should make it an underwater egg hunt and provide the kiddies with snorkels so they can find them under the stagnant waters under the slides. It could also be that the splash park might have spared some of the expense of installing pipes since the water seems to gravitate toward that place easily enough.
As we watched, we noticed that the cameras never strayed away from the commish and film the standing water that makes the park unusable right now.
If you are around your television sets tonight and for some ungodly reason surf over to Channel 23, see if you can see Lake Tetreau in the footage. We could bet you a cold Bud Light that you won't.
As the campaign slouches toward the May election, expect not only Jess, but also the incumbents like Da Mayor Tony Martinez and District 1 commissioner Ricardo Longoria to pull out all the stops on good PR opportunities that can get at public expense to suck and squeeze all the blood they can from the public's buck to get reelected.