CITY PRIORITIES SKEWERED; DOG CHIPS AND PLASTIC BAGS...

By Juan Montoya

For the last few years – ever since Tony Martinez has been mayor – the city has been fastidious about turning Brownsville into something it is not.

It is not a gentrified city.

It most certainly is not the Austin on the Rio Grande

It is not a bike-trial capital despite what commissioner La Chisquida Rose Gowen asserts.

It is not the grease-fighting capital of the world despite what Healthy Communities Rose Timmer would like you to swallow.

It is not the worm hole to Mars despite SpaceX's Elon Musk's pie-in-the-sky visions.
It is not into personal recycling despite the plastic bag ban, the proliferation of thrift stores, segundas, and used-tire shops. Recycling has been a way of life here. Lone men in bicycles hauling loads of cardboard and women sorting through segunda discards from alleys will attest to that. They're not scavenging. They're reducing the amount of garbage making it to the landfill. 

What it is is a city whose political and economic leadership has sucked its lifeblood to construct their walled compounds (a la Bill Hudson) and to fund their hoity-doity pet projects at the expense of the public treasury.

Instead of trying to suck up to the University of Texas System and husband the few assets the city has, local politicians (from Sen. Eddie Lucio to Martinez) seem hell-bent on giving everything away to endear themselves to influential institutions and individuals in the hope that they will be looked upon benignly and a few crumbs thrown their way.

That's why it's always so enlightening to read what the editorial writers of the Brownsville Herald say after a sudden rainstorm paralyzed the city and caused innumerable cost and inconvenience to the residents.

The daily – among whose shareholders is included IBC President Fred Rusteberg – was quick to come to the defense of the indefensible drainage system that the city has endured since it was founded.

"Brownsville," it stated blandly – "has always been flood prone..."

Well, not really.

Years after its founding in 1848, farmers recognized the need for flood control. But levees weren't enough since the Lower Rio Grande river experienced floods in 1865, 1886, 1904, 1909, 1914, 1916, 1922, 1948, 1954, 1967, and 1988.
The first levees were raised after a bond issue was passed in 1924 and 1925, but proved that individual efforts along the river would not do. Today, the Lower Rio Grande River Flood Control Project includes 258 miles of levee from Pentitas to near the Gulf of Mexico.
But the introduction of dams upriver limited the volume of water that flowed downstream. Today, six dams control that flow starting upstream from El Paso to Falcon Dam in Starr Cuonty.
The dams so restricted the flow of water that sometimes it was just a trickle reaching the Gulf of Mexico at Boca Chica.
What the dams and levee system  accomplished was in diminishing the volume of water reaching the Gulf naturally through the watershed. Instead, local rains such as the one we had recently, actually bottled up the water and kept it from reaching the river until it made its way through an old irrigation ditch system converted into a drainage district.
The way drainage works in Brownsville, the ditches funnel the rain runoff into the system that eventually leads to the Brownsville Ship Channel. If ti happens to be high tide, the water will not go anywhere and will recede only after the tide goes down.
Brownsville for may years boasted of the Impala Street water pump that would kicks in once flooding began. But what that meant was that the area west and north of Southmost was already flooded and the water had begun to travel southwest to a lower area.
Cameron County hit upon the idea of opening an outfall to the river at the corner of Southmost and Oklahoma where the Valle Escondido subdivision is located. That was the site of an old city reservoir and water was caught in the basin built by the levee system that circled the area and headed north toward the Port of Brownsville. The county installed a pump and a canal under the levee and when water reached a given level, the pump would kick in and send the water to its natural direction, the Rio Grande River.
Once the flooding was eliminated, the real estate gained in value, subdivisions and businesses have sprung up and even sanitary sewer has been extended there through state grants by the Brownsville Public Utilities Board.
Why can't three or four of these outfalls be constructed west of Brownsville, at Las Prietas, downtown at the end of Palm Boulevard and in the Southmost areas to divert the water to the river and city drainage connected to these mains to alleviate the flooding? That way it won't matter if it's high or low tide, the water will flow to its natural course.
Combine this with a constant maintenance of the drainage ditches and city grates, a continuous surveillance and maintenance of debris in the ditches, and a rigorous enforcement of litter thrown in the ditches might eliminate the problem of flooding altogether. Each Monday, county Public Works crews gather used tires thrown in the semi-rural areas by used-tire shop owners who don;t want to comply with the state directives on their disposal. That has to be looked at also.
But if our elected city leaders worry about implanting microchips in dogs and cats, outlawing plastic bags and other superficial gestures to improve the quality of life, it won't matter how many potholes you patch after a flood event. We will continue to literally throw our dollars down the drain.