THE FALLOUT ON 3 STOLEN CHIZCAS TRANSPORTING ALIENS

By Juan Montoya
Suddenly, city officials who lauded the idea of placing rental bikes costing in the thousands of dollars for rent in downtown sites have gone silent over the recent theft of three of them (or more) and used by illegal aliens to catch a train out of town.
Heralded as a move to improve city residents' health and to make the city bike-friendly, the bikes were supposed to be theft proof and could only be operated by the use of an app on a person's cell phone.

Well, if car thieves from Matamoros can hot wire the most modern cars and drive them across the river, what made city officials think that they couldn't break into the bike racks and make off with the new bikes?
In the case of three bikes, the police told a local broadcaster that they didn't know who took the bikes, whether they were in fact stolen, or whether the perpetrators meant to return them.
"Right now we're just handling it as a missing bikes case," a BPD spokesman told the reporter.

The bikes were found, along with a backpack and a gallon of flavored water, out toward FM 511 in the Rio Del Sol Subdivision. That subdivision is adjacent to the railroad tracks leading northward. A pair of shorts left on one of the bikes was still wet from the swim across the river. The backpack also contained a package of condoms.

The fact that the city is spending so much money on the bikes, app software, and the maintenance agreements with the vendors didn't sit well with
some local residents.

The whole biking thrust has been spearheaded by city commissioner rose Gowen, as has the proliferation of bike and hike trails.
One of her fellow commissioners, Rick Longoria, said he had voted against the idea of the rental bikes because he suspected something like this might happen.
"The only vote against it. Right here.," He wrote. "Waste of our taxpayers money,"

Dino Chavez followed suit and said that if every politician was held accountable for funds wasted, stolen of used inefficiently during their tenure, they would think twice about how they spent it.
"It's quite different when the money you are spending is not your own."
Others, most notably Ruben Gallegos, Jr., questioned the continued emulation of large urban centers in Central and North Texas such as Austin and Ft. Worth who have the rental bikes saying that one size does not necessarily fit all.
"(Brownsville) does not have a bustling downtown or a road system that is bike friendly," he wrote. "Just because it works in Austin or Ft. Worth doesn't mean it will work here...It amazes me how much one aggressive commissioner can do regardless of the validity of the idea."
And Zeke Silva (in whose neighborhood the three stolen bikes were found) pitched in his two-cents worth on the issue.
"We paid stupid tax payers money for bikes to give away. How much money has the poorest city in the United States of American lost over commissioner Rose Gowen wanting to grandstand over her project? Now they want GPS on every bike..."

But, according to the police and the city administration, no crime has occurred and no theft has been reported. They'll probably just throw more good money after bad as usual.