WITH ELECTIONS OVER, EVERYTHING ROSIE IN SAN PEDRO

By Juan Montoya
A few weeks before this year's City of Brownsville commission elections, incumbents John Villarreal and Rose Gowen suddenly realized that San Pedro, which is inside the city boundaries, had a water problem.

Taking their dog and pony show, they called a quickie "town hall" meeting where they made the appropriate sympathetic sounds and assured those present that they – if reelected to the city commission – would do their utmost to castigate the nasty board of directors of the Military Highway Water Supply Corp. and bring back fresh water to their burg.

Alas, for hapless Villarreal, that would not happen. He got beat by challenger Ben Neece for District 4 and would not be in a position to help them. However, Gowen was a different story. Here she was, a practicing gynecologist with a bent toward public health given her past association with the University of Texas School of Public Health, the farmers' market, cyclobia, etc., and in general, everything healthy.

In fact, her campaign signs featured her with a girl-next-door country gal type of look complete with radishes, carrots, lettuce and asparagus in her bike basket.
How could you not trust that freshly-scrubbed country face?

Surely, clean, healthy drinking water ranked at the top of her list for her constituents' health.

San Pedro residents, literally at the tail end of the supply chain for the water district, have been putting up with tainted water because of contaminated pipes that have not been maintained as they should have been. Cleanup efforts have proven to be extremely expensive and residents now buy their drinking water and have to put up with the tap water that varies from yellowish to a suspicious-looking tint that no one want to consume.

So when Villarreal and Gowen came to town making soothing noises, the residents believed them.
Ah, but what a difference an election makes. With Villarreal gone, local residents turned their hopeful eyes to the good doctor and called her after she had won, with their help, of course.

We have it from at least a handful of residents who heard Gowen's siren call that Rose has suddenly lost interest in their public health issue. There is nothing she can do for them, she is said to have told them when they called to inquire about the heavy lifting she had promised them before they darkened the oval next to her name on the city ballot.

And so the hapless residents of San Pedro were taught another lesson in municipal politics by one of the masters of the craft. Maybe if they had asked her to put a bike trail from Military Highway to Olmito she would have been a bit more helpful. Aguas, San Pete!