CAMERON COUNTY D.A. LUIS SAENZ GETTING A HEAD START

By Juan Montoya

Well, you can never start soon enough.
It seems like we have just been through a race for the Cameron County District Attorney's Office than we are reminded that there is a race for that office in 2020.

That's two years from now.

We're used to have state representatives and U.S. reps hit the ground running and to keep on running the entire two-year terms until the next election.

In this case, DA Luis V. Saenz is already putting out his campaign cards on social media that he will be on the ballot for the Democratic Party nomination for DA two years from now.

Of course, you can't start soon enough in these races. The last two real races that Saenz has had were with nemesis Carlos Masso, a local attorney who once worked in his office and was a  commission with the Brownsville Navigation District. Those ended in runoffs and were properly bitter, hard-fought affairs that split the party with factional infighting.

Many political observers agree that in the last mano-a-mano with Masso, only the indictment of Cameron County Tax Assessor-Collector Tony Yzaguirre and resultant media splash of the indictments carried Saenz over the top.

"That arrest really gave Saenz a boost," said a former county commissioner form Harlingen. "Luis was getting behind and when Yzaguirre was busted, he really gained ground."

This time Saenz appears to be taking no chances and is putting out the word that – despite his promises when he ran last time – he want another term as the county's top cop.

Loose tongues being what they are, there is already word filtering through the porous cracks of the county courthouse on Harrison Street that the recent approval by the county commissioners court of the DA's Office to hire a computer programmer named Kyle Johnson is but one of Saenz's ducks being lined up for the campaign.

Of course, the commissioners approved him to help Asst. DA Rene Garza sort through the Border Protection Unit data to prepare reports for the grant committee of that organization. Administered as trusteed grant program through Criminal Justice Division of Governor’s Office, the BPU covers 16 prosecution offices from El Paso to Brownsville, encompassing 39 counties.

Its grants allows each DAs office to hire assistant prosecutors and investigators whose primary responsibility is to better handle and coordinate prosecution of border crimes and ancillary activities like data analysis.

On questioning by county commissioners, Rene Garza said that he was seeking use of a one-time $20,000 grant outlay to assist him in managing and collating information from the county's Odyssey computer programs which he said were unwieldy. Further, he said that an outside employee was necessary because of the sensitive nature of the information being handled.

"Why are you guys paying an outside individual money when we already have folks within out own organizational structure that deal with this on a regular daily, basis, an hourly basis in some cases?," David Garza asked.

"If you have money and are flush with dollars that you want to put out why don;t you pay the IT Department or subsidize an individual to do what you're doing because it makes no sense to duplicate efforts from my point of view," commissioner Garza said. "Why is it that you have to bring in someone from outside to do their work."

When asked if Johnson had ever worked with anyone in Cameron County, Garza said he hadn't. And when Juan Saldaña, of the county's IT office was asked if he knew of Johnson, Saldaña replied that he had never met him. Saldaña also said they had done similar work for the county's health and engineering departments as well as for Pct. 4 commissioner Gus Ruiz.

"You mean that our county IT guys couldn't come up with a way to decipher and deliver the information in the format that you need when you're presenting it to the (grants) committee," Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño asked Rene Garza. "Have you checked with Odyssey?"

Garza said that – despite the operating agreement Odyssey had with the county – that when he talked to its representatives, they told him that it would cost "a lot of  money" to cull the information and that's why he had opted to look outside Odyssey for help.

The commissioners – after being assured that BPU grant money was being used and not county funds, approved the agreement with obvious reservations.

Still, some courthouse sources say that the reason Johnson was brought on board for the computer programming work from outside was because Saenz contemplates using him to help with the strategies in his upcoming campaign. While not included in the Odyssey programming, it's nice to have someone available to do campaign voter identification strategies.

"He's lining up his ducks for 2020," said one. "Nowadays, campaigns use message designers, voter-identification experts, and, of course, computer programmers to dissect the different categories of voters. Johnson fits the bill."