CITY OF BROWNTOWN MAKING LIKE A ROLLING STONE

By Juan Montoya

Ah, the All America City, Brownsville, Texas.

The poorest city in the United States. A city with such a sorry infrastructure that a steady rain floods it within the half hour and the the resulting potholes and bumpy roads keep the llanteros in business patching tires, repair shops replacing cracked windshields, and otherwise-unemployed welders in muffler shops busy patching up cars.

It also provides the city's Public Works crew with job security because they will spend the time patching up potholes until the next rain comes along and washes the asphalt into the drain. 

The Gotham of the South with more homeless living on the streets (and parks and store doorways) of downtown per square block than any other in the Rio Grande Valley.

You used to laugh about

Everybody that was hanging out

Now you don't talk so loud

Now you don't seem so proud

About having to be scrounging your next meal...

The city where the population is polarized by economic, societal, class, and snob status and where government caters to the whims of the rich on the backs of the poor. A city with an impoverished population that sees its meager resources poured into real-estate speculation by its mayor and his cronies, and funding the whims of self-styled gentry who think that bike-and-hike trails, markets of non-farmers, and dog runs will transform Browntown into Austin-by-the-Rio-Grande.

The city that was content to allow its scarce economic development dollars be squandered by overpaid underachievers who remained on the public teat by wining and dining public officials and bureaucrats and treating them to junkets around the globe on the job-development nickle. Off goes Hilts to Colombia, Brazil, the Paris Air show. Off goes Martinez to the Netherlands, to Turkey, Bogota, etc. And the jobs? No one asked, even after they knew.

A city where the elite think that their offspring, regardless of their talents, or lack thereof, entitle them to continue sucking the lifeblood of the people at the public trough. And where the truly talented and gifted without the benefit of their pedigree leave the city to impart their knowledge to the benefit of  other communities where they become leaders in government, business, academia, the sciences, and the arts, while the mediocre heirs of the Brownsville elite hold back its progress and are, in fact, fear it may derail their gravy train.

The Lucios, Garcias, Oliverias, Rentfros, Tiptons, Gallegos, Cowens, Zavalettas, Galonskys, etc.,
Before that it was the Cardenas, the McNairs, the Yturrias, the Pates, the Garzas, Hernandezes, Yznagas, etc.

The city where a sanctimonious leader drapes a mantle of holiness to cover his rapacious plundering of the meager city budget. A leader who speaks of bistros, Cyclobias, and other esoteric balderdash and turns a blind eye to the squalor around him. Patriotism used to be their last refuge. In his case, it has become religion.

The city where the municipal budget is buttressed yearly by $13 million transfers from the city-owned utility to cover its perpetual deficit, making it, in effect, a double taxation on the PUB rate payers, the majority of them residential; the majority of them low- and lower-middle class.

A city leadership that has been content to have bilked the poor and hiked the utility rates by more than one third with the promise of a $500 million magic electric plant that will never be built. 

And a leadership on the board of the PUB that has given its top three administrators $100,000 in raises each over three years to reward their prescient prophesy that the plant was needed. All the while the PUB sits on $100 million from the higher utility rates gouged from the poor.

The city that yearns to indulge in the pomp and circumstance of days gone by. The city that despises everything Mexican for 51 weeks, and then drapes on the costumes of charros and peons and befriends a Mesican for one week and wines and dines him/her and calls them their "ameego."

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?

People call say 'beware doll, you're bound to fall'

You thought they were all kidding you

In fact, it is a city where there is no one leading as if on purpose so they can dodge the blame when things inevitably go wrong. It's as if suddenly the word "interim" has become city officials' most popular first name.

The is no city manager, only an interim.

There is no city attorney, only an interim.

There is no police chief, only an interim.

There is no fire chief, only an interim.

There is no traffic director, only an interim.

There is no Human Resources director, only an interim.

There is no Health Department Director (?), only an interim. 

There is no building inspector, only an interim.

There is no Animal Control Department director, only an interim.

In the absence of anyone at the helm, politicians and bureaucrats have a free hand in "managing" the city's assets as they see fit. And the average Maria and Jose – and the rest of us – ride the slouching beast into the yawning abyss. 

How does it feel, how does it feel?

To be on your own, with no direction home

Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone