IN THE SHERIFF'S RACE, "A REFERENDUM ON THE REYNAS..."

By Juan Montoya

Sheriff Omar Lucio and Chief Deputy Gus Reyna

For 19 years, incumbent Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio has enjoyed the sympathies of the electorate who saw him as a nice, safe, grampa.

Even though he's getting along in his years - he's past 80 now - Lucio is still a likeable guy. He's safe and unless he talks, you could hardly notice the natural vestiges of age on a person.

But now, as we travel around the county, it is becoming clear that not even Lucio's natural likeability can overcome the widespread public perception that he is not actually running the 500-plus strong sheriff's department. Many tell us that the power behind the throne is actually wielded by Chief Deputy Gus Reyna and his brother Capt. Javier Reyna.

No one believes, for example, that Lucio single-handedly confiscated humongous amounts of drugs or cash from the Mexican cartels, or that he personally arrested nefarious criminals with his handy handcuffs and personally marched them out to Rucker-Carrizales for their misdeeds.

Former District Clerk Eric Garza

And no one in their right mind would suggest that he has personally overseen the care and custody of nearly 1,000 prisoners, many of them hardened gang members, who are waiting trial or transfer pal rancho 'pa agarrar "su numero."

"Con quien corres, bro?," prisoners are asked when they get to Olmito. Depending on the gang membership, they are placed in a cell block run by that gang where the gang bosses run the cell and administer discipline on their members.

The sheriff's position, is, in short, a purely administrative duty busy with personnel, budgets, and the relations with the county's administration, the State of Texas, the federal government, the Cameron County District Attorney's Office, the county's constables, municipal police departments, etc. On top of that, he has to get reelected every four years to keep the current staff in place. In fact, the staff well knows that their employment depends on keeping not only Lucio happy, but also his main administrators, the Reynas, contented.

To say that the department has run like a top is delusional. His challenger in the current Democratic Party runoff, former District Clerk Eric Garza has pulled no punches and pointed out the administrative shortcomings of the current crew. The list is long and embarrassing to a seasoned laman like Lucio. But it points to what could be his downfall in this race: his misplaced faith on his top administrators.

There are the usual problems with the jails and their non-compliance with the Texas Commission on Jail Standards (TCJS) that had been chronic from 2005-2012, and then later in 2015 and 2019 until a month before the March Democratic party primary in 2020.

While this may seem trivial, the results  have proven fatal to at least 18 inmates since Lucio has been in office. At first, many believed that the claims in the Garza ads of deaths of inmates in custody were exaggerated. Not so.

Incarceration for minor and non-capital crimes at Rucker-Carrizales have proved a death sentence to these inmates. It has also meant pain and suffering for their families. In television ads, Garza has pointed out that the custodial death reports rom the Texas Attorney General's Office show that a trip to Carrizales under county custody could cost you your life. https://oagtx.force.com/cdr/cdrreportdeaths

Again, it's not Lucio who is personally in charge of the inmates, but the buck stops at his desk as chief administrator of the jails under the Texas Constitution. It comes with the territory. He's a nice enough man, but does this shelter him from responsibility for the life and death of a human being? No. It depends on who he, as chief administrator, places in charge there. The results speak for themselves.

And in the year after he announced for reelection in 2019, his deputies behaving badly resulted in embarrassing disclosures that some of them were propositioning (and robbing) prostitutes in Hidalgo County, "fixing" DWI charges to lesser offenses, and one correction guard was caught selling pot to inmates after some of the prisoners snitched on him.

And who can forget shen a Brownsville man was killed in front of his family after  hardened criminal overpowered the lone guard sent with seven prisoners, slashed is throat, stole his gun, and swam acoss a resaca where he broke into a house, shot the man, and stole his car. The inmate died trying to make his getaway, but jot before he had reached San Benito.

After that, Lucio said his orders on transporting dangerous prisoners had been ignored.

That's not exactly what a sheriff wants the public to hear about his employees, that they ignores his orders, and points to the ineffectual personnel screening procedures in place. Perhaps the most embarrassing disclosure is that one of his staff promoted to a supervisory role as sergeant had been arrested for desertion from the U.S. Army. How can a competent Human Resources Office miss that?

At the start of the campaign, there were vile rumors floated by anonymous (of course) sheriff's supporters that Garza was the beneficiary of cartel money that would allow the cartels to invade the county if Lucio was not reelected. Then, social media posts (also anonymous) of former District Clerk Office employees complained that Garza was ruthless in making them show up for work on time on threat of getting written up and posts were were published alleging that he and his administrators often spent time away from the office themselves.

Then, former San Benito Police Dept. Chief Michael Galvan, who came in last in the Democratic primary election, and is obviously angling for a position at the department and spreading social media posts, darkly hinted that Garza may be responsible for a missing laptop from the district clerk' office. So far, Galvan has not filed a complaint with local police but is content to allow the uncorroborated allegation to fester.

The former employee's allegations of Garza's absence from office when he was a department head is a slim hook of course, since elected officials and administrators work under different rules and looking out for the taxpayers so that they get an honest day's work for an honest day's work from county employees is the least county taxpayers should expect.

When they were employed, we're sure these employees agreed to be there to serve the public during the hours of office operation. Being there, it is said, is 85 percent of the job.

That peccadillo, if applied to Chief Deputy Reyna, might be devastating given the repeated instances of alcohol-related scrapes that he has been involved in and managed somehow to dodge the bullets. People have seen that and wondered the why in the difference in the treatment of the chief from the average Joe.

"The runoff election between Garza and Omar will come down to a referendum on the Reynas," said a longtime county politics watcher who was a road supervisor in the 1990s and early 2020s. "Omar is loyal to his employees, but his people have made him look bad."

Now voters in this runoff will decide whether to stay the dubious "course" or opt to hand the administration of the office to younger hands.