AT COB, HEADS ARE ROLLING, NOW SALINAS IS GONE, TOO

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

It took a while, but after years' long roller coaster ride, Oscar Salinas, formerly head of the City of Brownsville Human Resources office has been terminated.

No, Oscar still lives, but he is no longer on the city payroll.

Salinas was one of those COB survivors in the stable of former City Manager Charlie Cabler who over time had learned  how to roll with the punches, did as he was told, and lived to collect another check at the end of two weeks. 

People were hired, promoted, moved, and fired at the whim of the city administration and prompting by some city commissioners and Salinas provided the justifications, however flimsy. Salinas payed a roll in the hiring and firing in the city bureaucracy for many years until things got a bit heavy and he had to be moved over to another department to deflect the heat from the city manager's office, HR, and the city commissioners.

His was was one of those transfers which is not really a demotion since they keep the same salary, but end up with duties that one – from looking at their resume – wouldn't think they had the training or ability to perform. You know, a kind of On The Job (OTJ) training at a nifty salary.

In Salinas' case, he went from the head of HR to something called a Traffic and Business Systems Analyst (?) over at the traffic department with his same $86,141 salary.

We suspect that as new city manager Noel Bernal looked at his personnel's salary schedule he might have been intrigued at how it came to be that Salinas was making more than Traffic Signals Administrator E.D. Levson at $49,760, $36,381 less than Salinas, who spent his time busily analyzing traffic and business systems for the COB. No one else in the department came close to pulling down those kinds of bucks.    

Salinas' tenure in the department started after he made the lateral move in 2018, and he outlasted his former HR assistant director Josh Perez who was also given a pink slip about a year ago. Even today, no one is saying what the specific transgression got him off the city payroll.

As Bernal grows acquainted with the byzantine workings of the COB bureaucracy, he will undoubtedly stumble across "sleeper" lateral transfers without sense or reason working at specialties outside their job descriptions. These lateral "demotions" have plagued the city for years and drained the resources better spent on facilities and services for city residents than to hide personnel who served a purpose and than had to be put out of sight, and our of mind.