SOMETIMES RIGHT AND WRONG IS A BLURRY CALICHE LINE

By Juan Montoya

A long time ago, when I was an administrative assistant with Cameron County Precinct 1, I remember dealing with the issue of undedicated roads.

Periodically, someone – usually someone driving by a road – would complain that the county crews were putting caliche on undedicated roads. Sometimes it was for politics. 

Other times, it was because the people needed a way out after rain storms gutted the existing road in their colonias. Usually, it never got to the level of state prosecution and the workers were disciplined and told not to do it again.

As the supervisor in the precinct, I was in the middle of demands by the resident that we at least send a grader to smooth out the dirt roads and the prohibition in the law that you didn't send crews, machinery, or materials to an undedicated road. Some wanted caliche, too, but they knew they couldn't demand it.

For the most part, I followed the law. But I must confess that sometimes I followed my moral compass and did what I though was right, and not necessarily legal. Let me explain.

Back before Sunny Skies, a colonia at the corner of Dockberry and Indiana roads in precinct 1 was legalized after a long and costly process by the county and the State of Texas, we could not enter the colonia. The residents shared one single spigot of water provided by the El Jardin Water District at the entrance to the colonia. The residents carried the water in buckets and barrels for their domestic use.

The Brownsville Independent School District administrators came to the county commissioners court asking that the county provide some caliche and machinery to spread it on the only dirt road that led into the colonia. The law, legal counsel said, prohibited us from doing that until the colonia was legalized and the road dedicated to the county road system. That meant that it would be years before we could service the residents even though they paid county taxes.

The BISD administrators said they wanted the caliche on the road in order for their buses to be able to pick up one Special Needs child who used a wheelchair and lived in a house at the very end of the cul-de-sac in the colonia and could not walk to the entrance of the colonia to be picked up by his bus. 

If their buses could not enter, the parents would have to negotiate though the mud and water puddles to bring him up to the entrance of the colonia at the edge of Indiana Road. Our hands were tied, we told them.

One day my road foreman( Joe Cuellar, el borrado) and I were driving along Dockberry and we happened to see the boy's parents pushing his wheelchair through the mud to bring him to the road to be picked up by the bus. Both were elderly and they labored through the grassy edge of the drive to push him along. They were exhausted and their clothes and shoes were muddy and the child's wheelchair and clothing were  splattered with muck. Right then and there we conspired to break the law.

It just so happened that the Villa Pancho Subdivision was about a mile south on Indiana and it had been scheduled for a caliche overlay. Villa Pancho was a long drive, about half a mile long. It took about 30 to 35 truckloads of caliche to cover it. I told our secretary (Rosie) to order an additional five truckloads for the job. 

During the course of the day when the trucks were arriving to deliver the caliche to Villa Pancho, as they passed by Sunny Skies, I told Cuellar to direct five of them to empty their loads of caliche in the Sunny Skies drive and to make sure that they got to the very end where the handicapped child lived.

If they were asked, the residents were to tell people that they had piggybacked on the county caliche contract and purchased the five caliche loads with their own money. 

They were to spread the caliche themselves because we could not have county machinery there. They happily agreed. The caliche lasted for five or six months until we had to redo Villa Pancho.

Years later, the Valley Morning Star had a story by reporter Raul Garcia Jr. where he quoted a 71-year-old resident of Freddie Gomez Road saying she was dearly appreciative that former Cameron County Judge Pete Sepulveda (and now county administrator) ordered the road crews of Precinct 4 to spread road millings on the undedicated road.

Garcia wrote:
Madelyn Fairbanks, who has lived on Freddie Gomez Road for many years, knows what the road used to be like. Fairbanks said she could stand in the potholes ankles deep. The water collected, and the mosquitoes bred in the potholes.

Last March, that all changed. More than 500 feet of the road was paved with mill to harden the dirt road, leaving a smooth surface for Fairbanks and her neighbors on which to drive."

Eventually, it led to his indictment and deferred adjudication. Today, he again is county administrator in charge of, among other things, the county's road system. And after years of laboring to straighten out the mess, the Sunny Skies colonia in Pct. 1 was accepted by the county and the road was dedicated and crews could enter the right-of-way to improve it. Eventually it was paved under commissioner Sofia Benavides.

Was Sepulveda wrong to help these elderly county taxpayers on Freddie Gomez Road?

What he did – and I, as well – clearly wasn't legal. I could have been easily indicted just as he was for what I did to help the parents and their handicapped child get to the school bus.

It wasn't legal. But up to today, I still feel that it was the right thing to do.