An opinion

I’m sorry to come back to Brownsville’s streets as a topic. The poetry and literary discussions on the site are much more to my liking and the readership seems to have broadened out and deepened quite a bit since the shift.

I started this series—not knowing it would be a series or at least thinking it would be fairly brief series— on February 6th of this year by asking my City Council representative to look into the costs of Pablo Kisel Boulevard’s maintenance costs since it’s acceptance from the contractor.

The impetus for the inquiry came from a Brownsville Herald story on a fifteen-million dollar street construction and maintenance bond, this following “$35.7 million in 2001, $23 million in 1991 and $12.5 million in 1986 to fund street projects” cited in a recent Herald editorial on Mayor Ayumada’s proposed fifty-five million dollar bond, which points out how easily earlier money has been diverted to other projects and asks do we trust the city to use the money for the intended purpose.

Whatever my purposes in starting, I soon had information that there were problems from the start with Pablo Kisel, that deals had been made that made its construction cost much lower and its maintenance much higher, and that, furthermore, people in the city administration had signed off on those deals. So I made inquiries and, eventually, made them official requests for information.

Then I was confronted with the obstinance in answering straightforward questions. The partial answer I eventually received from the director of Public Works, Santana Torres, was not credible. Labeled as an “estimate,” it appeared to have been concocted from a combination of dartboard throws and voodoo.

The request for the agreements made on the streets construction are being ignored as far as I know. The City Secretary suggested that I could pay perhaps hundreds of dollars for documents and clerk time or become a fixture in the Public Works office being led around in circles. Now she won’t answer simple questions about the status of the requests, apparently waiting for me to either go away or get a lawyer, either direction guaranteed to delay actually releasing information.

What bothers most here is that public officials seem to have adopted an “us versus them” attitude and feel fine ignoring citizen requests as though the citizen were not a part of this city, too. I do not have ambitions beyond a good poem once and again, and I represent no political interest or politician. Perhaps that’s the trouble.

There is something to be said, I suppose, to being the squeaky wheel. I wrote to Councilman Cisneros a while back reporting trash and brush in the storm sewers. The next couple of weeks saw a crew working through the neighborhood, clearing things out. But, I must ask, is that the way it should work?

Should known maintenance problems be handled ad hoc, or should they be part of a scheduled maintenance program. Call up Public Works one of these days and ask when the sewers in your street are scheduled to be cleaned. They’ll be baffled, seeming to have no idea what a schedule is, but the likelihood is that yours will be cleaned and soon, because, apparently, their motivation is that they “don’t want no trouble.”

While I’m bellyaching about Public Works, why, when they needed a director, did they advertise for a person with a degree in liberal arts rather than engineering? I was a liberal arts major and understand that we are generalists ready to do anything with a little lead time. During a spate of enthusiasm for computers, I learned no less than four programming languages. We’re flexible. But shouldn’t Public Works have the benefit of a disciplined, engineering mind? A little professionalism? (McAllen, to whom Brownsville is not to be compared, according to our mayor, has eight actual engineers on its payroll.) Perhaps if our politicians were a little more honest about what it costs to run a city, we’d quit cutting these corners.

At present, my answer to the Herald’s question is no. At present the city’s administration appears to be much more interested in covering it’s nicely-padded tail than coming up with straight answers on how things are going, answers to questions, which, as a matter of law (Government Code, Section 552.022), it is their duty to answer. We would do well to clean our house from attic to cellar and start over.