I had a pleasant conversation a little while ago with Ms. Estela Von Hatton, Brownsville City Secretary, on my pending requests for information on the construction and costs of Pablo Kisel Boulevard. She listed the dates that she had e-mailed Public Works on the matter, and they corresponded nicely with records of my own inquiries to her office.

I believe she’s on the right side of this and is trying to get to the bottom of the matter. As I said to her in a follow-up email, “I believe we have similar goals in this: tranparency in the city’s business, for one, but also an identification of the actions that led the city to take possession of a substandard street so that such things can be avoided in the future.”

Perhaps the city’s records might get a little better organized as a result of this inquiry. One of the difficulties Mr. Carlos Lastra cited when I first contacted him was that the records from the period–1997, when the office was run by Vernon Hodge–were not easy to locate.

We can always hope for improvement, I suppose. Then, too, Pablo Kisel has benefited from the squeaky wheel effect: Nearly all of the problems I reported photographically a while back, such as the one above, have been repaired.