Shared Email and Blog Commenters Provide A Glimpse of Carlos Marin's Role Within United Brownsville

Carlos Marin(Celebrity Magazine photo)

A frequently repeated theme in Brownsville's blogs and citizen chitchat is that the city is actually run by a group of power brokers from behind the scenes, apart from, but very much connected to local government.  The name of Carlos Marin, the CEO of Ambiotec Engineering, gets frequent mention in such discussions likely because his firm was involved in the production of the Imagine Brownsville Comprehensive Plan, a coffee table sized paperback the City of Brownsville was duped into purchasing for $900,000, but was never implemented.

While a single sidewalk was never laid or a tree trimmed as result of the plan, which now lays on city bookshelves gathering dust, a sort of city supervisory board did emerge, eventually morphing into something called United Brownsville.  IBC Bank President Fred Rusteberg, chairs this panel, that includes Carlos Marin, outgoing UTB President Juliet Garcia and also cleverly incorporated City Commissioners Estela Chavez-Vasquez and John Villarreal along with Mayor Tony Martinez.

Carlos Marin keeps an extremely low profile.  It's almost impossible to find of picture of him on the internet.  He serves on many, many local boards besides United Brownsville(Farmer's Market, V.I.D.A., etc.), but his name is never accompanied by a picture.  The photo above was taken by Celebrity Magazine, whose photographers attend public events taking pictures of locals, hoping to sell their glossy magazine to those immortalized in it.  The above pic of Marin originally included Ernie Hernandez(Ernie was cropped out as irrelevant to this story).  At a recent United Brownsville/City Commission meeting held at United Way of Southern Cameron, Marin did not utter a word.

Nevertheless, a forwarded email among members of United Brownsville seems to verify that Carlos Marin plays a major role within the group despite his quiet public persona.  Notice in the email below, how Mike Gonzalez, the Executive Director of United Brownsville emails the board members about a BiNED Summit Event.  Carlos Marin instructs Gonzalez to "clean up the generic text" so the invitation can be circulated "ASAP" to "invitees."

Robin McCaffrey, Carolyn McIntosh

The BiNED Summit 2013, scheduled for December 6 at UTB's Gran Salon, includes presentations by Robin McCaffrey and Carolyn McIntosh of Needham-McCaffrey & Associates, Inc., who recently received $454,592.08 for the Greater Brownsville Infrastructure & Development Plan, yet another study purchased by City of Brownsville tax-payer, rate-payer entities(Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation, Port of Brownsville, P.U.B.).


Commenters to this blog hinted that Carlos Marin will profit handsomely from this study, much as he did from the Imagine Brownsville Comprehensive Plan:

AnonymousNovember 19, 2013 at 7:47 AM

"If you look at this Jim, this plan is directly tied with Imagine Brownsville. Carlos Marin is the one that brought this firm to Brownsville and he was the one that worked hand in hand to get this study done. It accomplishes nothing but gives credence to the imagine Brownsville document. It is another pipe dream that in all costs over two billion dollars. When is the community going to wake up and stop giving money to Marin? They are going after commissioners for giving a family member a job, but a guy that steals millions from the community is free to roam and keep stealing."

and yet another comment:

AnonymousNovember 1, 2013 at 8:27 AM

"Marin is behind this corridor also Jim. He owns interest all around the corridor. He is the biggest thief in Brownsville. He is pushing now to make Oscar Garcia Jr. the director at GIBIC,..his trusted puppet. The item was tabled in yesterday."

From: Mike Gonzalez [mailto:mikeg@unitedbrownsville.com] 
Sent: Friday, November 08, 2013 4:46 PM
To: carlos marin
Cc: Marisela Cortez; Mark Kroll; Perry Brody; Alan Artibise; Pablo Rhi-Perez; FRED RUSTEBERG; Irv Downing; John L. Villarreal; Gerardo A Gonzalez
Subject: Re: BiNED Summit Website

website is cleaned up . . . please include it in your communications.


http://borderinsight.com


event registration option will be online over weekend.


TWITTER FEATURE: anything you tweet to hashtag #BiNEDSummit will come out on summit's website twitter feed. If you are logged into twitter you can simply click on the twitter button on the summit website to tweet from your account.



MIKE

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 8, 2013, at 1:39 PM, carlos marin wrote:

Nice job mike . Can you please clean up/remove the last parts with the generic text so we can forward to our invitees ASAP?

Carlos Marin Ph.D. P.E.
Ambiotec Group
Infrastructure Planning Engineering and Management
(956)778-4551
cmmarin@ambiotec.com

On Nov 8, 2013, at 11:54 AM, Mike Gonzalez wrote:

All - 

Below is the BiNED Summit Event website. We can direct invitees to this site for general information and registration.

The domain is www.borderinsight.com.

My hope is that after the summit we can transition this site to continue both action and dialogue to keep moving our BiNED concept forward. It will mainly be an aggregator site similar to mashable.com or BuzzFeed.com but solely on border issues.

The idea came to me after the San Diego conference where everyone expressed frustration on getting the "Border" message out to both DC and the American public. Hopefully this will help our region have a voice and allow us to join the conversation along with SD.

Thanks,

Mike

Addendum:  An engineer and his wife we run into at city events made this candid comment to me:  "I bid on smaller engineering projects in the city.  I've learned over the years that I'm just wasting my time and money studying and preparing a bid on the larger projects.  Those ALWAYS go to Ambiotec, regardless of the bid."