Will the City of Brownsville Transfer/Sell Lincoln Park Without So Much As A Public Hearing?

I've lived in cities with beautiful parks; Seattle, Fort Worth and, for more than two decades, North Little Rock, with its famous Burns Park, second in size among city parks only to New York's Central Park.

I've never lived in a city that utilizes its city's parks more than Brownsville. Last year on Easter Sunday, Charlie Cabler Park was filled with at least 500 people, family groups, each staking out a small section of the park as their own, gathered around a grill, boom box, and blanket, with the kids fanning out on scooters and bicycles or setting up a volleyball net.  Some of the largest piñatas I've ever seen were suspended by rope tied to tree limbs.  

City parks, these protected areas of greenery, ecosystem and ground cover are an irreplaceable legacy for our children and grandchildren, not simply an asset to be traded or sold.  Want to get into a fistfight?  Suggest to a New Yorker that Central Park be sold off for commercial development or to build more skyscrapers.  Yes, these parks are just as valuable on a city level as Yellowstone or Yosemite are to the country as a whole.

Still, we've been told that the Brownsville's City Commission will consider, in a 15 minute executive session at 5:45 PM February 4, donating or selling two parcels of land totaling 76 acres to the University of Texas system.  One of the parcels is said to be Lincoln Park.  I've been told that UT will pay $6,000,000 for the parcels.(Later today, we will endeavor to detail how valuable this particular park is to the city.)

Juliet Garcia, not ashamed
to take Brownsville assets

Some of the methodology leading to a February 2013 resolution by the City Commission that, should UTB, or its eventual successor as a satellite university of UT, locate downtown, the City of Brownsville would donate two parcels of land totaling 76 acres to the UT system, seems to cross ethical, if not legal lines.  For example, we're told that, prior to the City Commission resolution, City Commissioners, individually or in groups of two, visited with outgoing UTB President Juliet Garcia in her office, where she detailed the university's plan. Would not such behind-closed-doors discussion of city business constitute an illegal walking quorum?

There is an arguable difference of opinion as to the exact meaning of the vague resolution agreed upon last February by the City Commission.  Some feel that the meaning of the UT system locating "downtown" was to utilize some of the third-tier buildings the City Commission purchased in the downtown business area, something UT had no interest in doing.  They simply stayed where they were.

Another odd aspect of the negotiations to give away Lincoln Park, was the city's bypassing of their own team of attorneys, Mark Sossi, John Chosy and Allison Bastain, but instead using Judge Andrew Hanen's wife, Diane Dillard, to work out the deal.  Why was that expensive move necessary?

The stinkiest part of this whole deal, yet so in sync with the Tony Martinez' way of doing things, is there was/is no public involvement. The City Commission is on the brink of transferring one of the city's prized parks without so much as a public hearing!  That's disgraceful!

(to be continued)