Are the Mayor and City Commission in Over Their Heads?

UT-Lopez???

Workmen removing floor tile from the old Lopez Supermarket on Central Blvd. could not confirm if this was yet another soon-to-be satellite campus for 2014 UTB-2015 UT-RGV, East Campus.  

"I think it used to be a meat market," offered one guy, obviously from out of town.

While the University of Texas regents were making decisions about the future of their university system's participation in the education of students in extreme south Texas, Mayor Martinez and the City Commission were out buying buildings in downtown Brownsville in the hope that the regents would find them suitable for their prospective new campus.

Mayor Martinez found one building he was certain would be suitable, La Casa del Nylon at 1305 Adams St., a property that had been on the market for over ten years, owned by his friend, Abraham Galonsky.  Before another bidder could take the property off the market, Martinez dispatched his law partner, Horacio Barrera, to purchase the building for $2,300,000, using a two year old appraisal.  

Homeless Couple Living Under Awning of steadily-
deteriorating La Casa del Nylon building.  Tony Martinez
committed Brownsville taxpayers to a 20 year Certificate
of Obligation to pay for this building.  

Mayor Martinez, evidently as new to the real estate game as the docile City Commission, violated a cardinal rule of real estate, purchasing a property for a prospective buyer without checking with the buyer first.  The mayor was acting like Uzzah of the Old Testament who "steadied" the Ark of the Covenant while on a field trip with King David.  God killed him immediately for his presumptuousness. (I apologize for all these Biblical references lately.  Yes, I'm agnostic, but I read the Bible as a kid and can't get these stories out of my head.)

The old Goodwill Store building, chosen by
UTB over La Casa del Nylon

Unfortunately, the UT regents were not interested and to this day, La Casa del Nylon, purchased well over a year ago with taxpayer dollars, now part of taxpayer assets, sits idle, in decay, one large window on the 11th Street side broken, opening the building to the elements. Yesterday, the homeless couple with all their belongings in clear plastic, were still residing under the building's Adams Street awning.  In private moments, Chancellor Cigarroa and the UT regents must chuckle at Tony Martinez and the City Commission as rank amateurs.

Fresh on the embarrassment of trying to "help" the ultrarich UT system, Tony and the Commissioners jumped into something even more deadly for Brownsville ratepayers, a $327,000,000 commitment to buy 1/4 of an 800 MW powerplant, a deal that has the impartial, but highly respected bond service, Fitch, scratching their heads. Fitch estimates that P.U.B.'s current bond rating of A+ will plummet to "negative" because of the foolish deal signed on to by Mayor Martinez and the City Commission.  (Tenaska, a legitimate company will several billions in assets is in the business of selling power plants.  Recently, citizens in Illinois and New Jersey stopped their local politicos from "buying." We have no such luck in Brownsville as our politicos are naive and our citizens don't participate.) As we reported in an earlier Mean Mister Brownsville article:

It's downright scary when a neutral, well-respected entity like Fitch declares a deal unsound, even predicting "rate fatigue," a fancy phrase for the country's most impoverished city not being able to keep up with skyrocketing utility rates. Fitch is also strongly suggesting that Brownsville doesn't need this much power or this much debt. Those are common sense conclusions that Mayor Martinez and the rest of the P.U.B. Board will simply ignore.