Interim City Planner Ramiro Gonzalez gave the same power point he'd given at the town hall meeting, not mentioning the overwhelming objection to the increase by downtown business owners. Again, he made the misrepresentation that downtown Brownsville was "congested" due to employees of downtown businesses "pumping quarters into the meters." This blog has repeatedly shown pictorial evidence, that on the busiest days, two downtown metered streets, Jefferson and St. Charles, remain empty, while two others, Adams and Levee have many open spaces. (Tony Martinez, through his hey boy Ramiro Gonzalez, has been trying to raise parking meter revenue since 2011. This mayoral administration, foolish in spending, has tried to raise rates and revenue every conceivable way. Unfortunately, no one on the inexperienced city commission has helped much until the recent efforts to block Tony's illegal tapping into the $3,060,000 AEP Texas settlement fund. Likely, Finance Director Pete Gonzalez, nearing retirement, has tried to curb Martinez behind the scenes.)
Another contention by Ramiro Gonzalez is that there is a $20-30,000 shortfall in the parking meter fee program. Of course, Harlingen, with free downtown parking fees, has no such shortfall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAEZnS2ZstU&list=PL_ffKf9NIs6nbZ9UrM0iak03tyBPTqZnF#t=2620
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Blah, blah, blah. Nothing will come from this, Barton.
ReplyDeleteBrownsville Poverty:
ReplyDelete1. Single moms are the problem. Only 9 percent of low-income, urban moms have been single throughout their child’s first five years. Thirty-five percent were married to, or in a relationship with, the child’s father for that entire time.
2. Absent dads are the problem. Sixty percent of low-income dads see at least one of their children daily. Another 16 percent see their children weekly.
3. Black dads are the problem. Among men who don’t live with their children, black fathers are more likely than white or Hispanic dads to have a daily presence in their kids’ lives.
4. Poor people are lazy. In 2004, there was at least one adult with a job in 60 percent of families on food stamps that had both kids and a nondisabled, working-age adult.
5. If you’re not officially poor, you’re doing okay. The federal poverty line for a family of two parents and two children in 2012 was $23,283. Basic needs cost at least twice that in 615 of America’s cities and regions.
6. Go to college, get out of poverty. In 2012, about 1.1 million people who made less than $25,000 a year, worked full time and were heads of household had a bachelor’s degree.**
7. We’re winning the war on poverty. The number of households with children living on less than $2 a day per person has grown 160 percent since 1996, to 1.65 million families in 2011.
8. The days of old ladies eating cat food are over. The share of elderly single women living in extreme poverty jumped 31 percent from 2011 to 2012.
9. The homeless are drunk street people. One in 45 kids in the United States experiences homelessness each year.
10. Handouts are bankrupting us. In 2012, total welfare funding was 0.47 percent of the federal budget.
By Perez Prado
ReplyDeleteUPI
Embattled Hidalgo County Sheriff Guadalupe “Lupe” Treviño - one of the border’s most powerful law enforcement officials, whose office has been roiled with allegations of corruption - formally announced his resignation Friday.
Scandal has dogged Treviño since ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI arrested his son Jonathan Treviño, a former Mission police officer, in December 2012. Since at least 2006, 30-year-old Jonathan Treviño had run a street-level narcotics task force called the Panama Unit in Hidalgo County. In March 2013, Jonathan and other officers associated with the Panama Unit - including five Hidalgo County deputies - were indicted for “conspiring to possess with intent to distribute” cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine.”
For years, according to law enforcement sources, the task force had ripped off local dealers then resold the drugs for a profit. (The Panama Unit members pled guilty in 2013 and are still awaiting sentencing.) The news that the sheriff’s own son had been running a corrupt drug task force—while he lived with the sheriff—was shocking for many Rio Grande Valley residents. But it was only the beginning of the scandal that would roil the sheriff’s office.
Tony Martinez: We reap what we sew.
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