Tony's Control of City Commission Fading Fast

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     Although we still may not know Tony Martinez' vision for the city, we do know it does not include representative democracy.  In his first ever city commission meeting, Tony hoodwinked two young commissioners into relinquishing their traditional appointments to one of the key boards controlling millions of dollars of tax money.  While the rest of the commission watched Tony reappointed two good old boys, one for good attendance to prestigious boards.  

     More recently, Tony pushed through a plan to change the way members to the BDEC, GBIC and PUB boards are appointed.   At the 2/07/12 City Commission meeting Martinez was set to reap the first harvest from his newly installed plan.  If only he enjoyed papal infallibility and his wishes were viewed as sacred dogma.  But that is not the case.  This commission is gradually realizing that Tony is not the only one voted into office.  His role as mayor is to confer and reach consensus with a set of commissioners each possessing the same number of votes he does.    Tony's 4 appointees were rejected.  

     Melissa Zamora, in her blog "Blogging All Things Brownsville" reports on the meeting:

Tonight's City Commission Meeting

It was an interesting meeting.

There were several appointments to be made to the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation tonight. There were four board appointments that expired on 12/31/11. And, upon adoption of the new board appointment's policy at the last meeting, which I did not agree with, the City Commission was now poised to make appointments.

There were several applicants, and all but two were representative of District 3, my district. I would love for my district to have several representatives on that board, and any board for that matter. However, I didn't find that the representation would be representative of all districts. Commissioners argued that the intent of the new board appointment policy was to have the "best" representation on all boards. Still, this conflicted with the intent of creating district commissioners -- to provide city-wide representation.

After a heated discussion, it was decided that the board appointments be tabled to allow for district representation on BCIC. I know this was not the intent of passing the new board appointment policy, but in my opinion, it was the right thing to do.

In other business, the BCIC bylaws were revised to allow for removal of board members should they miss three meeting either regular or special meetings. I do agree that this was needed, but I was disappointed that when I proposed something similar for GBIC prior to the last city election, I didn't have any support on the commission. There were GBIC board members who had missed several consecutive meetings, yet remained on this board that makes multi-million dollar decisions. I expressed my frustration today, too. Why did we allow board members to remain on GBIC when they were frequently absent? Politics. Pft.

posted by Melissa Zamora @ Tuesday, February 07, 2012  16 commentslinks to this post 

wednesday, february 1, 2012