EDINBURG — The city will soon need to find a new city manager after current City Manager Ron Garza announced Friday he would be resigning.
Garza was joined by Mayor Ramiro Garza and the city council to announce he would be leaving to take a position with the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
“It is truly with a heavy heart that I will be leaving my role, city manager,” Garza said. “But I’m equally excited for the role that I’ll be undertaking there at UTRGV and I think it’s going to have just substantial and enormous impact to the entire region and also to, specifically, the city of Edinburg.”
His new role at the school, associate vice president of the workforce and the economic development, will focus on working with cities to boost those two sectors.
“They’re consolidating workforce and economic development into a new office of workforce and economic development,” Garza said. “I’ll be overseeing or leading that, working with cities all across the Valley really to help leverage the resources of UTRGV to help create more jobs, more industry, more economic development opportunities.”
Before he was hired as Edinburg city manager in February 2020, Garza served as the executive director of the Lower Rio Grande Valley Development Council. The decision to leave the city, he said, was a hard one to make but was driven by two reasons.
The first was because of the opportunity that came from the new position with the university, which he said was the vision of Guy Bailey, the president of UTRGV, and Veronica Gonzalez, the senior vice president for governmental and community relations.
“Quite frankly, in my mind, dreaming up what (UTRGV) should be doing to help support our cities and economic development, this would be exactly it,” Garza said. “I am literally moving into a dream role and there’s probably nobody else in the Valley that could’ve taken me away from the job that I love here as city manager but Dr. Bailey and Veronica Gonzalez.”
The second factor was the commitment to his family which includes his wife and two children.
“This is a good fit to keep me home a little bit more,” he said.
Before he moves on, Garza will remain with the city until they hire a replacement.
Still, his announcement comes less than three weeks after a new mayor and two new city councilmembers took office.
Garza, however, assures the new leadership did not influence his decision to leave.
The optics of his departure right after the elections is something that was discussed between him, Gonzalez, and the council, Garza said, but ultimately he didn’t want to pass up the opportunity.
“We kind of considered that, but I will say that I would have not even moved forward if it wasn’t for the support of our new mayor and two new council members and the existing council,” Garza said.
“I had their full support and, again, showing this transition of me staying around for at least a couple of months, at least through the end of February … I’ll be part of that process,” he said of the search for a new city manager. “That should speak to that. If a newly elected body had any influence in this decision, I think I would have just left a lot sooner.”
Garza has managed the city since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, entering the role just as the city issued its first emergency declaration related to the pandemic.
“Even at that, we were able to do so many other projects and so many other things,” he said, noting that he would continue to be a resource for the city on these projects.
“I’m not worried about any continuity issues,” he added. “It’s really as ideal a transition as you can ever get for these positions.”
Edinburg Mayor Ramiro Garza Jr., who had previously served as city manager to the city, thanked Garza for his service to the city.
“The city manager role is the number one position that mayor and council has in overseeing the city; that’s the person that runs the day-to-day operations,” the mayor said, adding that when Garza first told him and the council of his departure, they didn’t want him to leave.
“When he started telling me and I (heard) it in his voice in terms of the opportunity, it’s basically like a dream job for him,” Garza said. “I’ve always been of the mindset that we never get in the way of people’s dreams.”
Like the city manager, the mayor also assured a smooth transition and, on Tuesday, the city council will hold a special meeting to begin the search for a new city manager.
“We are going to do everything that we can to continue the services of our residents,” he said. “We don’t want anybody to think that anything is going to change.”
