RAYMONDVILLE — Willacy County has big boots to fill.
After 14 years as the county’s auditor, then 26 years as Raymondville’s city manager, Eleazar “Yogi” Garcia is retiring, leaving the legacy of a legend.
Earlier this month, city commissioners appointed long-time Lyford City Commissioner Tony Chavez, an accountant serving as the Lyford school district’s tax assessor-collector, as Raymondville’s next city manager.
On Dec. 31, Garcia, 62, plans to retire.
“I’m ready,” he said at his desk at City Hall as he worked on his last audit. “I’ve done 40 audits, 40 budgets. I believe you always leave it better than when you got here. It’s better now than before I got here. We have more businesses. We have more sales tax — sales tax has doubled. We’ve had economic development.”
Early years
Born in Raymondville to Gloria and Eleazar Garcia, an educator from a Santa Monica ranch who long-served as the county’s Democratic Party chairman, Garcia grew up with his two older sisters, Ida and Janie, who nick-named him “Yogi.”
“My sister named me when I was a baby,” Garcia, who stands 6-foot-5, said. “She used to have a stuffed baby bear and when I was born she put it in my crib. Everyone called me Yogi. When I was in school, I played catcher, so it stuck.”
At Raymondville High School, Garcia played baseball and basketball.
“I was center,” he said. “I was the tallest one.”
On Head Coach Alex Leal’s football team, Garcia was a star defensive end, helping the Bearkats win the district championship in 1976 and 1977.
A 1978 Raymondville High School graduate, he went on to earn an accounting degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1982.
Auditor’s job
By 1983, Garcia had landed the county auditor’s job.
“They were financially in bad shape,” he recalled.
Soon after taking the job, he bought his department’s first computer.
“We cleaned up the books,” Garcia said. “They weren’t even auditable. We had to fix them to make them auditable.”
By the mid-1990s, Garcia was on the team that brought the 1,000-bed state jail to town, offering land while helping to build a water tower for the county’s first prison, which hired about 150 employees when it opened in 1996.
Taking over as city manager
Later that year, Raymondville Mayor Mike Crowell and the city commission gave Garcia the city manager’s job, paying about $40,000 a year.
“It was pretty rough when we got here,” Garcia said. “We had departments barely making it. We had employees making minimum wage.”
At City Hall, he found out the previous administration had been dipping into the city’s general fund budget to help bail out the utility department.
“They were using the general fund to subsidize the water department,” he said. “The first year, we had a 30- to 40-percent water rate increase. That’s what got us out of trouble.”
‘Conservative business approach’
During his administration, Garcia worked to leverage about $20 million in grant money while landing $13.6 million in low-interest loans.
“You have to be conservative in your approach to business,” he said.
Through the years, Garcia worked with five mayors, including Crowell, Joe Alexandre, Joey Sosa, Lonnie Correa and Gilbert Gonzales, the incumbent who first won election in 2015.
“He’s an extremely strong, intelligent city manager. I think of him as a professional doing city business, county business,” Gonzales said. “He’s pretty much been a mentor to me. His knowledge of city government has helped me out.
He’s been my guide since I was elected and at the same time he gets along very well with the rest of the commissioners. How many city managers do you know who’ve been in office for 20 years?”
$33.6 million in accomplishments
During his tenure, Garcia leveraged grants and low-interest loans to fund many of the city’s biggest projects, including construction of a $4.5 million water plant, a $4.5 million reverse osmosis plant taping into water wells, $2.5 million in new water lines and $2.5 million in sewer upgrades.
Meanwhile, he spearheaded more than $3.5 million in street paving projects.
Across town, Garcia launched construction of a $1.8 million police station, the city’s $2 million Rural Technology Center and the $1.3 million Veteran’s Park.
During the years, he worked to curb flooding in this low-lying area, pumping $11 million into drainage projects aimed at drawing off runoff.
“We’re going to miss him — that’s for sure,” Gonzales said. “He’s done a lot for this city. He’s had a hand in all the improvements in the city. He is a legend for this city.”
Garcia and his wife Nida have three children.
