Our municipal and county leaders must walk around with blinders, or ignore what is going around in other parts of the country. In California and New York state, cities and counties are rife with over-bloated budgets and tax rates that have their citizens leaving their states for Florida and Texas.
I say big government is bad at the federal, state and local level, costing taxpayers billions. Here locally we have seen what happens when municipalities attempt to grow into a business that should be a private enterprise. For example, take the city of Pharr and its over-budget ambulance service that has the city in the hole to the tune of $12 million. According to a city official, the deficit will be cut in half due to a projected $6 million in revenue that the ambulance service was expected to generate.
Why are they competing with local ambulance services? Instead of starting a new ambulance service, they should be subsidizing the current EMS providers. But no, they would rather own vehicles, pay maintenance on said vehicles, staff said vehicles, pay salaries and benefits on said staff and so on.
Big government equals a big price tag. Our county leaders are also in the process of starting a garbage collection business for the rural communities to help stem dumping in rural areas. Another big government project adding more personnel, more salaries, vehicle cost and maintenance, and why? There are at least three garbage-collection services that offer rural garbage pickup, but the county wants to give them competition instead utilizing their collection services.
Now the reason that these rural communities are dumping their garbage is because homeowners in these rural areas, due to lack of income, won’t subscribe to these rural trash collection services. Now here is the good part: If the county collects the garbage for the rural areas, the county can then shift the cost to the rest of the county taxpayers and spread the wealth of those in the city to the lower-income colonias of rural HidalgoCounty.
So when your property taxes at the city and county level increase next year you won’t have to wonder, because I have given you the how and the why it happened.
Jake Longoria
Mission
Coalition
of voters
It is richly ironic that a coalition of the minorities this country tried to exterminate and enslaved, exploited, mistreated and discriminated against, including women, youth and the LGBTQ+ community (and across centuries), now looks to be the saviors of American democracy. Much appreciation goes to our brothers and sisters of color, especially those who showed up to vote in every state and kept the “red tsunami” to a mere trickle.
That “minority” vote prevented most election-deniers seats in government at any level, and helped return all Democrat incumbents to the Senate — something that hasn’t happened in about a century.
You are owed a debt of gratitude for a blessing we barely deserve. Many thanks.
C.B. Bolyn
Brownsville
