LETTERS: Pharr officials draw comment, Money misused

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Pharr officials draw comment

Here we go again with the city of Pharr hiring of five city managers in five years!

I gotta admit that the mayor and his city commission (minus Commissioner Ricardo Medina) are consistent!

In my humble opinion as a poor retired Pharr resident I say we vote out Mayor Ambrosio Hernandez along with his motley crew!

I’m a third-generation Pharr resident plus I retired after 21 years working with our city! Mr. Reyes Vela and Mr. Benito Lopez were former city managers who worked for many years, unlike the obscure ones who last one year and then they go bye-bye!

Unlike the current city commission, we need a strong mayor like Polo Palacios and even Ricardo Medina, who had a stable city government that ran our city like a well-oiled machine! Plus, we had Ms. Mary Munoz, who as city secretary kept her city hall employees like Zoila Ramirez, Marina Zenil and Dahlia Leal, etc., in fine tune and did their jobs and treated our citizens with class and respect!

The current city hall employees are very badly trained, plus they don’t have the courtesy to tell our citizens good morning when paying their utility bills!

Our city has 89,000 citizens, unlike McAllen and Edinburg, so why do we need three city managers with a salary of $140,000 yearly?

The head honcho should earn his pay and work his tail off from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and then be on standby for 24 hours!

In 2002 I was promoted to streets and alleys supervisor and I was in charge of street paving, drainage, weedy lots and mowing our alleys and the rights of way with a hard-working crew of only 14 employees! The current city public works has 67 employees but they don’t mow the alleys or sweep our streets!

Pharr City Hall is seen in this undated photo. (Courtesy: Pharr EDC)

I don’t understand why the current city commission hired private contractors to pave our streets when public works has a paving machine and rollers. My work crew did the paving, unlike the current public works employees who just ride around in their air-conditioned trucks! Plus, the mayor hires private contractors to mow the weedy lots instead of saving money when they should put their workers to do the job and save money!

Now the mayor raises our taxes when PSJA ISD paid $3.3 million to rent out the highly expensive city swimming pool! Why? Where is the money? Oh, yeah, former city attorney Patricia Rigney received a $400,000 settlement because she was fired for receiving lewd sex messages.

The city has no downtown merchants because the mayor built a expensive big fishing hole that took up the parking for our citizens who pay their bills at the city hall! Can you believe that? The king (mayor) has his own parking space at city hall! El Rey!

My fellow Pharr citizens, let’s stand up to the tyranny of the mayor and vote out his henpecked city commission (minus Ricardo Medina in the next city election!

Ricardo Rosales Sr.

Pharr

Money misused

Foreign dictators, washing off their hands and discarding their own poor, unwanted people upon Texas and all U.S. taxpayers, have no authority over our right to protect our sovereignty. Our government sends enough American taxpayer money to take care of these suffering souls, but the dictators use it to enrich themselves.

Stop the “humanitarian” self-serving sham and use American-sent funds on these poor innocents, not the wealth-grabbing elitist dictators.

Imelda Coronado

Mission


LETTERS — We welcome your letters and commentary. Submissions must include the writer’s full name, address and daytime telephone number for verification. Letters of 200 words or fewer will be given preference. Submissions may be edited for length, grammar and clarity. Letters may be mailed to P.O Box 3267, McAllen, Texas78502-3267, or emailed to [email protected].