ARA BOWS TO PRESSURE, RESIGNS AS CC PUBLIC WORKS SUPER

By Juan Montoya
Well, the reign of incompetence and malingering at Cameron County Public Works under Supervisor Louis Ara has finally come to an end.
Ara, who worked under overpaid County Administrator Pete Sepulveda and his Boy Friday David Garcia  finally put too many straws on the camel's back and was forced to resign.
How did Ara err? Shall we count the ways?
 He staffed his crews with City of Brownsville rejects like Santana Vallejo who still oversees an outfit filled with compadres of compadres, camaradas of camaradas, and other in-laws and outlaws that make former commissioner Edna Tamayo cringe every time some new antic is revealed to the public.
Vallejo himself was let go by the City of Brownsville after discrepancies in materials began to show up and city administrators found out that some of the material was being used by a company associated with the sidewalk program employees to perform work on private properties for self-gain.
We have a safety officer who is accident prone in his county vehicle, a crew of Public Work employees who decide to put out a truck fire with the bucket of a backhoe prompting the county's insurance holder to deny payment for the damage incurred on the 2010 model truck.
After every incident, the safety officer is given yet another vehicle only to get involved in some other mishap. Do these people lead charmed existences?
We have reports with the sheriff's department of county workers selling culverts and driveway pipes and caliche to colonia residents and keeping the money for themselves. When the charges are made, the residents who purchased the pipes are visited by defense attorneys who frighten them by threatening to accuse them as accomplices in the crimes.
Then a former county commissioner steps in to put in a good word with the sheriff department investigators and the Cameron County DA and allow them to get off on a technicality and the case just sort of goes away. The accused are then allowed to return to work and avenge themselves with the county workers who made the report to law enforcement.
We have missing tons of caliche disappearing from the Oklahoma Road county barn and when the Precinct 1 supervisor tries to make a report after he returns from his week's vacation, he is told to forget it.
We have an administrative assistant to one of the county commissioners ordering thousands of dollars in road oil, only to find that it wasn't oil that he wanted to buy, after all, but road emulsion. When the oil is mixed with water, you get a gooey mess that has to be disposed of since it's useless. We'll forget about that, too.
You have the PW crews sent to Carmen Road to lay a rural-grade paving job only to do it so badly that in less than a year the crews have to go out there and do the job over again, costing thousands of dollars in material, man-hours and machinery. And neither Sepulveda nor Garcia say a word. If the big bosses don't complain, why should Ara and Vallejo?
You have an employee made to go into a trench in Cameron Park, only for the sides of the trench to collapse and injure him. Did anyone tell the foreman in charge that the rules call for protective structures to be used for that kind of work? Now the county's insurance is made to pay for these administrative failures.
We have a road crew on Paloma Blanca Road wasting months of personnel labor, machinery and other county resources digging bar ditches and seal coating the road only to be told that they have worked on a section of road where the right-of-way doesn't belong to the county and then spend another week removing the drainage culverts and filling the bar ditch alongside the private property at public expense.
But that's not all.
Such are the personal relationships inside the Public Works Department that at least two employees are popped for DWI and drug possession by local law enforcement and then soon after that find their way back to work. In one case, after an accident, one of them refuses to take the drug test after an accident with the vehicle which he was operating and resigns instead.
Personnel policies being what they are, we will probably never find out why Ara left. But if the examples above are any indication, there are probably many many more instances of scandal and waste of public funds going on at Public Works and the colonia programs funded by the federal government than we will ever know.