QUESTIONS ON ROSALES' RESIDENCY ARE LEGITIMATE

By Juan Montoya
If you had voted in one city commission district for the past 17 years and three days after you registered to run for city commission in a neighboring district claiming that you lived there all along, would this not raise legitimate questions about your true residency?
That, apparently, is what happened in the case of Rosalio "Leo" Rosales, who is one of four candidates running for the District 3 position non the city ballot, the incumbent Melissa Zamora choosing not to run for reelection and devoting her time to being the public relations rep for Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz.
 We digress, but we must say that her talents have been made obvious in the first 100 days of the Saenz administration, with domestic abuse billboards dotting strategic spots on the county's thoroughfares and a memorial vigil held for the children slaughtered by convicted murderer John Allen Rubio.
Nonetheless, District 3 candidates in order of their place on the ballot are David Belleperche, Debbie Portillo, Martin Sarkis and Rosalio “Leon” Rosales.
Belleperche is an unknown quantity, having arrived in town recently. Portillo has been the executive secretary for United Brownsville, the shadow government funded with public "donations" by local entities, Sarkis is a small businessman who runs a mechanic and state-inspection station, and Rosales is the director of the Good Neighbor Settlement Home, a social service agency that feeds the homeless.
Some have taken umbrage with our mentioning that Rosales until March 4 had listed his address with the Cameron County Elections Office at 1029 Squaw Valley, an address that would have put him in District 4, a position now held by John Villarreal. Three days after he filed his application for a place on the city election ballot, he filled a change of address form at the county elections office listing his new address as 5810 Hitching Post, an address that now puts him in District 3, the position for which he filed to run as a candidate.
To the uninitiated, this may not seem like a big deal, but if you had sworn to the Sate of Texas you lived at the Squaw Valley address to get a voting card, and at the same time you are swearing that you lived at the Hitching Post address for the last seven years, what are the voters to believe?
Rosales may be a likable enough candidate in some quarters, but this matter has to do with some rather basic features of our electoral process, namely: If you are registered to vote in a different district and had voted as recently as last November's elections in that district, then Presto!, you register to run in another district and stated in a sworn statement that you had lived there for the last seven years, were all the times you voted in the last 16 years in the other district fraudulent?
Regardless of the objections from any camp, these are legitimate questions for this candidate. To opine otherwise just reveals the degree to which some people will overlook the obvious when they seek to establish their own unspecified agenda.