A brief overview of my speech announcing my candidacy for Presidio County Judge

On Monday September 22nd I hosted a meet and greet at Larry’s Burgers in Marfa from 5-7 PM to speak a bit about what’s been going on at Commissioners Court in recent months and to announce my candidacy for Presidio County Judge. The following is an overview of what I said onstage.

Hello everyone, it’s my pleasure to be here this evening with everyone. I want to thank you for coming out to hear what I have to say regarding recent County policy events and where I see us going from here.

I’ve been privileged to serve for the last 2 1/2 years as Commissioner Pct 4 for you; I appreciate the opportunity. For those of you who might not know, I served two terms as Justice of the Peace prior to this last term as Commissioner and before that I did three terms on Marfa City Council. I’ve been through a total of 15 budget cycles while in office and carefully observed a few more as a candidate and this year’s County budget cycle was the most disappointing of my career.

As much as many of our local governmental organizations are experiencing turmoil right now, this didn’t have to be the case in the County. Without going into mind-numbing details, I’ll highlight some costly and unnecessary things that happened this year that I found to be upsetting.

For the previous two budget cycles the County had been carefully planning and making progress towards assessing corrective action for our two courthouse facilities. As many of you know, more than a decade has gone by with no plans to repair or replace the HVAC system in the courthouse, while hundreds of thousands of dollars was being wasted on dysfunctional service contracts with vendors who could not make the system work properly. Our elevator has been malfunctioning for just as long. Commissioners have, in the past, been to intimidated by the potential scope of anything but band-aid style methods to correct the problems. With regard to the County Annex courtroom building in Presidio, faulty design and construction have led to internal water damage and mold contamination. The building has received multiple episodic patchwork repairs to attempt to remedy the situation, but the roof drainage is insufficient and the roof needs to be reconstructed in a different manner.

The County, with full agreement by all four commissioners, went out on a limb and put out a complete phased design/build master plan proposal for both those facilities and our jail roof, at the behest of our County Judge, who brought in his preferred firm, McKinstry. The process was initiated in early 2024 and efforts were made by me, our grant writers and Blair Park to receive Texas Historic Commission courthouse restoration funds for the project, knowing that was an outside chance but worth the time, travel and effort.

Once we were confirmed not to have been successful in the grant process, the rest of the process, with unanimous consent from the Court, moved forward.

The County does have savings in reserves, although we have been routinely passing deficit budgets in recent years. Sometimes we are able to save by coming in under budget. The savings that we have, now in yield bearing investment accounts, have given us the opportunity to utilize the I&S side of our tax rate for a certificate of obligation at a favorable loan rate. That would have been used for capital improvement projects. That list included the courthouse, courthouse annex and much needed road and bridge equipment to replace our ancient and worn out machinery.

To make a long story short, we went through this entire process and that of acquiring bond counsel, and having multiple meetings about how we were planning on addressing these needs. After having spent $250,000 towards completing the engineering and design process the Judge decided that he was opposed to it all. Whether going about in this way or another way, what we now have is a quarter million dollars down the drain and nothing planned other than the Judge saying he’s going to “look in to getting permission from the Historical Commission on how to put some mini splits in as a temporary measure”

We had been planning on the certificate of obligation as a consensus decision. Once that consensus was broken down on a “Presidio vs Marfa” argument that the courthouse is not worth saving (actual quote from Presidio City Council members the Judge brought into our meetings to yell at us) and that the courthouse should be donated to someone as a museum it was clear that all the plans, be they good or bad, that many of us had worked on figuring out were down the drain.

There will be no I&S side tax note; there will be a ballot item to deny the tax note that isn’t happening. That’s confusing for the public and makes the County look like we don’t know what we’re doing.

So even before I bring up the last minute/zero information ambushing the funding of Vizcaino Park, the Roping area and the Golf Course we can count a quarter million wasted on a set of engineering plan that won’t be used, a ballot item that is irrelevant and confuses the voters (vote for or against it, it’s not material) and the unnecessary and divisive sowing of hatred and jealousy of our own neighbors in the name of what- leadership?

Here’s what I promise.

I promise to listen to constituents. We don’t have to agree, but one of my jobs is to listen and comprehend.

I promise to be in the office. Covid is over- “Return to the Office” is in.

I promise to treat my colleagues with the respect they deserve; this has been lacking from our current County Judge and it’s baffling as to why.

I promise not to just make things up and present them as fact.

I promise to represent the whole County and try as hard as I can to heal division. Listening to people, returning phone calls, hosting public “office hours”, answering questions from the newspaper or radio, being present and participating in community events are all part of achieving this.

And I promise to bring things, first, back to normal, and then, we’ll try to go further. Commissioner Hisler’s efforts to salvage the defunding and imminent shutdown of Vizcaino Park and the Golf Course, which I support 100% is an example of outside the box thinking on how to make things work when things are not working well. Some of these things will take community assistance and an understanding by everyone that things sometimes have to change and change is not easy.

In closing, I ask for your support in this effort. I need each and every one of you to reach out, if you will, to help our County and community be the great place to live and work that it is. I promise I will do my best.