(Ed.'s Note: The potholes and pieces of asphalt littering the roadway on 13th Street before it intersects with Roosevelt Street in downtown Brownsville indicates that the patch-up job performed by City of Brownsville Public Works crews is money thrown down the drain.
While our city leaders and visionaries dream up schemes such as bike and hike trials to make the city be like Austin or San Antonio, the basic infrastructure like drainage, bus shelters and other necessities of urban life have been ignored in favor of the "sexy" projects.
We become inured to the facts that when we get even a moderate thunderstorm we can expect certain areas of the city – such as Four Corners, 13th Street, Villa Verde (McDavitt), parts of West Brownsville, and even downtown – to become lakes until the waters subside and drain off into the drainage.
You can close off downtown for three hours, ride bicycles in your fluorescent Spandex outfits, spend a fortune in municipal funds to do it, but at the end of the feel-good orgy, if it rains, you have to drive home through a flooded city.
The city crews will come around again and patch the asphalt, clean the ditches, and then wait for the next rain to do it all over again.
To the credit of commissioner Rose Gowen and her acolytes, the hike and bike trails are constructed of first-rate materials and won't flood while the rest of us do. For Public Works crews, a good rain means job security. For the city taxpayers, the potholes an broken pieces of asphalt mean more money going down the drain.)