Unless someone else dives into the District 2 race before the Feb. 15 filing deadline, voters there will have three well-known candidates vying for that office.
One is a former mayor (Pat Ahumada), another a past candidate for city office and past trustee of the Brownsville Independent School District (Caty Presas-Garcia), and the incumbent (Jessica Tetreau) who has had her share of controversy before and after she took office.
Ahumada lost to incumbent mayor Tony Martinez in the last go-round, and Presas-Garcia also lost in the BISD Position 1 race race, but pulled some 7,000 votes across the district, second of five candidates in that race.
It's axiomatic of Brownsville politics that at some time in the past, all three used to be friends and may have supported each other when each ran their races. Tetreau's signs once adorned Presas-Garcia's lawn and the incumbent, in turn, once supported her sister pol in some of her races.
Ahumada, of course, was once the rising star of Brownsville politics, but his penchant for alienating some of his fellow city commissioners and appointees to the various boards may work against him as he reaches out for support in this race. This is after all, Brownsville, and people tend to hold grudges dating back as far as high school in some cases.
Tetreau - now part of the majority on the commission - just got past a complaint filed with the defunct Budget and Oversight Committee chaired by commissioner Ben Neece by former interim police chief David Dale for allegedly interfering with the police department. The controversy generated by the open dispute by both city officials was much a do about nothing in the end, but laid open the antagonism between the majority and commissioner members.
Dale, like Carlos Elizondo, the former fire chief before, decided to record his conversation with the commissioner and ended up being replaced at the P.D. By now, these public officials should realize that no one likes to be surreptitiously by the help. It' a non-winner.
Tetreau has always shown a feisty - if not downright combative - side to her personality, so a scrap is the most likely result of this contest.
And then there's the dismal voter turnout in a city where voters - and campaign donors - seem fatigued by the yearly contests between the same actors. will apathy be the real winner in this race again?