By Juan Montoya
One carries himself off as a devout Christian, has a private chapel in his back yard, and repeatedly calls for guidance from the "angels of our better nature."
The other fancies herself a cyber queen used to flaunt her new diamond rings, claims she's worth more than $4 million and at the last City of Brownsville commission meeting sponsored a proclamation National Day of Prayer observed this past Thursday.
If ever the paraphrased saying that "religion is the last refuge of the scoundrel," applies, then Mayor Tony Martinez and District 2 commissioner Jessica Tetreau are poster children for the motto.
As they're beating their chest in penance, their actions through the allegations against their opponents in their campaign mailouts belie their deceptively benign words.
Martinez who has kept his public utterings borderline civil with the exception of the time he accused one of his opponents - Texas Southmost trustee Trey Mendez - of squandering public monies after federal jury issued a verdict against the board and awarded her a $13 million settlement which perfunctorily is under appeal.
He made his accusations knowing that since he was the last to make his closing statement in the forum, Mendez would not have a chance to respond tho the serious allegations.And he has take a potshot at his other challenger former city manager Charlie Cabler
who he claims was "under investigation" by a city commission audit committee and that he was issued a severance check for more than $215,000 in accordance to his contract but that it was not approved by the current commission.
The firing of TSC president Lily Tercero has been the one issue that Martinez's professional political consultants from San Antonio have hammered home in the mail outs. Mendez - who has opted to take the high road and has not attacked Martinez's performance in the last eight years - has not used the numerous peccadilloes and perhaps high crimes that Martinez has committed in his two terms.
Like a snake in the grass, Martinez has lain low playing the good angel, but in the last week before the election, he and District 2 commissioner Jessica Tetreau have pulled out all the stops and spewed their venom, sometimes unwarranted, at their opponents. Tetreau faces former Brownsville Independent School District trustee Catalina Presas-Garcia and former mayor Pat Ahumada.
Like Martinez, Tetreau has publicly prayed for her fellow men at Sams Stadium while at the same time issuing campaign materials blaming Presas-Garcia for suing her fellow BISD trustees after they tried to "censure" and "censor" her to the point where the board legal counsel tried to remove her from the board.
Press-Garcia eventually non-suited the district and did not get a penny from the lawsuit. The BISD, as it does in any lawsuit, spent money to pay for its legal counsel.The attacks by Tetreau caught Presas-Garcia by surprise.
"I didn’t sue the district I sued the board members who allowed the item (to remove me) on the agenda," she said. "The board attorney during an open meeting accused me publicly of asking him to take me to bed. It was an accusation that anyone should have defended themselves for defamation. It’s a shame people believe or say I received money from the law suit."
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"I have a husband, I have three fine young sons and I wouldn’t never ever stoop that low,' she said. "I will stand strong to defend myself when accused or taken advantage of and I will defend also the rights of our citizens."
In a desperate attempt to remove her from the ballot, Tetreau sued Presas-Garcia in district court. The attempt failed.
Likewise, Mendez said that the failures of former TSC president Tercero to save the college's nursing program, her continued use of trustee's signatures on more than $1 in checks when those trustees were no longer in the board, and her unilateral extension of a multi-million windstorm contract made his decision to terminate her a no-brainer.
"If I had to vote to terminate her I would do it again," he has stated.
And after the TSC board voted too separate from UTB, they had to fight off the attempts by Martinez to give away Lincoln Park and many of the community college's real estate to the oil-and-gas wealthy University of Texas System.
Martinez used the excuse that the UT System needed the Casa del Nylon to stay downtown and convinced the city commission to buy his buddy Abraham Galonsky's building for the extravagant sum of $2.3 million. The building has remained empty and a magnet for the homeless since. UT said it never wanted the building in the first place.
At one time city workers at the City Plaza building were told to pack to move the next day because the city was transferring the building to the UT System. But again, UT didn't want it.
But while TSC has not paid a penny to Tercero and BISD did not pay $2 million to Presas-Garcia, Brownsville utility rate payers have - since December 2012 - paid electric rates that have increased by 36 percent from 2013 to 2016, water rates 20 percent from 2013 to 2016, and waste water services 6 percent based on votes by Martinez and Tetreau.
They were raised to pay for $325 to build a $500 million natural-gas fired electric plant with private energy company Tenaska to have been completed in 2016.
The plant was never built, but the rates have remained artificially high. So far, the city ratepayers - mostly residential - have been charged more than $125 million more for the plant's construction.
By that measure, the $13 million verdict which is under appeal by TSC and the $2 million BISD non-suit by Presas-Garcia are red herring distractions by the snake-in-the-grass Christian hypocrites Martinez and Tetreau seeking to blind the voters to reelect them.