By Juan Montoya
When Mayor Tony Martinez lobbied for the $2.3 million purchase of the Case Del Nylon from his buddy Abraham Galonsky, he sold it as a way to lure the UT System to keep UT-Brownsville downtown.
That turned out to a hoax because when other city commissioners asked then-UTB President Julieta Garcia about Martinez's assertions, she said the UT System wasn't interested in occupying the building.
Now that UT has for all practical purposes and abandoned Brownsville for greener pastures in Edinburg, the building has become a warehouse for materials being used for city projects such as the new fine arts building being constructed and an ad-hoc shelter for the homeless who call downtown home.
On Tuesday's city commission agenda, there is a proposal for commissioners to add another $100,000 to the building's cost with the hiring of an architect to design additional features that the original shell of the structure did not contain. City staff is recommending that architect Roberto Ruiz be hired to design other amenities such as a new roof, an elevator, and fire suppressing system to make the building habitable.
There is no estimate of what the new amenities will cost to install, but we have heard that elevators are not cheap and neither are new roofs, fire-suppression systems and electrical generators. The general public view has been that paying $2.3 million for the building was excessive to begin with. With the new additions, that cost could go past another $1 million or maybe more.
And shouldn't the city have required that those amenities have been installed in the building before they bought it for all that money?
Some commissioners are lobbying for a fire-training school to be housed at the spot and we will be asking if that is the purpose of the improvements.
What a deal, hey Tony?