The Sentinel‘s Roger Black sat down with both Presidio County judge candidates last week to talk about the race and their visions of the future.
The big issue now is the Big Bend Wall. What should be done?
Both Congressman Tony Gonzales and his predecessor Will Hurd have both taken the stance of a virtual wall. They don’t think a physical wall is a good idea out here. There are advancements in technology that can get us to where we want to be. There are cameras. Now, they can discern between a mule deer, a black bea, a wild hog and a human being.
And I think [technology] is much the way to do this.
A border wall was not practical in the miles and miles of nothing in Arizona and in New Mexico. And in this mountainous range, I just don’t think it can be done. I don’t care what kind of money they throw at it or what timeline is given to build it. Or at what estimated cost—you might as well multiply it by a hundred, maybe a thousand. I just don’t see how it can get done.
You know, we were going to take over Greenland and make Canada the 51st state. It’s like the Gulf of America. Sometimes you hear something, but you really don’t know if it could be. I mean, you have to ask yourself, is this RFP a tactic for negotiations? It’s a 19th century solution to a 21st century program. Is there a more efficient and better way of doing this?
The river is full of wildlife—right here. The reintroduction of bighorn sheep, the wonderful growth of the Chihuahuan black bear, happening because the game law is being enforced. Ruins them all.
You drove down here. Do you know how many beautiful mountains you saw? And, do you know how many tributaries—dry creeks that we have? We have two inches of rain, and I guarantee it will move anything in those creek beds. They’re going to move sticks, logs, debris, everything, and as soon as they hit, as soon as those tributaries reach the Rio Grande, which is where this water goes, it goes to the Rio Grande. It’s going to cause a cleanup nightmare.
With a big wall, you’re building a dam, basically. It’s gonna back this water up, and so the concept of stormwater diversion becomes obsolete. You’re not going to be able to do it.
You might almost say goodbye to it all.
This is a big county with a small population. What do you think can improve the economy?
We are very rural. We have come to understand, that as county judges [in the Big Bend], we have more of an impact using our combined numbers. Our counties are so large that when we go together, we get things done. For example, the funding of public defenders. We went to the State Supreme Court—County Judge Curtis Evans, County Judge Greg Hennington, County Judge JoJo McKenzie—and they conceded to us.
There’s a wonderful opportunity now to bring here some of the billions of dollars being distributed for rural healthcare. We’re creating a network [for the region] of small clinics. These are going to be a hybrid. There will be a nurse, or a nurse practitioner, or a paramedic to see you there in person, and write prescriptions with access to virtual doctors who are specialists.
Technology is going to catch up for us.
The next opportunity is trans-border trade. We’re seeing saturation at the port of entries in El Paso and Juarez, and in Del Rio—saturation in infrastructure traffic volume, impeding trade. And speed and trade are linked.
The closest manufacturing center [to the Big Bend] is Chihuahua City. From Chihuahua to Juarez is a four-hour drive. But from here to Chihuahua is only two hours. If the market is a “Texas Triangle,” we’re on the route for cement or medical equipment. Beer, that’s another big one. Seven million bottles of beer cross over from Mexico into the United States every day.
We have seen some growth over the last four or five years. At Presidio, there is the only port of entry bridge, owned by TxDot. That’s a curious history. There was a [private] one-lane bridge that opened and closed whenever the owner, Frank Dupy, wanted. But it became structurally unsafe. Local pressure got the federal government to explore building a new bridge.
Dupy didn’t care much for it, and in 1959, there was actually a shootout over it—the Old West Texas. That killed any progress toward the county wanting to construct a new bridge. The Texas Department of Transportation finally built us a two-lane bridge. They’ve recently expanded that to a four-lane. Our traffic has gone up accordingly. And we think there’s a viable opportunity for us economically to grow.
Could we work together in the region?
With the decline in population and unrealized growth in trade and tourism, you have to go back and look at our sense of pride for Texas. For the Texas government to get that, it does me no good. It does Jeff Davis no good. It does Brewster County no good or the little cities that are within those counties. [Meanwhile, there’s the threat to reduce income from property taxes, particularly for schools.]
People are saying this is a north-south issue, that this is a Marfa-Presidio thing. It’s not. We all need the same access to services. You can’t get a birth certificate in Presidio. You can’t get a marriage license here. You can’t file the property deed. You have to go to Marfa.
For all these things, the real issue, it’s about the distribution of funds. There are only 16 million dollars total between all the taxing entities in the county. Loving County, Texas, the smallest county in Texas, has a budget of 25 million dollars—for 67 inhabitants, 67 residents. And we’ve got $16 million to distribute between all of us between our schools, our hospitals and all the county services.
You look at rural Texas and you’ve got rural Texas counties with oil and without oil. And there’s a big difference between them. The Texas Demographic Center is saying, basically, if you don’t have oil, you’re probably going to dry up and blow away. Andrews County [in the Permian Basin] is projected to double. Ector County is gonna double. Midland County’s gonna double. Presidio, Brewster, and Jeff Davis are losing population.
I think we attack this problem by combining forces in many areas. One example, let’s use a landfill. When I was a young city administrator for Presidio, the only enterprise that made money for the city was a landfill.
But the water department lost money. EMS lost money. Most EMS get 20-25 cents back on the dollar. And then you got the fire department and law enforcement, which don’t make money. I don’t care how many tickets you write, it’s not going to be economically viable.
Let’s go back to the landfill. A landfill site here has about an eight-year shelf life. And 45,000 pounds of trash come into the Presidio landfill every day. All of the trash collected in Marfa ends up at this landfill. They have a private company that goes and picks it up for them and drives it south. And I think it’s an opportunity where the county, the city of Marfa and the city of Presidio could come and say, you know, what? Let’s talk about it.
There could be a way that would benefit Presidio and Marfa and the county. That is something that we should recognize that we do create trash everyday. It’s a mess, and I think what we should do is, say let’s combine all our efforts and along the way, pick up trash in Shafter and provide service to the outlying colonias, and build a new system with our landfill. That it will save money to every resident and business in the county.
But again, you got to get over that us versus them. I’ll tell you, it doesn’t matter. Cowboys vs. Indians, Shorthorns vs. Blue Devils, ranchers vs. farmers. Mexico vs. the U.S—we could go on and on and on. So, at some point, some way, we need to get over this. We should be bigger than this. We should be tackling problems together.
Commerce, international trade, and tourism are things that we need to focus on. How do you keep a young family here? Well, it’s going to be healthcare plus public education. I mean, both of our school districts combined have low average grades. We’re failing somewhere again. Those are conversations that we should be having between the two school districts.
By 2050 or 2060, Presidio County is going to only have 1,500 residents? No. As long as Ojinaga stands, there will be people in Presidio. I don’t see it happening.
But it doesn’t help that we don’t have a strong local economy. Whether we like it or not, Presidio doesn’t attract tourism the way Alpine does, Marfa does, or even El Paso. We have the railroad coming. That’s a huge opportunity. We have the geothermal project that starts in March as well. When we do this geothermal, we’ll start looking at hydroponic farming. We’ll start to look at warehousing for international trade.
You have to go back and look at how do we grow? I mentioned a family of four. Presidio median income here is $20,800. The median income for a family of four in Marfa is $48,000, and they probably still can’t [make ends meet]. In Brewster County Alpine, it’s $58,000. Brewster County, Alpine specifically, has some advantages. They’ve got Sul Ross, the professors and the students. How much of an impact do they have on the local economy? They have a hospital, the Tri-County hospital. They have the federal courthouse. They have the FBI office. They have the Border Patrol base. They have an Amtrak station. State and federal government funding are infused in all those. Presidio doesn’t have that, and neither does Marfa. How do we at least put us at a better standing?
The property tax distributed between Presidio ISD and Marfa ISD. It’s 50% of your property tax bill. Would it be horrible to have a Consolidated Presidio County School District? You combine those, and you have less money spent administratively. Would it ever take off? I don’t know. I think it should at least be explored.
And if we find a real way to communicate, we can solve some of our own problems. I think we can solve some of our own problems. I’m gonna meet soon with Texas Senator César Blanco. We’re talking about Health and Human Services funding and what our plan is for it. I want to have a serious discussion about this: payment in lieu of taxes, sales tax distribution, rural healthcare initiatives. We need a lot of things.
Tell us about your roots here.
I could take you, if we had the time, and show you where my great-grandparents were born and where they are buried. We come from a long history in Presidio. My wife and I are graduates (1984) of Presidio High School. We were junior high sweethearts.
Her mother is from Presidio, and her father is from a little town on the other side of the border, just outside of Ojinaga, called Divisadero. It’s a farming community, and they were true migrant workers. They farmed all around Presidio. There was cleanup and the cotton and everything else happening over there. My wife tells me these wonderful stories of how they all banded together—nine daughters, one son, a mama, and a daddy. And they saved up enough money to buy an old, beat-up gas station here in Presidio. My father-in-law had a second-grade education. And his youngest daughter (my wife) has two bachelors, two masters, and a doctorate. And I think that’s wonderful.
So you have a trans-border sense of the history here.
Well, Cortez wrote about Presidio when he was traversing along the Rio Grande with the Spaniards in 1683, and there’s some written documentation even before then, 100 years earlier. He talked about this community of Indians, the Jumano, Lipan, Apache, and their agrarian lifestyle. They’ve existed for a very, very long time. And now we compare these places–Juarez and El Paso with 3 million people, Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass with 90,000 or so, and the same can be said for Del Rio and Acuña—we’re the odd ones out. The Ojinaga area has 45,000 people.
Yet the economy has not taken off. There was agriculture and livestock at its peak, but when the bracero program started going away, it became unsustainable. We have wonderful, fertile farmland. We just don’t have the employees to cultivate it.