This
blog entry is meant to compliment my last contribution dated Oct 8, 2013.
I used to believe that a lack of investigative
journalism was responsible for the continued political corruption Laredoans witness.
I now know this is not the truth. The cause of the corruption in Laredo is due
to a lack of morality. People may not accept my assertion and counter that they
are moral because they do not hurt children, murder, or rape; however,
refraining from such actions does not necessarily affirm morality. What I mean
is most people would not commit such heinous crimes in the first place. A
person who actually lives by a code of ethics and possesses morality should be
experiencing internal conflict when attempting to, or are being coerced to
commit an action they know is wrong, because they are searching their consciences
for ways of reconciling that action with their personal code of ethics. If a
person is not experiencing this internal conflict, or lack the intestinal
fortitude to speak out against the immoral; then they have no ethics. Now that I
know the cause of this corruption, I can illustrate how a lack of morality, by
our City management, perverts the current Recycling Program allowing it to
become more of a benefit to special interests than to the taxpayers.
In
July of this year, 2013, the City of Laredo Solid Waste Department stopped
delivering collected residential recyclables to the Material Recovery Facility
(MRF) at the landfill because of upgrades to equipment. Instead, they began to
deliver all recyclables to a warehouse in the 900 block of Logan Street off of
Market Street. Further, all stored recyclables which had not been processed at
the MRF were also transferred to this warehouse. This is no big deal to some readers;
however, think about what the conditions inside a metal building without A/C,
during the hottest months of the year in Laredo, would be like. Further,
consider what those extreme conditions would do to any residual organic
materials which were comingled in the recyclables. Correct! They began to decay
and a putrid odor was detectable in the neighborhood and blue bags and other
plastic items were strewn across the landscape. I know this for fact because I
witnessed it firsthand. I witnessed rotting materials piled to the roof of this
warehouse. The unacceptable conditions in this warehouse had persisted for
almost two months and were becoming difficult to conceal from the local
residents. The City management realized this too because Solid Waste began working
overtime during the first week of October to remove this offal from the
warehouse and store it outside at the landfill. After witnessing these
abhorrent conditions, I personally went to Fox News and then called KGNS Pro 8
News, on October 4, 2013, to inform them of this offensive health hazard.
Sadly, no reporters investigated until a week later when all the recyclables
and the offending odor were removed and the area tidied. A coincidence? Perhaps.
In any event, the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality (TCEQ) did respond
to my complaint and is investigating the incident.
I would like to make clear that the length of
time the recyclables were stored at the warehouse was due to poor planning on
the part of City management and not directly linked to a lack of morality on
their part; however, it is also important to realize that failure to formulate
a contingency plan in case of unforeseen delays in the upgrades of the MRF
stemmed from their stupidity, but I digress. The storing of trash/recyclables
in such close proximity of a residential neighborhood does, however, stem from
a lack of morality. In fact, which councilman allowed a neighborhood in his
district and his constituents to be treated with such contempt and disrespect?
More importantly why? The answer to the latter questions is because of City
management’s commitment to subsidize First Recycle with taxpayer dollars. The
warehouse in question is owned by AX Forwarding; a sister company of First
Recycling. Since the City was nice enough to foot the $8 million dollars,
courtesy of the taxpayers, to create a recycling program complete with updated
equipment and curbside delivery which First Recycle will profit from, a person
would think AX would just allow the city use of its facility free of charge.
This is not the case. The City was paying AX Forwarding $5K a month for its
use. If prodded, City officials may try to justify their actions by stating it
is a violation of the City’s Code of Ethics to accept donations or gratuities from
companies or persons they are doing business with, in this case AX Forwarding,
and are justified in their payment for use of the facility. However, this is
not a defense because the City did not seek at least two other quotes from
other warehousing companies in order to benefit from the lowest bid. This is a
direct violation of City of Laredo purchasing policy. While this infraction of
their own policies may not be illegal, I maintain it is highly unethical and demonstrates
a lack of concern by City leaders to consider the welfare of the taxpayers as
priority. Instead, City leaders openly favor the private interests they currently
support.
While
writing this piece, my thoughts kept returning to the people of the District
III neighborhood who were shown such disrespect by City leadership who allowed
this hazard to defile their communal residential space. If this had been a
warehouse near Shiloh, Del Mar, or Regency would the councilman/men of those
districts have allowed such a hazard to be created in the midst of their
constituents in the name of special interests? I doubt it. What about the
media? Would the local news outlets have taken my complaint seriously and
reported the facts surrounding this health and fire hazard if it existed in an
upscale sub-division? I bet dollars to doughnuts they would have. Would the
City Health Department have issued citations to the owner(s) of the warehouse
if it operated in a more northerly locale? Of course! Would the City fire marshal
have issued citations to the owner(s) for creating a fire hazard? In a
heartbeat. If anyone doubts my assertion, just think back to the Big Green
Monster. The objection to the Monster was a matter of aesthetics and not
incited due to health and fire hazards. So just imagine…
SIGH…
The above listed hypotheticals just reinforce, at least in my mind, that a lack
of morality is the reason political corruption is so prevalent and wide spread;
especially in Laredo. If we study the events as I have described them, we will
see that if one councilman would have exercised a sense of morality and
shielded his constituency from unethical practices (which is what he was
elected to do) he might have forced the rest of City management to act with
integrity by default. What could be more immoral than politicians using
taxpayer dollars to subsidize private businesses? In concluding this rant, I proclaim
that the only thing more immoral is the lack of respect and the contempt that
residents of this District III neighborhood have been shown by City management,
the local media, and sadly, their own elected councilman.
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