Reporting on the Rio Grande

By Raul Garcia

The city of Mercedes elected its new mayor on June 18, 2011. And with 52 percent of the popular vote put lifetime resident and three-term Mercedes City Commissioner Henry Hinojosa as the town's new mayor.

"There is a lot to be done with this town," Hinojosa said. "We have the sales tax in addition to grants and low interest rate loans that are available for cities."

Throughout his campaign he kept saying lets concentrate on revitalizing downtown and that he it the right leader for the job to take Mercedes to another level.

"Once we start further beatifing downtown and paving the streets and bringing new business then lets escalate TV and Internet commercials and really concentrate on the business of downtown," Hinojosa said.

In January 2012 five candidates had been campaigning for the vacant position, left by Mayor Joel Quintanilla when he was elected county commissioner for Hidalgo County Precinct One.

The City of Mercedes has a total of 7,668 registered voters but only 1,831 made it out for the General Election to cast their vote for mayor of Mercedes in a race that pitted five candidates.

And in May 2011 none of the five candidates on the campaign trail was able to secure 51 percent of the votes leaving Hinojosa and Ruben "Chano" Guajardo, the top vote getters, to square off in a run-off election one month later on June 18.

As a commissioner Hinojosa stressed that before the success of the Rio Grande Premium Outlets mall he and the commission in the mid nineties Were leading a poor community and were able to rebuild a police department three times it's size, refurbished, modernized and doubled the size of City Hall, computerized the water plant, the sewer plant was expanded and modernized, bought state of the art fire trucks that the fire chief wanted.

In 2007 the Rio Grande Premium Outlets came to Mercedes bringing in over 2,000 jobs and over 200 retail stores. An incentive the City gave the developers was the mall would only pay half of its sales taxes for ten years.

Today the city Standard and Poor's status is an A rating and has a reserve of nine months according to city officials.