Reporting on the Rio Grande

By Raul Garcia Jr. / Oct. 12, 2011

At the start of last meeting in September Dianna Tovar read a letter that she was resigning from the commission and she then got up and walked out.

On the following Monday on September 26 the Mercedes City council met for a special meeting to discuss in executive session to accept or deny Tovar’s resignation. 
By then Tovar had already made up her mind again that she wanted to rescind her resignation and continue on with her duty as a Mercedes City Commissioner.

During the Special meeting Commissioner Rudy Rodriguez made the motion to accept their decision to reconcile Tovar and it was second by Commissioner Leonard Garcia.

“Mayor Hinojosa asked Dianna to give a statement at the Special meeting and she said no I don’t want to do it I want to do it in front of the people that I walked out on,” said Vernon Hoover a Mercedes resident. “I asked Dianna if she was in or out because they never even said if she was reinstated or not.”

Hoover said she asked Tovar for a brief on what caused her to publish a letter of resignation and walk out of City Hall and the Voters of Mercedes in September. According to Hoover she told him he would have to come to the next city council meeting to hear her reasons for wanting to resign.

“At Tuesday night’s council meeting all that was said was by the mayor that she had not resigned,” Hoover said. “I stayed to the end of the executive session to see if she would give a brief statement and she never did.

“If she would have just said I made a hasty decision because of one of the articles that was brought up  and I ask you to forgive me or a brief statement that I didn’t give a formal resignation, and I believe if she had done some thing like that it would have been dropped and that would have been the end of it.

Former Mercedes City Commissioner David Garza said he was at the meeting when she resigned  and that her resignation is a joke to the commission.

“She pulled some kind of temper tantrum and all of a sudden she wants back in,” Garza said. “There was sixty people that saw what she did, she resigned in public and I mean that has got to be worth something.”

Garza said the resignation letter only said the commission was going in a direction that she couldn’t go and that they were wrong and she was right.

“She resigned in public and she turned her letter in and the whole valley knows she resigned.

Some of the reasons that may have caused her to resign were the disagreement from local war veterans against her work on a new memorial in honor of Wally Prado a Silver Star decorated Vietnam Veteran. The recent decisions the council made on the ambulance services and engineering firm that were voted on in September.

When asked to comment on the issue of her resignation she said come to the next meeting to hear my statement.