Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Valleywood Magazine: News you can use
By: Raul Garcia Jr. / Nov. 29, 2011
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| Raul Garcia in April 2007 with the first Valleywood issue. |
Valleywood Magazine is a monthly news publication in full color that provides news and information to the Rio Grande Valley. It features stories on local individuals in business, sports, entertainment, politics, education and reports on the events locally and nationally.
Find the printed newspaper at local stores, restaurants, offices and libraries throughout Weslaco, McAllen, Mercedes, Edcouch, Elsa, Edinburg, Donna, Brownsville, and Progreso.
All the content is available on the Internet though the social network. You can find video reports by Valleywood on YouTube. With Twitter Valleywood has been keeping in touch with readers while reporting the news as it happens.
Click the following links and be friends with Valleywood on Facebook, subscribe to its Youtube channel and follow the news magazine on Twitter.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Rivera gives his resignation during a special meeting
By Raul Garcia Jr. / Nov.20, 2011
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| WISD vice president Ivan Perez, superintendent Dr. Richard Rivera and Board president David Fuentes at the Sept.. 21 meeting discussing extending term limits to 4 years. |
Protesters gathered in the Weslaco Independent School District’s board chambers in effort to keep Dr. Richard Rivera on as Weslaco’s Public Schools superintendent.
That came after the board voted not to extend Rivera’s contract.
Newly elected school board member Oscar Caballero was the deciding 4-3 vote in not keeping Dr. Rivera as the superintendent of schools in Weslaco and some of his supporters were disgusted by his vote.
Dr. Rivera has spent most of his professional career in Weslaco’s Independent School District working his way up the ladder from a teacher, assistant principal and superintendent of schools since 1996 after starting his career in Weslaco forty-five years ago.
Rivera’s current contract pulls in $215,000 dollars a year for his experience.
However at the September 21 board meeting there was discussion of the possibility of skipping the next election and extending school board member terms from three to four years. Thus changing elections from May to November.
WISD school board seats One, Two and Three are up for election in May 2012. If the Board gets a resolution passed by Dec. 31 to amend their charter to extend school board terms they would not stand for re-election until 2014.
“To me this particular plan is almost undemocratic to deny a community an election,” said Dr. Robert Sepulvida. “I was elected last year for three years and if you do this your going to add three and a half years to what I already have.
“I wasn’t elected for five and a half years I was elected for three.”
Sunday, November 13, 2011
City of Elsa hit with loss of 300k
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| Commissioner Eli Rodriguez in disbelief that the city has lost over $300k. |
By Raul Garcia Jr. / Nov. 13, 2011
On Thursday September 29 the City of Elsa elected officials meet for a special meeting to receive a financial document organized by a public accountant that found the city’s financial standings were in the red and that an amount totaling over$300,000 thousand dollars was unaccounted for.
“It means that we either didn’t collect the money or we collected the money and we didn’t put it in the bank,” said Manuel Garcia of Garcia & Pena Accountants. “We’re going back to the billings and the billings were being done on a manual basis on a spread sheet.”
Newly elected officials found they were a new majority and are now faced with the task of balancing the city budget and working together to find out why the city has been losing money annually.
As the country goes through another recession and cities across the country find themselves trying to climb out of a cash-strapped economy. They heard the revelation of the city’s budget and stayed quit and focused as their accountant went through Elsa’s financial audit.
“This council wants to know and I am very fortunate that all these gentleman are in agreement with me,” said Robert Escobar, Elsa’s mayor pro-tem. “And I don’t have to scream and shout like last year when you presented this document that showed we were negative quite a substantial amount of money.”
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| Manuel Garcia addressing the financial state of the city. |
Mayor Pro-Tem said the financial audit of the city the previous year also showed huge losses but the majority of the council voted to approve the audit and not question it.
“They did not try to correct this problem last year,” said Mayor Albert Perez. “Now we’re having the same problem again.”
Mayor Pro-Tem said information continued to say that after the city officials were not re-elected to office last May city documents were removed, destroyed and it has made a hardship on the accounting team to iron out the finances of the city.
“We have to have a strong foot hold as far as expenditures we’re incurring and how our revenues were going,” Escobar said. “What I want to know are definite responses as to why we are negative or not.”
The city lost revenues in almost every category and the general expenditures were found to be in the negative of $2 million.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Mercedes officers work after hours to set up haunted house
By Raul Garcia Jr. / Nov. 6, 2011
The City of Mercedes held it’s annual Halloween Haunted house and community volunteers are attributing its long success to two Mercedes Police Department officers Myriea Abrego and John Paul Sauceda.
“We give out candy bags we give out hotdogs, drinks and of course the haunted house,” said Sgt. John Paul Sauceda. “We also have a costume contest so anybody is welcome to compete so it turns out great.”
Over the last nine years the event has drawn the community closer to the Mercedes Police Department and pulled children and families off the streets of Mercedes every Halloween. And the main attraction besides all of the fun and games is the Haunted House maze that was organized and lead by the two officers.
“It was really scary and little kids aren’t supposed to go in there because they get scared,” said Carla Bokardo, a 16-year-old Mercedes resident. “ It’s a lot of fun and sometimes you get scared and sometimes it’s just for fun.”
Most of the children and young adults had said they have lots of fun at the event and they have been a regular for the last two to three years. Children said the community event is a lot of fun and that the most memorable part of the event is going through the haunted house.
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| Mercedes Police Department Haunted House volunteers Myriea Abrigo and Sgt. John Paul Sauceda have been working on the project together since 2005. Sauceda helped reignite the community project nine years ago. |
“The Halloween Carnival has been a success because of the haunted house because the kids look forward to it and these two have devoted so much of their time in making it a success for it to be successful for our community,” said Linda Wade.
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