One Valley, A Mess of Towns...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

McALLEN, Texas | To many here, the Rio Grande Valley is solely Hidalgo and Cameron counties. Demographers, the people who study socio-economic hustle & flow, will tell you Starr and Willacy counties belong in the grouping. The first two border each other, the other two generally separate themselves by way of geography and zero interest in being seen as members of the collective.

Starr County lies to the west of Hidalgo and Willacy to the north of Cameron. It's easy to see on a map, although harder to imagine it if you know that both Starr and Willacy are rarely talked about in the Rio Grande Valley. Think distant cousins on that.

The valley, you will be told, is Hidalgo and Cameron counties. Or, better yet, it's the cities of McAllen, Harlingen and Brownsville - there surrounded by a sprinkling of smaller towns, such as much-smaller Pharr, Mercedes, La Feria and San Benito.

To say that the RGV is one would be to wish for it. The valley is not one anything. The Big Three cities like to believe they stand alone - McAllen with its better reputation and economy, Harlingen with its geographic central location and the region's busiest airport and Brownsville with its ballyhooed SpaceX future. Lump them into anything as one in the presence of their citizens and be treated to a valley-size frown. We're nothing like those people, they'll tell you.

Civic pride rules. There is an official Rio Grande Valley. And then there are the wild, differing politics. The favored language is the same, the use of it varies. McAllen is considered the progressive city, Harlingen the conservative one and Brownsville the unpredictable. It seems to work, or it has to some extent for decades.

It's also true that you'll rarely hear of joint ventures undertaken by leaders of the three major cities. McAllen's Republican mayor, as far as we know, isn't planning big moves in conjunction with the also newly elected mayors of Harlingen and Brownsville. There is no known annual or bi-annual meeting of these three elected officials, nothing to indicate that they will work toward a better Rio Grande Valley. Indeed, all talk at their local State of The City is about, well, their city. That's to be expected, only it might improve relations if they did meet occasionally and pondered the coming years.

The RGV is growing. McAllen's population is now at 142,000 residents. Harlingen counts a few more than 72,000 and Brownsville's is somewhere between 180,000 and 240,000 - the number skewed, it is said, because of transplants from neighboring Matamoros, Mexico who are in town but are not citizens.

The Kinder Institute for Urban Research, based at Rice University in Houston, issued this statement in a recent report titled: "It Is Time To Recognize The Rio Grande Valley As A Rising Borderland Metropolis".

It said the valley's population would double by the year 2045, from its present 1.3 million residents to 2.5 million.

That is a coming development to think and worry about.

Individual city planners may already be working on what that means, but at some point leaders of the region as a whole need to sit down and work up a Masterplan, or, at the very least, identify areas of concern, such as a larger labor pool, increased traffic and improved infrastructure, augmented mass transportation and additional law enforcement. Municipal budgets will be very much different in 10 years, much less 20.

RGV leaders appear to be doing nothing, from what we have seen and read lately.

Do the new mayors of McAllen, Harlingen and Brownsville even know each other's names? Does McAllen Mayor Javer Villalobos know of Harlingen Mayor Norma Sepulveda, and does she know of Brownsville Mayor John Cowen? We may be getting ahead of ourselves here, but, well, when is the last time you heard of the RGV doing anything as "one," and not as individual communities?

It's likely true that Dallas could not care any less about Fort Worth 30 miles away, but the RGV is, by way of history and conventional wisdom, a bit more symbiotic than the indifference up in DFW. The valley is seen as one. A band of towns, yes, but as one.

Talk about competition between RGV cities and towns can be found readily in restaurant and coffee shop discussions. More often than not, however, the discourse is about singular issues, such as questions to do with what city has the best airport, the best shopping district, the best law enforcement and the best city government.

Opinions swell, yes. "We're Number One" is a phrase taken hostage by every city & town in the valley, in all cultural ledgers - from high school football to civic pride, from local food to size of City Hall. That's to be expected, of course.

But what more could the Rio Grande Valley be if its cities & towns worked together to forge "one" valley and not live as if a pie where the slices are all over the table?

It would be spectacular, it says here...

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