MAY 8TH ELECTIONS

Well, it's obvious I'm not going to get the survey questions out for the ECISD candidates. My husband went back to the hospital from the rehab hospital. Then I was expecting him to come home and had to do all kinds of things to the house in preparation. Now it looks like he won't be coming home for at least another 3 weeks.

BUT, he's better and my house is clean and we have a set of questions to build on for later. Whatever.

There are some articles in the Odessa American on the candidates in the May 8th election that have been revealing, notably the ones concerning Ben Valasquez, City Councilman for District 5. Valasquez was uncovered by the OA as not having a driver's license, not having auto insurance, not having paid tickets for 10 years and not paying property taxes for a number of years. This was bad enough, but then comments started being entered under the articles about his opponent, Roy Hunton, accusing him of being fired from ECISD for charging stuff on the ECISD account for his construction company and also of hitting a child.

I'm totally disgusted with having no candidates to vote for. I got disgusted enough to call Roy Hunton and discuss this with him. He was flabbergasted about the theft charge and said that there had been a situation with a 14-15 year old at the Alternative Center. He explained that he had been having a disagreement with another teacher when he decided the best thing was just to leave and turned to do so. The kid was getting up from his desk at the same time and he bumped into him and tried to keep the kid and himself from falling which succeeded, but the kid complained that Mr. Hunton had hit him. The incident was investigated and Mr. Hunton was exonerated.

He went on to explain that he wasn't even in the construction instruction part of ECISD for at least 10 years before he retired and had never misappropriated any funds at any time.

He did not want to even reply to these charges because he didn't want to lend them credence although I encouraged him to contact the OA and do an interview with them regarding this smear attack several times. He seems to be a very nice man who only wants to concentrate on the problems with our city that he can help solve.

There has been some discussion under the article on Richard Herrera who is running against Donna Smith, current president of the Board of Trustees, for Position 3. Donna Smith has been presented in the discussions I've had with people who deal with the school board as weak and tending to follow the lead of Carol Gregg who has been described as a hard-left liberal. I have to say that if Mr. Herrera is real, he may have some solutions to some real problems we have with Hispanics in our school system; however, he seems to be particularly concerned with Hispanic kids' problems and in view of the stranglehold CRUCIAL, MALDEF, and LULAC have on our school system, I don't trust him not to be symphathetic to just turning the school district over to them.

I would like to see Carol Gregg gone. Her opponent is a nice-looking, business-owning 29-year-old named Luis Galvan. There's not much been said about him, but he did an internship with Rep. Pete Gallego. I looked Pete Gallego over. He's a liberal Democrat and involved heavily with Mexican-American issues and organizations. He's rated in the 20's and 30's by conservative organizations. With this and, again, CRUCIAL, MALDEF and LULAC to contend with, I think we'd do better sticking with Gregg for another round than risk putting Galvan in until we know more about him.

Ray Beaty, thankfully, has no opponent and ECISD has called the election on him and he will not even have to be on the ballot.

Javier Jovan is running against Dean Coombs for the City Council District 4 position. I don't know what to say about this one. I like Dean Coombs. I also liked what Jovan had to say about taxes, the ODC, more open government, etc. Jovan has also been described as one of Valasquez's friends, but he identifies with the Tea Partiers which does not compute with Valasquez as a friend. Y'all figure this one out.... my head hurts.