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Newspaper and Travel Guide
for Pecos Country of West Texas
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Three killed, three injured in accidents
A longtime Pecos-Barstow-Toyah ISD teacher was killed Friday evening, and a Balmorhea woman was one of two people who died Saturday afternoon in separate traffic accidents in Reeves and Presidio counties, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Manuel Gaston Tarango, 46, 103 Lincoln St., was pronounced dead at 6:57 p.m. at Reeves County Hospital by Dr. Eusebio Barrentos, following the one vehicle rollover on County Road 342 (Lincoln Street). Because the accident occurred just outside the Pecos city limits, DPS trooper Willie Andino of Monahans handled the investigation, and said Tarango was the only passenger in a 2005 Lincoln that was eastbound on Lincoln when he failed to negotiate a curve and lost control of the car.
The vehicle ended up on the north side of Lincoln Street, where it struck one of the new concrete culverts installed recently, as part of a project by Reeves County and the Town of Pecos City, as part of their project to widen and repave Lincoln Street. Andino, who was assisted in the investigation by trooper Emmit Moore, said Tarango was not wearing a seat belt at the time of the accident, and after being pronounced dead, his body was taken to Pecos Funeral Home.
Tarango was a 16-year teacher for Pecos-Barstow-Toyah ISD, beginning at Barstow Elementary. He has been a science teacher in recent years at Crockett Middle School, and is survived by a wife and two children.
The second accident occurred at 5:10 p.m. on Saturday, on U.S. 67, 38 miles south of Marfa in Presidio County. According to DPS trooper Lewis E. Sullivan of Marfa, rain was a factor in the two-vehicle crash that left passengers in both vehicles dead, and three other people injured.
Rafaela Baylon Orozco, 47, of Balmorhea, and Elva B. Armendariz, 55, of Midland both were pronounced dead at the scene at 7:30 p.m. by Presidio County Justice of the Peace Fred Granado. Orozco was a passenger in a 2001 Dodge drive by Armando Orozco, 47, of Balmorhea, while Armendariz was riding in a 2002 Chevrolet pickup driven by Elias Genovevo Armdendariz, 59, of Midland.
According to Sullivan’s report, Orozco’s car was northbound in the rain on U.S. 67 when he lost control of the vehicle, causing it to go into a side skid across the highway and into the southbound lanes, where it was struck on the right side by Armendariz’s pickup.
Both drivers were transported to Big Bend Regional Medical Center in Alpine in critical condition, Orozco with internal injuries and Armendariz with incapacitating injuries. Also in critical condition was another passenger in the pickup, 4-year-old Edwin Armendariz. He also suffered incapacitating injuries.
The deceased were transported to Alpine Funeral Home. All five persons were wearing seat belts at the time of the accident, Sullivan said. He was assisted in the investigation by DPS troopers Robert Lujan and Angel De los Santos of Marfa, Sinto Madrid of Presidio, and Shannon Don Hamby and Stephen Ray Houltinghouse of Fort Davis.
Online report protests made by restaurants
The term ‘food fight’ took on a slightly different meaning on Thursday evening, at the start of the Town of Pecos City Council’s regular meeting at City Hall.
Councilman Cody West read a statement objecting to a report aired on KOSA-TV the previous night on a proposal to put the health department inspection reports on the city’s restaurants and food vendors on-line. Representatives of some of the local restaurants also were on hand to criticize both the report on Ch. 7 and statements made by council members, while councilman Frank Sanchez criticized both TV report and an earlier story in the Enterprise on the initial proposal.
“I’m very disappointed in the story on CBS-7 last night,” West said, in criticizing reporter Eddie Garcia for the angle his story took. “In this case, he spun the story to make it seem like every restaurant in Pecos is not suitable for dining.”
“I’m fully aware that food service inspections are public record and consumers should have the right to know if their favorite restaurant is complying with the state and city code when it comes to food preparation,” he said. “One of our local inspectors stood in front of this council recently and said he has seen no major problems with our restaurants. Most of the violations he has pointed out to restaurant owners have been corrected within the time allotted.
“You have to read between the lines of this news story to get the facts,” West said, saying that the report failed to make it clear up front that the violations were “in the past.”
City manager Joseph Torres said he was interviewed for the story, and allowed Garcia to shoot video of his computer screen showing the city’s restaurant inspection list.
He said they scrolled the database back six years looking for violations. “We went to 2004 and there were one or two violations, and he right away shot on the ones that were findings,” Torres said.
“When Eddie Garcia came into my office he basically wanted to know when I was going to have these reports online. My response was when the council directs me to,” Torres said. “He asked to see the database, and on the first screen there were no violations.”
Sanchez said he was interviewed for the story by Garcia, and was disappointed in it and in a July 16 article and headline in the Enterprise on allowing the public online access to the inspection reports.
“Maybe we could put them online. It would keep them honest,” he said during the July 12 meeting. “I would like to see a system where people can look it up online.”
“When Ricky Herrera gave his report at the July 12 meeting, that’s when I brought it up,” Sanchez said on Thursday. “It was just one of the avenues we should look at.
“It’s going to be up to the council. If the council doesn’t want to publish it online, that’s fine,” he said, adding that the action was the full council’s decision, and he was not happy with council members who he said had blamed him after receiving negative feedback from the July 12 meeting.
“I want the council members to come out in the open and tell me, because I don’t appreciate going behind my back and slandering me, which is totally unprofessional and unethical,” Sanchez said. “They’ve told a couple of restaurant owners it was strictly my idea, and it was not.”
“Councilman Sanchez, the evidence doesn’t look too good,” said Al Gomez, who along with his wife, Mary Ann, own Alfredo’s Restaurant on South Cedar Street. “You called me and told me you weren’t responsible, yet you were on the TV show last night.”
Gomez said his restaurant has been recognized by Texas Monthly and will have a segment soon on Food Network. “Mary Ann and I work awfully hard in protecting our business. “We have 17 employees here and another 19 in Fort Stockton. We try to provide good jobs to our citizens here in town and make sure the money stays in town.”
Gomez said his father was the city health inspector in 2004, when the violations shown on KOSA occurred. “I did some digging. That business is no longer here,” he said, adding that the last serious violation was four years ago.
He also criticized Sanchez for his statement about keeping local restaurants honest. “We have nothing to hide sir,” Gomez said.
“That’s a matter of interpretation. I’m not saying that you’re dishonest,” Sanchez said.
“Well, you’re saying you want to keep us honest. Honest for what? What are we trying to hide?” Gomez said. “We don’t want to snooker the city. We’re not in that operation.”
“If you have some kind of discrepancies, we get those reports most of the time, and they’re in public view at the restaurants. Most restaurants will give you information on how we did and the score, so we’re not hiding anything,” Gomez said.
Gomez joined West in voicing his opposition to putting the health inspections online.
“The reason I don’t like it is marketing purposes. In big cities like Odessa, Houston and San Antonio, if they do that in the big cities, you might lost a customer,” he said. “But when they lose a customer, Mr. Sanchez, they gain 50 more. … If I lose that customer, I lose the grandma, grandpa, cousins, tios tias, aunts, uncles. I lose everybody. So can you see where the problem is for us?”
“I want you to understand Mr. Gomez that the story was taken way out of context,” Sanchez said. “It wasn’t strictly my idea. We agreed to try and look at different areas, as far as posting things online.”
“I believe that putting this on line will only have a negative effect on our local businesses,” West said. “This city government should be more pro-business. We are not Dallas or San Antonio, where restaurants are expendable. We have very few and should do more to help them.”
“This report could have been done in any community in America,” West said. “CBS 7 chose to report it because the council brought up the issue. Now our community has yet another black eye.”
Gomez also complained about a visual used during the TV report. “They went down Cedar Street and got pictures of every restaurant. So it looked like ‘Here are the rat people’,” he said.
Jean Winget, manager of the Best Western Swiss Chalet, which shared the Alpine Lodge Restaurant with the Best Western Swiss Clock Inn, said she also was opposed to putting the inspections online.
“If we’re breaking the law tell us what you want done and I don’t have a problem doing it. I don’t even have a problem if you shut our doors because we’re not doing it,” she said. “But I do have a problem with you going out there and telling the whole world we’re a filthy town. I think it’s not good, and it’s going to hurt all of us.”
The discussion took up the first half hour of Thursday’s meet. Council members took up another restaurant-related issue later in the meeting, discussing but taking no action on a request to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that the city be considered for a TCEQ sanitary sewer overflow initiative.
The request centers on problems the city has had in recent years with lines on the southeast side of town that have been clogged by batter and oil waste from the Trans-Pecos Foods plant on Interstate 20. Trans-Pecos Foods has taken steps to correct the problems, but the city is also looking at an ordinance to mandate grease traps for restaurants and other large-scale food preparation areas.
“TCEQ is inviting us to participate in it,” city public works director Edgardo Madrid told the council, adding he expected Pecos to have a 95 to 100 percent chance of being added to the program.
Madrid said the city has until mid-September to prepare the application, which would allow time for letters to be sent out to restaurant owners and for a public hearing on the change.
“I’d rather do the first meeting after the notice,” West said, and council members agreed to table any action on the new ordinance until next month.
Sports complex could face higher maintenance costs
With the passage of a $16 million bond issue in 2008, Reeves County voters gave the Commissioner’s Court the right to access money for several projects, including construction of a new sports recreation complex.
Construction costs have actually dropped since then for the eight field baseball/softball complex the county is proposing to build on 110 acres of land between the Reeves County Golf Course and Pecos Municipal Airport, and county judge Sam Contreras put the project’s current cost at $9.1 million, about $3 million less than voters originally approved for the work.
But even if the money is there to build the project, funds will also have to be found to maintain the facility. That’s something local governments have had trouble over the past 25 years funding due to budget shortfalls, and something that – based on a similar facility recently completed in Big Spring – could cost the county in the range of $250,000 annually to properly maintain, slightly less than double the current ballpark expenditures.
Reeves County agreed to take over maintenance of five ballparks at Maxey Park, along with the Chano Prieto Little League field in the late 1980s, after the Town of Pecos City said it no longer had the funds to maintain the three baseball and three softball fields. The county also maintains Martinez Field on the southeast side of Pecos, built in 1981 at a cost of $99,000 and which has been used for both baseball and softball.
However, the county also has run into financial problems during the past decade, and while upgrades have been made in the past few years to the Little League field, only minimal work has been done on the Maxey Park fields, most of which are in need of new bleachers and fences.
Martinez Field received some upgrades a decade ago when it was being used by the Pecos High School softball team, including the installation of lights that were not part of the original ballpark. But that field has also struggled with maintenance problems, mainly in maintaining grass on a facility built in an area with a highly saline water table on the edge of Mosquito Lake.
Following passage of the bond issue in November of 2008, the county looked at rehabbing the Maxey Park fields into a new complex and building the complex at Martinez Field before deciding on the option in-between the two sites and just to the south of the golf course, which is to be expanded from 11 to 18 holes as part of the bond issue funding.
“What we’re thinking is we can save some money if it’s all in the same area,” Contreras said during the July 19 Pecos Economic Development Corp. board meeting.
“The county has a lot of land at Martinez Field to put the fields there, but it would cost more,” he said, explaining that the recreation facility and the golf course could share both personnel and irrigation systems.
“If we built it there and work it out, it would be more economical to use the workforce at the golf course,” said Danny Rodriguez, PEDC board chairman, who also is a member of the Pecos City Council and an employee of Reeves County, as head of the Community Sports and Recreation Department’s off-season and outdoor recreation programs.
“We have some county personnel working who can help out. Currently we have some people who are not as busy as they could be,” Contreras said.
However, he added that as of now, the county has no estimate of what the annual maintenance costs for the new facility would be. “What the figure is depends on if we have the personnel,” he said.
The City of Big Spring recently completed a similar facility, the Roy Anderson Park and Sports Complex on Interstate 20 on the northwest side of the city. Pecos’ 11-year-old and its 11-12 year-old Little League teams used two of the park’s eight fields earlier this month, for their West Texas Sectional Tournament.
A total of 10 teams in the two divisions participated in the tournament, with most of those teams staying overnight in local hotels. Supporters of the Pecos complex note that the facility would allow similar tournaments to be held locally, benefiting area restaurants and motels.
But at the same time, an official with the Big Spring Little League, which hosted this month’s sectional tournaments, said in order to help pay for the expenses of maintaining the fields, league teams are charged $250 apiece by the city to use the complex. Based on 12 players per team, that translates into just over $20 per player for the maintenance costs.
According to a Big Spring city official, the $250 team fee is about one-tenth of one percent of the city’s budgeted maintenance costs for the Roy Anderson complex.
“We just finished it this year, so we don’t have past numbers,” said Nancy Crenshaw, assistant city finance director. But she said Big Spring is estimating a $244,000 cost for maintenance of the eight fields during the upcoming year.
“It was $299,000 this year, because we were getting the grass established,” she said.
The complex is on the opposite side of town from Big Spring’s municipal golf course, so the Roy Anderson facility cannot directly share workers, as would be possible in Pecos. But Crenshaw said the complex employs one full-time and two part-time people to handle the work. “The budget includes salaries, supplies and maintenance,” she added.
Locally, spending on maintenance of the county ballparks has increased in the past two years, but is still well below the figure quoted by Crenshaw for upkeep of the Roy Anderson complex, which also features a parking area, two rest room and concession stands, and a play area for children at the ballparks.
According to figures from Reeves County auditor Lynn Owens, the county has spent a little over $50,000 on non-salaried maintenance and operational expenses during the first six-plus months of this year, after spending $80,000 in 2009.
That includes expenses of a little under $27,000 during the first half of 2010 towards physical plant maintenance of its recreational facilities, after spending just under $30,000 in 2009. That compares to spending only $9,600 on items such as paint, lumber and piping during the 2008 fiscal year, and just a combined $28,000 in the years between 2005 and 2008.
Other expenses for county ballparks during the period included water and electric utilities. On those, records show the county has spent $23,593 so far in 2010, and spent $50,641 in 2009; $34,553 in 2008; $31,989 in 2007; $30,160 in 2006 and $16,265 in 2005.
Junior high cheerleaders attend summer camp
Crockett Middle School Cheerleaders had the opportunity to attend Summer Cheerleading Camp in Alpine, at the Sul Ross State University Campus.
The group attended the NCAA sponsored camp this summer from June 27-30, learned several new routines, skills and participated in competition.
Three of the junior high cheerleaders were nominated for All-American, including Ebony Candelas, Cindy Leos and Carriz Payan.
This is the first year in many years that the junior high squad has attended camp.
The sponsor for the group, Mary Alice Hughes attended the camp with the young girls.
Pecos Enterprise
York M. "Smokey" Briggs, Publisher
324 S. Cedar St., Pecos, TX 79772
Phone 432-445-5475, FAX 432-445-4321
e-mail news@pecos.net
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Copyright 2003-04 by Pecos Enterprise
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