|
Newspaper and Travel Guide
for Pecos Country of West Texas
Friday, May 28, 2010
Lujan, Dutchover named top PHS grads
A young man who speaks three languages will give the Valedictorian speech Friday evening at the Pecos High School New Gym during commencement exercises for the Pecos High School Class of 2010.
Aaron Lujan, the son of Manuel and Olga Lujan is this year’s Valedictorian. He is also the grandson of Manuel Sr. and Lorena Lujan.
Lujan was born in Monahans and currently resides in Barstow and will be attending the University of Texas at Austin.
He plans to study pre-med in hopes of becoming a cardiologist.
During his free time, he likes to play and listen to music, run, take amateur photography, experiment with cooking, learn new languages (he knows three already, English, Spanish and Italian) and hang out with his friends.
He says that his goal in life is to break all boundaries that keep people from succeeding and doing what they really want to do.
A favorite quote of his is, “A man is but a product of his thoughts; what he thinks, he becomes.”
An avid golfer is the Salutatorian for the class of 2010.
Richard Dutchover, the son of Ronnie and Jimmy Dutchover, has spent most of his life here in Pecos and has always been at the top of his class academically.
His ambitions include school and golf.
He has been playing golf all of his life and has always loved it, and finished first in this year’s district golf tournament.
Dutchover will be attending Saint Mary’s University where he hopes to pursue a career in the medical field.
Guest speaker for the evening is a former Pecos resident and former Golden Girl.
Rhonda White Pelton, was born in Pecos and baptized at St. James Baptist Church. She attended schools in Pecos-Barstow-Toyah ISD, including Bessie Haynes Elementary, Zavala Jr. High School, Pecos Junior High 8th Grade Campus and Pecos High School. While in Pecos schools, she was active in UIL Academic events, band, athletics and student government.
At Pecos High School, Pelton was a member of the debate team, served as team manager of the Lady Eagles Volleyball and basketball teams, and a member of the Lady Eagle Track team. In 1990, she was honored to be chosen as Golden Girl of the Old West.
In May 1991, she sat where the class of 2010 will sit on Friday, as she graduated from Pecos High School.
Pelton received excellent instruction and coaching in Pecos, and as a result was awarded numerous academic and merit scholarships. She chose to pursue a degree in Chemical Engineering at Prairie View A&M University.
As a student at Prairie View, she was active in campus life and academics. She served as a class representative in the Student Government Association, and was inducted in to Omega Chi Epsilon Chemical Engineering Honor Society.
She was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1996, and began her career at the Dow Chemical Company.
She has served in several roles in her 14 years at Dow including, Process Control Developer, Production Engineer and Six Sigma Black Belt Project Leader.
Pelton is currently serving in the capacity of Process Automation Senior Specialist providing support to production facilities around the globe, including Portugal, Germany, Brazil and the U.S. Gulf Coast.
She resides in Houston, with her husband, Michael and two children, Niara, eight years old and Michael Jonathan, age six.
Top graduates from Balmorhea High School are Valedictorian Daniel Bejarano and Salutatorian Joe Abel Rodriguez.
Both have been very involved in their studies and extracurricular activities throughout their high school years.
Odessa band’s singer guilty of pot smuggling
A federal jury convicted an Odessa Tejano band singer in two separate cases last week involving the smuggling of over 1½ tons of marijuana into the United States, and the man is now awaiting sentencing next month in U.S. District Court in Pecos.
United States Attorney John E. Murphy announced that 27-year-old Odessa resident Jose Alfredo Porras-Muniz, the lead vocalist for the Tejano band, Los Diamantes de Ojinaga, faces between 10 years and life in federal prison after a jury at the Lucius D. Bunton Federal Courthouse convicted him on May 19 in two separate drug smuggling cases.
On Oct. 8, 2009, a federal grand jury in Pecos returned an indictment against Porras-Muniz (a.k.a. “Pepeyo”) charging him with possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. Evidence presented during trial revealed that on July 6, 2009, Porras-Muniz arranged for the smuggling of approximately 77 pounds of marijuana in to the United States through the Port of Entry in Presidio.
On March 11, 2010, a federal grand jury in Pecos returned a separate indictment against Porras-Muniz charging him with possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. Evidence presented during trial revealed that Porras-Muniz and others smuggled over 3,000 pounds of marijuana in to the United States. On Feb. 17, 2010, federal authorities seized the marijuana on Godbold Ranch Road in Presidio County and subsequently arrested Porras-Muniz. At that time of his arrest, the first indictment became unsealed.
Porras-Muniz is scheduled for sentencing on June 21, 2010, before United State District Judge Robert A. Junell in Pecos.
These cases were investigated jointly by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service, Presidio, and the DEA HIDTA Task Force in Alpine, with cooperation by the U.S. Border Patrol, Marfa Station, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Presidio.
Assistant United States Attorney James J. Miller, Jr., is prosecuting this case on behalf of the government.
Commissioners OK resolution for rail district
A resolution to form a Rural Rail Transportation District was approved during the regular Reeves County Commissioner’s Court meeting, held Monday morning at the Reeves County Courthouse.
Commissioners approved the resolution, which is connected to the proposed Texsand intermodal rail yard project two miles west of Pecos, but did not approve appointing the county judge and the commissioners as the five directors of the Rural Rail Transportation District.
“We approved the resolution, but Lynn (Owens, county auditor) felt that there were some conflicts, so we tabled it until we can find out more about the legalities of that,” said Reeves County Commissioner Precinct 1 Roy Alvarado.
Alvarado said that Pecos Economic Development Corp. Director Rob Tobias told the group that the commissioners could appoint themselves to serve on the district.
The resolution stated that Reeves County seeks to support the existing local economy and to attract new jobs, industry and commerce, and since 1881, railroads have played a major role in Reeves County, moving not only people, but also agricultural, industrial, and construction goods in and out of the county and two railroads serve Reeves County today and offer their service to support commerce and industry.
Tobias has gone before the Pecos City Council as well as the PEDC board in the past year pushing the creation of a Rural Rail Transportation District, which would be able to collect taxes to fund infrastructure improvements related to projects like the Texsand intermodal yard.
A new interchange on Interstate 20 at Locker Road, along with the extension of water, sewer and electric lines to the site, would be needed as part of the yard’s construction. Texsand is looking to build the facility to offload sand used in oil and natural gas drilling operations, but other companies connected to the energy industry and other local businesses have expressed interest in using the yard, which would be the largest facility to load and unload railcars between Fort Worth and El Paso.
The State of Texas allows counties to create Rural Rail Transportation Districts to preserve and enhance rail transportation assets and the Reeves County Commissioner’s court, along with many civic leaders have investigated the role of a Rural Rail Transportation District and consider a district to be a valuable tool to develop rail facilities and rail related industrial development.
During their regular meeting, commissioners also received an update, quarterly report on the employee benefit plan by Debbie Falknor of Wells Fargo Insurance Services and listened to a presentation by Ellen Mosley with AFLAC – Administrative Duty.
Mosley told the group about the many plans that are offered by AFLAC in the different price ranges.
They approved a service agreement with Johnson Controls for a maintenance agreement for six years, York Chillers at the RCDC-III unit in the amount of $18,915 for a period of one year beginning June 1; approved payment from 2010 bond funds to JOVA, Inc., in the amount of $3,557; a payment from bond funds to JOVA, Inc., in the amount of $15,750 for RCDC I&II repairs; payment from bond funds to Johnson Controls, Inc., in the amount of $24,482.71 for RCDC I&II smoke purge and repair expense; payment from 2009 advance insurance funds, to Petruska and Associates in the amount of $990.00 for April legal services; payment from 2009 advance insurance funds to Williams Scotsman, Inc., in the amount of $2,593.16 for rental of temporary education and visitation trailer and payment to Satterfield & Pontikes Construction, Inc., in the amount of $2.8 million.
Annual Memorial Day Festival set this weekend
Music, food and fun will all be part of the festivities planned this weekend in Balmorhea and everyone is invited to come out and enjoy the holiday weekend.
The 10th Annual Memorial Day Festival will be held on Saturday, May 29 and Sunday, May 30, in beautiful downtown Balmorhea.
A full schedule of events will be held on both days with the main feature being three live Tejano Bands.
The sixth Annual Jerry Mendoza Scholarship Softball Tournament is also on deck for the weekend.
About 22 vendors will be ready to serve the public with a variety of festival favorites ad some Mexican foods, like “tripitas” and “barbacoa.”
The tree-lined park will be filled with people from all over West Texas and lawn chairs are a must for the long day of music, according to festival organizers.
Bands scheduled to play are, the Sangria Band of Midland; Albert Garcia and the PT Show Band from Midland; Joe Davila and the Jetliners of Dallas; El Mariachi Galan from Odessa and D.J. music provided by the popular Junga Jams of Pecos.
Youngsters can enjoy swimming at Balmorhea State Park or the Kiddie Pool in downtown Balmorhea, so festival attendees need to bring swimming gear.
The public can also enjoy fishing at the Balmorhea Lake this weekend.
Organizers for the event are inviting everyone in the surrounding communities to join them for fun and relaxation.
Paint shortage won’t slow current TxDOT jobs
A shortage of a material used by the Texas Department of Transportation for striping highways across the state won’t affect next month’s seal coating project in Pecos, but could leave locations where emergency repairs are made without highway lines for a while this summer.
The Dallas Morning News reported on Tuesday that TxDOT has suspended redrawing the stripes on existing roads due to the shortage of a resin-like material called methyl methacrylate. Texas Department of Transportation spokesman Chris Lippincott said manufacturers have notified Texas about production and demand delays.
Texas normally would have enough paint to redraw 171 million feet of the 4-inch-wide stripes on highways and other state-maintained roads, but the shortage is expected to last through the summer.
TxDOT crews in Pecos have been working for the past several weeks on preparing Cedar Street (U.S. 285) for a seal-coating project, and Larry Levario, maintenance director for TxDOT’s Pecos office said that the shortage wouldn’t affect that work next month.
“As far as current projects and the seal-coating program, we’ve already got enough of it,” he said, and crews were out on Tuesday putting temporary stripes onto areas of the intersection of Third and Cedar Streets, where the street surface had been scraped off in preparation for the seal coating project.
Levario said officials in TxDOT’s area engineering office in Fort Stockton plan to have the seal coating crews in Pecos between June 19-22 for the project of laying tar and rocks down on Cedar Street. The work is scheduled to be completed the day before this year’s West of the Pecos Rodeo Parade, with this year’s rodeo set for June 23-26.
Lippincott says construction of new roads will continue, but the paint shortage could delay some required striping. Temporary markings and ``no center stripe'' signs will be used.
RCH board gets first look at Rural Health Clinic plan
Reeves County Hospital District board members got their first look at the preliminary design plans for the district’s new Rural Health Clinic, during the board’s monthly meeting on Tuesday, and were invited to attend a meeting this coming Tuesday between hospital officials and representatives of Lee Lewis Construction, the Lubbock firm hired to build the $4.6 million clinic.
Lorenzo Serrano, hospital special projects director, said the initial design presented to the board was the second rendering by Lee Lewis’ architect. The first presentation was modified to include changes sought by the doctors who’ll be using the clinic for their offices, but Serrano said, “There are a number of issues with this design we’ve conveyed back to the architect.”
Hospital CEO Al LaRochelle said the final interior design plan would be brought to the board for approval, as will the preliminary exterior design plans for the clinic.
Serrano said the changes already made involved relocating the offices and exam rooms to the outer edges of the building, but that other changes still need to be made on the Rural Health Clinic, which will be built west of the hospital on Stafford Boulevard.
“One problem we have with the design is the patient waiting area privacy issues,” Serrano said. The current design has a central waiting room near the front entrance for all physician offices.
Serrano, LaRochelle and board members also discussed inclusion of a separate entrance and waiting area at the clinic for patients brought from the Pecos Criminal Justice Center for examinations.
Serrano said the clinic would have 11-by-12 exam rooms, larger than in the original request proposal, while the entire building under the current plan would be 18,000 square feet, 2,000 square feet less than in the original proposal. That caused board member Leo Hung to ask why the size of the clinic had been cut back 10 percent.
“Two-thousand square feet becomes substantial. I want to know what happened,” he said.
“This is not completed yet,” LaRochelle said, adding he expects several more modifications before the final design is brought to the board for approval.
“I’m not sure why, if they shrunk it down to 18,000 square feet, what the hospital is getting for it,” LaRochelle said, while Serrano added that an area to draw blood from patients also needs to be added to the plans.
Inclusion of curtains in front of some of the exam rooms for OB-GYN patients was one of the changes sought, while board member Jim Breese asked Serrano about the coverings and window placements for the clinic rooms located next to the outside of the building. “If you don’t do that, you haven’t done anything,” he said.
LaRochelle said board members were invited to attend a meeting scheduled for 12 noon on Tuesday at the hospital, where the new changes will be presented to Lee Lewis officials. Serrano said they are also going over flow charts of the current Rural Health Clinic set-up inside Reeves County Hospital, to see what other changes may be needed before a final plan is presented to the board.
Hospital says tax abatement at plant ended
Reeves County Hospital District board members decided that a tax abatement granted to Trans-Pecos Foods in 2003 has expired, during their meeting on Tuesday in the classroom at Reeves County Hospital, and agreed to expand the hospital’s medical associates group to include all recently recruited physicians to the facility.
Hospital CEO Al LaRochelle said Reeves County Chief Appraiser John Huddleston had asked the board to clarify the length of an abatement granted to Trans-Pecos Foods, just after it started up operations with the purchase of the former Anchor Foods plant on Interstate 20.
LaRochelle said he and special projects manager Lorenzo Serrano went back and found the board had granted the abatement in May of 2003 on certain items acquired by the company for production. But no time frame for the abatement had been stated in the motion to approve the request, only that abatement would be for “five years or longer,” according to Serrano.
He said the city had granted Trans-Pecos Foods a 10-year abatement, but board member Jim Breese said the company currently owed over $400,000 on non-abated taxable property to the city, hospital district, Pecos-Barstow-Toyah ISD and Reeves County.
“I’ve been told they (local taxing entities) have been waiting, but I guarantee if I had been delinquent that amount, they wouldn’t be waiting that long,” Breese said.
Lydia Prieto, who heads the P-B-T ISD Tax Office that also handles collections for the city and hospital district, said the city, school and hospital share of the taxes came to $366,514.52. Prieto added that Trans-Pecos Foods had made an initial $71,000 payment on the back taxes on Wednesday, and had set up a payment plan with her office and the Reeves County Tax Office for the remainder of the overdue property taxes.
Hospital board member Leo Hung, who along with Linda Gholson and Pablo Carrasco was on the board when the original abatement was granted, said he believed members back in 2003 meant for the abatement to be a five-year agreement. “We never discussed 10 years,” Hung said.
LaRochelle said an agreement approved in 2003 would have begun in the 2004 appraisal year. “If you did five years, than it would have ended up in the 2009 tax year. So basically, it would be ending now,” he said.
LaRochelle said the issue came up when the district was presented the preliminary 2010 appraisal numbers by Huddleston, which the district will use to set its budget and tax rates this summer.
The discussion on the status of Reeves Medical Associates was connected to its bi-annual state application renewal. LaRochelle and hospital chief of staff Dr. W.J. Bang, who as an independent practitioner needs to be notified of the renewal, both said the change would be better for the hospital, in keeping physicians informed about actions taken by the hospital’s staff on medical-related issues.
Reeves Medical Associates is a non-profit owned by the hospital district, designed under state law to keep medical decisions separate from a hospital’s financial decisions. Dr. Bang said New Mexico doctors have run into problems with medical decisions being made on a financial basis due to the lack of a separate medical association.
“I run the hospital, but I don’t practice medicine. This is to make sure I don’t start,” LaRochelle said.
“I think it is very important, and it will increase efficiency, with one medical staff instead of two medical staffs,” Dr. Bang said.
“I think it’s very important to have a unified medical staff for the future,” he said. “If small things start accumulating, eventually after two years they’ll leave.”
LaRochelle said the board currently only has three members, Dr. Orville Cerna, Dr. Ziad Abdo and Dr. Steven Serrano, but that the district is now up to nine physicians. “You don’t want to have people on the outside wondering what one group is doing,” he said.
Along with the Reeves Medical Associates change, the board also approved a recommendation from Dr. Bang as part of the medical staff report that privileges be granted Dr. Bhavesh Shah, who will be the hospital’s new podiatrist. The board also approved privileges for 37 radiologists under contract through Nighthawk Radiologists to do remote readings of X-ray and CT scans conducted locally.
In other action on Tuesday, Gholson, Hung and Breese all were sworn in for new two-year terms during the meeting, after all three were unopposed for re-election earlier this month.
The board also rejected a request from Westway Ranches LLC to purchase mineral interests owned by the district, while approving a new lease agreement on 3 1/3 acres of land in Ward County with CSC Interests, which replaces a five-year lease that is expiring.
“I guess we’ve got a number of these properties leased already and are getting some money, but I think this is a little low,” Chief Financial Officer Frank Seals said of Westway’s offer of $75,000.
“I wouldn’t sell it in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t do it,” LaRochelle said. “I know $75,000 is $75,000, but I believe we should hold onto everything we have.”
LaRochelle said progress is going slower than hoped for in getting the hospital’s new computer system fully operational. “The learning curve is much more severe than I thought it would be,” he said, adding that while the computers for the nursing system were working as planned, things were going slower with the hospital’s business office, and as a result, the hospital has seen a drop in its cash flow.
“We usually billed $285,000-$300,000 a month in Medicare, but as of the other day we’ve only gotten $40,000 (in May), so it’s really affected our Medicare cash flow,” he said.
LaRochelle said training on the system is continuing, with up to seven consultants in town when training on the physicians’ part of the new computer program begins.
Board members approved a change to the district’s benefit plan regarding benefits, barring workers who resign without notice from cashing in their benefits, including paid leave time. The new rule requires a two-week notice before PPL benefits can be cashed in by a worker quitting their job at the hospital.
New Town of Pecos City Mayor and the hospital’s director of public relations, Venetta Seals, also went over the results of the May 11 city council meeting, in which she discussed problems low water pressure in city lines was creating at the hospital, and in the kidney dialysis unit.
“They basically told us to get our own tank and supply our own water,” she said. City officials told Seals they would try to do a better job notifying the hospital about low-pressure problems, but that a ground storage tank would allow the hospital to have an emergency water supply to maintain the pressure needed to operate the dialysis machines.
Breese said the district could look at a 500-gallon tank, to augment the 130-gallon tank currently in place. LaRochelle said the hospital would have to find a location for the tank, while Breese added the water would have to be continuiously circulated in an above-ground tank even when water pressure was normal, to avoid algae buildup in the system.
Summer reading program set at library
The 2010 Summer Reading Program at the Reeves County Library, 505 S. Park, will kick off on Monday, June 7.
The special event will be held at the park by the West of the Pecos Museum, 1st and Oak Streets, from 10 a.m. until 11:30 a.m.
Story Hour, singalongs will be part of the activities and refreshments will be served.
The Reading Program is scheduled to continue from Monday, June 7 through Monday, July 19.
For more information contact the library at 445-5340.
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
Associated Press text, photo, graphic, audio and/or video material shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium.
Copyright 2003-04 by Pecos Enterprise
|
