The Gowen Effect: Fixing Things When Others are Way More Broken

By Diego Garcia III | Editor of The Brownsville Beacon

Rose Gowen is up for reelection this year. If she loses her bid for keeping her seat on the city commission, she'll leave a lasting legacy on the council.

Truth be told, not many who leave public office leave a lasting legacy in Brownsville, and when they do, it is often times a legacy of scandal or wrongdoing. Hardly is a Brownsville politician remembered for their positive impact on the city.

Most commissioners take their seat thinking they're going to have an impact on the council then they realize their projects aren't going to come to fruition, or they spend the majority of their term bickering with other commissioners or dealing with the negativity that is the Brownsville political landscape, so they decide not to run for reelection. We'll call that the Troiani Effect (or the Munguia Effect).

The Gowen Effect will be different. 

While still being recognized in infamy, her legacy will be remembered with a bit more skepticism than a legacy left behind by a mayor trying to deposit a 26,000 dollar city check into his personal bank account. People will scoff at her just a little more than rhe self-aggrandizing commissioner who spent her tenure on the council thinking everyone was out to get her rather than implementing policy aimed to help the city.

Gowen will forever be remembered as the commissioner who spent insane amounts of money to fix hypothetical quality of life problems when there were real, tangible problems that went largely ignored. 

Her hike and bike trail project should have been christened the "good money after bad" project. 

For those of you who don't really keep up with local politics, Brownsville's landscape was revamped a few years ago when almost all the railroad tracks in town were uprooted and removed. Instead of leaving a big ugly scar across town, the city, with Gowen picking up the baton and running with it, endorsed and championed a network of hike and bike trails to be built from one end of the city to another. Millions of dollars were spent paving a trail, building exercise stops, and landscaping the trail that would eventually stretch from the downtown area running parallel to Paredes Line Road towards the northern city limits. 

Gowen's Field of Dreams mentally made perfect sense in her head and justified the stacks of money that kept getting pumped into the project. If you build it, they will exercise. She thought Brownsvillians were too fat, too lazy, and too diabetic, and if they had a multi-million dolllar trail, they'd all get skinny, active, and fit.

In theory, that was a great idea. But we all have to remember that in theory, communism works.

Brownsville had, and still has, real issues that plague the city. A quality of life fitness project should have taken a backseat to the myriad of issues that really need addreasing. Take your pick from more police protection for the city, drainage problems, the lack of bus shelters, potholes and other infrastructure problems, real healthcare improvements (you would think Gowen, being a medical doctor would have paid attention to this), the economy and holding Elon Musk to their word, or from any other problem you can come up with. 

Or simply put, we need quality traffic lights, not pretty bushes with flowers. We need streets to stop flooding, not bicycle rental machines. 

The Gowen Effect is already being felt in Brownsville. Instead of focusing on improving the drainage along Boca Chica Boulevard (a project TXDoT says they conveniently don't oversee), the Texas Department of Transportation has begun a massive project to construct an elevated center median similar to the one that went up along Ruben Torres. 

On a major thoroughfare that already has too much traffic on it, TXDoT, in their infinite wisdom, has created bottlenecks all along Boca Chica from the expressway to Four Corners. Lanes have been merged and thru lanes have been changed to left-turn only lanes, making traffic worse.

The Gowen Effect in full display, if ever there was an example. 

Will the voters choose Gowen for another term as a city commissioner? We'll see what the election results tell us in a few months. Her slate of opponents haven't really done a whole lot for Brownsville in the past, but many Brownsvillians are tired of Gowen's lack of real improvements. Will Gowen's lack of real solutions, or the fact that she doesn't pay property taxes on her historic house give her seat to a new commissioner? 

The devil we know may not be better than the other devils we know, either. This is one race where "none of the above" might very well be the best choice.

Or maybe Brownsville really wants four more years of projects we want, but don't really need.