Perry Politiking With Texas Border !

Posted on Sat, Feb. 11, 2006
Deputies are spread thin along border
By Bud Kennedy
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

Texas is finally spending state money on law enforcement along the Mexico border.

What took so long?
True, in the past two months we've committed to sending almost $10 million to pay county deputies more and buy more patrol cars. But when public safety in counties along the border depends on a few loyal deputies who face down drug dealers but collect puny paychecks of $20,800 a year, every penny from Austin helps.
"We have been neglected forever down here," said Sheriff Sigi Gonzalez Jr. of Zapata County, south of Laredo.
"The counties can't afford to hire more people or pay well. We've been pleading for help for years. Until now, our calls went unheeded."
Coincidentally -- or maybe not -- Gov. Rick Perry took a sudden, deep interest in border law enforcement when it looked as if he would have a tight re-election race in the March primary.
In December, the governor directed $6 million in federal grants to county agencies along the border. After a Mexican drug gang confronted Hudspeth County deputies, this month he kicked in $3.8 million in state money. He also ordered state troopers and game wardens to help enforce the law and protect public safety.
Texas can't take over the U.S. Border Patrol's job. But our troopers and our dollars can help local deputies protect Texans' public safety and property along the border and maybe discourage drug gangs from brazenly crossing the Rio Grande.
"It's been so depressing along the border," said Steve Westbrook, a former East Texas sheriff and now director of the Sheriffs Association of Texas professional organization. "The counties are completely understaffed. They've always been financially strapped.
"And they're up against some drug gangs across the border that are playing for keeps. It's just nearly impossible to hire somebody to do a border deputy's job for so little money."
Politicians talk a lot about fences and troops to secure the border.
But they rarely talk about spending more money on the simplest and first line of defense: the underpaid, overstressed deputies driving long, lonely patrol shifts for border law-enforcement agencies.
Deputies in Hudspeth County, east and south of El Paso, have been on TV a lot lately.
They chased and confronted a drug gang crossing the Rio Grande armed with military-style weapons and dressed in fatigues. This week, the chief deputy said one deputy's wife was approached and warned that officers should "stay off the river."
The news reports rarely mention how many deputies Hudspeth County has. Or what they're paid.
Hudspeth County has 12 patrol deputies.
Counting days off and vacations, that's three deputies per shift to cover an area about four-fifths the size of Connecticut.
Hudspeth County has 113 miles of international border.
The starting salary: $20,800 a year.
To face armed drug gangs.
"We do what we can afford," County Judge Becky Dean Walker, a rancher, said by phone from the county seat, Sierra Blanca. "We try to have enough people to keep the roads safe and patrol the county. We have trouble keeping people."
No wonder.
In Gonzalez's county, his deputies keep the peace for 13,000 residents plus visitors to Falcon Lake.
Using the usual rule of thumb promoted by police associations -- three law-enforcement officers per 1,000 residents or tourists -- Zapata County should have 39 patrol deputies.
Gonzalez has 26.
The starting pay: $23,175.
"The Laredo police pay decent, but otherwise, the local law-enforcement agencies along the border are some of the lowest-paid," Gonzalez said. "We wind up training a lot of people; then they go on to jobs with the Border Patrol or Customs."
The worst-paid officers wind up with the toughest jobs in Texas: investigating burglaries, break-ins and violent crimes along a much-traveled border.
"People think the border is patrolled by airplanes and heat sensors," Gonzalez said. "All you have to do is come down here and look. We're the ones on the front line."
He talked bitterly about how federal Homeland Security dollars have been spent mostly in heartland American towns, buying gear such as a defibrillator for a high school basketball gym in Tennessee.
"They think the terrorists are going to attack the basketball game?" he said.
"To me, that's money ill-spent."
He hesitated when I asked whether border counties are neglected because they're mostly Democratic.
"We've just been neglected, that's all," he said. "Gov. Perry is showing that he's concerned with the border now."
The first grants sent about $367,000 to each county. Hudspeth County, for example, bought two off-road four-wheel utility trucks for deputies and increased overtime pay.
Unlike governors in Arizona and New Mexico, Perry did not declare a state of emergency to leverage more federal money.
The Brownsville Herald quoted Perry as saying, "I don't think the people of Texas need to have a declaration to know that what's happening along the border is an emergency."
Every Texan can see the emergency for deputies along the border.

The question is whether our leaders in Austin will still see it after the November election.

Bud Kennedy's column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. (817) 390-7538 bud @budkennedy.com
source: http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/columnists/bud_kennedy/13848539.htm