Letter to the editor

What’s going on in Gonzales?

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As a resident of our county, I am wondering what is going on in our small town. It seems that every time I open up the paper, the city has issued out a new tax, a new fee, or a new ordinance designed to make money from the citizens of Gonzales. I thought the people we elected were “conservatives” that are supposed to be opposed to those issues.
As of now, we have a city that can’t afford new vehicles to maintain the electricity they supply to the city. We’ve got franchise fees and property taxes that were increased. We have brush fees that were doubled and then after paying for the equipment they use, the vehicle they drive, the gas it uses and their hourly wage, you have an extra fee of $25 per 15 minutes. That’s $100 an hour, good for the city, not so good for the resident. We have a city dump paid for by the tax-paying citizens of Gonzales that used to be free, now it’s $40 a trash bed and $200 a trailer.
We’ve got people who enter our private property under the authority granted by the city that measure your grass, inspect your vehicles, tell you how to throw away your trash at your residence you pay for under the threat of a fine that can reach up to $2,000.
When I was growing up, a dad and his son could spend the afternoon working on a project car and fix it up. Now, the city made that a violation punishable with a fine.
Same thing with advertising a business. You got the get a permit to advertise a service. Now you have to pay the city a fee to find a job to pay your bills and feed your family. After paying $5.3 million for a new water treatment facility and $43,000 to find out why we had fecal matter in the water, six months later we’re finding molecules that are supposedly non-toxic in our drinking water to this day. And we’re still charged more for it!
We’ve had two city managers in the last 18 months that got paid as much has the people managing cities the size of Dallas and Houston. It’s insane.
This is what us conservatives call regulation, designed to find a way to make a dollar out of the hardworking citizens of our community. When the oil boom left, the city had a surplus and they spend the money, we didn’t. now they’re targeting us with fees and taxes that’s a burden on our businesses and our daily way of life and it’s affecting our households. It all started with the garage sales and tax, now look what it’s become
In my opinion, maybe it’s time we stopped having popularity contests and start having elections. Instead of voting on who the person is, how about voting on the issues. Maybe an outsider to shake the place up the way Trump is shaking up Washington. We already know what the people who are in power now are going to do, their record speaks for itself.

Thomas Enriquez
Gonzales

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