Cortez: If Hidalgo County hasn’t fixed poverty in five decades, we need to do something different

I want to bring this to everyone’s attention. Senator Hinojosa said Hidalgo County is the 8th most populous county in Texas. And a recent study showed that Hidalgo County has had a poverty level of 20% or more for the last five decades. If we haven’t fixed the problem in five decades, we better start changing what we’re doing if we want to fix it in the future. 

We’re in a situation where we have to be extremely competitive in gaining the jobs that we want. If you look at the population that we have that is either under-employed or unemployed, either there’s not a job for them here to compensate them for their skills, or they’re not qualified for the job itself. So, thank God we’ve got UTRGV and South Texas College and now Texas A&M giving us a lot of opportunities to train our people, to give them a skill so they can be able to move out of the welfare line into the taxpayer line.

Well, whose responsibility is to do that? And if you come from a county that has 22 cities and an area with 47 cities, if we add Cameron County, we decided that we’re not going to ask the federal government or our state government to fix the problem. We’re going to do it ourselves. 

But the problem that we’ve had in the past is we do very good at identifying the problem, and even come up with solutions to the problem, but we did a very poor job in the execution of the problem. 

Where we are with the (Hidalgo County) Task Force is we’ve created a structure, a structure of many, many nonprofits, governmental agencies, educational institutions, to be able to take an individual who is in employed or under unemployed or lacking skills, and give them those skills and hopefully match it with a with a job. We can do that ourselves. To borrow a statement from our president, F.D. Roosevelt, back in the era when banks were having problems. He said, this is a problem not only government can solve. It takes both government and people to solve and I’m going to tell you that I’m very, very pleased with the people that we have in Hidalgo County that have volunteered to do this. 

So all of these assets that… this great senator… that we have, and I want to take 10 years off his life because I need 10 more years from him, and the new Congresswoman, (they can help bring in the resources that we need in order for us to be able to accomplish the goals that we have.

Editor’s Note: The above commentary was provided by Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez at a legislative affairs luncheon hosted by the RGV Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and held at the DoubleTree in McAllen. Cortez was on a panel with Congresswoman Monica De la Cruz, state Sen. Juan Hinojosa, and McAllen Mayor Javier Villalobos. The moderator was Julian Alvarez, senior vice president of Lone Star National Bank.

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