Reporter
Ray's Quarry
How is the populist mayor of El Paso trying to upend the old-line anglo establishment? One crushed-rock-and-concrete supplier at a time.
(Page 2 of 2)
UP IN THE PEACEFUL, SMOKE-FREE air of Caballero's tenth-floor office at city hall, the world seems quite a bit more serene, as though the very idea of a bare-knuckle fight over his populist politics is impossible to contemplate. From his window, you can see the problem spreading out below him—poor areas of Mexico bleeding into only slightly less poor areas of the United States, and international bridges where hundreds of motorists wait in interminable, carbon monoxide-drenched lines. Depending on how you look at it, El Paso is either a dirt-poor city with the nation's most intractable social and economic problems or the most remarkable political opportunity in America, an advance look at the promise and perils of the Hispanic-majority state that Texas will soon become. Caballero, who calls himself an "unbridled optimist," is convinced that it is the latter and that the increasingly noisy opposition of much of the business community, half of the city council, and several city neighborhoods represents a relatively small bump in the road. It is impossible to tell if he really believes this or if this is simply the Panglossian spin he chooses to put on his first year in the job. "Our policies reflect the sentiments of the overwhelming number of people in the city," he says in a soft voice. "I am not espousing what I consider to be a minority opinion at all. This might sound dogmatic, but I am simply expressing the views of most El Pasoans."
Caballero is sixty years old, a scholarly man with a friendly manner who made millions as a plaintiffs attorney. (Some of his critics call him an "ambulance chaser." It's true that he sued many doctors and hospitals for malpractice; he sued Thomason, the county hospital, eleven times.) He left his law practice in 1989 and devoted himself to a quiet study of border history and to liberal political causes. He is from a prosperous El Paso family that owned a motel and a restaurant, and he got a first-class education: an undergraduate degree from Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso), a law degree from UT-Austin, a master's in tax law from George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and a master's in public administration from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Caballero's political career began in 1994 with an audacious attack on state government. That year, he and activist lawyers Eliot Shapleigh and Jose Rodriguez (now a state senator from El Paso and the El Paso county attorney, respectively), under an archaic Texas statute, persuaded a judge to convene a criminal "court of inquiry" to prove that the city was being deprived by Austin legislators of its share of state money. Five years later, a community group backed by Caballero and Shapleigh sued local banks for allegedly interfering with the group's attempt to find information about the banks' loan-to-deposit ratios—how much money they lent locally compared with their local deposits. "We need that information," Caballero says of his démarche. "These big banks have magnificent worldwide business plans, but we are not in them. They want your deposit business but won't lend you money." (The suit is still pending. In June one of the defendants, Wells Fargo, announced that its loan to deposit ratio was 104 percent. If that is accurate, then Wells Fargo lends more than it takes, which would be a complete contravention of Caballero's charge.) In the same spirit, during the 2001 campaign, Caballero called the banks "thugs" for threatening the community group, and he has continued to attack them as mayor.
Caballero has also been willing to challenge the city's oligarchs, criticizing the business community's "dreadful" record of bringing in decent jobs. "He took on an elite few who have been favored at the expense of the many," says Shapleigh, who is widely regarded as the mayor's political doppelgänger. "The chamber of commerce executed a flawed strategy that left El Paso with the largest number of people in the country with low wages and no benefits. He took the chamber on directly." Indeed, in his first week in office, Caballero did what previous mayors would have considered unthinkable: He cut the city's funding of the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce—some $140,000—to zero.
CONTROVERSY ASIDE, THERE'S NO DENYING that Caballero has had a measure of success in his first year as mayor. He rammed through the nation's strictest anti-smoking ordinance (you can't even smoke in bars in El Paso—you can imagine how popular this is with the hotel and food and drink industries). He passed an 11.8 percent property tax increase that he used to give city employees a pay raise, to clean up garbage-strewn streets by increasing the frequency of street sweepings, and to keep the city's public libraries open later. He pushed El Paso to become the first city in Texas to consider not only the bid price when awarding city contracts but also what health benefits the bidder offers its employees—in essence, it means that unless you offer your employees insurance, you're not likely to win a city contract.
Caballero has also articulated a coherent long-term vision for the city, something no El Paso mayor has ever done. A big part of it revolves around the medical complex, which is theoretically a solution to El Paso's core problems: a low-wage economy with large numbers of people who have no insurance, and a shortage of doctors, hospitals, and specialists (El Paso has one primary care doctor for every 2,445 residents, versus one for every 1,465 elsewhere in Texas; 40 percent of El Pasoans go to Mexico for health care). Caballero's idea is to turn the city's greatest weakness into its greatest strength. The first phase of the plan is to sign up the more than 200,000 El Pasoans who are eligible for federal health insurance but aren't covered and to encourage private companies to provide health-care benefits. The second phase is to turn the existing two-year Texas Tech Medical School branch in El Paso into a four-year school and create a research institute that will focus on border health issues such as hepatitis and diabetes, for which $50 million of state "tobacco money" has already been set aside. The third phase is an effect of the second: Around this "critical mass," other facilities, such as a children's hospital and various specialty clinics, would be encouraged to grow. In Caballero's vision, the medical complex would eventually spawn thousands of high-skill, high-wage jobs, and El Paso would become a major health-care center for the region.
What's wrong with that? Nothing, say most El Pasoans, including many of the mayor's opponents. And, indeed, Caballero and Shapleigh are given credit for fighting for the research institute and the expanded medical school. But there is violent disagreement on how all of this should be put into play. Developers say that it makes no economic sense to put the medical complex in the central area of the city, where per-acre building costs are far higher than in outlying districts. They point out that the large medical complexes in cities like Houston and San Antonio grew by private sector initiative rather than by public sector fiat. And the mayor's plan will involve the huge expense of moving railroad tracks. "He is phenomenally ignorant of the economics of development," says a developer who prefers to remain anonymous because he fears Caballero's reprisals. "Smart growth is a wonderful idea in a wealthy community. It is a bad idea here." Caballero disagrees. "People want the city to grow," he says, "but they do not want it to grow with abandon. You should grow with order and with some idea that you're maximizing the infrastructure that you've already paid for." Developers also say that, instead of encouraging economic development and new jobs, the mayor's radical politics are shutting them down. "The word has gone out," says another developer who also declines to be identified. "Headhunters and consultants for big companies are saying, 'Considering what is going on politically in El Paso, we're not coming. You're off our list until you solve your problem.'"
Nothing illustrates this conflict like the fight over the Jobe quarry. Caballero has made Stanley Jobe the poster boy for all that is wrong with the city. But in many ways, Jobe Concrete is exactly the sort of business the mayor says he wants. Jobe employs some 650 people, mostly Hispanic and many in jobs that pay more than $10 an hour. Many are recent immigrants. Jobe donates generously to local charities, pays full health and 401(k) benefits, and pays $10 for every A earned in school by his employees' children—$64,000 worth this year—and $500 per semester for their college or trade school education. Though his quarry is the target of several lawsuits over air pollution, local air monitors consistently show particulate emissions to be within legally acceptable levels. The quarry is indeed an eyesore, but it has been an eyesore since the thirties. "To me the mayor's intentions are not honorable," Jobe says. "He keeps sending inspectors out here. He is trying to regulate us out of business. But we have a right to be here."
WITH EL PASO'S MAYORAL ELECTION only ten months away, and with much of the business community in lockstep against Caballero, the city is likely to erupt into full-scale electoral warfare before too long. Business leaders are hunting for a candidate, preferably Hispanic, on whom they can drop large amounts of money. Their efforts will be helped by the El Paso Times which endorsed Caballero's opponent in 2001 and recently ran a page-one story about the mayor's first year in office under the headline "Vision Problem." Caballero, meanwhile, is steaming ahead with his elaborate plans. Coming off a landslide victory just fourteen months ago, and in the absence of any evidence that his support has significantly softened, he remains the odds-on favorite to win. Even many people in the business community I talked to think he'll be reelected. But like so much else he's trying to accomplish, it's going to be a long stretch of hard road.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
