If you haven’t heard, Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina and his wife Dalia have been charged with several counts of illegal voting and, in Molina’s case, a first-degree felony count of organized election fraud during an arraignment last week when KRGV alum and, now, Edinburg Director of Communications Cary Zayas had, probably, the dumbest meltdown I had ever seen.
On Wednesday, Non-PR expert Molina and his crack communications team released a painfully awkward video statement via Zayas’ Google Drive (ok?) where, in 32 seconds, Molina professed he and his wife’s innocence while also, in 32 seconds, somehow managed to make himself sound significantly less believable.
Resident outcry and calls for his resignation came to a head earlier this week when resident Robert Solis attempted to submit a petition to recall the 2017 mayoral election and, effectively, force Molina out of his seat and potentially, into another race.
The Monitor reported that when Solis attempted to submit the petition to Edinburg City Secretary Ludivina Leal, he was met with all kinds of clerical opposition, runaround, and stalling until he was finally able to turn in his petition approximately several hours later. With the petition, Solis will have 30 days to collect signatures from 25% of the voter population, or roughly 2,000 voting residents.
Now, the City of Edinburg’s legal department claims that his petition is invalid because Solis did not use the “proper forms” for this particular clause in the Edinburg city charter to be evoked.
So where exactly are those proper forms, you might ask?
Good question!
Maybe Edinburg City Attorney Omar Ochoa can tell us!
“Because this has never been evoked before, the city has never had cause to keep that petition form on hand. We’re looking through old archives, we’re looking through old minutes, old agendas. The city secretary’s office is working very hard to try to find this document so we can provide it to the person who submitted the affidavit.”
Jesus Christ.
For fuck’s sake, I legitimately can’t tell if Ochoa is literally obstructing Solis from exercising his legal right in the city charter or if Ochoa and his entire department are all fucking morons that couldn’t have just copied a God damn template off the internet and added some Edinburg letterhead for this guy to sign.
Either way, this is Lady era utter bullshit but unbelievably apropos for a city that continuously oozes out some of the absolute worst people to run for office.
To Robert Solis: For all I know, you could just be related or tied to another political shrill who’s using you as a ploy, but God bless you for trying to save your God-awful, God-forsaken city.
