44 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Late Spring 2019 TheCoastalBend.com A word about confidential sources—Most of you who will read this story, and the features in this maga- zine overall, are doing so because we offer something new in Coastal Bend journalism: investigation. And to investigate is to find the truth under layers of deceit and protection. We can declare with confidence, that the City of Corpus Christi and most every municipal- ity in the Coastal Bend is infected with incompetence, gross inefficiency, and outright corruption. If you are a reader who disagrees with this notion, email us now (txcoastalbend@gmail.com) to inform us of purity in local government, and we will do a story about it in our next edition. Despite the well-known and very costly shortcomings of leadership at the City of Corpus Chris- ti, our local news media, which amounts to two TV newsrooms (we hear more are coming), our one daily newspaper, plus a couple of weekly community papers, serve as little more than transcribers of events in the past-tense, although a few exceptions exist. Any effort to dig deeper into any issue of controversy is neither encouraged nor funded, and we as a community have suffered billions (yes, billions) of dollars in long-term damage due to a state of information oblivion—and there is much, much more to come. This story is intended to clear some of that oblivi- ousness, this time on the subject of one of Corpus Christi’s costliest public debacles, the long-running and ongoing problems at the City’s Water Department. Un- til now, we citizens of Corpus Christi have never heard the “why” and the “who” that connect one crisis after another, or how an unqualified City staffer has been allowed to fail over and over, and not just survive in his job, but enjoy multiple promotions. This is the kind of story that can only be done with the help of confi- dential sources—people on the inside, whom we have vetted as actively connected, and who have provided verifiable evidence of their claims. To identify them- selves, however, would result in termination of their positions by those whose power structure they threat- en, while at the same time eliminating them as sources of what is really going on. Above all, like you and us as taxpayers and citizens who care about the future of our hometown, these folks want to live in a city that func- tions with competence and transparency, and that is operated by public servants whose only mission is to do what is good for the people of Corpus Christi, and not for themselves or their allies personally. T he City of Corpus Christi Water Depart- ment has earned quite a reputation over the past decade or so, along with the dis- dain, and in some cases, hatred, of our fellow citizens. Poor planning and pro- curement, coupled with varying levels of incompetence, have led to a consistent and costly com- edy of errors that has labeled Corpus Christi a laughing stock among our fellow Texas cities. Businesses have closed, residents have been displaced, and City coffers have been drained, to the tune of tens of millions of