By Dave Montgomery | Fort Worth Star Telegram | PoliTex | September 16, 2009

AUSTIN — A coalition of municipal and county officials along Texas’ 1,200-mile-long border is challenging Gov. Rick Perry’s statements that property owners and local law enforcement are being overwhelmed by smugglers and gangs from Mexico.

“Your remarks, if accurately reported, create a public impression of lawless hordes overrunning the border region and do not reflect our collective experience,” Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, said in a letter to Perry. “While each of our communities has their own unique issues, being overwhelmed by criminal elements from Mexico is not one of them.”

Foster made the remarks in response to Perry’s announcement last week that he planned to deploy the Texas Rangers to work with the Texas National Guard in a beefed-up border enforcement effort. Perry said the teams would be dispatched to “high traffic, high-crime areas along the border” to help stem increased crime spilling over from Mexico.

“As county and municipal officials on the Texas-Mexico border, we strongly suggest improved coordination with local officials in your efforts,” said Foster. “If you are devoting additional law enforcement personnel to our region, we would appreciate you and your staff taking the time to make sure that our efforts to secure the border are complimentary and coordinated.”

Foster said that crime on the border is “on the way down” after decreasing by 65 percent over the past several years. Apprehensions of illegal border crossers, he said, have dropped by 40 percent. El Paso, which Foster described as the third safest city in the United States, has seen a 60 percent drop in arrests of illegal border crossers, said the mayor.

“Drug violence, narcotics trafficking, and human smuggling isn’t just a problem that cropped up on the border yesterday. It has been ongoing,” Gilbert said. “If the Governor thought it was such a big problem, why did he wait until in the middle of a heated election cycle to do anything about it,” he continued.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has repeatedly campaigned on border safety issues, including a pricey electronic monitoring system that allowed citizens to monitor the border. “All of Perry’s border policies have been a dismal failure, best summarized by the phrase ‘too little, too late’. If the Governor was using the border as anything other than a campaign issue, then why didn’t he get his predecessor, George W. Bush, to do something to curb border violence when he was president,” Gilbert continued.

“Perry never bothered to pay attention to the border until it is politically expedient. Earlier this year, when it became evident that he would have a battle for the hearts and minds of GOP primary voters, he began his faux begging to the Obama Administration for resources the state already possessed. He’s comical.  He’s a drugstore cowboy who thinks Texas exists in a vacuum.”

Gilbert also said that Hutchison’s criticism of Perry’s announcement was laughable. “Kay Bailey Hutchison has been a U.S. Senator for more than a decade. She hasn’t done anything to curb border violence and drug cartels. For her to even lift a finger to criticize Governor Perry from her ivory tower on the Potomac is irony befitting a fiction writer,” Gilbert continued. “If sniping from Washington is her idea of leadership, then maybe she should stay in Washington and do what she does best, nothing,” he continued.

“The Texas Rangers are among the most elite law enforcement agencies in the world, and they do a great deal to keep Texans safe and combat crime. Governor Perry sending the Rangers to the border is a criminal misallocation of one of our state’s finest law enforcement resources. Evidently the Governor doesn’t understand the difference between a situation that needs a state police force and one that requires more serious intervention,” he said.

“As your governor, I won’t go hat-in-hand begging for money after calling for Texas to secede from the United States. I’ll go to Washington and articulately make our case on behalf of all Texans. We’ll send the drama and over-blown theatrics back to Paint Creek when Governor Perry leaves Austin once and for all,” he concluded. “The time for childish antics and peevish, ego driven behavior is over. We need serious, responsible people in government not four more years of bluster.”

Gilbert is the only Democrat in the race for Texas Governor who has seriously taken Governor Perry to task on this and other issues.