The school tour of the county government was organized by the Eagle Pass Independent School District to teach them about how county government works.
The group of students were given a tour through different departments including the historic Maverick County Courthouse and the Maverick County Judge’s chambers where they met up with Maverick County Judge Saucedo who welcomed the students and presented them with different information on the elections department, county and district clerks office, and how each office is vital to a working government agency.
Judge Saucedo, who served as Commissioner for Pct. 3 for over 14 years, gave the students a historic lesson on Seco Mines as a community and how far the area has grown and prospered.
He explained that growing up in the area and seeing the community’s needs helped him realize that he wanted to serve his community as a public official as his father Maverick County Judge Ramon Saucedo did.
“All I wanted to do was go back and work on the community that I grew up in,” said Saucedo.“It’s a great deal of pride for me to have these kids here because these are the leaders of tomorrow, these are the people we want to come in and take our jobs. We hope that when these kids go off to college they’ll come back and help as leaders.”
Saucedo also commented on the recent election in which county residents voted against the $8.5 million COB.
“I’m disappointed but I also understand some people aren’t aware of the trials and tribulations that we’ve gone through as administrators. It’s black and white; debt has gone down from $70 million to a little over $25 million, and I know for some people it’s not a big deal but it needs to be,” said Saucedo. “When I started as a county commissioner I had to rip everything up and start for the bottom to get everything I needed out there. All I wanted to do is try to provide the services I was able to provide as a commissioner to the rest of this county. What happened happened; I can’t do anything about what happened to the prior commissioners here, but I can assure the public what these commissioners are trying to do for them. This was not going to have an impact on their tax base because these were obligations we had already paid, so all we were doing was replacing one obligation with another obligation and we were going to be allowed to do things that needed to be done. There was no luxury in that project. When you looked at it, most of it was paving the streets, a lot of it was vehicles needed by the sheriff’s department.”