SATIRE: This is parody. Not a real news report.
MCALEN — With commissioners still deadlocked between a Spanish Colonial facade and a glass beige box, the City of McAllen moved decisively Monday by hiring six limestone columns for the new city hall, a building that has not been chosen, budgeted at $50 million, or built. The columns, selected from a rendering of the hacienda-style concept that commissioners did not pick, will begin work immediately standing at the south entrance and announcing to arriving residents: “This is where your tax dollars went.”
“We couldn’t decide on a building, but we could decide on punctuation,” said a city spokesperson, gesturing at the columns, which have already been issued McAllen employee badges reading “COLUMNS, ORNAMENTAL/FISCAL.” “These are the only city employees with a fully defined job description. The rest of the org chart is a feasibility study.”
Columns Will Report Directly to the Feasibility Study
The columns’ official duties include holding up nothing, waiting for a construction manager at-risk to be hired, and greeting “customers” — the term Commissioner J.J. Zamora used for taxpayers — at the south door, the one residents will actually use rather than the one that photographs well. The columns will also serve as interim city hall should the deadlock continue past 2046, by which point the staff is projected to grow from 198 to 354, including IT swelling from 32 to 60 employees whose primary role, per the study, is emailing the other rendering back and forth.
“People ask how we justify 60 IT workers in a building that doesn’t exist,” said an IT supervisor from a folding table outside the Bentsen Tower. “Simple. Someone has to attach both facades to every email forever. That’s 28 more of us by 2046.”
The two facades, meanwhile, remain in arbitration. The cream-walled, terracotta-tiled Spanish Colonial concept keeps citing Quinta Mazatlan and Casa de Palmas as references. The glass box counters that it has a rooftop terrace nobody asked to evaluate and an asymmetrical south entrance, which is the architectural term for a shrug.
Columns Ask Only One Thing: A Building
At a tense press conference, the columns’ agent noted his clients are being asked to punctuate $50 million while supporting a structure that is currently a PDF. “My clients are structural professionals,” he said. “They did not train their whole lives to stand in a parking lot near the convention center pointing at a cost estimate that City Manager Isaac Tawil himself wants lowered.”
City staff clarified that the columns’ salary is $0, but their concrete foundation — chosen over steel, like the current building, possibly raising cost — will be drawn from the unbudgeted remainder of the $50 million, which also does not exist yet.
“This is historic,” said the spokesperson. “For the first time, McAllen has completed the easiest part of a civic project: the decoration at the front door. Everything else is just details, like which building, how much, and where.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Can the columns explain where the tax dollars went if there are no tax dollars spent yet?
A: The columns are trained in proactive accountability. They will explain the $50 million before, during, and after its non-expenditure, which commissioners called “very reassuring.”
Q: What happens if commissioners pick the glass box, which has no columns?
A: The columns would be reassigned to the rooftop terrace, where they will explain the money to the pigeons, a demographic that models show also did not ask.
