SATIRE: This is parody. Not a real news report.
RIO HONDO — The $1 million rebuild of Robert Garza Road, once promised to parents as a back-to-school gift, has officially slipped to January 2027 after City Hall confirmed it has run out of employees legally capable of signing a check. Municipal officials stressed Tuesday that the asphalt, the contractors, and the will to pave all exist in abundance — the missing ingredient is a single human hand attached to someone authorized to hold a pen.
“We have the money,” said an interim official who asked to be identified only as “The Last Remaining Employee.” “It’s sitting right there in a Texas General Land Office grant account. Beautiful money. Crisp. We just can’t, per the city charter as we understand it, touch it, move it, or acknowledge it without a signature, and everyone who had one of those moved to San Antonio.”
Position Posted: ‘Check-Signer, Entry Level, Must Be Check-Signer’
The job posting has been live for eleven weeks and requires five years of check-signing experience, a notary stamp, and the ability to transform into two separate employees, since the vacancy is technically for two people. Applicants so far include a retired mailman, a very confident 12-year-old, and a fella from Primera who offered to sign everything with his thumbprint and “a handshake, como antes.”
Meanwhile, construction crews who broke ground April 6 report they keep discovering infrastructure the city did not know it owned, including a water line, a sewer line, a storm drain, and what one foreman described as “a mystery pipe that might be emotional at this point.” Each discovery requires a change order, and each change order requires — officials sighed audibly — a signature.
“We’ve got $40,000 in change orders just sitting in a drawer like quinceañera pictures,” the official said. “Every time the backhoe hits a pipe nobody drew on a map, that’s another piece of paper going into the No-Pen Zone.”
Parents Route Themselves Through Grief
At nearby Rio Hondo Elementary, drop-off has become a slowly rolling argument on Bates and Reynolds streets, where parents perform increasingly creative maneuvers previously seen only in Raymondville flea market parking lots. District officials have asked families to remain patient through January 2027, a date parents noted is after two more school years, one midterm, and possibly the heat death of the Valley summer.
City officials remain optimistic. “The moment we hire a signer, this road is basically done,” the official said. “Six weeks, tops. Six weeks plus the pipes. Plus 2027.”
