Rising Lonestars interviewed El Paso County Iliana Holguin to discuss her nomination to the RLS Top 10 in July. Councilmember Holguin told us about her efforts to expand the county sewer and water systems to the unincorporated parts of her distinct and her experience transitioning to local government.
Transcript
Iliana Holguin
So my name is Iliana Holguin, and I am a county commissioner for the county of El Paso. I represent Precinct three, which encompasses what we call the Mission Valley, which starts in the Isleta area, where we have the Isleta mission. It goes through Socorro, where we have the Socorro mission and all the way through to really the county line through San De Lisario, where we also have some historic assets there all the way to the county line and then also north of the highway, north of I-10.
Iliana Holguin
One of the fastest growing areas of the county where we see a lot of homebuilding happening right now. So in this past redistricting that we just completed late last year, my precinct actually had to shrink the most out of all of the other precincts. Most of the other precincts had to actually grow. And that’s just because my precinct has seen so much growth in the past few years and we continue to see that growth.
Iliana Holguin
So I had to lose about 45,000 residents in the last redistricting to get me down to a size that was comparable to the other precincts. So right now, the four precincts each have a population of about 216,000. But I have a feeling my precinct, because of the continued growth, there’s a lot of residential areas that are continuing to be built.
Iliana Holguin
I have a feeling that ten years from now, when we do the next census, the next redistricting, I’ll probably be in the same position again, or the office will be in the same position again where we’re having to to get smaller just because we’ve grown so much in population.
Daniella Cuellar
Okay. Thank you so much for that information. You were nominated to our July top ten Rising Stars because of your work expanding the El Paso sewer system. So previously on Connected Families in District three. Tell me about the infrastructure needs of your district and what you’ve done to address them.
Iliana Holguin
Yeah. So this has been something this is an issue that’s incredibly important to me and it’s always been very, very important to me. And I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t really realize continues to be an issue. We still have neighborhoods that aren’t connected to water and aren’t connected to sewer, and these are two very basic rights that we all have, and the majority of us take them for granted.
Iliana Holguin
We know we can turn on our closet and we’re not going to have trouble accessing clean drinking water. We have a sewer system that we don’t have to worry about failing. The large majority of us have that luxury. But what we need to understand is that there’s still so many people in our community in the county of El Paso who don’t have that luxury.
Iliana Holguin
We literally still have hundreds of neighborhoods where some of them may not have water. Some of them may not have wastewater. And some of them still don’t have either. So what happens is folks have to rely on bringing in water. So trucking in water, hiring a company to bring them water. But even then, that’s not necessarily safe to drink.
Iliana Holguin
So then they have that additional expense of having to buy bottled water or and as far as the sewer goes, a lot of these neighborhoods still have septic tanks, which if properly maintained and replaced when they’re supposed to be replaced, septic tanks can work perfectly well. But the problem that we see in a lot of these neighborhoods is that they were built back 30 years, go back 40 years ago, in some cases in the eighties, even in the seventies.
Iliana Holguin
And a lot of these septic systems have never really been properly maintained or they’re starting to fail just simply because of their age and because they’ve met their lifespan. So then it becomes a really big health issue for these areas. When you have septic tanks that are starting to fail, that aren’t able to contain the waste that they were meant to contain.
Iliana Holguin
And so that’s why it’s so important the connection to water, but also that connection to sewer. And so when I first ran for this position, that was one of the biggest needs that I identified right away. And thankfully here at the county of El Paso, that’s we’ve been able to make that a priority for us, is to try to make sure that we’re able to connect as many of these neighborhoods as possible.
Iliana Holguin
There are hundreds of them. So it’s going to be a gargantuan effort, but we’re going to do it in baby steps, right? One neighborhood at a time when community at a time. And I’m really, really lucky that the rest of the commissioners court really understands why this is so important and that they’ve been willing to set aside the funds to do that.
Iliana Holguin
So just as an example, the county of El Paso received $162 million in ARPA funding, the American Rescue Plan Act funding, and the Commissioners Court agreed to set aside 20% of that total, which comes out to 34 million, specifically to help connect these communities, these neighborhoods to water and wastewater. And that was just huge for me. I mean, that really showed that the county of El Paso really is committed to finding a solution for these families.
Iliana Holguin
So unfortunately, even though 34 million sounds like a lot and it is a lot of money, it’s still only going to help connect about 12 neighborhoods. But that’s okay. That’s okay. It’s it’s baby steps. We’re going to do as much as we can. We’re going to keep looking for the funding, and that’s been a priority. So, for example, after we receive the ARPA funding and we set aside the 34 million, we we have two different congresspeople here in El Paso.
Iliana Holguin
And one of them, Congressman Gonzalez, represents he covers a small part of my area. His district, congressional district runs all the way from San Antonio to El Paso. And so he covers a small corner of El Paso County. But that’s my overlapping district. So when he started requesting, as all the congressmen and women did, started requesting proposals for community projects, for funding through Congress, for through the appropriations process, we submitted a request to be able to connect four other neighborhoods to wastewater.
Iliana Holguin
And thankfully it was approved. Our project was chosen so literally that project, it’s been chosen by the congressman’s office and literally is now just waiting to get through the process so that it can get to the president’s desk for signature so that we can have access to those funds. So that’s another way that we’ve found that we can potentially access funds to connect these neighborhoods.
Iliana Holguin
And then, of course, on top of that, we still do what we’ve always done, which is apply for grants. So the Texas Water Development Board has been very generous and also the Department of Agriculture has been they’ve been very generous as far as funding connection projects to water and wastewater. And so the county continues to apply for those grants as well.
Iliana Holguin
And it’s through a grant through the Agriculture Department that actually the lower income neighborhoods were able to get connections to wastewater, that that was the groundbreaking that we had just a couple of months ago that was featured in the in the top ten article.
Daniella Cuellar
Wow. I find it very inspirational that you were so quickly able to identify the needs of your community, which actually leads me to my next question. You have an extensive history of nonprofit work and activism within your community. What inspired the transition to local government and how has that furthered community cause?
Iliana Holguin
You know, for me it was, I think, just a logical next step. So I’ve I’ve been an attorney now for a little over 20 years. I think I’m going on my 22nd year now and a big part of my career has been working at nonprofits where that’s been my entire focus is trying to reach underserved communities. So I’m an immigration attorney, so I, I, my clients were the most, you know, the most marginalized, the most in need of help, the ones that needed immigration status, the ones that were most afraid to try to find out how they go about regularizing their status.
Iliana Holguin
So a lot of my work was going out into the community trying to explain to folks, this is what’s available to you, this is what you can avail yourself of, this is what you qualify for, and this will help your family be able to move ahead if you do this. And and so I was really used to going out into the community and talking to the community directly one on one.
Iliana Holguin
That was one of my biggest jobs, even though I was the executive director. In addition to overseeing all of our staff and providing that legal oversight, I took it upon myself to be the one to always go out into the community. So any time we received a phone call that, you know, a school, a church, a neighborhood association, a housing unit, their residents wanted a presentation on immigration benefits.
Iliana Holguin
I would do those myself, and I you know, anytime anyone invited me, I would go and I was there. So that was, I think, already a big part of who I was. So when I decided to run for office, I did that because my part of town, it does include a large part of the rural part of the county, the unincorporated part of the county where you find a lot of these neighborhoods that don’t have connections to water and wastewater.
Iliana Holguin
So El Paso County has a population of about 860,000, a little under eight know a little under 700, I think live within the city of El Paso. So that’s incorporated. So they’ve got all of the services, the remaining 160, almost 200,000 people live outside of the city of El Paso. We do have smaller municipalities, but they’re much, much, much, much smaller.
Iliana Holguin
So you have a lot of people who live in unincorporated, many times rural parts of the county. And that’s where you find that a lot of these services are still unavailable. So as I was, you know, as I decided to run for office, it was because I really felt like, you know, I could get into the communities, I could try to figure out what the different needs were and then try to do something about it.
Iliana Holguin
And so that’s what I did. And like I said, I’ve been incredibly, incredibly lucky that the rest of the commissioners court also agrees that these are really, really important issues that we have to try to resolve. I think everyone knows it’s not going to be an overnight thing. We’re not going to be able to connect hundreds of families just overnight.
Iliana Holguin
And that the challenge for funding, that’s always going to be a challenge. But like I said, all we can do is little by little connect every neighborhood that we can, because really we’re in the year 2022 in the richest country in the world. We should not have people, you know, our fellow community members who still don’t have access to clean drinking water or sanitary sewer service.
Daniella Cuellar
Absolutely. And I think it’s amazing how you help so many people with that and especially with the budget, how difficult it is to really give them a voice. Which leads me to my next question. In an interview with El Paso Times, you described yourself as a consensus maker willing to work with people to really a unified voice. Rising stars was born out of the desire to highlight local government at a time when national politics seems constant with division and polarization.
Daniella Cuellar
So what are your thoughts on the ability for local politics to transcend party boundaries and force consensus building?
Iliana Holguin
Yeah, I think consensus building is so, so, so important. You know, the commissioners court, there are five of us and our areas of the county are very different. They’re similar in a lot of ways, but they’re still very different. Our needs are very different. You know, we have some precincts that don’t have the same issues that my precinct does because they don’t cover any unincorporated areas.
Iliana Holguin
And so it’s really important to make sure that the other commissioners really understand the needs, understand why this is important, even though it may not affect them or their constituents directly, why connecting homes to water and wastewater is good for our entire community, for the health and safety of our entire community. So consensus building is very, very important.
Iliana Holguin
And I just with the different roles that I’ve had in my life, that’s something that I’ve always had to do, is try to bring people together to to make sure that we’re focused on the common goal that we recognized with that common goal was and that we’re all working towards that common goal. So I definitely, definitely, definitely believe in, you know, bringing people together, building that consensus, not trying to I don’t know, you know, bully other people to think the way that I do or to agree with me, but really to make them understand why it’s important and why I’m trying to do what I’m trying to do.
Iliana Holguin
So definitely consensus consensus building I think is a very important part of any local government, whether you’re talking about a commissioners court for the county or city council or your local school district. I mean, I think that that’s the way that we’re going to get things done, the things that we need to get done for our community. That’s how we’re going to do it by coming together, working together and finding a solution together.
Iliana Holguin
Not about, you know, not, you know, throwing blame around or hashing up things that may have happened, you know, 30 years ago. And all disagreement. And that’s not the way to do it. It’s by coming together, identifying that common goal and then making sure that everyone is on board towards making it happen.