By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
County commissioners court members on Wednesday heard an update on the work being
done to offer a variety of services to local veterans.
Enrique Treviño, the county’s veterans service officer, made the presentation during
Wednesday’s regular term meeting of the court.
Treviño prefaced his update by saying one of the things he wanted to do after being hired
as the veterans service officer was to update the court quarterly on the work his office is
doing.
“I wanted to give you all some of the numbers we’ve had for the last three months.
We’ve had a total of 730 walk-ins: 208 in January, 247 in February and 275 in March. We’ve made 50 trips to Audie Murphy, 47 to Kerrville, 30 local, two to Eagle Pass and
one to Uvalde, for a total of 130 trips,” Treviño told the court.
He added, “We’ve attended 11 public events, conducted two training sessions for
Laughlin personnel on base, and I wanted to give you some of the highlights.”
Treviño said he and his office are assisting Commissioner Pct. 2
Juan Carlos Vazquez in
establishing a VA clinic for county veterans in Precinct 2.
Treviño said, “That will greatly help our veterans. We’ve also established a relationship
with Project Mend in San Antonio, which is a grant-funded project that provides free
medical equipment to our veterans. They’ve never operated in Del Rio, but they’re going
to do that now, so if we have veterans that are in need of any type of medical equipment
you can think of, they have a 16,000-square-foot warehouse, and they’re going to work
with us, so we will be able to use our transportation to get our veterans up there, get them
outfitted with whatever they need and bring them back.”
He added, “We provided training for active-duty personnel and veterans at Laughlin Air
Force Base, and we’re going to, every third Thursday of the month, go out there and help
the veterans that are transitioning out of the military with BDD claims, so they’re able to
get their disability benefits once they get out, so we’re working on that also.”
Treviño said he has also done multiple interviews with local media outlets and
established a program in conjunction with the Elks Lodge to provide blankets and other
home goods local veterans might need.
“We assisted the office of Rep. Kerry Isaac with House Bill 4993, which is going to
establish a physical fitness program for the Texas National Guard, and I think it’s a great
honor to be able to help them establish that program,” Treviño said.
He added, “With commissioners court approval, we established a local transportation
program, which has been great. We’ve had a lot of retired veterans, who are completely
disabled, and they can now go to Laughlin or to different appointments through our local
transportation program.
“Recently I traveled to Ciudad Acuña, because we’d gotten a call about a veteran living
there who had passed away there, who was alone, and they called us and they said, ‘Hey,
we’ve got a U.S. military veteran who has passed away and no one is claiming the body,’
and we reached out to the judge, and he gave us the approval to go and get this figured out. I went over there and they were gracious enough to help us and figure out that the gentleman had served on a ship, but it was a private company, so he was, in fact, not a
veteran, but we established a good relationship with them.
“I met with members of the U.S. consulate in Nuevo Laredo, so we established that
connection in case we have in the future a veteran who passes away in Mexico, so we’ll
be able to facilitate bringing him back over here and getting them the burial honors that
they deserve,” Treviño said.
Treviño also thanked Owens and the court for providing 11 space heaters given to
veterans during several cold spells over the recent winter months.
“We had veterans who were living in homes where the temperature was 30 and 40
degrees with no heating, and they reached out to us, and those space heaters, I think,
really saved some lives, so that was a great blessing for our veterans,” Treviño said.
He said he and his office are already making plans for Memorial Day and Veterans Day
events this year.
“We’re working to make the events really special this year, along with the Veterans Day
Parade. We’re going to make it really, really nice. I reached out to some outside
communities, and they’ve said they would participate as well,” Treviño said.
Treviño said his office has become part of a behavioral threat assessment management
response team, involving a variety of local agencies, to provide emergency help to
veterans in crisis.
“We help de-escalate the situation, and I know a lot of our veterans are dealing with
PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and other issues, and bringing these groups
together could really save some lives,” Treviño said.
He noted he and his staff “are always on the lookout for any resource we can bring to our
veterans in Del Rio.”
“I like to say that we’ve tripled or so the amount of foot traffic we have, so I’m very
happy about our staff. We’re doing good things for our community,” Treviño said.
After Treviño’s presentation, Owens said, “We’d talked a couple of times about housing
for our veterans. Is that still needed?”
Treviño replied, “It is. Unfortunately, we have veterans, and as an example, we had a
veteran whose benefits were cut from $2,400 a month to zero overnight because his
cancer was removed and even though he’s still under chemotherapy, they told him, ‘Well,
the cancer’s been taken out, no more benefits for you,’ so he’s now homeless, and this
gentleman is 69 years old. We have those situations that happen all the time. For
whatever reason, a person becomes homeless, and we really don’t have any resources.”
“You’re kidding. That’s so sad,” Owens said.
Owens asked Treviño to provide his office with some numbers on unhoused and
homeless veterans in the area.
“We’re fixing to start working on the budget, and if you could get us some numbers as to
how many people we might need to put up. We don’t know yet what’s coming in our
budget as far as what our taxable values are going to be, but that might be something we
could look at when it comes to our veterans,” Owens said.
Owens also asked Vazquez to give an update at the court’s next meeting on his work to
establish a VA clinic in Precinct 2.
Treviño thanked the court “for being very proactive when it comes to our veterans.”
Treviño said, “Just in talking to different veterans officers from throughout the state, this
county, by far, is at the very tip of what we offer our veterans, so we’re very blessed in this county that the county has always supported our issues, and like I said, no one else in
this region even comes close to what we’re doing.”
Owens said the court and previous courts under different judges have always done what
they could to support local veterans and would continue to do so.
The writer can be reached at delriomagnoliafan@gmail.com
