Betancourt wins against Hasse in landslide

Cameron County Treasurer David Betancourt is one step closer to re-election.

Unofficial final results as of 10:30 p.m. showed Betancourt, who has held the position for the last three years, won the Democratic Party nomination for the county seat, defeating Charles "Tad" Hasse 11,462 to 3,118 votes.

"I have a lot of friends and family helping me out, and I feel real good about the election," Betancourt, 57, told The Brownsville Herald Tuesday, a few hours before preliminary results were released. "We needed to inform people about the continued need for the office and what we do. ... I think we did a good job."

If elected, Hasse had pledged to abolish the Office of the Cameron County Treasurer by transferring its duties to the auditor's office. The move would not have harmed employees and would have saved taxpayers nearly $1 million, said Hasse, 51, a Brownsville native and an information technology technician for the city’s municipal court.

On Tuesday before the election, Hasse reiterated his platform.

"We have a useless department. It serves no legitimate purpose," he said. "Everybody that we got the message to was firmly convinced; I just don’t know if we got the message out to enough people."

But Betancourt said that more than 200 counties in Texas continue to see the need for the system of checks and balances the treasurer’s office provides.

"They know it is a necessary part of the financial system and of accounting for the county," Betancourt said. "(The seat) was established by state’s constitution."

Betancourt said his main focus as treasurer has been in making safe investments and securing the best interests for the county’s bank accounts. If re-elected to the post, he said he would continue to maintain the county’s funds "so that we have safety, security and liquidity."

Since he was elected treasurer, he has earned Cameron County $6 million in interest, he said.

Before taking the county position, Betancourt served as a Brownsville city commissioner, a seat he was first elected to in 2002 to fill the unexpired term of John Wood. He was elected to the City Commission the following year, becoming one of the two first commissioners in the city’s history to be elected from a single-member district.

Betancourt has also served as Brownsville’s mayor pro tempore and was an English teacher at Rivera High School for more than 20 years. He has served on several city advisory boards, including the Brownsville Airport Advisory Board, the Cameron County Parks Advisory Board, the Brownsville Economic Development Corporation and the Planning and Zoning Board.

He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin.