Helen Ramirez isn’t your typical city manager.

When she took the job in January 2023, after having served as deputy city manager since 2019, the city’s first female city manager brought with her a set of skills not usually associated with the job: a background in urban planning and the private sector as opposed to public administration.

It’s served her well, Ramirez believes.

“I’ve always been more of a director of development services,” she said. “I worked for the private sector for 10 years in international planning and business development. As deputy (city manager) I was over many of the development departments, engineering and public works, planning, building — those types of departments.”

Her experience helped her locate the “critical path” forward to getting projects accomplished, roads and streets for example, she said. The city has milled and overlaid — completely rebuilt from the ground up — more than 100 of them during Ramirez’s tenure. The total reconstruction of Old Highway 77 between Ruben Torres Boulevard and Morrison Road, one of the worst roads in town, is a major ongoing project.

When Ramirez came to Brownsville she noticed potholes everywhere, a major source of complaints from residents, though the city didn’t have the equipment to fill them properly, she said.

“They would use cold (asphalt) mix instead of hot mix, so it would rain and the pothole would come back to life,” Ramirez said.

The city invested in the equipment needed to do milling and overlay in-house rather than depending on contractors. The reconstruction of Price Road, which took two weeks, won a state public works award, she said.

The equipment wasn’t cheap, of course, so it helped that S&P upgraded the city’s bond rating to AA plus based on its financial accounting performance, including a zero deficit, Ramirez said. The higher the bond rating, the lower the interest on borrowing for big-ticket items like road-repair equipment.

Brownsville City Manager Helen Ramirez addresses the crowd Thursday, March 9, 2023, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the eBridge Center for Business & Commercialization in Brownsville. 

(Denise Cathey/The Brownsville Herald)

A lot of planning has gone into these and other projects — a notable change since Ramirez’s arrival, with an emphasis on planning to a degree Brownsville hadn’t previously pursued. The new emphasis has produced plans across the spectrum: the parks, health and recreation master plan; the downtown renaissance master plan (one of her proudest achievements, she admitted); the city’s first ever mobility master plan; and the first housing master plan.

The point is not just to do projects, but to do them in the smartest and most financially responsible way possible, with substantial public input, Ramirez said.

“The mother of all plans is the comprehensive plan,” she said. “We funded it and we’ll prepare it hopefully the first quarter of next year. That is (about) what Brownsville wants to be in the next 10, 20 years. … What do we want to be? What do we want to preserve? How do we want to build out our quality of life? Those are the questions that the city is going to have to answer in the next year and a half.”

Ramirez invited every city resident to submit input for the comprehensive plan when it’s time. All the master plans have to align, naturally, or else contradictions and conflicts will be the result, she said. Case in point: the city’s old Uniform Development Code. Ramirez said one of the hardest things the city has ever done (and its first real master-planning blitz) was to completely rewrite the UDC, which sets regulations for builders and developers.

It was an unwieldy, multi-layered, confusing mess, and a total rebuild was long overdue, she said.

“Reading our codes was like an onion,” Ramirez said. “You’d peel off layers and you never knew if you were going to get the right answer or not.”

Brownsville City Manager Helen Ramirez addresses attendees Thursday, June 22, 2023, for the announcement of a new route to Las Vegas from Avelo Airlines beginning in September at the Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport. 

(Denise Cathey/The Brownsville Herald)

It was a frustrating situation for developers and the city alike, she said. The new UDC was approved in 2021, though amendments are still rolling in based on developer feedback.

“Codes work for 80% of projects, but there’s always 20% it doesn’t work for,” Ramirez said. “So we’re really looking at that. We’re listening to our developers.”

Investing in the city’s employees, providing them with professional development and advancement opportunities, and paying them as much as the budget allows have also been key priorities during her tenure, Ramirez said.

“I wanted it to be people-first organization, where we care about people, we develop people, we develop ourselves,” she said. “Many of the companies that do well are successful because they treat their employees well and they develop them, from improving soft skills to really thinking about succession planning.”

Ramirez is a huge proponent of the “one city” philosophy, which holds that problems are best solved when departments work together rather than in silos, and when the city also works with its external partners — the public school system, higher educational institutions, economic development organizations and the port, for example.

City Manager Helen Ramirez stands on the roof of City Hall overlooking historic downtown Brownsville on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. 

(Miguel Roberts/The Brownsville Herald)

She actually jotted down “one city” on a napkin in her kitchen one morning while preparing for her final interview for the city manager position, Ramirez said.

“I remember waking up thinking what do the cities of today need to do to really advance and be successful and accelerate the local economy,” she said. “We’re 23 departments. We’re over 1,300 employees. Over 60% of our operating budget is personnel, including police and fire and EMS and everything. How will we be successful?

“We will be successful if we work in unity as one, that we’re not silo-ed within those 20-plus departments. … We need a sophisticated way of problem solving, because our problems are becoming more complex.”

Ramirez is stepping down from her role with the city due to family health issues, which she said require her full attention, effective Dec. 19. She conceded it was a tough decision. At the same time, she thinks Brownsville will be in good hands with Interim City Manager Alan Guard, Assistant City Manager Doroteo Garcia Jr. and other capable leaders, Ramirez said.

“I love the city of Brownsville,” she said. “I’ll always be an advocate for the city. I’m leaving it in a good place, and I’m very proud of what we’ve done together as one city."