South Texas town feuds with its own mayor : The fight over money and power in tiny Encinal has shut down street lights and trash collection.

If democracy works best in small communities, as the critics of Big Government insist, the message apparently hasn’t reached this woebegone hamlet on the plains of the Rio Grande.

There are no street lights here--power was cut last month after Encinal’s 620 residents fell behind on their bills. There is no trash collection--halted for the same reason. There isn’t even a working telephone at City Hall, which for all practical matters has drawn the curtains and folded up shop.

Teetering on the brink of insolvency, Encinal has resorted to the only municipal function it has left to perform: Hire a lawyer and sue its own citizens. That includes 42 residents with delinquent refuse and utility accounts; the town’s entire water board, which has balked at sharing revenues from a proposed sewer system; and a community gadfly, who alleges that Encinal was improperly incorporated and thus isn’t even a legal government entity.

“I hate to say it,” said Roberto Aldaco, an Encinal native who serves on the board of commissioners in surrounding La Salle County, “but my people are so hardheaded.”

The villain, according to some, is Mayor Rogelio (Roy) Salinas, a U.S. Border Patrol agent whose autocratic style at City Hall has earned him the nickname “Castro.” His critics accuse him of fleecing their impoverished agricultural burg, pocketing funds, bouncing checks and stonewalling audits.

They even drafted a spiteful petition, signed by more than 100 residents and delivered to Salinas’ supervisor at the Laredo border crossing. It described Salinas as a source of “daily grief.”

“It’s civil disobedience, in a sense,” said Inocente Flores, 62, whose family is among those being sued for unpaid garbage and light bills. “The people would all pay for the services--we just don’t want to pay him .”

Salinas, who moved to Encinal in 1991 and was elected mayor six months later on a 46-0 vote, has vowed to stand his ground. He insists his only agenda is to help Encinal become a modern, fiscally sound municipality, which means balancing the books and collecting for services.

The problem, as Salinas sees it, is that too many of his constituents remain rooted in South Texas’ old agrarian ways--dirt streets, open cesspools, smoldering trash. They are using him as an excuse, he contends, for shirking civic responsibilities.

“I’m not saying it’s a backward or hillbilly community . . . but it’s very rural and people here basically don’t like to be told they have to pay for anything,” Salinas said. “If we’re going to survive, this city needs to have some money coming in.”

During the town’s heyday in the ‘40s and ‘50s, when the population was double the current figure, Encinal’s needs were always met by a benevolent onion farmer named Alfred E. Schletze. El patron , as men like him were known in these parts, Schletze not only employed anybody who was willing and able, but donated land for Encinal’s first water well, its landfill, its cemetery and its park.

When his farm gave way to a housing subdivision and the new Interstate 35 left the town shrouded behind a sole freeway exit, the future seemed to bypass Encinal. Amid hopes for a gleaming, federally funded civic center, Encinal incorporated in 1979; instead of winning government grants, the city’s first mayor was indicted on embezzlement charges but was later cleared for lack of evidence.

“My dream is to rebuild this community,” said Salinas, 41, who has purchased nearly 100 vacant lots from absentee landowners. “I’m not a bad guy. I believe in Encinal.”

But Salinas’ vision of progress, which captivated voters the first time around, had lost its allure by the time he was narrowly reelected to another two-year term in 1994.

One of the sticking points was garbage pickup, which had been provided gratis by the county for years but had recently been left for the city to manage. Salinas’ solution was to secure an $84,000 grant for a collection facility, then charge every residence $10 a month for the service.

Nearly half of Encinal’s families balked, many of them opting for more old-fashioned disposal, such as burning or dumping illegally along an overgrown back road named Sunset Boulevard.

City Councilman Isidoro Soto, 71, said that “they don’t want to change. They’re living 50 years in the past.”

Salinas asked the Encinal Water Supply Corp. to include the garbage fee on its bills because that is one service residents cannot do without. Instead, the nonprofit company, a jealously guarded bastion of power here, accused him of trying to wrest control of its waterworks.

For reasons still in dispute, the water company then did just the opposite of what Salinas had sought. After years of collecting a monthly $1.50 street-light fee on behalf of Central Power & Light, water officials suddenly fobbed that function off on City Hall, which was forced to add the utility charge onto already delinquent garbage accounts.

The result has been a study in municipal meltdown, leaving this town with a deficit larger than its $12,000 annual budget. To complicate matters, the meager street-light fees City Hall collected were diverted to the general fund instead of CP&L;, a lapse that even the mayor concedes was ill-advised.

“That’s why people don’t want to give him any of their money,” said the mayor’s most persistent critic, Lolene Newman, a retired teacher who is planning to write a book about the controversy. “Instead of taking us forward, he’s the one who’s put us back in the ‘50s.”