His Town: Firefighter, Lawyer, Now Mayor of the City He Helped Incorporate
Arturo Martinez de Vara. Photo: Josh Huskin.
Lawyer Arturo Martínez de Vara’s hometown of Von Ormy, Texas, is a community where people talk about the Texas Revolution as if it were yesterday.
Settled before the Alamo fell, Von Ormy, population 1,300 and 15 miles southwest of downtown San Antonio, is rich in history but short on amenities. It features a post office, two churches and three truck stops. There is no cable TV or high-speed Internet service. Flash floods wipe out dirt roads in spring and fall, when powerful storms known as “Blue Northers” blow south from the Rocky Mountains.
It was during one of these storms in 2004 when Martínez de Vara, while answering distress calls as a volunteer firefighter, joined a discussion that changed the community forever.
“Why didn’t the county government do something to fix this flooding problem?” he recalls firefighters asking. Then one chimed in: “Why not form a city and do it ourselves?”
“We had talked about it before,” says volunteer fire chief John Ortega Sr. “Art finally decided ‘I’m going to do this.’ He was passionate about getting it done.”
Martínez de Vara, 35, grew up in Houston but spent summers in Von Ormy, where his mother’s family has lived for six generations. He returned to stay with his grandmother while attending St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, graduating with a dual degree in theology and law in 2007.
It took about as long for Von Ormy to win incorporation as it did for him to become a lawyer. He was elected the city’s first mayor in November 2008 and re-elected two years later. Now he juggles a general law practice with an unpaid mayoral job leading a city of 1.8 square miles, one of Texas’ smallest.
And he’s taking time off from his practice to be chief of staff to a state representative in this year’s Texas legislature session.
Click to read the rest of “His Town” from January’s ABA Journal.
