"BROAD TO BROKE" IN TWO SHORT YEARS

By Juan Montoya

As we predicted on April 23, the board and administrators of the Brownsville Independent School District – facing budget shortfalls and construction overruns – have decided there will be no raises for employees and teachers of the district. And now, more and more, the criticism hurled against the Gang of $4 majority by Acción America's Carlos Quintanilla saying they had taken the district from "Broad to Broke" is ringing more true every day. Within the last two years, the BISD has gone from gaining national recognition winning the Broad Prize (and $2 million in scholarships) the CUBE Award for outstanding school boards, to wallowing in budget deficits and seeing district's prestige plummet in the community and across the state and country.
Blaming "an uncertain economy," the BISD announced it will "forgo pay raises for all employees for the 2010-2011 school year."
However, nowhere in the comments by BISD superintendent Brett Springston was there any mention of the real reason for the tightening of the BISD employee and teachers' belts.
While it is true that school districts all across the state and nation are under budget pressures, the BISD in particular has been beset by woes of its own creation, namely gross mismanagement of the budget process and construction costs overruns (read change-order mayhem).
As the board of trustees slogs through the 2010-2011 budget process, one thing has become abundantly clear: the past two years have brought the district a deficit of more than $35 million over that period.
BISD will adopt the 2010-2011 budget by the end of June. The district’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30.
BISD administrators told the local daily that the districts' 2010-2011 budget will be some $493.08 million. BISD is Brownsville’s largest employer with 7,434 current employees. Department heads are already under instruction to trim their operating budgets by 20 percent from their operating budgets.
BISD dipped into its reserves $11.8 million to support its fund balances. In 2006, Brownsville voters approved $135 million in school construction bonds. Those funds were used to build Pullam and Keller elementary schools, which opened this year, and Manzano Middle School and Veterans Memorial High School, which will open in the fall, according to Gary Long of the Brownsville Herald.
What is not mentioned is that Veterans Memorial High School was originally budgeted at $45 million, but mismanagement and change orders inflated that price to $65 million.
And sloppy planning of ingress-egress at the new Manzano Middle School and Keller Elementary School resulted in cost overruns when the district had to purchase homes in the adjacent neighborhood (Casa Linda Homes) after the Texas Department of Transportation rejected its plans. However, since construction of sports fields to the east of the school had been completed, the BISD could not use an existing easement to provide buses and students with an outlet for traffic.
Working budget papers acquired by this blog indicate that the district seriously miscalculated on several budget items, notably personnel salaries and construction costs.
District planners projected costs for salaries for instruction (teachers, aides, etc.) to total $199 million in 2009. The actual amount spent turned out to be $206 million – $7 million more than the projected amount.
The figures for construction of facilities are even more egregious. Working budget papers indicate that the district miscalculated the costs of the new construction by $92 million which is listed as a deficiency on page 31 (Exhibit C-3). Additionally, district planners estimated that they would spend $2.6 million in 2009 for facilities acquisition and construction and the actual amount totals $24.8 million.
Those items alone indicate that the miscalculations cost the district about $114 million more than projected.
Yet, the same records indicate that until the 2007 budget, the BISD actually had a $7.2 million surplus heading into 2008.
In 2008, projected revenues of $393 million did not materialize and the district collected only $387 million. At the same time, the district spent $395 million, a deficit of some $8 million.
The 2009 budget outlook is even worse. The district projected collecting $390 million but collected only $384 million. At the same time it spent $411 million a staggering $27 million cost overrun in operations.Do some of these architects and construction firms or their representatives appear in the political contributors' lists for Rick Zayas, Ruben Cortez, both running for re-election this coming November?Already, challengers are lining up to take on the three. Cortez and Zayas are members of the so-called Gang of $4 which hold the majority on the board along with Rolando Aguilar and Joe Colunga. If you remember, Zayas ran for the two-year term for the seat held by at Lehman. Now those two short years have passed and Zayas has been dogged by his business relationship with Cortez in the Cameron County Jail Commissary contract from which their management firm pulls a cool half-million smackers a year. Will voters' disgust at the way things have run the past two years spill over into the November trustee elections?
"The district is going to have to do something drastic," said a retired employee from the finance department. "Either they're going to have to stop construction of schools, or costs are going to ave to be trimmed from somewhere. The state won't allow for this to continue this way."