RENTFRO AND DANNENBAUM COME BACK FOR SECONDS

By Juan Montoya
In the course of covering the UT System's attempts to gobble up the local college district (TSC) we have stumbled upon two players in in this unfolding tragedy who we have seen on this sordid stage before.
One, James Dannenbaum, is the chairman of the international engineering conglomerate Dannenbaum Engineering, and a Regent with the UT System.
The other is none other than our own Daniel Rentfro, who lists the college, the Brownsville Navigation District, Capital One, and the Town of Rancho Viejo, Texas, as his clients.
Dannenbaum, as a regent, will have the chance to approve the proposed partnership agreement with the TSC trustees if TSC president Juliet Garcia has her way. The deal will hand over the entire assets – including real estate and bank deposits – to the UT Sytem for their "management."
Rentfro, as counsel for the TSC board, helped to draft the agreement for Garcia and has been pressuring the board trustees to take immediate action to approve it and present to the UT System regents. If he and Garcia had had their way, there would have been no public input or debate about the contents of the agreement before its passage.
Only the intervention of the public and the intestinal fortitude of four of the trustees kept that from happening. If it had happened, the district's residents (taxpayers) would have been left shouldering the deal for the next 80 years without having a say-so in the matter.
Now that the majority of the trustees have made the document public and the people have been able to see that not only does the agreement call for the surrendering of the district's assets to the UT Sytem and under its management, it also calls for the removal of any meaningful say-so in the selection and appointment of the college presidents.
Further, the president will be able to hire and fire (and promote) all the college staff and faculty without seeking approval from the board.
This finely crafted piece of thievery cannot possibly pass public muster. A public meeting to consider the agreement is scheduled for October 4 at Gorgas Hall.
But we digress.
We have run into Dannenbaum and Rentfro in the not-too distant past. If you'll remember, Dan and the senior Daniel Rentfro (peace be with him) were the counsel for the navigation district when they were squandering $21 million that resulted in a non-existent rail and truck bridge at the Port of Brownsville.
In fact, it was through Dannenbum's engineering firm that almost $15 million of non-justifiable payments were made to companies where Dannenbaum's chief engineer – Louis Jonas – had either direct or indirect control. In the end, the company paid $1 million to Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos as a sort of penance (guilt money) without admitting any wrongdoing.
And we also remember seeing a spreadsheet of all the people and companies who got paid with bridge bond money at the port. Among them was Rentfro and his daddy. Apparently, they did some legal work and earned themselves a couple of grand in addition to their regular retainers at the Port of Brownsville.
During the course of an investigation by a local attorney (Charles Willette), we learned that the port trustees had asked the Rentfros whether it was advisable to wire money to money exchange house in Mexico and offshore as payments to the companies sin Mexico. Willette said that despite the trustees misgivings, the Rentfros saw nothing wrong or suspicious with the maneuver. Then, poof, the money is gone, honey.
So this is not this duo's first time at the rodeo, children.
Scrutinize the proposal well and see it for what it is: a naked power grab by an imperious college president and her allies assisted by a legal hit man who is used to facilitate the pillage of our community and hand it over to powerful industrialists who are only too glad to accept ill-gotten gifts.