JULIET'S PUBLIC FACE SHOWN FOR WHAT IS: NAKED FORCE

By Adela Garza
TSC Trustee

"Anyone who has been following the recent debate on the UTB/TSC partnership is probably confused by President Juliet V. Garcia's recent op-ed in The Herald.
A lengthy compendium of the partnership's many accomplishments, on its face, constitutes a compelling case to leave things exactly as they are.
After all, as President Garcia herself concludes, "By any measure the innovative experiment worked."
But leaving things alone is not what President Garcia has in mind.
In her very last sentence she shows her hand when she writes: "There has to be a better way." The result of her search for that "better way" is that the well-functioning partnership between Texas Southmost College and the University of Texas at Brownsville is right now under attack.
The partnership that was built over the past two decades between a community college and an upper-division university is now being purposefully dismantled.
The"'innovative experiment that worked" is being deliberately cast aside. Since by her own admission and 'by any measure' the partnership has worked admirably, we should demand that President Garcia's for a major legal, financial and organizational restructuring of this sort be accompanied by a clear identification of exactly what is wrong and in need of improvement.
We should demand that her call for remedial actions be a detailed and highly specific rationale for how the recommended changes will make things better. We should demand to know precisely who would control this new entity and why this arrangement is assumed to be better than the fully functioning one we already have.
We get none of these things in the new operating agreement. What we get instead can be most charitably characterized as smoke and mirrors, for by design no real new organizational entity is being created.
All of the offices, staff and administration that will run the new educational entity are precisely the same ones that currently run UTB. The only thing that changes is that UTB, suitably renamed, will assume control of everything that once belonged to the TSC district and its board. The entity proposed by President Garcia is thus a fiction. Better said, it is a legal fiction designed to permit UTB and its president to legally seize control of everything that once belonged to the TSC district and its elected representatives.
This is what constitutes President Garcia's "better way."
The effort to eliminate the authority of the TSC board has in fact been going on for some time. Over the past year President Garcia and her staff have actively dismantled what used to be the Texas Southmost College district office. Virtually everyone who used to directly serve the trustees and board has been fired, forced out or transferred to UTB. The result is that the board's institutional presence has been almost entirely eliminated.
But the proposed operating agreement does more that eliminate the board's institutional presence and authority. It also requires the board to hand over all TSC property and other physical assets, hundreds of acres of land, parking lots and dozens of buildings, all of them paid for by local taxpayers, collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Finally, the new agreement effectively eliminates the trustees' ability to serve in their legally prescribed capacity as fiduciary agents. It does this by obligating them first to continue taxing the citizens of our district, then by making them hand over all the tax dollars to an entity over which the board exercises no control or oversight.
The result is a brand of taxation without representation that is not only contrary to the trustees' obligations as public officials, it is profoundly undemocratic. It is precisely the sort of thing an elected board is supposed to guard against.
What role remains for the TSC trustees?
On that matter the new operating agreement is quite clear: They will simply serve in an advisory capacity on several advisory committees. Committees that the operating agreement "shall not take part in the control or management of the business or affairs of UTB/TSC." Committees lacking any authority whatever to act on behalf of the institution "except as and to the extent expressively authorized in writing by the President."
Committees whose advice can be accepted or ignored as deemed convenient by the UTB President and her staff. As those who have followed the debate know, President Garcia's effort to sell the trustees and the community on her new operating agreement has been both relentless and ruthless. Supporters and the unsuspecting are told that approving the agreement will "strengthen the partnership" while anyone who raises questions is publicly and privately denounced as trying to "destroy the partnership."
But this tactic of putting critics on the defensive is not only dishonest, it is also transparent. Read the proposed operating agreement and you will quickly see that the reality is exactly the opposite.
It is the proponents of the new agreement, not its critics, who are intent on dismantling the UTB/TSC partnership, the "innovative experiment that worked," then sticking the citizens of our community, one of the poorest in the nation, with the bill--forever. If indeed Juliet Garcia is right and "there has to be a better way," this is surely not it.