THE PROOF IN THE PUDDING: THE ZAYAS-WIGHTMAN RELATIONSHIP

By Juan Montoya
After months of denial and dissembling that former Brownsville Independent School District trustee Rick Zayas and blogger Robert Wightman were not in tandem attempting to subvert the wishes of the voters by trying to besmirch the actions, reputations and moral character of the new board majority, the chickens have come home to roost.
They have plotted to have BISD chairman Catalina Presas-Garcia removed for asking too many questions, tried to stop the audit of the $25 million bond issue that ended up putting the taxpayers' money in everyone's pocket (architects, contractors, etc.) demanded by Lucy Longoria, cast crass insinuations against their families, mates, and relatives, and cynically laughed off the damage they have caused our school district.
They have played the media, the public, and those of us who think the resources of the district should go toward teaching our students, not toward enriching the close associates, political suporters, family members, and sycophants of BISD board members.
Orchestrated by the losers of the last BISD elections (Zayas-Ruben Cortez), this campaign against the people's representatives bears all the earmarks of a cyber-lynching characteristic of disbarred attorney Robert Wightman, a recent exile from Dallas.
"No," Wightman doth protests too much,"I never supported Zayas."
But who was there with him this Friday in Leonel Alejandro's 357 District Court when Freedom Newspapers finally got the message that suffering this malingering misanthrope was beyond logical endurance?
None other than sore loser BISD trustee Rick Zayas, who stood by Wightman to respond to a motion by Freedom Newspapers asking the court to declare "Bobby" a vexatious litigant and stop his gravy train of browbeating his victims into paying him to stop his legal assaults that costs them time, money and worry.
He has made a living off of this in our area after having been unceremoniously ejected from the legal profession in Dallas, the Texas Supreme Court, and even the U.S. Supreme Court.
Freedom Newspapers by now know, since they filed the motion, that they're in for a vintage Wightman legal roller coaster ride that goes something like this:
"After an adverse ruling by (a) court, he will file a recusal motion or a lawsuit against the judge, hoping to bait the judge into bias by branding him a 'tyrant' or a 'whore for the insurance companies' or a 'defendant' in one of his lawsuits.
The result is procedural gridlock, one recusal motion following another, one judge deciding whether another judge can be impartial. Rarely will a case get heard on its merits. Rarely does he win these procedural debacles. Delay, abusive threats, frivolous filings – all are part of his vindictive campaign to terrorize the legal system."
Lately, as a self-described "educational consultant," he has sanctimoniously said that he stands for all that's good and moral in this world, that those that he disagrees with are moral degenerates, whores, pornographers, and, his favorite, homophobic.
The campaign against Presas-Garcia, Longoria, Escobedo, and all those who don't subscribe to his twisted agenda was conjoined during the last election of the BISD by Zayas and his former sidekick and business partner Cortez.
The voters, smelling the stench of the degeneration and deviancy of candidates who brazenly lied to them on bread-and-butter issues like the scandal on the way we treat our special needs students if they're not related to board members, the favored treatment and handing of plum jobs to relatives and associates, and the plain arrogance of those on who violated our trust, jettisoned them.
The enemy is at the wall.
Superintendent Brett Springston is taking his cues from Wightman and Zayas to hold on to the job he wouldn't have if he had to compete against a pool not limited by Zayas and Cortez to employees of the district.
So is Joe Colunga, who has yet to answer for his own conflict-of-interest questions on the treatment his Special Needs son had when no one else received the same treatment. Need we tread on that thin ice, Joe?
A sore loser like Zayas, with time and money on his hands, and an embittered, dejected misanthrope like Wightman should not be allowed to skewer our attention from the fact that Springston is dirty, the entrenched bureaucracy has run this district to the ground, and we should shake off our blinders to the fact that too may people in the past have milked the district for their own interest instead of the betterment of our students and our community.