LUCIO TRIES AN END-AROUND ON TSC BOARD

By Juan Montoya
Having had a united majority on the Texas southmost College Board of Trustees reject their extortionist partnership agreement with the UT System, President Juliet Garcia has enlisted the forces of Texas State Senator Eddie Lucio Jr. to pressure them into calling a public referendum on the issue.
However, the four trustees – Trey Mendez, Adela Garza, Rene Torres, and chairman Kiko Rendon – are having none of it.
"Why are the legislators like Lucio getting involved in trying to overturn a decision made by an elected board?" asked an incredulous majority supporter.
"What kind of precedent is Lucio trying to establish? Does it mean that whatever decision officials make at the local level can be undone by a state official? If they don't like the results, they can just call for a referendum and campaign to get their way?"
Reports indicate that Lucio tried to convince trustee Trey Mendez to call for a popular referendum on Garcia's proposal for unification with the UT System.
A person who heard the senator wheedling and badgering Mendez said one could almost see Lucio's pearly whites glisten as he cajoled the young attorney to call for the election on the Garcia administration's new and improved "partnership."
"I'm your friend, Trey," Lucio is said to have intoned in his best cloakroom tone, "You know I'm your friend..."
Mendez – mistakenly, it seems now – was seen as the weak link in the majority by Garcia supporters. As TSC's lead negotiator with the UT negotiating team, he, a UT graduate, was expected to buckle under the pressure of Garcia's full-court press.
He was the object of a demonstration by a handful of protesters led by rouge UTB priest Armand Mathew who has personally threatened to "destroy" his legal career in Brownsville if he didn't change his vote and opted for unification of TSC with the UT System.
In a scripture-quoting letter to Trey, an attorney, Mathew spewed scorn and open disdain for the young catholic and threatened to destroy his legal career.
"The straightforward statement: If you do not rescind your vote, I will spend every last ounce of my energy organizing this community against you and your career as a lawyer in Brownsville. This is not a threat, Trey. It is simply an honest statement of what I intend to do," Mathew wrote.
Observers say that since the establishment's candidates went down to defeat last May, Garcia and her political supporters have been busy trying to find a way to pressure the new majority into passing the partnership between the UT System and TSC.
Failing at that, they have now resorted to calling for a referendum to let the voters decide on the issue.
"Oh, now they want to put it before the people?" said a majority supporter. "Why didn't Garcia call for a referendum when she pushed through the partnership in the first place? I hear that they have $90,000 set aside for a campaign. They can buy a lot of media space with that. Last time they pushed for the $68 million bond issue, they had the politiqueras out there hauling the elderly from day care centers to vote for it."
The UTB-TSC issue has become the hot topic in talk around town, "said a City of Brownsville staffer.
"That's all people are talking about. One of the municipal judges wanted to know if he had the facts straight on it this morning. But all we're hearing is the one side that comes out on the Brownsville Herald. even then, people aren't convinced we should give UTB the junior college."
Still, a local attorney at the Cameron County Courthouse said the flurry of frenzied activity by the losing minority made no sense to him.
"Why are they making such a fuss?" he said. "These guys campaigned on that platform in their races. They're just doing what they said they were going to do. If they want a referendum, there's another TSC election coming up in two years. They can have their referendum then."
If anything, Trey should remember that it was Lucio who convinced the commissioners at the Port of Brownsville to change engineers from Black and Root to Dannenbaum Engineering and ended up paying $21 million for a bridge to nowhere.
And it was Lucio who convinced Willacy County commissioners to contract with a prison builder whose operatives greased a few palms to get the contracts. A handful of commissioners were convicted of accepting bribes in that fiasco.
Don't take the apple, Trey. Cuidalo Santo Niñito.