SHOOTING THE TSC-UTB SURVIVORS: THE BROWNSVILLE HERALD

By Juan Montoya
It is the standing joke around newsrooms that once the working stiffs on the beats get done covering a story crime the editorial writers to do their thing.
"An editorial writer is someone who descends from the hills where he watched the rage battle below in relative safety and then shoots the survivors," the saying goes.
Such was the nature of the editorial in today's Brownsville Herald where the writer urges restraint to the passions on both sides of the preservation or elimination of the Texas Southmost College district and chides them for being prideful at expense of the educational opportunities both can offer to local residents.
However, in castigating the TSC trustees who decided the voters didn't elect them to get rid of provide the UT System with the $200 million in assets of the district and leave the local taxpayers holding the bag on a $102 million debt, the writer has little criticism for the UT System, the regents, or the architect of the dispute, TSC-UTB president Juliet Garcia.
In fact, it has been the dearth of critical coverage of this issue by the daily that has allowed the pro-elimination crowd to feel its oats and disseminate outright falsehoods surrounding the termination of the partnership agreement.
These are the facts: The UT System regents voted to terminate the partnership, not the TSC trustees.
It has been the UT System that has reneged on paying its rent to the TSC district to the tune of $15 million (maybe more now, with penalties and interest).
It has been the TSC-UTB president who has unleashed an unholy campaign against the four trustees who would not go along with her plan to hand over the assets of the district (land, buildings, bank deposits minus the $102 million in debt) and accept a peripheral "advisory" capacity with her as an eminence.
And it has been her minions, including the Most Reverend Armand Mathew, Oblate, the Torquemada of the Rio Grande, who has led the mob to the very doorstep of one trustee (Trey Mendez) and threatened to destroy his career as an attorney in his hometown. You remember him, at one time he was the director of the Center for Civic Engagement at $52,000 a year and was feted at a recognition banquet where he was praised for his life's work at the bash full of pomp and circumstance.
And now we have the planted letter writers with such endearing terms as "misguided," "selfish," "ridiculous." and characterized their actions in fending off Garcia's extortive partnership as "idiotic and selfish."
This was printed, mind you, on the same page on which the editorial writer is calling on both sides to put aside their "pride – even arrogance – that threatens to harm the very function of providing the educational opportunities for which UT and TSC were created."
Just one question to the letter writer, one Scott Parker, as you laud the quality of education that will be provided our local students by this "prestigious public university" and "richest universities" why can't they pay their rent?
And if you admire their educational product so much, why is it you disparage the opinion of Mendez, a product of the UT Law School and supposedly a possessor of that fine analytical mind that is produced by your paragon of academe?
Do you perhaps think that he might know something you don't?
In the case of the Herald, while quoting such people as Reba Cardenas-McNair, Mathew, and omitting the sins of Garcia (the hefty $40,000 increase in her department, her attempt to purchase a $640,000 mural with taxpayers' money), in its negligible coverage of the one-sided partnership offered by Garcia, its slip is showing its slip.
It kept its readers in the dark to the fact that during an October meeting Garcia and TSC counsel Dan Rentfro were trying to ram though the partnership agreement and that no one knew what was in it to begin with. Given the fact that the editorial writer is now saying the agreement is so very important to the education of the chillun' all of a sudden, why would that be? It wasn't important then?
After all, we know that its publisher Daniel Cavazos serves with some of the principal suspects on some boards, notably on Project Grad, where he rubs elbows not only with Reba, but with Juliet Garcia herself, Eddie Campirano, Denise Blanchard, Irv Downing, William Strong, and Eddie Trevino, among others.
Reba is president of Cardenas Development Corporation, and is the daughter of Mary Rose Cardenas, one of the original board members who begged the UT System personally to come to Brownsville in return for giving away the family farm. In turn, TSC-UTB has named buildings after Mary Rose, by no stretch a scholar or for that matter a college graduate.
Campirano was a TSC board member who is now the director of the Port of Brownsville, where one of Juliet's sons-in-law was given a cushy marketing position.
Eddie's own daughter, in turn, was given a nice-paying job at the Harvard by the Rio Grande. One hand, apparently, washes the other.
We've known Denise Blanchard for many years as the office director and (before the Fall) the Chief of Staff for deposed U.S. Rep. Solomon Ortiz. She fended off media questions about her boss's role in the $21 million Port of Brownsville bridge fiasco with aplomb and when Lencho Rendon left the sinking ship, shed took over the cutting of the cheese.
Strong is with the TSC-UTB Department of English, where Juliet occasionally raids to award herself raises in the guise of TSC transfers to UTB. Irv Downing is the counterweight to Robber Baron Fred Rusteberg from the IBC, and is Rusteberg's partner in foisting United Brownsville on the gullible citizens of the City of Brownsville who forked over $1 million in tax funds to set up the mechanism to hide the bankers' handiwork without accounting to anyone or letting them see how the sausage is made.
And, of course, Trevino is the former Mayor under whose watch (and with whose impetus) the United Brownsville (then called Imagine Brownsville) scam was perpetrated.
Up to now, only Garcia's, Roberto Robles, Rusteberg, Mathew, and the vociferous pitchfork and torches mob going by the name of "the Committee" have had their voices heard though expensive ad-agency generated ads and presentations hosted for service and social clubs by Rusteberg at IBC facilities.
Yet, the one time that Mendez took out an ad in the Sunday paper generated a groundswell ion support of the majority's "preservation rather than elimination" approach. As the majority of the trustees and the negotiation teams of both institutions hammer out a contract both can live with, let it be known far and wide that the battle has been joined.