SHOULD ROBLES RESIGN AS TSC TRUSTEE?

By Juan Montoya
He has been heard utter in public in no uncertain terms that he doesn't care what happens to Texas Southmost College, the entity that he courted voters so that he could represent them for the last 13 years.
His credentials to represent them are impeccable.
A former migrant worker who rose beyond his station and achieved his dream of becoming a heart surgeon and a leading light in his community to bring fine arts to his city.
But now, Robles, whose current term ends this May, cannot seem to overcome the fact that he was on the losing side of the efforts by the current UTB-TSC administration headed by his idol President Juliet Garcia to dissolve the community college and hand over all of its some $200 million in assets (real estate, buildings, and bank deposits) and end the 85-year history of the institution that provided a leg up to countless residents in their quest to better their lot.
Robles should understand this community's affinity to this little institution.
After all, he was born in rural Raymondville and was one of 14 children born to a migrant family.
He himself attended Texas Southmost College before finishing his Bachelor of Science in Biology and Chemistry at Pan American University. After that he received his clinical training at New York Medical College before specializing in cardiology at the University of New Mexico.
By all measures, TSC provided him the necessary first step for him to go on and achieve his dream.

So why would he deny others the same opportunity?

As a member of the UTB-TSC Partnership Advisory Committee, he was one of the advocates of Garcia's plan to do away with the community college function of TSC and institute the implementation of a so-called "community university," hailed by its proponents as the newest wrinkle in higher education, a sort of benign hybrid of higher learning, if you will.

But along the way, local students were denied in-district tuition, suffered the highest tuition rates in the state, if not the country, and had (have to still) pay outrageous user fees that discourage any bet the most well-to-do to attend classes there.

If they wanted to take a community college class, local students are forced to pay university-level tuition rates that eat through their federal grants like a piranha goes through a school of sardines. Is it any wonder that the UTB-TSC hybrid had amassed a 17 percent graduation rate for students attending over six years?

That went on for 20 years since the 1991 "partnership" was forged between compliant local TSC board members and community "leaders" and the bigwigs at UT System who were content to allow the local yokels to burden themselves with debt and "transfer" annual payments now averaging some $51 million in exchange for sporting the snazzy Longhorn logo on their extravagant construction projects.

It is estimated that between 1991 and 2011, these annual "transfers" have totaled close to $1 billion in local assets to help out the UT System and keep them here. Not content with fleecing the rubes, UT System planners in 1991 also required UT-Brownsville (as they did UT-Edinburg) to refrain from partaking in the oil-and-gas fabulously wealthy Permanent University Fund (PUF) that is alloted to all UT and A&M campuses (some 15 of them) every year.

At the same time, they kept the TSC district as a taxing entity (a cash cow) and local residents shouldered the burden of keeping UT here by voting to indebt themselves passing bond issues to be paid by local taxpayers and their progeny for the next 20 years to come after its passage.
This debt (a $68 million bond issue) in time and with interest will grow to some $100 million when it matures. The Garcia plan would have continued the "partnership" without a TSC entity until the debt was paid by the district residents.
As one trustee in the majority who rejected the plan and decided that the college was better off going at it alone as it had for the 65 years before the coming of TSC, "It would be like paying a mortgage for 20 years and at the end of that period end with nothing to show for it."
For some reason or other, Robles cannot seem to understand that the scheme was unacceptable to the people he represents. He and trustees David Oliveira (whose cousin State Rep. Rene Oliveira went along with the "partnership" at its inception) and Dr. Robert Lozano, sided with Robles and Garcia to scuttle the majority's decision.
It didn't work.
Now Robles is going around talking down the little college that gave a poor boy like him the opportunity to grab on to the lower rung of the ladder and pull himself (and his aspirations) upward. So what is he still doing on the board of trustees besides trying to throw a log on the tracks and derail the TSC train to please Juliet?