MELISSA'S MICROMANAGING RAISES SUSPICIONS OF INFLUENCE PEDDLING

By Juan Montoya

City of Brownsville commissioner Melissa Zamora's latest foray into the rightful purview of city management – the bidding process for selling services to the city – is raising eyebrows and suspicions about her motives.
Not only do our readers question her sincerity about her sudden concern for the activities in the purchasing department, but also about her interest in who gets such piddly contracts as demolition work for the city.
In the past, the precocious Ms. Zamora has fund her self in the maelstrom of controversy after she became embroiled in matters related to the doling out of city services and resources, often to people close to her or with whom she was known to be intimately associated with.
This latest brouhaha involves her questioning of city contracts to demolish condemned homes and structures, a relatively minor portion of the city's business.

Why she is getting involved in singling out this service is raising questions in the contractor communityand questions on whether she is running interference for those who may have bid and not received the jobs in question.

Zamora's perceiv

ed conflict-of-interest problems started soon aftershe was elected commissioner. Back in 2009 Brownsville, she announced that she had severed ties with construction giant HNTB who was doing business with the city so as to eliminate any question of possible conflicts.

The Kansas City-based firm with offices in Brownsville had been providing the city with engineering services on projects at the city’s Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport, the Brownsville Sports Park, and is in charge of engineering for the Cameron County Regional Mobility Authority, which is working on numerous city projects including the West Rail Relocation Project, the now-abandoned West Parkway Project and other developments.

Zamora at the time told the local daily that said that she signed a contract with HNTB to provide it with media relations work from Aug. 10 through Nov. 30 of that year.She abstained from voting on a project for which the firm had performed engineering work.

Brownsville’s City Charter states that the mayor and commissioners cannot be interested in the profits or emoluments of any contracts, job, work, or service for the municipality. The provision reflects that, to the contrary, a mayor or commissioners would forfeit their offices if such conflicts exist.
Sossi pointed out that Zamora was not an owner or principal of HNTB nor was she an employee. "Commissioner Zamora provided work to HNTB as an independent consultant and therefore had no interest ‘in the

profits or emoluments of any contract, job, work or service for the municipality,’ " Sossi told the local daily.

At the time city contract attorney Mark Sossi came to her rescue and said his reading of the charter exonerated Zamora.

(HNTB, by the way, was recently named in a report by the government that charged that it had overcharged $9 million in its fees to allocate disaster money in Texas.)

Just as her personal relationship with HTNB raised questions in 2009, the following year she also got into a controversy after she tried to get Brownsville Community Development Block Grant funds to build a Boys and Girls Club in Cameron Park after the charter for the Brownsville Boys and Girls Club expired.

The commissioner came up with the plan to build one in property in Cameron Park which she said had been annexed by the city. She planned to use the active charter of the Los Fresnos Boys and Girls Club to do it. The application was asking for $1.5 million dollars.

City Planner Ben Medina said that the city committee charged with disbursing the funds reviewed $7.3 Million worth of CDBG proposals and recommended funding for $1,660,788 of infrastructure, $533,028 and $1,359,703 of commitments.
As stated at the time, the city would buy the property from the county, temporarily come under the Los Fresnos B&G Club and later come under its own name when the Brownsville club regained its charter.

But it wasn't until Zamora said that the architectural firm listed for the project, Gomez, Saenz and Mendez, was willing to donate the architectural work that suspicions about her personal relations with the principals arose that the questions arose.
At the time, David Mendez and Zamora were an item and were seen at numerous civic and social functions, arousing suspicions that there was something more than civic-mindedness behind the proposal.

(That firm, by the way, was named in a forensic audit performed on the multi-million cost overruns – initially $45 million that rose to to $64 million – at the Veterans Memorial High School and the audit staff recommended that it be prohibited from bidding on future construction projects with the district.)

Still another example of the suspicions following the gregarious commish is the brouhaha that erupted after she fought off the proposals by start-up airline Fly Frontera to establish Monterrey-Brownsville air service, only to discover that she had

been privy to extensive talks going on with AeroMexico to provide the same service.

Then, after the announcement of the AeroMexico service was made in open session, Mayor Tony Martinez announced that commissioner Zamora was to be in charge of the public promotion efforts on this side of the Rio Grande. A caller at the time to Elite Promotions, where she is a marketing representative, was told that "Commissioner Zamora is in charge of that account."

Later, a livid commissioner threatened legal action against bloggers and said that she was donating the promotional work and that Elite Promotions had nothing to do with the project. And while the commissioner fought tooth and nail to prevent the city and the BEDC from providing incentives for any airline, she was strangely quiet after the Mexican airline started receiving that very thing after the dust had settled.

What motives are driving Mellie and Martinez to intrude in the city's bidding and purchasing process?

Contractors are mystified at their sudden interest.

"If there's something wrong with the bidding and purchasing process, fix it," said a contractor. "But Zamora's and Martinez's sudden interest in this is raising suspicions that there is an ulterior motive working here."