b. Discussion, consideration and possible action regarding threatened or pending litigation, including lawsuits by Hector Gonzalez and Antonio Juarez, and the status of settlement negotiations or settlement proposals.
By Juan Montoya
Withe the death of insurance mogul Johnny Cavazos, it is somewhat fitting that the lawsuits sparked by the outcry of two former BISD board members and two current ones because his company wasn't recommended for the multimillion Stop-Loss insurance contract should also reach a quiet end.
On Tuesday, the BISD trustees will decide whether the settlement negotiations between attorneys for Rick Zayas, Ruben Cortez (both former trustees) and Rolando Aguilar and Joe Colunga (both current trustees) and the two former BISD administrators will come to an end.
The lawsuits over the termination of former BISD Superintendent Hector Gonzalez and former Chief Financial Officer Antonio Juarez are on the board's agenda after traveling a long and winding (and extremely costly) path toward resolution in state and federal courts.
Yet, now we understand that the parties in the cases through mediation have reached a tentative settlement in both cases that will be presented for approval by the board on Tuesday.
If you'll remember, Juarez sued the former majority and the BISD after he was forced to leave his position as CFO after Colunga and Cortez demanded that he be fired by Gonzalez of face firing himself by their group. It's all laid out in the Gonzalez lawsuit now making its way through state court.
In the Gonzalez case, as in the Art Rendon case before, the former majority paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Ric Navarro and his Harlingen law firm to find some justification for their termination. Whatever flimsy "evidence" Navarro produced for the former board was rebutted by their attorneys and the cases continued making their way to trial.
Then there was the slight matter of the four trustees (Zayas, Cortez, Aguilar and Colunga) being denied qualified immunity in federal court even after they appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans (en banc, as their behind-the-scenes genius legal consultants advised). In fact, the appeals court flat out denied a rehearing on the same matter.
Apparently, that was the sticking point of these settlement negotiations. Would the four trustees be made to pay from their own pockets?
We still don't know the answer to that question, but we'll know soon enough this Tuesday if the wishes of the insurance company to staunch the hemorrhaging flow of money to lawyers defending the district and the trustees are heeded.
In the Gonzalez case, the courts gave the plaintiff's attorneys time to formulate a conspiracy complaint that drove stake through their defense. Evidence introduced in both cases indicates that the majority and others in the district conspired to violate their civil rights, perverted the grievance process and used employee against employee to justify terminations, and violated their right of protected speech when reporting illegal acts with the proper authorities outside the district (FBI, Texas Rangers, US Attorneys, etc.).
In the HealthSmart case the district had to cut its litigation losses and settle. In the Rendon case, the result was the same. Former BISD AD Joe Rodriguez dropped his defamation lawsuit against trustee Catalina Presas-Garcia. And now, as we head for Tuesday, it'll be up to the current majority to put a stop to this carryover from the previous majority and bury the issue once and for all.
3 comments:
So what's up Juanito...........
So Juan how much did they pay you not to print the comments the community has on this topic. You are a bought B****H!
The BISD Board is likely to give up tax dollars to pay these guys off, in order to get theise ugly suits off their plate and out os sight from public scrutiny. Hey, its only money....and not theirs...its ours. We replaced one groups of crooks with another groups of crooks.
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