UNITED B'VILLE MAKES PITCH FOR MORE FREE BISD BUCKS

By Juan Montoya
With the full-court press coming to a school district near you, the nonprofit corporation controlled by a self-appointed board headed by IBC's Fred Rusteberg, UTB's Juliet Garcia and Brownsville Mayor Tony Martinez wants the Brownsville Independent School District to give it $25,000. What United Brownsville – which is accountable to no one and conducts its business out of the public eye – has to do with educating the children of the district is anyone's guess.
The group – United Brownsville – will have a slick presenter come a beggin' tonight at the meeting of the board.
Apart from the organization's vague weasel-worded mission statement that it seeks to "build the sustainable collaboration needed to achieve our citizens’ vision developed through the Imagine Brownsville Comprehensive Plan," there is no specific course of action and worse yet, no track record of what it has done with the $25,000 it got from the district last year or the year before.
What it does have, however, is BISD president Enrique Escobedo and also BISD superintendent Carl Montoya as two of its members.
We have spoken in this blog before of the shadow-government aspect of this organization that was created in the waning days of the Eddie Treviño City of Brownsville administration at the urging of manipulator Carlos Marin and a small cadre of schemers who managed to wrangle $1 million or more form the city's coffers to prepare a grandiose the Imagine Brownsville Comprehensive Plan.
That turned out to be a grab-bag of jumbled U.S. Census statistics and a compendium of wish lists gathered from a number of town-hall type meetings held throughout the city.
That plan, supposedly, was the mandate for the group to steer the direction (and budgets) of the organizations who it browbeat into funding it from their donations to the group.
Using this "plan" as its justifications, it appointed itself as the guardian of the public's wishes and their money"to determine what mattered most to our citizens, assess our current situation, and develop strategies to overcome the gaps between our citizen’s vision and current conditions."
In fact, the executive director was picked by Rusteberg alone without any public consultations from the people who pick up the tab and he chose his fellow Tea Party conservative Mike Gonzalez, a former mayor of Kyle, Texas who left a landscape of public debt behind him in that small city. He was of course, a kindred spirit with Fred, who also likes to use other people's money to finance this organization of control without having to pay a penny for it.
The slick purveyors of this plan have gone before local publicly funded entities and convinced the members of the governing board to give them money to continue their shadow government.
Among those that have drunk the Rusteberg-Garcia-Martinez Kool-Aid and forked over $25,000 annually are the City of Brownsville, the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation, the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation, the Brownsville Navigation District, the Brownsville Independent School District, The University of Texas at Brownsville, Texas Southmost College, and the Brownsville Public Utilities Board.
Now hat does UB have to do with the BISD's mission?
Board members would do well to assess the goals of the district in these lean economic times and critically decide whether they fit in with the plans these people have for the taxpayers' money.

BISD Mission Goal Statement
"Brownsville Independent School District, rich in cultural heritage, will produce well-educated graduates who can pursue higher educational opportunities and who will become responsible citizens in a changing global society by utilizing all resources to provide equitable opportunities for students."

Finance Goal
"Develop, maintain, and evaluate a district budget that ensures equitable distribution of funds that supports district initiatives."

How can any board member support these two goals by giving $25,000 of its taxpayers dollars to an organization headed by millionaires who do not have to answer to anyone, for whom no one has voted and no one can remove except themselves?