DID UTB EMPLOYEES WORK ON JULIET'S SEASIDE DACHA?

By Juan Montoya
Do you remember the h
ullabaloo that erupted when local residents found out that the UT System Regents had requested (and the Texas legislature approved) a bill that allowed the university to sell then PanAm President Homer Peña's home to Juliet Garcia and her husband Oscar?
The late state representative Henry Sanchez was aghast when he discovered that the state legislature had done what it had never done before, sold the house of the university president in Brownsville to Garcia after pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars in renovations and improvements. With passage of measure, the people's home belonged to her through a special bill in the legislature.
Today, the house bought at $175,000 is valued at more than $270,000, a neat profit of more than $100,000.

And is it any surprise at who financed the note? Would you believe Fred Rusteberg's IBC Bank the same Rusteberg who hosted meetings agitating to overthrow the democratically-elected trustees at TSC? Other properties listed to the Garcias include a house at South Padre Island valued at about $929,000.
Her salary of about $320,000 was given a boost this year when a transfer from TSC raised it by another $25,000 to nearly $350,000.

Well, after we posted that her South Padre Island, cozy, seaside, three-story crib was up for sale, we started getting messages and emails indicating that some of the SPI residents had seen UTB-TSC employees working on the yard and on the home making repairs long before it was known that it belonged to the precocious St. Juliet.

No one, of course, wanted to cross swords with Juliet and said nothing. Her ruthlessness, perhaps, was already well known among SPI residents.

We always wondered why it was that a person who was receiving so much more than 99 percent of the people in South Texas still felt they had to take even more from the public for their own personal interest? Does it ever end? With the separation between TSC and UTB to become operational this August and TSC trustees already slicing $1,000 off the tuition and fees for its students, that move is like  a breath of fresh air given the "take" attitude exhibited by the likes of Juliet in the past.