LONG FAWNS OVER CFO MENDOZA, IGNORES MISD DEFICITS

By Juan Montoya
What is it about Brownsville Independent School District chief financial officers that seems to set the Herald's education reporter Gary Long's heart aflutter?
It is the way they crunch numbers? The ready smile? The finesse of manipulating figures?
Perhaps we'll never know. All we can safely say now is that new BISD CFO is being lionized by Long as the Second Coming, straight out of the Mission ISD.
The hook to the Long saga about Mendoza is that the district has been handed $800,000 by the Texas Education Agency after it ran out of statutory limitations on the time it is authorized to conduct audits over alleged disallowed payments by migrant education programs. BISD was one of six large districts in Texas under audit.
Out of that $800,000 that was released, Mendoza told Long that "he would redirect $495,000 in local maintenance funds back to the campuses for instructional supplies."
Well now, that's very munificent of Mr. Mendoza, that he would "redirect" the funds on his own.
We don't presume to be scholars of public school governance, but we have the nagging suspicion that – if Brownsville adheres to state public school law – Mendoza cannot "redirect" one dollar anywhere unless he and the administration under my uncle (not really) Carl Montoya recommends it to the board and those elected officials, in turn, approve the "redirection.
Gary is correct in stating that teachers have Long-complained  about not having enough funds to provide educational supplies for their students. And although Long wasn't as thorough enough to include the final figure per student that elementary, middle schools, and high schools will get in Brownsville, it will be more than the current $64 for high schools, $55 for middle schools, and $45 for elementary campuses.
All it took, Mendoza waxed to Gary, was "someone coming in from the outside to see past the way things always have been done and to initiate change."
Yeah, well, we don't know about that.
For the past three years, the BISD has been trying to wean itself from borrowing from the fund balance to offset the difference between revenues and expenditures as it had been the custom during prior years. As a result of raiding the balance, the district had come very nearly to run afoul of the TEA's directives that it maintain a fund balance that would allow it to operate for a specified number of days (30 days, or a month).
In fact, the local board policy set back in the days when Eliceo Muñoz was on the BISD board set that number at three months, or 75  days. Currently, the $46 million in reserve funds would not comply with the local board policy.
We bring this up because Mendoza told Long that "my philosophy is to spend the district's money as if it were my own," an enlightening (and self-serving) statement. A review of the Mission ISD budgets over the last three years indicates that the district has run on  deficit since 2011.
Records indicate that although local and immediate sources of revenue, state program revenues, and federal program revenues increased every single year over that time span, and the total budgets for the three years were $140,755 (2011), $146,204,309 (2012), and $152,201,509, Mendoza managed to run a deficit each one of those years.
In 2011, the deficit was $416,747. In 2012, the deficit grew to $5,391,160. In 2013, his last year at the helm as CFO there, the district will have a $16,565,429 deficit.
Many CFOs like to say that these are not really deficits, but rather that these are "shortfalls" between revenues and expenditures that have been solved by a mere transfer from fund balance to the operating budget. We guess that you can put lipstick on a pig, but it will still remain a pig, won't it?
That was the problem that another Long CFO favorite, former BISD CFO Tony Fuller had with the semantics of raiding the fund balance to "balance" the district's budgets.
The fact of the matter is that if any CFO cannot get the district's administration and board to control the balancing of revenues and expenditures what does that say about his or her performance?
Now, as to running the district's financing as if it were his own, well, does Mendoza's household have a $504 million budget?
In the laudatory article on Mendoza, he makes a big deal about his "extensive experience with technology applications at the Mission school district."
What he didn't say was that one of the hits that the Mission ISD's budget took this year was the upgrade of its security and surveillance system for a hefty $801,319 price tag. The process was personally overseen by Mendoza, who conceded to the McAllen Monitor that he recommended that the contract be awarded to a Brownsville security company.
And although the winner was not the lowest bidder, they were allowed to whittle down their proposal from the original $848,11.78 and eventually lower than the lowest bidder who was Star Telecom LLC.
The Brownsville company was American Surveillance and what makes this worthwhile noting is that it is owned by Jaime Escobedo, who just happens to be the brother of Enrique Escobedo, the president of the board of the BISD, his new employer.
Some of the companies bidding for the Mission ISD have cried foul and are contemplating taking some action against the Mission ISD and Mendoza, in particular for his performance in the bidding process they claim was altered to favor the Brownsville company.
Mendoza got a hefty raise from his salary at the MISD when he came to the BISD to $120,000, Long's report indicates.