BISD COUNSEL, ADMINISTRATION: SHOOT THE MESSENGERS

By Juan Montoya
Next Monday, at high noon, Brownsville Independent School Distr5ict legal counsel Baltazar Salazar and the administration are going to ask four board members named in a lawsuit filed by trustees Catalina Presas-Garcia and Lucy Longoria to hire outside counsel to remove them from the board.
How can they?
As parties in a federal lawsuit, isn't this a basic conflict of interest to vote to remove your accuser and pay lawyers to find a way to remove them from their position?
Ever hear of First Amendment retaliation?
The four board trustees – Otis Powers, Minerva Peña, Jose Chirinos, and Cesar Lopez – also voted to censure the two women, and in effect, allowed the late Enrique Escobedo to muzzle them and prevent them from participating in discussing the items that were on past agendas.
By being party to the "censure" (or is it censor?), they became part of the de facto conspiracy to agree to shut the two  pesky trustees with all their uncomfortable questions.
Counsel Baltazar – the same lawyer who lost the appeal to have three felony arrests for theft expunged by the state – is leading the charge.
If anyone should leave this forum of the people's political representation it should be him.
Since when does the hired help decide who should run the manor?
Don't get us wrong, it is correct and proper to exclude the women from deliberations on the lawsuit they filed against the board. No one expects them to be at the same table where a defense is being discussed against their lawsuit. But to agree to hire lawyers to remove them from office because they exercised a legal right in a federal court?
The four board members who participate in this little tragicomedy should consider this move very seriously.  
They really should look very hard at the request by Baltazar who wants to hire outside counsel to defend the board and district against the women;s lawsuit and ask themselves if they remember what he said when he made his presentation to be hired.
He promised he would "tone down your legal expenses" and bring "stability, because you have chaos, and when there's chaos, lawyers make money."
The school district, he told them, had "become a cash cow" because the district did not follow procedure and said he was there "to serve the board as a whole."
So why does he have hire outside counsel to defend the district from the lawsuit and then hire yet more outside counsel to look for ways to remove the women from office?
Have the wishes of the electorate to be represented by these two trustees been replaced by the whims of a lawyer who never told the board when he was hired that he was trying to expunge the record of his three felony arrests for theft?
Is this what we have come down to, to be guided by a lawyer who not only lied by omission to board, but also publicly accused one of the women of sexually accosting him?
And what of the thousands of voters who put these two women as their representatives on the board? Will their choices be replaced by the legal machinations of a pack of devious lawyers? What ever happened to representative government?
Are they actually ready to disenfranchise the voters who elected them to office?
What the hell is happening here?