INTRIGUE AT BISD TO SELECT NEW BOARD OFFICERS

By Juan Montoya
Furtive phone calls, dropped hints, and good old horse trading are going on behind the scenes as the passengers aboard the SS Brownsville Independent School District start rearranging the deck chairs following this year's election.
New member "Coach" Joe Rodriguez who claims he has a board member for more than 30 years has been heard buttonholing fellow board members asking that they make Jose Chirinos the new board president and Oscar Lopez vice-president. Otis Powers, currently president, is not making any waves and is hoping for the best.
Since Carlos Elizondo is a newly-elected member, it is highly unlikely that he will be chosen to hold any of the positions of president, vice-president or secretary.
Rule out Catalina Presas-Garcia as well. She and Luci Longoria, who will be replaced by Lopez, couldn't even get a third vote to put items on the agenda, much less an officer's position.
Minerva Peña would dearly love to be president or vice-president, but as the saying by Mark Twain goes, she would do better not to make a peep.
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt," he said.
Rodriguez has worn just about every hat imaginable to milk a living from the BISD. After capping his legendary career as coach of the Brownsville Golden Eagles with a devastating loss to Seguin in 1969, he was a member of the BISD board on and off. After creating the position of Athletic Director, he resigned from the board to take that job compliments of his buddies on the board.
It's interesting that the board chamber will now be filled by members who have racked up an unenviable record for mismanaging the district's moneys or are in some way directly involved in the purchase and distribution of contracts for the district's services.
Lopez, for example, was the director of purchasing for the Mercedes Independent School District when he was tapped by the late board president Enrique Escobedo to complete the unexpired term of trustee Christina Saavedra. As purchasing agent for the MISD, he was instrumental in recommending the awarding of the surveillance contract for American Surveillance, the company jointly owned by Escobedo and his brother. A lawsuit in federal court filed by Presas-Garcia and Longoria allege that his appointment was part of a quid-pro-quo for the company getting the contract.
Now Lopez is a member of the Texas Buy Board, an entity which can directly influence where the BISD does business.
Chirinos, as head of the BISD Transportation Department, got a scathing review of his performance there by audits from within BISD and from the forensic audit performed by Defenbaugh and Associates.
Chirinos kept something called an "Activity/Motivational Fund Account" in his budget which came from the profits of the vending machines at Transportation against BISD policy. There were no accounting of the proceeds. After the audit, the money now goes to the district's miscellaneous revenue fund like all other departments. It was, in other words, Chirinos had a slush fund.
The auditors found an inventory that kept steadily growing from 2007-2008 to 2010-2011, finally decreasing in 2011-2012, when Chirinos was gone.
* During those four years, the accumulated inventory increased by $325,868. It wasn't until Arturo Rendon took over in the 2011-2012 budget that it decreased by $277,749.
* Of the 3,841 parts with a value of $792,535 in inventory, approximately 698 items with a value of $89,144 had become obsolete. They no longer fit any of the buses on the district's fleet. The district had to eat the loss.
* The useful life of 46 tires worth $5,020 had expired. These tires could no longer be used or sold.
* Variances in the inventory due to "miscounts, theft, disposal or removal from inventory without corresponding record" totaled $16,092.
The auditors recommended that the department implement a "just in time" outsource method with vendors that would reduce inventory, and save warehouse space and costs. That "JIT" system is now in place.
When the auditors visited the Transportation warehouse in 2012 they found it stacked to the roof with and "excess amount" of miscellaneous office supplies that included three LaserJet printers still in the box that had been purchased in 2009 and 2010. Cases of paper clips, file folders, computer paper and other office supplies filled the sides of entire walls.
* Curious to see whether a sample audit of 200 fixed-assets would turn up any discrepancies, the auditors found that a camera worth $589, a battery backup worth $477, at least four radios worth over $300 and an external hard drive worth $263 were missing.
* During a 100 percent fixed-assets inventory, auditors discovered that 11 items totaling $100,377 could not be located in the department.
But it was the overtime budget under Chirinos that caused the most concern for the auditors. Until he left, the  overtime charges ballooned unchecked. When asked about it, Chirinos said that the unions  and the past administration prevented him from acting. Here's a breakdown by year:
                          Overtime Pd.                                 Increase                        
2008-2009        $2,142,468
2009-2010        $2,976,557                                  $834,089
"Coach" Joe didn't fare much better.
That audit found “that no doubt the Athletic Department in general and Tom Chavez in particular exercised undue influence and misuse of authority in choosing BSN Sports, through their sales rep. Joe Rodriguez "in purchasing uniforms and other sports supplies for Manzano Middle School and Veterans Memorial High School for the 2010-2011 school year."

It was the opinion of the Forensic Audit Staff that no doubt the Athletic Department in general and Tom Chavez in particular exercised undue influence and misuse of authority in choosing BNS Sports, through their sales rep.(Rodriguez) particularly in the purchasing of uniforms and other sports supplies for Manzano Middle School and Veterans Memorial High School in school year 2010-2011.

(This) resulted in close to $500,000 of purchases being given to Chavez's close friend and former A.D Rodriguez. Chavez allowed he and Joe Rodriguez's personal relationship to interfere with what should have been a business decision causing a potential loss of revenue to be sustained by the district. The Forensic Audit Staff recommended that a no-solicitation clause be included in future employment contracts and that BISD make a determination with respect to a (vendor such as BNS) whose representative (Joe Rodriguez) issued a threat over the telephone to file a lawsuit against the district.

"It is the opinion of the (auditors) that Chavez and his AD staff afforded BNS preferential treatment to the detriment of the district. Consideration should be given to administrative action disciplining Tom Chavez with termination as a consideration."
So what did Rodriguez react to this issue:
He filed a lawsuit against the auditor, of course, and chose as his attorney none other than Rick Zayas,a former BISD trustee who was beaten by Longoria in the 2010 election.
Then there's Otis Powers. Powers loves his freebies, compliments of the various vendors with the district. He has half of the herd of deer in South Texas stuffed on the walls of his financial consultant's office on Price Road. The hunting trips cost money, but not to Otis.
So you see, boys and girls, the business of the BISD is business. And with the new majority on the board, it'll be business as usual.