TSC BOARD: WHY DIDN'T KIKO RENDON RUN FOR REELECTION?

By Juan Montoya

Before the Texas Southmost Everyone deadline to file for the 2016 board trustee elections, everyone thought that chairman Francisco "Kiko" Rendon and trustee Ed Rivera would be running for another six-year term.Much to everyone's surprise, neither one of them did.
Rivera ended up filing for a position on the Brownsville Navigation District Board of Commissioners despite questions about his legal residence.

Rendon, told everyone that he had not sought reelection because he was going to pursue his doctoral degree and could not spare the time to serve on the board anymore. But in looking over his tenure and his time on the board, it was apparent that other concerns were keeping him busy. Had he satisfied his urge to serve after TSC got its accreditation? Or was he just tired of public service?
We were given a lead that we would find some answer to our questions on the county's Odyssey legal database and we looked. It didn't take long for us to see that, indeed, other issues had plagued Rendon over the six-year stretch on the TSC board besides the separation from UT Brownsville.Most, if not all, were lawsuits to collect default judgments over services and materials he had used for his KR Construction firm. In fact, even before he ran for office in 2010, he had already been served with his first such lawsuit. The debtors trying to collect extended from Brownsville to Tennessee and to Minnesota and include materials, equipment and even a credit card.

A compendium of those lawsuits as they appear in the Odyssey data base follows:

In the above lawsuit, Kiko was sued as early as Nov. 2007 by Transit Mix for having defaulted on $22,183 when his company and he refused to pay the bill and Transit Mix demanded the sum plus interest and attorneys' fees. The lawsuit was filed in Hidalgo District Court. The plaintiffs said that they had provided KR Construction with deliveries of materials between Dec. 1, 2006 and Feb. 16, 2007. The contract was date May 2006. After they had not been paid, they sued seven months later.

Then, just in his first month on the TSC board, Rendon was again named in a lawsuit seeking payment of May 28 by Alamo Concrete for payment of $57,601 for materials and services rendered to his company. Alamo Concrete charged that Rendon had spent the funds of his company and neglected to pay them even after repeated attempts to collect.   

On Sept. 7, 2010, Rendon was sued by the Tennessee Commerce Bank which ended up holding the note on a $26,260 1995 Caterpillar backhoe that Rendon had leased from Odyssey Equipment Financing. Odyssey assigned its interest to another company which in turn sold it to the Tennessee bank. The bank claimed that Rendon made monthly payments of $742 from October 2016 to February 2011 and then stopped paying. Several of the payments made by check came back marked No Sufficient Funds (NSF). The bank wanted its equipment back, and $6,681 in back payments, interests and attorneys' fees.    

Rendon's troubles accumulated when on March 2011, he was again named in a lawsuit by IBC Bank in Brownsville seeking to collect the remaining principal on a $200,000 loan made to him and KR Construction. The note was issued on Nov. 2008 and extended seven times from May 25, 2009 until Dec. 31, 2010 before the bank sued to collect. They wanted the $176,504 remaining on the principal plus interest and attorneys' fees.   

Target National Bank of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was the next litigant trying to collect from Kiko for credit card overruns in the sum of $8,217 in a lawsuit filed in Cameron County. The company said it was owed that amount plus interest and attorneys' fees. It lined up behind the rest and sued. Whether they got their money or not is not clear.

One litigant who actually got a judgement against Kiko was Rancho Viejo, Inc., who sued him on February May 27, 2011 for $1,152 in JP 4-3 Juan Mendoza's court and got a default judgment. The case dragged from May 2011 to November 26, 2012 before Mendoza issued his findings.

First National Bank of Edinburg next appeared on the legal data base when on Aug. 22, 2011, it sued Rendon for defaulting on a $20,000 note it issued him and he had not paid. The bank wanted the principal, $5,000 in attorneys' fees plus interest.

Now, one or two defaults on loans or materials could happen to anyone. But once that amounts to more than half a dozen, people start to look closer.
Few people knew Kiko's money troubles while he was serving on the TSC board and responsible for the district's finances. Now that these instances have come to light, is it any wonder that neither he nor Rivera felt any compunction about giving United Brownsville a $25,000 "membership" fee or voting to give TSC President Lily Tercero's former boss (and now TSC consultant) a $180,000 fee from the community college's annual budget?
Yes, Rendon has a lot more to worry about than the mundane chores of running a community college and overseeing the finances of a public institution. Is there more than what the legal record shows?