Anonymous said... El Rrun Rrun the best Spin Zone blog! Puro B.S. & half truths!
Well, sometimes we have to take our readers' criticisms to heart and say that they may be right and we were wrong.
Such is the case with our Thursday post where we speculated that in just over two months – June and July and part of August 2016 – Texas Southmost College-suspended president Lily Tercero signed off on $100,000s in payments to vendors and students without the required co-signatures from TSC board officers.
In a Public Information request to TSC, we emailed the current administration that we were: "...making a formal information request for copies (electronic or otherwise) of checks issued by TSC during the months of June, July, and up to August 10 of 2016. Please see that the name of the administrator and TSC trustee signing off on the I payments are included."
After TSC and its counsel asked for additional time to gather the information, we received a box containing hundreds of copies of the cancelled checks and facsimiles of payments.The overwhelming majority, except for some at mid-August bore the rubber-stamp signature of Kiko
Rendon, Ed Rivera and TSC president Lily Tercero. As in the signatures on the graphic at right, the checks bore the names of both trustees who were not longer on the board and not authorized to sign.
After inspecting the trove of cancelled checks, instead of $100,000s, we found that the total of the checks bearing the rubber-stamp signatures of Rendon and Rivera total more than $1 million in that time period alone. Our mistake, dear reader. Saying it was $100,000s in payments was a half truth after all.
There was another hitch.
Rendon had been replaced by Brownsville attorney Ruben Herrera on May 18 and Rivera had left at the end of June after a runoff between Evelyn Cantu and Dr. Tony Zavaleta. So far, the better part of a two months and a half after Rendon had left office, Tercero had used his rubber-stamp signature to act as a co-signer and approve the checks. The same applied to Tercero's use of Rivera's singature stamp which Tercero kept on using for nearly two months after he was replaced on the board.
In a nutshell, by using the rubber-stamp signatures of both Rendon and Rivera instead of one of the current board members, Tercero virtually single-handedly approved the expenditures of more than $1 million in community college funds.
The co-signatures, by the way, are a security requirement to deter the spending of public funds without the required oversight by an elected official on a board.
Tercero has already shown that she is used to disregarding the rules that apply to all people entrusted with public funds. She is currently the target of an investigation into her extension of a windstorm insurance contract that will cost the college near $1 million without going to the board for approval.
The new board, in response to these and other reports of irregularities in the administration of the college's financial and academic programs, suspended her and placed her on paid administrative leave.
A hearing on her dismissal is scheduled for September 19.
