WE STAND CORRECTED (AGAIN): LILY SPENT $1.5 MILLION W-CHECKS COUNTERSIGNED BY TRUSTEES NO LONGER ON THE BOARD

By Juan Montoya

Well, we were wrong again.

One of our critics said we were telling half truths and BS when we said that a review of checks issued by Texas Southmost College using countersignatures from two trustees who were no longer on the board showed that President Lily Tercero had spent "$100,000s" without authorization or checks and balances.

We found out that she had used the signature rubber stamp of former TSC chairman Kiko Rendon way past he was replaced by local attorney Ruben Herrera on May 18. In fact, she kept using Rendon's stamped signature until late July or early August. The same holds for her use of former trustee Ed Rivera's rubber-stamped signature even after he was replaced on the board June 27 by Dr. Tony Zavaleta. Her use of the bogus rubber-stamped signatures continued until late July and early August. It wasn't until August 5 or 6 that chairperson Adela Garza's countersignature stamp was used on checks Tercero approved. This was despite the fact that the administration had her signature stamp on file from her serving as a board officer on a previous term
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After we posted that, on of our legion of critics (there are many of us here) pointed out that we were telling half truths.

Well, he (or she) was right.

We went back and did our due diligence and (to our chagrin) discovered that they were correct. 

The response from TSC legal counsel to our Public Information Request yielded a box of copies of issued checks which we laboriously went over and discovered that we had indeed been remiss.

Instead of the vague $100,000s figure we quoted in the original post, we found out that Tercero had approved the payment of $993,615 (rounded) on 486 checks issued by TSC between June and July alone.
Another list of checks was delivered to El Rrun-Rrun along with that trove on 16 letter-size sheets containing facsimiles of 18 checks each. Our eyesight is so bad nowadays that we started to peruse them, but had difficulty ascertaining the amounts as we rounded off the total to more than $1 million.
Well, we convinced ourselves that we should do our job thoroughly and used a magnifying glass to total the amounts on the 294 checks listed on the 17 sheets and came up with a total for both sets.
The total amount that was approved by Tercero where the name of one or both former trustees was used to countersign the payments totaled $1,502,082 (rounded).
This, in effect, means that she was the sole authority who approved the expenditures and payments without any oversight. If not that, then the use of the bogus trustee names was used for both months by Tercero, who should have known better.
After all, her own rubber-stamped signature appears on all of the checks.
Was it just an oversight by Tercero, or perhaps an oversight by some underlings at the TSC finance office?
When you couple that with her other failures – the windstorm insurance contract extension she approved without going through the board, the moribund condition of the nursing program, the exodus of teaching staff from TSC because of her managerial style – then you have the makings of a for-cause dismissal as the college's top administrator.
The hearing for her dismissal is set for Sept. 19. If she is successful in her application for the presidency at Northeast Lakeview College by then, the issue could be moot.
In her application to them way back in June 19, she stated that she is "the former president of Texas Southmost College (2011-2016) (who) oversaw the official separation of the college from UT Brownsville authority to independent, fully comprehensive, and separately accredited community college status."
If things fall into place, her separation from TSC is also a foregone conclusion.