COMPLAINT AGAINST TSC IGNORES TERCERO'S FAILINGS

By Juan Montoya
It's illuminating to see the double standards emerging in the wake of the one-sided front-page Sunday article in the Brownsville Herald on the two complaints filed with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission On Colleges which grants colleges accreditation.

Former trustee Rene Torres and current board member Dr. Reynaldo Garcia listed an almost identical narrative in their complaints with the COC to trigger the review of TSC's accreditation and whether the acts they described merited a reassessment on whether TSC should remain accredited. One of the most creative ones on the list of acts is what they say is the parliamentary error of taking a vote with a motion that did not generate a second.

Since there were no minutes of the meeting, the men had the meeting transcribed and submitted a notarized copy to the COC. We have not seen the tape or listened to the recordings, but let's say that the error did take place. There is no doubt that a board majority voted to appoint Mike Shannon as Interim President. That gives one a sense of the board in that appointment.

But these two want the COC to consider whether the actions taken by the interim president after the majority voted (second or no second) to appoint him as interim are legal or should be voided.

They say: “First it is important to note: there was no second to this motion. Therefore it would appear that the board’s action is invalid and Mike Shannon is not the interim chief executive officer of TexasSouthmostCollege. Additionally, given that he has not been properly appointed, his decisions and actions should also be in question."

We find that very interesting. The lack of a second should have been noted by Garcia, who voted on the motion, or at the very least by the board's counsel. To try to go back and overturn every action taken by Shannon officially as interim is   a non-starter. It would cause total chaos.

We also wonder why Garcia and Torres did not complain when it was revealed that Tercero had continued using the rubber stamp signatures of Kiko Rendon and Ed Rivera for months after both men left office after they did not run for reelection.

Should TSC go back and try to void and nullify the $1,502,082 in payments of hundreds of checks with the bogus signatures?

Tercero had approved the payment of $993,615 (rounded) on 486 checks issued by TSC between June and July alone. Rendon was gone after the May election and Rivera remained to be replaced by Dr. Tony Zavaleta after he beat Evelyn Cantu for Rivera's seat in the June runoff.

But another list of checks was delivered to El Rrun-Rrun on 16 letter-size sheets containing facsimiles of 18 checks each. 

We added the total on the first 486 and the checks listed on the 17 sheets (288) and came up with a total of $1,502,082 (rounded).
This, in effect, means that she was the sole authority who approved the expenditures and payments without any oversight.

Tercero 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?
If Garcia and Torres can say that the vote taken to name Shannon interim TSC president should be voided and nullified, why didn't they raise a hue and a cry about her continued use of an obsolete rubber stamp signatures months after those trustees had departed? Doesn't that make them also void?

Or is there a convenient double standard being used here?