PUPPETEER JOE ROD PULLS CHARLIE AND PHIL'S STRINGS

By Juan Montoya
When Phil Cowen was running against Otis Powers for school trustee he said – among other things – that in his prior stint on the board of the Brownsville Independent School District, that he had overseen a building boom that brought the district's facilities up to snuff, all without raising taxes or issuing bonds.

He urged the voters to allow him to do that again.

Well, on the board's June meeting, the same Phil Cowen seconded the motion by Carlos Elizondo and by a 4-2 vote the board approved a 11.35 cent increase on property taxes that will see the tax rate go from $1.265000 to $1.1525000 cents per $100 valuation on the average residence in the district.

Voting with them was Cesar Lopez and Joe Rodriguez. In a recent meeting, Rodriguez asked his fellow board members to stop referring to the tax hike as an "increase" and find other "verbiage" to describe it to take the off public sting. The tax raise will be used as collateral over five years to borrow some $100 million to build new facilities.

 The only trustees who voted against the rate hike were Dr. Sylvia Atkinson and Minerva Peña.

And then, as chairman of the BISD Facilities Committee, he was more than willing to tell the BISD taxpayers that he was ready to increase their taxes or issue bonds, or both.

Cowen knows nothing about being tactful or circumspect, or really doesn't give hoot what the taxpayers of the district think.

In the very first item of the April 28 Facilities Committee Workshop where he is chairman he said he wanted to discuss "bond issue and raising taxes now."

Now this is the same trustee that as a candidate boasted of how he had build numerous district facilities in his prior stint as a board chairman and had done it "without raising property taxes."

(However, cooler heads prevailed and the agenda was withdrawn after having been posted on the BISD website.)

In the next item he wants vendor Paragon, who has garnered millions in contracts with the BISD to give him a quote on building four soccer fields and avoid the bidding process because they are Buy Board vendors.

(Which brings in board president Lopez. Lopez is a Texas Association of School Boards Buy Board representative and has to recuse himself when a company selling the BISD products belong to the Buy Board.  However, as the TASB Buy Board representative for Region One, he gets a commission from all sales in his district.)

In notes taken during a private meeting between two top administrators in the BISD Purchasing directors, Superintendent Esperanza Zendejas told them that she had chosen Paragon after "having coffee" with some fellow superintendents.

So far, the tally is hovering somewhere around $7 million for Paragon. Isn't it amazing how far a coffee klatch recommendation can go?

This is the Paragon that trustee "Coach" Joe Rodriguez said were the "best company in the world" and we wouldn't put it past him that he was the one who suggested to Zendejas that the BISD hire them to install artificial turf in soccer and football fields in the district. After all, Rodriguez is a registered vendor with BSN Sports, a company that regularly lands contracts with the district. Yet, that doesn't stop him from discussing sports equipment-related issues during meetings of the board. He's like Ma Bell used to say before the breakup: "We don't care. We don't have to."

And speaking of BSN Sports, a few years back they merged with Herff Jones, the scholastic ring maker who Zendejas chose to purchase 41 gold and diamond rings for the Porter championship soccer team. There was only one hitch: No one had approved the purchase order and when the invoice arrived, no one wanted to deal with it.

In the end, the board approved the purchase after the fact. As part of the $41,000 purchase, Rodriguez's sister company threw in two "volume discount" rings at $975 a pop for Zendejas and "Coach Joe."

And no one thought that it may be a conflict of interest that Rodriguez argued for the board to pay for the rings for the players and non-players from Herff Jones even after his company and the ring maker had merged and were virtually the same corporation years before the BISD bought the rings.

In fact, just five days after the soccer team won, Zendejas responded to a competitor saying that the district had already decided on the vendor.


Yet, during the open meeting where the issue of who ordered the rings and who would pay for them came up, Zendejas did not let the cat out of the bag. In fact, the auditor assigned to investigate the matter (Arvin Tucker) did  not include Zendejas' email in his report and said "no one knew" who had ordered the rings without a purchase order, saying only that the district's procurement process had not been followed.

Elizondo, a former fire chief, has found a fellow traveler in Rodriguez, who seems content to let things flow despite the fact that he knows that City of Brownsville Personnel Policy Manual prohibits city employees serve on elective office that overlaps the city's jurisdiction to prevent potential conflicts of interest.

The city manual states that:

Section 702: Political Activity
"B. Specifically, City Employees may not engage in the following activities:
4. Hold an elective City office or hold an elective or appointive office in any other jurisdiction where service would constitute a direct conflict of interest with City employment, with or without remuneration. Upon assuming such office, an Employee shall resign or shall be dismissed for cause upon failure to do so."

So far, everybody, especially Rodriguez, who needs his vote, has been willing to overlook that legal nicety and continue with the obvious conflict of interest.