BISD TRUSTEES PULL A FAST ONE; AND PUBLIC CAN'T OBJECT

By Juan Montoya

In the Brownsville Independent school District's unique version of the Mexican tradition of "El Año del Hidalgo," an outgoing trustee and two others facing possible losses in their election Tuesday have called a special meeting noon Monday to get theirs before the getting stops.

That phrase does not refer to the hero of Mexican independence, but rather to the corrupt Mexican government tradition of an outgoing administration or public official emptying the coffers before their successor takes over. In other words, it's a last chance to deplete the public treasury before their terms end.

And since this is a special meeting, there is no public comment period for the people to voice their displeasure at this obvious display of arrogance and corruption at its worse.

Insiders say that BISD board president – Cesar Lopez, who is not running for reelection – has told everyone far and wide that he has the votes to award the $85,000-plus salary position of Administrator for Marketing to City of Brownsville commissioner schoolteacher and part-time disc jockey Ricardo Longoria Jr.

Those votes will probably be those of Lopez, Carols Elizondo, Joe Rodriguez, and one other, although we seriously doubt that Laura Perez-Reyes will go along with this obvious disdain of propriety in public service.

Why propriety?

Longoria is a sitting city commissioner, an entity which is providing evidence in the Cameron County District Attorney's Office prosecution of Elizondo who is under indictment and facing one count of theft by a public servant and one count of misapplication of fiduciary property based off a complaint filed against Elizondo by the Brownsville Fire Fighters Association.

He has also been charged with 11 felony counts of computer security breach for entering the city's Emergency Reporting System for the Brownsville Fire Department looking up cases after he had been suspended.

Will Longoria side with Elizondo and against the city's allegations if push comes to shove in court?

There is also another problem with this particular hire. Superintendent Esperanza Zendejas was authorized to draw up a job description for the position and to bring it back before the board for final approval. Now we learn that she drew up the description but never brought it back for board approval before she posted it for applicants.

If the board did not approve it and the funding has not been allocated in the compensation plan, the position doesn't exist. So how can anyone – not just Longoria – be hired without funding allocated to the position?

With the BISD – and trustee Joe Rodriguez – under the gun to produce customers to pay for the $1.4 million scoreboard at Sams Stadium within four years, he has obviously hit upon Rick's showmanship talents to hustle local businesses and professionals to cough up the dough.

After all, Longoria has shown he can milk the municipality to hire him for DJ gigs and has made the sale of Charro Days outfits a side business and works at it when he attends the Mr. Amigo presentations in Mexico City on city's dime.

We guess that kind of qualifies him for the BISD plum despite not having a marketing degree from a college or university. If he can sell charro outfits to Mexicans (like refrigerators to Eskimos), by golly he can probably sell the district to the local yokels.

The board will also consider the approval to compensate three other employees (G.L.A., C.D.E., M.H.) for years of back pay the administration says they earned but were not paid.

The board will vote to employee identified as G.L.A. for eight years experience for the years 2015- 2016, 2016-2017 and 2017-2018.

They will also consider paying employee C.D.E. stipends for the fiscal school years: 2014-2015, 2015-2016, 2016-2017 and 2017-2018.

Employee M.H. is also in line to get paid for a stipend earned but not paid in the following fiscal school years: 2014-2015, 2015-2016, 2016-2017 and 2017-2018.

Employee E.D. will be consider for compensation for job related experience earned but not paid in the following fiscal school years: 2014-2015, 2015-2016, 2016-2017 and 2017-2018.

Now, granted, perhaps some of these folks might have gotten short shrift all those years and deserve their honest wage. But to do it in a specially-called meeting a day before the election and just a week before their successors are sworn into office?

It smells to high heaven. Why not wait to let the new board decide? What's the hurry?

Could it be that Lopez couldn't care less because he won't be in office anyway, and Rodriguez and  Elizondo think that there is a very real possibility that they will lose their elections and won't have another chance to hand out the goodies to their pals?

If we were one of the 10 other candidates who are challenging the incumbents, we would make our displeasure known by showing up at the board at Monday's meeting. Some, like most of the public, probably cannot make it to the board room at noon Monday since they are probably working. But that might be the logic of calling the meeting at that inconvenient time.

There is another rather unsavory political tie between outgoing BISD president Lopez and Longoria. Both have ties to former Cameron County Commissioner Lucino Rosenbaum Jr. Rosenbaum encouraged Longoria to run for the city commission back in 2003 when he was just 29. He even brought him into the Southmost Lions Club and introduced him to his political supporters.

Since then he has been reelected to office and his term is set to expire on May 2019.

And how did Longoria repay his benefactor? He turned right around and supported Cameron County Commissioner Sofie Benavides (the successor of her late husband Pedro Benavides) when Rosenbaum ran for county commissioner again.

Lopez, meanwhile, is married to a woman whose sister is married to the wife of Lucino Rosenbaum III, the former commissioners' son. On different occasions when Rosenbaum Jr. has needed to do business with the district, he has not received the support he thought he would from Lopez, his pariente.

It's a small town with a lot of people in it, isn't it?