SEVIER-SCHULTZ: HOW CAN HE BE IN CHARGE OF $5 MILLION?

Special to El Rrrun-Rrun

In 2012, Graham Sevier-Schultz graduated from college with a B.A. in general interdisciplinary studies and spent the next two years there waiting on tables in Dallas restaurants and cafes.

He married a Dolly Lucio - a Brownsville woman on June 2012 in Dallas who graduated from medical school and became a pediatrician - and in 2015 they came to Brownsville. For the next two years, as she worked at her practice, he sold coffee in city commissioner (and gynecologist) Rose Gowen's Farmers market on Linear Park.

The two women, both members of prominent Brownsville families, quickly established a rapport that carried over to benefit Lucio's husband Sevier.

Finally, in 2017, the couple opened up Seventh and Park Cafe helped along by generous public subsidies facilitated to them by their benefactor Cowen. The city granted Seventh and Park favored "bicycle-friendly" designation and subsidized free advertising for what he hyped as “third wave coffee" cafe serving cappuccinos and latte art and bike-parts store.

Under her auspices and her fellow commissioners, Sevier-Schultz was appointed twice to the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation, a Part B sales-tax funds entity that could - and did - pour good money into high-dollar quality-of-life projects like Gowen's bike and hike trails across the city.

Today, Sevier-Schultz - who was waiting in tables and peddling coffee less than five years before - is now the chairman of the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation, which receives about $5 million in Part A sales-tax receipts annually. He was first appointed to the GBIC in 2019.

Since then, he has entered the pizza business in partnership with City of Brownsville Mayor Trey Mendez with his Dodici's parlor and garnered appointments to the two boards through city commission appointments. That, apparently, has made him feel untouchable and he has been overheard saying as much.

And during her reelection campaign, Gowen made 7th and Park her unofficial headquarters holding political rallies there.

Now, feeling his oats, he pretty much is acting like a bull in a china shop.

Sevier, apparently a firm believer in spreading the public wealth to well-placed friends, last Friday tried to get the board of the GBIC to fund a $500,000 "loan guarantee" to his biking pal Nick Mitchell-Bennett, the Executive Director of the former Community Development Corporation of Brownsville through a creation called the Community Loan Center for the Rio Grande Valley Multi-Bank.

The loan center's  aim - in Mitchell-Bennett's own words - is trying to thwart finance companies and drive the "payday loan industry out of business." But he needed capital and as they looked around for likely funding sources, they alighted on GBIC's annual $5 million in sales-tax receipts.

There was only one catch: The Type A sales tax - in contrast to Type B - is primarily intended for manufacturing and industrial development and under the legislation that created it can only fund land, buildings, equipment, facilities expenditures, and targeted infrastructure and improvements.

(That's Mitchell-Bennett and Sevier enjoying one of Gowen's hike-and-bike trails decked out in the latest cool-guy cycle gear.)

Things like restaurants and lending schemes are not included in the approved funding categories by the State of Texas.

But GBIC records of the February 20 meeting indicate that Russel Gallahan, of the Texas Comptroller’s Office, made a presentation to the board - including Sevier - where he explained the legal parameters of what expenditures could be made with the Type A Tax Code funds.

The intent, Gallahan explained then, was to bring Industrial Primary Jobs that would then bring “new” money into the economy. The focus on small business, loans, etc., only creates a circulation of local money, he said, and no new money is introduced into the economy.

The Type A Tax Code is clear in that the boards can only fund projects that create primary jobs in specific industries that represent certain North America Industrial Classification System (NAICS) codes.

The NAICS, he explained, assigns a code or a number to all industries. The Texas Type A Tax Code lists those NAICS codes. Restaurants, service industry, loans, etc., are not on the NAICS list for Texas Type A primary jobs.

But the words of an economic development expert meant nothing to Sevier.

Undaunted, he and his biking pal Mitchell-Bennett justified GBIC fronting the loan center the $500,000 as a strategy at "employee retention" and as a way to attract new employers to the area once they knew that the workers could have a source of funds (loans) to keep them working.

Sevier's actions surrounding the Friday meeting speak volumes.

The regular GBIC meeting was usually held this Thursday every month (today), so calling a meeting on the Friday before (last week) at 10 a.m. seemed a bit odd to members. And he did not provide board members with details of the proposal in the usual backup package provided them for individual items on the agenda. Mitchell-Bennett would fill in the gaps.

Additionally, the four other action items were placed on the Friday agenda by the chair was without consultation with any other members. They dealt with the creation of new projects which would have further encumbered the GBIC's budget.

Under former Mayor Tony Martinez, the GBIC was forced to loan the city $1 million each year from its $5 million in sales-tax receipts toward the building of the new terminal expansion at the Brownsville-South Padre Island International Airport.

Characteristic of the Martinez administration, a project scheduled to cost $35 million ballooned to almost $60 million through change orders and steering work to the mayor's camaradas.

 (That's Martinez decked out in bike gear during a jaunt to Colombia with the former BEDC director Sandra Langley - now on the board of the PUB - and a Colombian guide.) 

The GBIC, whose annual take will be curtailed this year because of lowered revenue due to the airport and now the commercial downturn caused by the COVID-19 crisis, could be strapped to meet its obligations on projects already being funded.

In a way, Sevier's petulance might have worked to GBIC's advantage because when the loan guarantee to Mitchell-Bennett was denied, Sevier cancelled three other items he had placed on the agenda that - if passed - would have obligated the GBIC's budget to fund them into the future. Will he wait to have make sure he has a board majority before reintroducing them?

Last Friday, an obviously miffed Sevier also cancelled today's meeting.

So there you have it.

A board which manages a $5 million annual economic development budget is now saddled with a former waiter and current coffee, and bike-parts salesman who is imposing his "vision" and "strategy" over a staff that includes a CEO hired after a national search and paid $250,000 a year to lead  the organization.

Forget the messenger. Listen to the message.

Brownsville is in competition with our neighboring cities for good-paying manufacturing and skilled professional jobs that will raise all boats. One can almost hear the raucous laughter ringing from  north and west of Olmito.

We squandered precious years when the Brownsville Economic Development Council executive committee hired Jason Hilts as CEO, a man without a proven track record who turned out to be an inept, dishonest, self-dealing grifter whose only "qualifications" for the position were a suave flattery with which he stroked politicians' egos and an ability to paint his failures as a necessary step toward a promised economic nirvana that was always just over the horizon.

And now we have this?

By being satisfied with this standard, the city's leadership is sending the message that they are content to have politically-connected, self-serving sycophants occupy critically important positions on boards like the GBIC whose function is to guide the economic development of the city and its future.