PUB BOARD RUNNING INTERFERENCE FOR MARTINEZ, BRUCIAK?

(Ed.'s Note: With his longtime law firm personal secretary Sandra Seanz the chair of the Brownsville Public Utility Board, former City of Brownsville mayor Tony Martinez, below, and PUB CEO John Bruciak, at top, feel they have nothing to fear over their actions pertaining to the failed 800 MW $500 million gas-powered electric generating plant project with Omaha-based energy company Tenaska that they continued pushing for years after they knew the plant would not be built.

Other PUB board members also have close ties to Martinez, including Sandra Langley, a local banker who traveled on publicly financed jaunts to Colombia under the guise of attracting economic development for Brownsville residents. With the two Sandras in his pocket, Martinez and Bruciak feel they have nothing to fear. Mayor Trey Mendez – a PUB ex oficio member – is also said to have business partnerships with Martinez, a claim disputed by Mendez's supporters.  

And a commenter said that "PUB Board Member Dr. Jude Benavidez wife Anne is an Ambiotec manager and Jude has been employed by them as a consultant in the past." The audit names Ambiotec as one of the handsomely paid engineering firms hired to work on the Tenaska plant project.

Tenaska signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the city in 2012 which allowed them to unilaterally terminate their participation if they could not find subscribers for its 600 MW share of the electric production that the plant was supposed to produce. The energy shortage fabrication they projected in 2011 was based on flawed energy projections and used an additional 13.5 percentage surplus they claimed was required by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas ERCOT for its construction. A forensic audit firm revealed that ERCOT required no such surplus. 

On December 2012, during a joint meeting of the city commission and the PUB board, utility increases of 42 percent were approved by the commissioners and they remain in place even now. Today, after collecting more than $125 million since 2013, there is only $29 million left and no plant was constructed. 

Bruciak and Martinez knew by 2015 that Tenaska had not been able to sell the 600 MW that – in spite of their "shortage projections" – continued to grant Tenaska extensions until the energy firm notified Bruciak and Martinez in 2017 that they would stop their participation. By then, PUB had spent some $14 million on the project through inflated engineering and legal costs. It even included appointing a PUB "consultant" to travel to Mexico at $35,000 a month to drum up customers for the energy there without success. 

And they continued to keep both boards in the dark so that the utility could continue its right-of-way acquisition of land from Hidago County for a plant that they knew would never be built. During the February 2021 freeze when the power was turned off for local residents, PUB's-generated electricity was sold on the grid and netted the utility $121,488,315 selling electricity to the state wide grid  during the worst of the polar cold front February 15 through February 18. 

Now for the bad news.

As the statewide grid of electricity was threatened with a collapse and power outages spread across the state during and after the storm, ERCOT raised the price of energy and kept it high so that it cost providers like PUB more to produce electricity. It cost PUB $145,381,315 to produce the energy during that period and as a result they – or rather its ratepayers – ended up an estimated $38,190,065 in the hole. Someone had to pay, and guess who will? Not Bruciak (who lives in South Padre Island) or Martinez, but the owners of the municipally-owned utility, the long-suffering and deceived residents of the nation's poorest city.  

Will this duo – with the support of  pliant PUB board members – get away with this abject performance that has cost PUB ratepayers exorbitant utility rates which have now doubled and tripled their monthly bills and has resulted in record disconnections of utilities for local residents?)