No one –and I least of all – likes to give away the Brownsville Independent School District’s money. Like you, I would rather spend it providing a world-class education for our students, keeping our teachers employed, and easing the burden on our taxpayers.But if paying $700,000 to settle means it would stop our paying three or four times as much if we lost in court – as our attorneys assured us we would – the prudent thing to do was to face the truth and cut our losses. The record will show that I wanted to go to court, until I learned that it would have meant disaster for our finances.
These lawsuits arose after two former board members – Rick Zayas and Ruben Cortez – and two current ones – Joe Colunga and Rolando Aguilar – voted to fire former superintendent Hector Gonzales and Chief Financial Officer Tony Juarez. They were angry that Juarez did not recommend that the BISD’s lucrative Stop-Loss insurance contract be given to the company whose agent of record was their longtime political supporter Johnny Cavazos. They ordered Gonzales to fire him, or be fired himself.
Federal Judge Andrew Hanen issued an order later upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. Both found that there was enough evidence to go to trial to determine if the four defendant-trustees – Zayas, Cortez, Colunga and Aguilar – had conspired with others and engaged in illegal conduct to deprive the two men of their constitutional rights because both chose not to join the conspiracy and went to the FBI and state law enforcement instead.
Since the lawsuits were filed we have spent millions defending the district and the trustee-defendants. Even before we paid the $700,000, BISD estimates we had spent this much*:
· $366,755 to Denton, Navarro, Rocha & Bernal (includes the Art Rendon case)
· $150,000 on BISD Insurance deductible
· $1,100,000 ACE Insurance settlements
· $700,000 ACE Insurance Legal Fees
Until we settled, we had spent a grand total of $2,316,755…with no end in sight.
If we had lost in court, this would have been multiplied by three or four times. All of it would have come from our fund balance since the insurance companies do not pay damage judgments caused by the illegal conduct of the trustee-defendants.
That is the unvarnished truth. The federal record speaks for itself and I, for one, am not going to second-guess a federal judge and two federal courts and spend more of your money defending the indefensible.
Distasteful as this episode has been, it’s time to put this behind us and move forward and use our funds to provide our students the education they deserve.
*Source: BISD Financial Office
0 comments:
Post a Comment