POWERS, BARBOSA, CHIRINOS AND PENA RUNNING AS TICKET

By Juan Montoya
By now it has become plainly clear that Butch Barbosa, Jose Chirinos, Otis Powers and Minerva Peña are running as a ticket for the board of the Brownsville Independent School District
How do we know?
Fliers passed out in some neighborhoods in Brownsville under the auspices of SAVEBISD PAC list them as the candidates to vote for.
You remember tat PAC. It is the one that is blaming Caty Presas Garcia in quarter-page ads making it seem as if she had been the only one on the board to vote to cut the district's losses and  settle the lawsuits filed by former Superintendent Hector Gonzales and CFO Tony Juarez. In fact, she was one of four trustees who decided that after having spent $2.3 million in defending the district and the former majority whose actions spawned the lawsuits in the first place (Rick Zayas, Ruben Cortez, Joe Colunga and Rolando Aguilar), it was time to cut its losses.
BISD's lawyers counseled the board that if they district lost – and it most certainly looked that way – BISD's taxpayers would have to pay three or four times as much from its fund balance because the insurance company would not pay for the trustee-defendants' illegal conduct.
But this doesn't seem to matter to the people behind the PAC. In fact, we have noted that the person listed as the treasurer (front man) is none other than Joey Garza, a known politiquero in the employ of Erin Hernandez Garcia, daughter of Pct. 2 commissioner Ernie Hernandez and Norma Hernandez, liked with the massive voter fraud during the JP 2-2 runoff election July 31.
Citizens Against Voter Abuse have documented countless mail-in and early walk-in votes attributable to him that indicate that he was one of the Hernandez cogs in the concerted effort to harvest the votes of the elderly and mentally-impaired voters hauled in vans to the polls under the nose of county elections officials.
Powers' brother Darrell Otis Powers, is the notary who certified the PAC in the first place. The PAC was formed back in March and has targeted Presas-Garcia – not because of the Gonzales-Juarez settlement – but because she was seen in the company of her opponent Yolanda Begum at some campaign events.
That's why the Hernandezes took umbrage with the incumbent. The reason that former trustee Otis Powers has joined the cabal stems from his defeat at her hands in 2008. In fact, he had made it known that he wanted to run against her and would have had his chance of revenge had Presas-Garcia not switched to Place 5 at the last minute and avoided an unpleasant blood fest that Powers wanted.
Chirinos – whose dismal management of the BISD transportation department resulted in almost $3 million in overtime charges during his tenure there – is still smarting from his removal from that gravy train and his easing out of the district after an audit was performed by the district. The report found that he had allowed extravagant purchases of inventory and a run on the district' budget through his overly-generous overtime guidelines.
Barbosa is using the Hernandez machine to try to get elected. All of the ads published under SAVEBISD PAC target Presas-Garcia as the boogie man who gave away the store and blame her for approving the settlement and for teachers not getting raises.
The ads make no mention that the previous majority (Rick Zayas, Ruben Cortez, Joe Colunga and Rolando Aguilar) raided the district's fund balance to "fix" budget deficits and to cover the huge construction cost overruns and change orders recommended by the Bond Oversight Committee under...you guessed it..Butch Barbosa, its chairman.
As far as Minerva Pena, what can we say? That she has aligned herself with the likes of Otis, Butch and Chirinos only goes to show that the woman is more interested in popularity contests that indicate an adolescent fixation that allows her to relive her days as the captain of the Porter Belles pom-pom squad.
As head of the technology committee on the board she did not call one meeting of that group as far back as we can remember. She, however, would have us let bygones be bygones and forget about her ineptness and shallowness of intellect.
This year's elections place us in a dangerous position of having a board majority composed of Chirinos, Powers, Pena and perhaps Escobedo. It does not bode well.