THE PAC'S TRUE COLORS: ERNIE, BUTCH AND THE GANG

By Juan Montoya
The SAVEBISD PAC started as a host of Bobby Wightman's Brownsville Voice blog.
Now it has reemerged as the voice of a Ernie Hernandez politiquero Joey Garza.
Obviously, Norma and Ernie Hernandez didn't appreciate the fact that Brownsville Independent School District trustee Catalina Presas-Garcia was seen speaking with their daughter Erin Hernandez Garcia's opponent Yolanda Begum.
In fact, we have from a good source that Ernie himself told Presas-Garcia that she could forget about the 1,500 votes he controls when she ran for the board again.
So, in true form, the Hernandezes have loaned their flunky Garza to the Butch Barbosa camp to use his name in political advertising on behalf of "Butch," who can issue a plausible denial of any involvement.
Now, with the ad in today's Herald, it has also revealed itself to be the vehicle of vengeance against  Presas-Garcia from the Joe Rodriguez camp for her role in stopping the BISD from being used as the private ATM machine for him and his toadies.
The SAVEBISD PAC makes much ado over the $26,581.21 that Presas-Garcia has spent traveling on 8 trips on behalf of the district to attend National School Board Association meetings and Council of Urban Board of Education (CUBE) conferences over the last four years.
The cities where she traveled, Washington, D.C., San Diego, Orlando, Baltimore, San Francisco, New Orleans, Boston and New York City, have all been sites for these national organizations' conferences. The BISD, after all, is an urban district even though some of us still want to think of ourselves as some sort of backwater and are content to let compadrismo and favoritism guide our policies.
If you average it out over four years, it come to a grand total of $6,645.28 per year, hardly enough to equip "our children," as the PAC ad claims, with "basic school supplies" they allegedly don't have.
In fact, what Coach Joe got at the end of his illustrious career at the BISD was a $90,000 golden parachute as a goodbye present from the former board majority who thought nothing of handing out BISD money like it was theirs. That's almost four times as much as the travel money and it happened in one fell swoop.
And also conveniently missing from their critique was the fact former BISD trustee Ruben Cortez logged more than 25 trips in two years and spent an astronomical $35,874. Now Ruben is running for the Texas State School Board of Education. Where is the hue and cry from the SAVEBISD PAC?
How do we know the Rodriguezes are behind the PAC ad? Those who went on the Atlanta trip included Presas-Garcia, Hector Gonzales, Supt. Carl Montoya and Dr. Christina Saavedra. Minerva Peña was scheduled to leave with them from the Harlingen airport and cancelled at the last minute. While at the airport, the group saw that Coach Joe and nephew Mike Rodriguez were taking pictures. Were those pictures supposed to have been on the Herald ad but was cancelled when they were outed?
By the way, Peña – after conveniently missing the Harlingen flight with the group – showed up in Atlanta nonetheless. Funny how the PAC makes no mention of Peña. After all, she is also running for reelection, isn't she?
Now we can see that the perfect political storm against Presas-GArcia is being pushed along by these usual suspects. And Butch is more than willing to align himself with politiqueros and embittered sacred cows of this ilk? Theres' nothing more that Ernie wouldn't love than to have a toady on the board of the BISD board that has control of a $509 million budget. That is almost five times as much as the county's, where he has just about run out slots with which to hand out his patronage.
Oour district faces the urban problems faced by larger cities in the country: unemployment, urban decay, teen age pregnancies, dropout rates, crime, and drug violence that results in a large percentage of our Latino and poor white students ending up behind bars.
These issues should not be overlooked when we elect trustees to the BISD board.
The fact that Ernie is looking for another source of patronage and has been handed the opportunity to line up at the BISD feeding tough should give everyone reason to pause. The octopus is spreading his tentacles and using prejudices fueled against Presas-Garcia by the Likes of Rodriguez and the previous majority to beguile the unwary voters.