By Juan Montoya
We ran into a good friend the other day watching a college basketball game over some suds at a local watering hole. Actually, he was having some other libation and we were savoring a few glasses of fermented hops.
But whatever poison it may have been, we listened as he told us that we have been consistent in repeating a factual mistake in our coverage of the continuing saga enveloping the Brownsville Independent School District in the scandal surrounding the scams in the operations of the Food and Nutrition Service Department.As we know, the day before the late Silverio Capistran – the former director – was to meet with federal gents of the United States Department of Education probing the purchase of barbacoa purchased with federal funds from a vendor who acquired the meat from Mexico, he was found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot to his head.
Whether you believe it was suicide – as a justice of the peace ruled – or not, the question is really academic. The factual mistake, our friend said, was that the company which sold the bad meat, Valco, was not a Texas Association of School Boards (TASBE) Buy Board vendor as is, say, Paragon, the artificial turf installer.
Instead, Valco, which went out of business after spoiled barbacoa was detected in the BISD's cafeterias, was a member of the Region One purchasing cooperative, not the TASBE Buy Board. BISD is a member of that cooperative as well as a member of the Buy Board. School districts do not have to comply with bidding requirements if the vendor is a member of these cooperatives or buy boards because it is thought that these bodies have already fulfilled those requirement when they vet these firms and place them on its list of acceptable vendors as members.
Why is this distinction important? Because BISD board president Lopez is a representative of the TASBE Buy Board, not the Region One cooperative. We listened to our friend – whose informed opinion we do respect – and agree we were wrong.
So Mr. Lopez, our apologies for saying Valco was a member of the TASBE Buy Board for whom you work. It is not. It's may seem like a fine distinction, but it is an important one.
Be that as it may, the public stills needs to be informed of how their money was spent and if any crime occurred in the operations of the district by the BISD administration, its staff, or its board, including board president Lopez.
Those questions have not been answered in the FNS case and neither has the the real story surrounding the untimely death of its director been told. Our inquiries into vendors associated with the department have been resisted by the district and its legal counsel now claims that information is exempted from the public eye by protections in the Texas Public Information Act.
They have resorted to appeal the release of that information with the Texas Attorney General's Office and asked for the AG's opinion, a move which will buy them a couple of months. But what we didn't know was that the BISD had hired a local legal firm to conduct an investigation into the Valco matter and produced a report. Is the report public?
And is there any reference in it to who was behind the company and whether Capistran had other "investors" with him to profit from the transactions by Valco and/or other vendors who did business with the district?
We are already in the process of making yet another information request to get a copy of that report. Will the BISD recur to the AG's Office again to withhold it and keep the public from knowing what happened? We'll soon see.