Remember the hastily-pulled Senate Bill filed by Texas Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. to consolidate all the school districts in Cameron County into one and to have the trustees at the Brownsville Independent School District run the mega district until elections could be held?
After county school districts officials learned of the Lucio bill, he told a local television station that he had withdrawn it (SB 2112) because there had been an office mix-up and that it had been filed prematurely by someone on his staff without his consent.
Now some school district insiders say that the bill was merely a ruse by Lucio to warn the PI ISD that unless they played along and gave the LNG companies the tax abatements they had requested that would have placed a cap on the taxable value of the plants, the danger existed that they would be legislated out of office.
"This was a shot across the bow of the PI ISD showing them what they can expect if they continue to deny the LNGs their cap and abatements," said a longtime education legal counsel who has worked here and up the Valley. "Lucio was telling them they should play ball with the LNGS or else,"
The firestorm that erupted after word got out on the mass media of the measures contained in the bill irked numerous administrators and members of the boards of trustees of the eight school district in Cameron County. Lucio had submitted the bill March 10, but many local educators had not been aware of its contents until weeks afterward.
They pointed out that, if it had been approved. the boards of trustees of the eight school districts would have automatically been replaced by the trustees of the largest district, the Brownsville Independent School District until elections could be held based on a formula that would elect two members of the new district by county commissioner precinct and one at-large, making it a nine-member board.
"That would have thrown out 56 (eight times seven) elected board members by legislative fiat," said a BISD administrator. "That would have been unconstitutional and would have been stopped immediately by the U.S. Dept. of Justice."
Lucio, after years of being in the state legislature knew that to change the boundaries of any elective district, it would first have to be cleared by the U.S. Dept. of Justice Office of Civil Rights. There was no provision for this in the bill he filed.
"How many sessions has he been in Austin where redistricting plans are drawn and they have to be cleared first by the feds?," asked Cameron County official. "Lucio knew this. He just thought the bill wouldn't clear the first committee where it was assigned. Why submit a bill without this caveat at all?""
It would also have meant that in the interim, the board of the BISD, with their 48,000 students, would have seen the student body jump to nearly 98,000 students. Also, the district's budget, which is about $545 million, would have increased to more than $1.065 billion.
Now school district insiders say that the bill was a ruse by Lucio to warn the PI ISD that unless they played along and gave the LNG companies the cap and tax abatements they had requested that would have placed a cap on the taxable value of the plants, the danger existed that they would be legislated out of office.
Since Lucio pulled the bill before it was even placed on the calendar or referred to a committee, will we ever know? If the PI ISD trustees change their minds on the abatements, we'll know they got the message.