Big Jolly Politics

politics in Harris County and Texas

Two former HISD administrators indicted, charged with doctoring dropout-rate docs

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A Harris County grand jury today indicted two former Houston school system administrators on felony charges in connection with accusations that they altered school records to falsely lower reported dropout rates, the local prosecutor said.

Delores Westmoreland was indicted on three counts and Peggy Collins was indicted on two counts of tampering with a government record, according to a statement released today by Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos’ office.

The second-degree felony charges carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

“Today, Key and Kashmere are operating under new leadership and HISD is committed to ensuring the continued academic success of students in these schools,” the Houston school district said in a press statement this evening. Both women were fired in 2010, the statement said. 

The statement by Lykos’ office, issued around 5 p.m., said bail for Westmoreland had been set at $30,000, and for Collins at $20,000. The statement did not say when the two women were arrested or by which law enforcement agency, nor did it say where the two women were jailed. Neither Westmoreland nor Collins’ names appeared in the real-time searchable online inmate lists on either the Houston City Jail or Harris County Jail’s web sites at 7 p.m. this evening. Two deputies at the Harris County Jail could not say whether the two women remained in custody.

Phone calls and an e-mail to Donna Hawkins, the district attorney’s spokeswoman, were not immediately returned.

Houston Independent School District officials forwarded allegations against the two women in spring 2010, Texas Watchdog previously reported.

“We informed (the) DA,” then-HISD spokesman Norm Uhl wrote in an e-mail at the time. “(We) turned our report over to them when it was complete on April 19, (2010).”



An HISD investigation in 2010 found Key Middle and Kashmere High School employees moving computers and other equipment in and out of the buildings and at times into vehicles.



The law firm Martin Disiere Jefferson & Wisdom, hired by the school district to investigate the problems at Key, found multiple instances of price gouging students on snacks, unauthorized fundraisers aimed and thousands of dollars of missing equipment.

As a result, HISD officials fired six employees, including former Key Principal Mable Caleb.

***

Contact Mike Cronin at [email protected] or 713-228-2850. Follow him on Twitter at@michaelccronin or @texaswatchdog.

Photo by flickr user petercastleton, used under a Creative Commons license. 

Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, follow us onTwitter and Scribd, and fan us on YouTube. Join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feedsin your newsreader. We’re also on MySpace, Digg, FriendFeed, and tumblr.

This report was written by Mike Cronin and first appeared at Texas Watchdog on 2/24/12. It is being used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Schools trim few teachers following Texas state budget cuts, sky not falling just yet

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Few teachers actually laid off in Texas. In many cases teachers were re-hired. In at least one case, a district reported having more teachers than it had before the state budget cuts.

On a warm Saturday last March before a rally of more than 10,000 people on the south steps of the Texas Capitol, John Kuhn captured whatever populist desperation there was in the air that day.

For a moment the superintendent of tiny Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District with fewer than 500 students near Wichita Falls, was the storm for public education foreseen by the Moak, Casey & Associates study that many in the crowd had for months pored over.

John Kuhn
John Kuhn

Billions in state funding cuts. Twelve thousand teachers and staff laid off, a figure reported as fact as recently as December by National Public Radio. Tens of thousands of other school professionals out of work. Schools closed. Students grossly shortchanged.

“Millionaire senators: cut my pay to minimum wage, and I will still come into the classroom and teach the kids who need me,” the San Antonio Express-News reported Kuhn thundering to an approving crowd. “Bail out the bankers, and bankrupt the teachers. We will still teach.”

“Chicken Little was right,” Jacqueline Shannon, former president of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, wrote three weeks later in a San Angelo Times editorial decrying the proposed education cuts. “The sky is falling.”

Texas Watchdog set out to fact check Chicken Little. Without the aid of statewide analysis – an annual report done by the Texas Education Agency won’t be released until April – Watchdog requested data from the 10 largest school districts serving nearly a fifth of the almost 5 million students in public schools in Texas.

As in the fable, the sky did not fall in those districts. Confirming what the Texas Education Agency says it has heard anecdotally across the state, relatively few teachers were actually laid off.

Instead, these districts shed thousands of teaching and administrator positions through the usual attrition of retirement or leaving the district. That yielded a 5 percent drop in the number of teachers overall at the nine districts that responded to Texas Watchdog’s public records request. The El Paso Independent School District failed to provide any responsive information.

(Please see our chart of teacher gains and losses below and the raw numbers here.)
teachers chart

Bonuses offered to up resignations

The philosophy in the Arlington Independent School District, which lost 220 teaching positions by attrition, was echoed again and again in the decisions made in the other largest districts.
“Every consideration was made with how this might impact directly on the classroom,” spokeswoman Amy Casas says. “We would have wanted no cuts or fewer cuts. They were tough cuts, but we made them thinking about the people who most impact the classroom.”

Alone among the top 10, the Fort Worth Independent School District showed an increase of 63 teaching positions from the past school year to this one, although through several rounds of hiring and layoffs the district currently counts an overall loss of 37 teachers, district spokesman Clint Bond says.

The Houston Independent School District laid off 724 teachers for the start of the school year, but rehired 300 of them, district spokesman Jason Spencer says. More than 400 more teaching positions were left vacant.

In some cases districts goosed their attrition and avoided layoffs by offering a resignation bonus. When the Dallas Independent School District offered 15 percent of a teacher’s salary up to $10,000, 707 employees took the offer, district spokesman Jon Dahlander says.

The total payout for the bonuses was $6.4 million, but it represented a $45 million savings to a district contending with an overall budget cut for the current school year of $63 million, Dahlander says.

“We were able to handle all of it through attrition, but we lost a lot of excellent teachers and some outstanding principals,” Dahlander says.

Fort Worth, which offered smaller retirement stipends last year, is making the same offer Dallas did in the hope that 600 more teachers and another 100 staff people will retire or leave the district at the end of this school year, Bond says.

The Dallas and Fort Worth gambits of spending money to save money suggest that if the sky isn’t falling school officials are pretty sure it is being trussed up with used parachute silks, some old bedsheets and a few butterfly nets.

Having gotten by on attrition, Dallas needs to find another $37 million in savings. To get it the district is planning in the coming school year to close 11 schools and merge them with 10 or 11 others.

While the savings and efficiency equations work, parents, students, teachers and administrators are deeply unhappy, Dahlander says.

“It has been painful, but we knew that going in,” Dahlander says. “Up to this point everything we’ve done has been to try to cut away at the margins. By closing these schools and realizing those efficiencies we think and hope our staffing can be handled by attrition. Our one goal is to protect the classroom.”

Schools cuts affect classrooms, union rep says

What attrition forces on a district is difficult for the public to see. In several of the big districts, including Arlington, teachers gave up planning periods to be available to teach additional classes.

By doing the simple math the losses in the 10 largest districts has changed the ratio of students to teachers by no more than two children.

This, of course, isn’t how teachers and students are distributed throughout a district. Teachers and the needs of students are specialized with so many categories that aren’t easily divisible.

Michael Quinn Sullivan
Michael Quinn Sullivan

State law requires a ratio of no more than 22 students for each teacher in kindergarten through fourth grade. In 2010-11, 168 Texas school districts asked for and received a waiver from the Texas Education Agency to allow for more students in 2,238 classrooms, agency spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman says.

In this school year, 294 districts requested waivers for 8,362 classrooms, Marchman says. Almost a year ago, the Agency itself lost at least 110 positions to state agency-wide budget cuts.

Texas State Teachers Association spokesman Clay Robison considers the waivers a primary indicator of how districts are hurting, although the association keeps no data of its own on teaching and administrative fluctuations.

Robison has no difficulty parceling out blame to conservatives in the Legislature and Gov. Rick Perry.

“It also proves the lie in the contention that you can cut $5.4 billion and say education in Texas is fully, adequately and equitably funded,” Robison says.”You can’t say you are not affecting classrooms. You simply cannot do that.”

Under what may appear to him a falling sky, Robison fires his salvos across a political gap without a bridge. Michael Quinn Sullivan, founder of the conservative advocacy group, Empower Texans, says the real lie is the implied threat to education every time cuts to the public education budget are considered.

“The quickest way to direct attention from the wasteful spending is to threaten the livelihood of our teachers,” Sullivan says. “There is no defensible reason to fire teachers in tough budget times, given the explosive growth of budgets in items unrelated, or tangential, to classroom education.”

For Sullivan the primary question isn’t how much money is spent, but how it is spent. Teacher staffing in Texas has kept pace with enrollment increases, Sullivan says. Overall spending has lapped enrollment by several times over the past several years, he says. (See chart below and here.)

school spending and enrollment

“We can never spend efficiently until we have a sound grasp of what we are trying to achieve with our spending,” Sullivan says.

Sullivan finds it rich that San Antonio ISD, which cut its teacher positions through attrition this year while agreeing to add $3 million to an already $35 million commitment to renovate Alamo Stadium and its Convocation Center.

At the same time, the district added its name to the list of hundreds contending in four lawsuits that the state’s funding of public education was, among many other things, insufficient, negligent and unconstitutional.

The suits were filed by the Equity Center of Austin, the Texas Schools Coalition, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Thompson and Horton law firm in Houston.

The language used in the lawsuits recreates a Chicken Little tableau. “The Texas school finance system,” one suit says, “has reached a crisis stage again.”

Administrators in the 10 biggest school districts in Texas are going on with budgeting for 2012-13 as if those lawsuits had never been filed.

After gutting out $77.4 million in budget cuts this year, Houston ISD needs to cut another $44 million more, spokesman Jason Spencer says. The district believes it can count on $18 million in reserves, he says.

Teacher attrition will undoubtedly be part of the formula, but Spencer says he isn’t sure how the board for the district might make up the rest.

Residents in the district are beneficiaries of an optional homestead tax exemption and the lowest property tax rate of any school district in Harris County, Spencer says. Spencer says he isn’t even trying to guess what might happen if the board calls for raising taxes.

“We’ve gone along cutting people out of departments like our central administration,” he says. “I’m feeling like this time it is going to be cutting entire departments and whatever that department was providing.

“Even if all of those lawsuits were successful, they won’t even touch us until quite a way down the road.”

***
Contact Mark Lisheron at 512-299-2318 or [email protected] or on Twitter at @marktxwatchdog.

Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Scribd, and fan us on YouTube. Join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feeds in your newsreader. We’re also on MySpace, Digg, FriendFeed, and tumblr.

Illustration from the story “Chicken Little” in the New Barnes Reader, published 1916, posted for re-use on Wikimedia Commons.

Article originally published on TexasWatchdog.org and written by Mark Lisheron. Used via Creative Commons License.

Texas Watchdog: Rash of improper influence over high-dollar contracts at Houston ISD — while teachers are cut and schools are closed

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Houston school trustees have been accused in at least seven cases during the last two years of using their influence to affect what companies the school district does business with, public records show.

In all but one of those cases, trustees are accused of using their influence to give school district work to favored vendors — even if those vendors weren’t the best-suited or the lowest bidders for the job.The problem goes far beyond the high-profile cases that garnered media attention this summer, such as school board President Paula Harris’ friends doing more than $1 million in business with the school system, and plans for a contract worth up to $640,000 for a health-care consultant with the vaguest of job descriptions.In two of those cases, people with ties to district vendors threatened HISD supervisors that they could lose their jobs unless the district personnel followed directions, records say.

At the same time, the process by which unelected HISD administrators choose the companies with whom the district contracts — to build things, provide services or furnish materials — raises questions and is open to outside influence, outside experts told Texas Watchdog. One former district insider said administrators overrule staff decisions about which companies and suppliers the district should do business with.

The combined effect of the two phenomena: The Houston school district, with an annual $1.6 billion budget that is larger than the budgets of four states, potentially may have overpaid contractors with connections — all while the school district laid off teachers, closed four elementary schools, cut per-student funding and tried to raise $20 million from the private sector.

Still, some district leaders have talked about asking voters to issue more bonds and possibly raise property taxes next year.

Leadership aware of the problem

HISD leaders point to the two external reviews of the district’s procurement procedures they have commissioned — one by a national education nonprofit, the other by an independent auditing firm — as examples of examining and rectifying public concerns with how HISD awards contracts. Both audits launched this fall.

But internal e-mails and other communications show that HISD’s top leadership have been aware of these problems — and have tried to fix them — for months, if not years. And well before the stories broke about HISD’s contracts with Westco Ventures and Dr. Kenneth Wells.

To little avail.

“I am hearing that our facilities staff is offering contracts to companies that did not receive top ‘ranking’ by our procurement folks,” Superintendent Terry Grier wrote in a 2010 email to a group of trustees and top administrators. “I plan to find out if this is happening and why. If it is true, it is going to stop.

“We need to award contracts to the lowest responsible bidder, with an emphasis on responsible, and frankly, board members need to get ‘miles’ away from this process.”

Around the same time, Grier admitted to trustees at a school board meeting that the school system had violated state law in how it handed out certain construction contracts.

Some contractors, Grier told the group, “submitted bids that, under state law, should have been accepted and then, for whatever reason, were not accepted,” according to an audio recording of the meeting.

He also quoted to the trustees the district’s inspector general, Robert Moore, saying Moore had said last year that HISD “had more trouble with this in the last 18 months than all the time that he’s been in the district. And 18 months ago is when this kind of started surfacing.”

Eighteen months prior to Grier’s comments would have been November 2008.

Grier, who has been superintendent since 2009, did not respond to a phone call or an e-mail request for comment for this story. Asked to elaborate on Grier’s comments, Moore referred Texas Watchdog’s questions to HISD spokesman Jason Spencer.

“He remembers talking to Dr. Grier about job-order contracting. And subsequently, the audit committee requested that those contracts be re-bid,” Spencer said, referring to Moore. “That was done last spring.”

Another change Moore informed Spencer the district made is that “a representative from the procurement services department has been assigned to assist with construction and facility services bids on a regular basis.”

Using public records, Texas Watchdog identified seven cases in which HISD school board members appeared to have involved themselves in the district’s contracting decisions or were accused of involving themselves:

  • An unnamed school board member took actions at the last minute to halt the school board’s planned vote last year on a contract because that board member was unhappy that a certain contractor was not being hired, Trustee Harvin Moore said in an e-mail to Grier and some of his top administrators.
  • School administrators last year delayed final approval of a contract for painting work afterTrustee Manuel Rodriguez complained that the district needed to hire more painting companies to provide economic stimulus to the community. Administrators had decided there was only enough work for two companies, or three at the most, but Rodriguez pushed for six to be hired, as in previous years. Harris e-mailed one of her best friends, Nicole West, who runs Westco Ventures, about the delay on the contract vote, records show. Public records aren’t clear on which vendor the district ultimately hired.
  • The school district two years ago hired a company owned and run by a business partner of Harris’ campaign treasurer after Harris was involved in arranging a meeting between the company and a top HISD administrator. Texas Watchdog reported on the e-mails in August, but records released more recently show that HISD officials signed off on hiring the company within 48 hours of the meeting taking place.
  • A local contractor was awarded a piece of an $950,000 contract to change air filters on school air conditioners last year because of the influence of an unnamed school board member, the school district’s head of facilities maintenance told internal investigators. The allegation was later ruled unfounded by the district’s inspector general. A one-time paid campaign staffer for Marshall also has worked for that contractor as a consultant to help the company get business with HISD. Texas Watchdog reported the allegation in September. The staffer was accused of threatening the job of an HISD official, Texas Watchdog reported. 
  • A major contractor for the district, RHJ-JOC, was unfairly given a piece of a contract for maintenance and small construction jobs after passing $185,000 in kickbacks to Marshall through his campaign manager’s consulting firm. The allegation has been made in civil court filings by a rival contractor. The rival also alleges that former HISD Chief Business Officer Dick Lindsay was forced out of his job by Marshall after Lindsay refused to accede to Marshall’s demands that HISD hire RHJ. Marshall similarly engineered the ouster of Grier’s predecessor, Abe Saavedra, the lawsuit alleges.
  • Harris e-mailed with the district’s then-procurement director about a business run by one of her best friends and a local construction company — five months before the school board voted to approve $8 million in contracts including the friend’s company. Two months after that meeting, the school board voted to add both companies to the district’s list of minor suppliers — those providing services worth less than $25,000 a pop —  for a construction project. Texas Watchdog reported on the incidents in September.
‘Not what I am looking for’
Harvin Moore hopes he heard wrong.The Houston ISD trustee — who has been a critic of the district’s contracting processes — said he thought he heard a fellow trustee yank a planned contract vote off a school board agenda because the board member was unhappy about who the contract was going to.The allegation appears in an e-mail by Harvin Moore to a group of top administrators, including Grier.

“I saw a fellow trustee demand (the contract) get pulled” from a school board agenda, Harvin Moore wrote when it happened in May 2010, “And I believe he said it was because someone was missing from a vendor list. I hope I heard that wrong.”

Harvin Moore did not name the fellow school board member in the e-mail exchange. The only other men on the Houston school board are Marshall, Rodriguez, Greg Meyers and Mike Lunceford. Available public records don’t show which contract was yanked off the agenda.

Harvin Moore, who is not related to district Inspector General Robert Moore, wrote at the time that he was “really upset about this,” and wrote that the last-minute delay in the vote on the contract would have a domino effect that would threaten the then-proposed renovation of Grady Middle School in his district.

Such things are supposed to be “smooth and automatic,” he wrote.

Texas Watchdog reported on Moore’s concerns with the Grady Middle School project in October.

Asked recently by Texas Watchdog to elaborate on his e-mail, Harvin Moore declined to name the trustee who pulled the item from the agenda, but said he was frustrated because he “just didn’t know what was going on.” Harvin Moore also could not remember the identity of the vendor in question.

“I wanted to make sure that nothing like this ever happened again,” he said in a phone interview.

Harvin Moore, a former U.S. Treasury Department official, said he wasn’t sure how things worked now in the district’s contract-awarding process.

“Through the years, board members with influence and contacts have been able to get contracts,” he said. “I hope that’s not still the case, because it sure is important that these things be unbiased and based on the best value for the taxpayers and for the kids.”

Harvin Moore praised efforts by Grier, Chief Operating Officer Leo Bobadilla and Issa Dadoush, HISD’s general manager of facility services, to make things more transparent.

“They’ve been addressing the problem,” Moore said. “They have integrity and ability. It’s just going to take continued work.”

However, records show the contract-awarding process wasn’t smooth and automatic for an HISD school painting contract last year: The trustees got involved in who was hired.

A team of half a dozen HISD procurement and contract administrators worked to narrow down the list of which companies should be included, records show.

Eleven companies wanted in on it, and the HISD team researched and rated each company on its track record, its financial health, how many minority subcontractors it hired, and other criteria over a period of weeks, assigning each factor a numerical score and then ranking each company.

HISD’s procurement staff thought there was only enough work for four companies, so they recommended the top four be hired. In fact, one e-mail shows one procurement staffer had suggested there was only enough work for two or three companies.

The days ticked down. The contract — to be shared among the four recommended companies — was slated to be voted on the May 13, 2010, school board agenda.

But Rodriguez was unhappy about it.

In an e-mail to Dadoush on May 10, 2010, Rodriguez asked why the district hadn’t hired six companies for the contract, as it had in previous years.

Dadoush wrote back that his office “determined that four (contractors) should provide sufficient coverage for the District based on anticipated work load.” The potential hires were evaluated on industry best practices, he wrote. The entire school board was carbon-copied on the exchange.

Rodriguez wrote back that he still wanted six contractors hired — to help out the economy.

“Best Practices have not helped the small minority business in the Houston area, they have been used to deny access to public funds that are being paid to big business, many times not even from the same city or state,” Rodriguez wrote.

“We need to be able to help our community with work, especially in this difficult economic times.”

Rodriguez questioned whether the companies hired for the contract included enough minority-owned companies. Dadoush responded that one contractor, RHJ, itself was a minority-owned company, and the other three contractors had planned to meet goals of using 80 percent, 60 percent and 30 percent minority- and women-owned businesses as subcontractors.

“Thank you for your response, but it is not what I am looking for,” Rodriguez responded. He questioned why more minority companies weren’t hired as contractors, not as subcontractors.

“Small businesses want the opportunity to grow, and make these decisions for themselves and be able to earn the lion’s share of the profit, instead of getting bits and pieces that contractors want to pay,” Rodriguez wrote. “We the district have given the opportunity to the players to help small business grow, but this has not happened. All through the community one can hear of the injustices that the district or it’s contractors have done to the smaller companies. Where does it stop, how does it change?”

On May 12, 2010, the day before the planned school board vote, the school district’s chief financial officer, Melinda Garrett, sent out an e-mail: The painting contract had been removed from the May 13, 2010, agenda so that Dadoush could do a review of the process of evaluating contractors.

The following day, Harris forwarded Garrett’s e-mail without comment to her friend, Nicole West, owner and operator of Westco Ventures, the company that has done more than $1 million in work for HISD.

Westco wasn’t among the bidders on the painting contract, but it has subcontracted in the past on HISD jobs for Fort Bend Mechanical, one of the four recommended companies on the painting contract. Fort Bend Mechanical, an HVAC service and installation company, has done millions of dollars of business with HISD.

‘That’s when favors happen’

School board members routinely hound district administrators when their friends don’t win contracts with HISD, former district procurement chief Stephen Pottinger said in a series of interviews with Texas Watchdog during the last four months.The two school board members who most frequently communicated with HISD administrators about contractor-buddies were Harris and Rodriguez, Pottinger said.“If the contractor (Rodriguez) wanted didn’t get the award, he’d call me and want copies of all the bids,” said Pottinger, whose own contract was not renewed this summer. (See separate story at this link for more details.) “He got emotionally involved. He’d say, ‘You awarded the contract to this company, but not to this one. Give me a copy of the bid.’ I don’t know what he did with the information I gave him. I don’t want to think about it.”

In response to Pottinger’s statement, Rodriguez told Texas Watchdog his main concern was that HISD officials weren’t weighting or grading the bidders properly.

E-mails published earlier this year by Texas Watchdog show Harris also was in contact with an official at a local firm, Environmental Consulting and Management Services, before that firm was hired to do environmental testing on school building sites in 2009.

ECMS’ owner, Tyrone P. Dorian, is a business partner of Frank Jones, Harris’ campaign treasurer, state records show.

The e-mail trail shows Harris helped arrange a July 8, 2009, meeting between an ECMS rep and an HISD official. Records made public by the school district last month show that, within two days of that meeting, HISD administrators wanted to hire ECMS for work worth up to $10,000.

Pottinger described a phone call from Harris requesting that he meet with two vendors –one of whom was her close friend and Westco Ventures owner Nicole West — as “a debacle.”

“Harris said, ‘I have two vendors that are upset about a recent contract award, and I need you to meet with these vendors and get it resolved,’” Pottinger said. “It turns out (one of the vendors) was her best friend (West). And, interestingly enough, this woman was absolutely obnoxious. I mean, you would think somebody who was trying to earn — and I can’t stress the word ‘earn’ enough — district business would be a little more friendly or accommodating. But she was demanding. Her attitude was, ‘I deserve this. I have contacts. I know people.’

“That’s when favors happen — ‘I need you to look at this vendor. I need you to visit with this guy,’” Pottinger said.

At the time, Pottinger said he took Harris’ request to “get it resolved” at face value.

“I understood that to mean: Explain why the vendors didn’t win the bid, and allow the vendors to take a look at the vendor process,” Pottinger said.

But in hindsight, particularly, after Harris told Texas Watchdog that she never discussed West with Pottinger — an assertion that Pottinger says is false — Pottinger said, “I wonder if it was (Harris’) intent to sway me toward awarding West a contract. (Harris) was so adamant that she never knew who I was.”

Pottinger wondered, too, why West would call Harris, the school-board president, rather than him when he was the one who oversaw the bid process from beginning to end.

“In retrospect, there are a lot more questions than answers,” Pottinger said.

Two months after Pottinger met with West and a representative of the other company Harris had mentioned, The Woodlands-based Sparks Construction, both companies were added to HISD’s list of minor suppliers, those providing services worth less than $25,000 at a time, for a construction project.

In the time since Harris joined the school board in 2008, the school district has hired West and her companies for what the Houston Chronicle called a “boggling variety” of services, including tutoring elementary-school children, private investigation services, private ambulance rental, painting, security alarm system installation and dry cleaning auditorium drapes.

Texas Watchdog has counted at least three friends of Harris doing business with the district. Aside from West, Harris’ campaign treasurer, Houston lawyer Frank Jones, negotiated Grier’s contract, and his law firm, Greenberg Traurig, is on HISD’s list of approved outside legal counsel. Frank Jones’ wife, Demetra Jones, has also done more than $75,000 in no-bid consulting work for the district.

Who’s changing the recommendations?

School board members are supposed to merely vote yes or no on giving contracts to companies or slates of companies recommended by HISD’s unelected administrative staff.
But therein lies another problem for the school system: The companies and slates of companies “recommended” to the school board are sometimes not the companies that HISD’s professional staff actually recommended for hire.It was routine for HISD’s procurement staff to recommend that one company be hired for a certain service or supply, only for that recommendation to be changed by some unknown higher authority and a different company to be presented to the school board as having been recommended, Pottinger told Texas Watchdog.Grier and Garrett have acknowledged a problem with HISD staff making changes to vendor and contractor recommendations.

Speaking at the May 20, 2010, board meeting, Grier and Garrett told trustees that unnamed district administrators had been changing recommendations for contractors hired to oversee certain types of construction projects.

“In this case, there was a set criteria that was proposed” for the contracts, “and the evaluations were done against that criteria. And then the No. 1 companies were recommended by the committee and, after that is when some of the changes were made,” Garrett told the school board.

Those changes were against state law, she said.

Grier and Garrett’s comments referenced the same type of contract for which Morganti was being eyed for work at Grady Middle School, in a role that would give them broad leeway over directing and managing the entire rebuilding project.

District officials had to redo some questionable contract decisions to make sure they followed the law, Garrett said at the meeting

“When we went back and looked at the recommendations that were made, we have come back and, on the exhibit, the companies that are listed are the ones that came out as the No. 1 ranking of the committee in all cases,” Garrett said.

“And before, they weren’t,” Grier added.

The superintendent said he intended to change things — and there would be consequences for those who did not toe the line:

“We want to make sure that once, quite frankly, the (selection) committee submits the bid recommendation to our staff, that we take that recommendation, that there’s not people pulled off the list or other people put back on the list by other people in the organization because they think that somebody might not have the capacity to do more than three jobs or four jobs, or because of this or because of that.“And, quite frankly, we’ve had administrators pull people off a committee, and your own (Inspector) General, Robert Moore, has asked, ‘Why were those decisions made?’ And we have not been able, frankly, to provide written documentation as to why and to support those decisions …“Quite frankly, when I got here and I started hearing the complaints, and I started investigating, and that’s when we started pulling (contracts off school board agendas). I promise you, we made it very clear to our staff that we were going to do this right and we were going to be in compliance, or, quite frankly, we’re going to have some changes to personnel.”

Worst to first
But at that very same meeting at which Grier made those comments — May 20, 2010 — school board members took steps to hire a contractor on a construction project that Pottinger and an outside expert say should not have gotten the recommendation of HISD’s staff.The case is that of the rebuilding of Grady Middle School in West Houston. The company whose name was presented to the school board as having been “recommended” for the job, Morganti Texas, had scored well below competing bidders on ratings that were supposed to be objective and impartial.Despite that, Morganti got the initial nod for the Grady Middle project, and the school board even voted to begin negotiating the Grady contract solely with Morganti — a contract that might well have been a done deal, had the company not eventually tried to jack up the project’s price tag by $2.5 million, prompting HISD to end the negotiations.

Harvin Moore, who represents the area including Grady, has called the district staff’s recommendation of Morganti “contract steering” and “corruption.”

As Texas Watchdog reported in October, HISD’s staff ranked Morganti 18th in the “quantitative scoring” category and 15th in the “qualitative results” category. And the district selection committee rated Morganti as having the worst overall reputation among the 28 potential bidders on the Grady project.

“How do you go from that to first?” Harvin Moore asked at the time.

He’s not the only one with questions about the Morganti deal.

“Looking at the figures for the Morganti award, it appears that these figures are skewed,” said Cindy Hallett, the former longtime procurement chief of the Eanes school system outside Austin.

Texas Watchdog asked Hallett to review HISD’s documentation on how the district arrived at the recommendation of Morganti for the Grady Middle project. Hallett and Pottinger don’t know each other and have never met.

“If I were (Satterfield & Pontikes Construction), the vendor that consistently scored No. 1 on the qualitative analysis, I would definitely formally contest the award.”

Dick Lindsay, the school district’s chief business officer at the time and now a vice president with Satterfield & Pontikes — the same company that is rebuilding Grady Middle School – declined to comment or answer any questions when reached by phone by Texas Watchdog.

When HISD kicked Morganti off the Grady project, the district quickly hired Satterfield & Pontikes to take over. Satterfield has since built the school, and it is scheduled to open until after Christmas break in January, Moore said.

Pottinger wasn’t involved in the choosing of the contractor for Grady Middle — construction issues are handled by an entire separate department than the one he ran — but, he, too questioned the initial choice of Morganti.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “If the quantitative (rating) was worth half of the total score, it’s very difficult statistically for that vendor to become ranked No. 1 overall.”

Pottinger also told of another incident in 2010, one in which he was personally involved.

The school district was considering contracting with a series of companies for a certain service, he recalled.

“We recommended multiple vendors based on their scores in the evaluation process, and gave the recommendations to Dick Lindsay,” Pottinger said.

Lindsay was forced out in February 2010. It’s never been clear why he left.

Pottinger recalled that Lindsay put the item on the school board agenda for a vote – but listed completely different vendors than Pottinger’s team recommended.

Pottinger said he and his colleagues talked to Garrett about the vendor switch.

“This is not what we recommended,” Pottinger said they told her. “There’s a problem here. I remember she got really upset. I don’t know if she got upset at us or at him. But she was upset.”

Pottinger said he followed up with Garrett because “as soon as we gave the data to somebody else and they were able to manipulate that data, this is what happens. This is the result.

“The auditors got involved – super-involved,” Pottinger said. “So, Melinda said, ‘Cancel the contracts with the current vendors and rebid it.’ And all of a sudden, Dick Lindsay disappeared.”

—–

Photo of ‘Money Hand…’ by flickr user stevendepolo, used via a Creative Commons license.

Post originally appeared at Texas Watchdog, was written by Mike Cronin and Jennifer Peebles and is used via Texas Watchdog’s Creative Commons license policy.

Houston ISD's Paula Harris blocks Texas Watchdog reporter from her Twitter, Facebook feeds, calls reporter 'unethical'

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Click here to view the original post on Texas Watchdog's website written by Mike Cronin.

The president of the Houston school board told a Texas Watchdog reporter on Monday that she hasn’t answered requests for comments about herself and her ties to district contractors for more than nine weeks because the reporter is unethical.

Paula Harris made the comments after Texas Watchdog sought her out after a school board agenda review meeting to ask why she had blocked the reporter from both her Twitter account, @HISDPaulaHarris, and herFacebook page, and about whether she had been involved in making a post about the Twitter-blocking disappear from the reporter's Facebook page.

An incumbent campaigning to keep her seat against challenger Davetta Daniels on Nov. 8, told the reporter that she had “a whole list of unethical things” she said the reporter had done. “That’s why I won’t talk to you,” Harris said.

She accused Texas Watchdog of trying to secretly record that conversation and a Houston Independent School District audit committee meeting in August, which Texas Watchdog says is not true. 

“I’m very busy,” Harris said Monday night. “I don’t have time to talk to you right now.”

HISD spokesman Jason Spencer this morning sent a letter to Texas Watchdog's editors, saying that the district "respectfully request(s) that Mr. Cronin be instructed to respect Ms. Harris’ decision to not speak with him." Spencer also said Texas Watchdog had "crossed the line into bullying, intimidating, and unethical behavior with respect to Trustee Harris."

Controversy has engulfed Harris in recent months. Texas Watchdog has reported these stories about her in recent months:

For each story that includes her, Texas Watchdog has routinely called Harris and left her voicemails on her work and cell phones, and also e-mailed Harris at her work e-mail and her HISD e-mail addresses. Harris has not responded to any of those requests for comment since Aug. 4.

As for blocking the reporter's Twitter account from her own Twitter account, “my political people take care of that,” Harris said. “I don’t know anything about that.”

Harris isn't the only Texas government official to have blocked a reporter from accessing her otherwise-public tweets. Gov. Rick Perry also has blocked reporters from following his official Twitter account, including Tom Benning of The Dallas Morning News; Bud Kennedy of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram; and Scott Braddock of KRLD, a CBS-TV affiliate that covers Dallas and Fort Worth.

Texas Watchdog did not receive a reply to a message sent to Harris’ two e-mail accounts and the account of her spokeswoman, Jeri Brooks, asking what justification Harris, the elected president of a public agency, was using to block a journalist from reading statements she had labeled as her official remarks. Brooks is the lead strategist for the Houston-based One World Strategy Group, a communications consulting firm.

The e-mail from Spencer also claimed Texas Watchdog "has no legal right of access" to Harris' Twitter accounts. 

Harris and Spencer also both accused Texas Watchdog of trying to secretly record the conversation it had with Harris Monday night at the HISD building — despite the fact that the reporter was holding his digital audio recorder in front of him the entire time. She asked whether it was against the law to tape record someone without their permission, and when the reporter replied it was not, Harris said, “Well, I think it’s unethical. This is why I don’t want to talk to you. Because you’re unethical.”

Texas and many other states require only one party's consent to a conversation for it to be legally recorded — in this case, the reporter's. 

The reporter had been holding the recorder in front of his torso, between Harris and himself, in plain sight. The reporter did not have anything but the recorder in his hands. 

“If you walked up to someone and started recording the conversation, that’s legal, with or without the other person’s consent,” said Bill Aleshire, an Austin-based lawyer at Riggs Aleshire & Ray. The former county judge of Travis County, Aleshire also provides legal advice for the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas in Austin.

“I don’t think public officials ought to be afraid to be taped,” said Aleshire, a former public official himself.

Harris and Spencer also accused Texas Watchdog's Mike Cronin and Jennifer Peebles of trying to "plant activated video and audio recording devices inside a closed meeting of the board’s audit committee."

"That's patently false," Texas Watchdog Editor Trent Seibert said. "Our staff brought their audio-visual equipment to the audit committee meeting, as they are entitled to do under state law. They were told to leave when the committee went into a closed session. As they left, they were told by the school board members that they could not leave their equipment in the room. They gathered up their equipment and left the room." 

FACEBOOK REMOVES POST ABOUT HARRIS

The Texas Watchdog reporter posted on his Facebook page Monday that Harris had blocked him from reading her HISD statements on her Twitter account. The post generated several reader comments and a discussion.

But less than two hours later, the post vanished.

By press time, Facebook officials had not responded to two e-mails – Facebook does not provide a media-relations phone number – asking how or why the post was removed.

But two cybersecurity experts and a web developer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh provided the most likely explanation: A person with access to Harris’ Facebook account reported to Facebook officials that the Texas Watchdog post constituted “abuse” against Harris.

It appears “someone complained to Facebook that someone had posted inappropriate content and Facebook deleted it,” said Lorrie Cranor. She is a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science and the College of Engineering.

Dena Haritos Tsamitis, who heads operations for Carnegie Mellon’s Information Networking Institute, said she asked a team of students to test a variety of scenarios to determine whether it was possible for a Facebook post to disappear “without someone hacking into your account or ‘the powers that be’ at Facebook getting involved and they have come to the conclusion that it's not.”

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called Facebook’s removal of the Texas Watchdog post “over the top.” The center is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on civil liberties, privacy protection and the First Amendment.

“Facebook appears to have violated its own terms of service,” Rotenberg said. “Facebook cannot remove a user’s post on a whim. There should be something in the terms of service that enables Facebook officials to objectively determine whether a post is abusive. It’s not enough simply to be asserted that it’s abusive.”

Beyond that, Rotenberg said that “the case is particularly troubling because it raises First Amendment concerns.”

The Texas Watchdog post was reporting on the activity of public officials – it’s public activity, Rotenberg said.

“Facebook will say they’re a private company, but the courts have recognized circumstances of First Amendment rights against private actors,” Rotenberg said. “A journalist is trying to report on a public official. If there’s any speech that’s more protected than that, I’m not sure what it would be.”

***
Contact Mike Cronin at [email protected] or 713-228-2850. Follow him on Twitter at@michaelccronin or @texaswatchdog.

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Interwoven ethics problems at Houston ISD, Houston Community College, port authority, Harris County — all one big ball of string

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There’s trouble at the Houston school district. There’s trouble at the port authority. There’s trouble at Houston Community College. There’s trouble at the Harris County government.

A casual reader of Houston news might think it’s a coincidence that there’s so much controversy in four of Houston’s largest government agencies.

But the ongoing ethics concerns at those four agencies include overlapping casts of characters. And officials’ relationships with contractors and vendors are a common theme in all four – in some cases, they’re the same contractors.

For instance:

  • Some of the officials involved in the scandals brewing in Harris County and at the Port of Houston Authority are friends and campaign supporters of Houston Independent School District trustees President Paula Harris.
  • One of the central figures named in an internal investigation into questionable contracting at Houston Community College, former college trustee Abel Dávila, has close ties to HISD.
  • And a major contractor for both HISD and HCC has been accused in court records of giving kickbacks to an HISD trustee, while another major contractor for both entities hired three firms with ties to HCC trustees as subcontractors.

In other words, it’s all one big ball of string, with loose ends going in four directions.

HCC and HISD

Similarities abound between Houston ISD and Houston Community College.

They’re both public entities that levy property taxes. They’re both huge operations – HISD with an annual budget of $1.6 billion, and HCC with annual operating expenses of more than $300 million. And, obviously, they’re both in the education business.

But there’s also a lot of cross-pollination between the two entities: The same people with connections in high places, the same contractors getting work – and the same controversies lately over jobs going to connected contractors.

Within the past couple of years, HISD and HCC have had two sets of married trustees: HISD’s Greg Meyers was married to HCC trustee Sandie Mullins, and then-HISD trustee Diana Dávila was (and still is) married to former HCC trustee Abel Dávila.

While Meyers has been the subject of some controversy – his marriage to Mullins ended in divorce amid allegations by her that he was “spending time,” as the Houston Press put it, with an HISD employee – HCC’s Abel Dávila has been one of the key figures in an outright scandal at the college, records show.

An investigation done for the college by an outside law firm questioned, among other things, a $1.5 million painting contract given to a firm headed by a pharmacy tech in her early 20s who is a family friend and former student of Abel Dávila’s.

Diana Dávila resigned from the HISD school board last year soon after the Houston Chronicle revealed that she had tried to get her husband appointed to the school system’s bond oversight committee, which oversees hundreds of millions of dollars in school construction.

Story continues below Flash graphic — click here to jump down automatically.

Before she left the school board, HISD’s then-head of procurement e-mailed to Diana Dávila each week the district’s list of newly issued “requests for proposals,” records made public by the district show. The records show the weekly lists of new RFPs — for everything from safety shoes to remodelling of an entire middle school — went only to Diana Dávila, and not to the other school board members.

Since her resignation from the HISD school board, Diana Dávila and two current HISD trustees, Larry Marshall and Manuel Rodriguez, have been accused in civil court filings of having “significant funds” spent to entertain them by tech vendors seeking business with the school system under the federal E-Rate computers-in-schools program.

Neither Abel nor Diana Dávila could be reached for comment for this story. A message left at a local eatery owned by Abel Dávila yesterday afternoon was not returned by press time, and multiple other Houston phone listings for that name did not yield a return call. 

The HCC investigation, done by outside law firm Smyser Kaplan & Veselka, identified the pharmacy tech linked to the Dávilas as a Jocelyne Ramirez.

A person by that name gave $500 to HISD’s Marshall as a campaign contribution in June 2009, campaign financial disclosures show, but it was unclear from records available online this week whether Marshall’s donor was the same person as the pharmacy tech.

Also at issue in the HCC investigation was Abel Dávila’s involvement in HCC’s 2009 decision to hire Chevron to help the college save on energy costs. The investigative report accused him of trying to use his influence as a trustee to get Chevron to hire Ramirez’s company as a subcontractor, including that Dávila “pushed to get (Ramirez’s company) paid $500,000 … for being ‘mentored’ by Chevron on how to perform ‘program management’ services,” and later wanted the firm to be hired by Chevron as a subcontractor for electrical and general construction work “in the range of $1.25-$1.5 million.” 

HISD is also working with Chevron and another firm, Schneider Electric, on an energy-savings arrangement.  The school board voted in June to have the firms perform initial energy audits.

INFLUENTIAL MEDFORDS

Meanwhile, the internal investigation at HCC also found that a major contractor for the college, Fort Bend Mechanical, had hired as subcontractors three firms tied to three college trustees: the pharmacy tech’s firm tied to Abel Dávila, the son of Trustee Yolanda Navarro Flores, and a property management company run by Trustee Chris Oliver.

Fort Bend owner Pete Medford told the Houston Chronicle last year that Abel Dávila had introduced him to the pharmacy tech. Medford did not return a call for comment for this story.

Fort Bend Mechanical is also a major construction and maintenance contractor for HISD. The school system has paid the Stafford-based firm more than $9 million in the past two years, according to the district’s check register.

School district records show Westco Ventures, a firm owned and run by one of Harris’ closest friends, Nicole West, has subcontracted for Fort Bend Mechanical on HISD work. It was not clear at press time what job or jobs for which Westco “subbed” for Fort Bend, or how much Westco was paid.

“We don’t really know whether a lot of these stories are true,” HISD Superintendent Terry Grier told the Houston Chronicle’s Ericka Mellon last year, “but we’ve had people complain that subcontractors have come to vendors and said, ‘If you don’t name me as a sub, you’re going to be in trouble because of my association with this person or that person.’ We don’t know if that’s true or not.” Grier declined to be more specific or name names.

Also last year, Grier spoke indirectly about his concerns about how the district chose its contractors. 

"I have seen a procurement department made up of independent folks rate bids from a variety of different companies across the district to do a lot of different work," Grier said last week. "And then I've seen staff — just for whatever reason — pull names off of a list and put other names back on a list, (with) no rhyme or reason except, quite frankly, influence where influence has no business coming from."

Though he didn’t name any names then, either, Grier’s comments came after the school board voted to begin negotiations with Fort Bend Mechanical, RHJ and two other firms, KBR and Jamail & Smith — for repairs and small construction jobs at various Houston ISD facilities. 

The Medford family are also among Marshall’s major campaign donors. Five Medfords have given Marshall a total of $18,000 in campaign cash in the past three years, records show. (The Medfords have given to other HISD trustees as well, but to a lesser extent. Records show donations of $5,000 to Greg Meyers, $2,500 each to Harris and Harvin Moore, and $1,500 to Juliet Stipeche.)

Marshall also disclosed on his January 2009 HISD ethics disclosure form that Fort Bend Mechanical officials gave him tickets to football games between the Houston Texans and the Tennessee Titans and against the Chicago Bears.

COMMON CONNECTION IN RHJ

Another major contractor for both Houston Community College and HISD is RHJ-JOC – the firm that has been accused in court documents of giving kickbacks to HISD trustee Larry Marshall.

The company, led by Houston businesswoman Eva Jackson and her husband, Richard, touts its relationship with HCC on its website:

RHJ-JOC has completed a number of projects for the Houston Community College (HCC) throughout the system since 2003. This includes projects at the Administration Building, The Fine Arts Building, Heinen Theater and the JB Whitely Building at the Central Campus. As part of their dedication to the community and commitment to mentor minority and small business enterprises, RHJ-JOC contracts with several subcontractors for their work at the HCC.

Meanwhile, HISD has paid RHJ more than $3.2 million over the past two years, according to the district’s online check register.

In a civil lawsuit, Houston businessman Gil Ramirez Jr., head of RHJ rival Ramirez Group, alleges that RHJ paid kickbacks to Marshall in return for RHJ winning a big school district contract over the Ramirez Group. The suit claims the kickback payments were routed through Marshall’s campaign treasurer, who was paid $185,000 by RHJ as a consultant. 

Marshall has denied any wrongdoing. Neither Ramirez nor his attorney returned calls for comment in recent days. 

Marshall is a board member of a Houston-based nonprofit that Eva Jackson heads, theInternational Faithbased Foundation Inc., which seeks to endow “global humanitarian development and disaster relief projects,” according to its website. Also on the foundation board is HCC trustee Bruce Austin, records show.

In the past three years, RHJ and the Jacksons have made campaign donations to HISD trustees, including $5,300 to Harris, $3,500 to Marshall and $250 to Moore, disclosure forms say. 

Meanwhile, a Gil Ramirez Sr. gave $1,000 to Rodriguez in 2009, and a Gil Ramirez, with no suffix listed, gave Marshall $1,000 the previous year. A “Gill Ramirez Sr.” was also listed among the campaign supporters for HISD trustee Manuel Rodriguez on an invitation to a July fundraiser.

LINKS TO HARRIS COUNTY, PORT AUTHORITY

There are also links between some of the folks involved in recent controversies in HISD, Harris County and the Port of Houston Authority.

Revelations of wining and dining at taxpayers’ expense preceded Edwin Harrison’s retirement this summer as Harris County’s longtime financial services director.

But Harrison wasn’t the only one jetting off to New York – and sometimes even to Costa Rica — to live large, including taking in an NFL game in New York City in a luxury suite paid for by Goldman Sachs. With him on some of those trips were lawyers on Harris County bond deals, and one of those lawyers was Frank Jones.

Jones is also campaign treasurer for Harris, who is up for re-election this year in HISD’s District IV. His law firm, Greenberg Traurig, is one of a handful of law firms that have paid back Harris County a total of $300,000 for travel and entertainment expenses. 

Meanwhile, records show that firms run by Frank Jones’ wife, Demetra C. Jones, have done more than $75,000 in no-bid consulting work for HISD, putting on after-school and continuing education classes.

Demetra Jones used to work Harris County Precinct One Commissioner El Franco Lee, serving as Lee’s head of human resources and risk management for nearly 20 years.  She did not return a call for comment for this story. 

Lee also had testy exchanges with Harrison and Frank Jones’ most vocal critic, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, when the subject of Harrison’s trips came up at recent county Commissioners Court meetings. Neither Lee nor Harrison returned calls for comment for this story. 

Harris’ campaign also paid one of Demetra Jones’ firms, TLConsulting, for fundraising work in the most recent fundraising period, according to campaign financial disclosure forms and Harris’ own HISD ethics form, submitted in July.

Records also show that Westco Ventures, another firm connected to a Harris friend, has done more than $300,000 in work for Harris County in the past three years, including $182,000 in post-Hurricane Ike cleanup work at the flooded-out Evelyn Meador library branch in Seabrook and $59,000 to overhaul the county-owned cafeterias at the County Administration Building, Criminal Justice Center and civil courthouse after the existing contractor walked off the job in 2009.

Harris is the godmother to the children of Westco owner Nicole West.

Another of Harris’ campaign supporters is the former Port of Houston Authority communications chief who left with a $380,000 settlement package last year, Argentina James.

That golden parachute was one of the installments in the recent investigation of the port authority by KTRK-TV’s Wayne Dolcefino. Titled “Port of Plenty,” the series outlined questionable spending by port officials, including a port-funded trip on the port authority’s tour boat, the M/V Sam Houston, for James’ children’s basketball team. The trip included a $1,280 catering bill.

James has given Harris’ campaign $500 in the past two years, financial disclosures show. Harrison, the former county official, also gave $200.

James, who has launched her own public relations firm, HillDay, since leaving the port authority last year, told Texas Watchdog she knew both Harris and Demetra Jones but only in a professional capacity. 

The port authority is a public entity, with board members appointed by the Harris County Commissioners Court, the Houston City Council, and other local governments. Part of its revenues come from property taxes. Some of Dolcefino’s findings are being probed by the Harris County attorney.

***

Contact Mike Cronin at [email protected] or 281-417-8849. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelccronin. Contact Jennifer Peebles at [email protected] or 281-656-1681. Follow her on Twitter at @jpeebles or @texaswatchdog. 

Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, follow us onTwitter and Scribd, and fan us on YouTube. Join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feedsin your newsreader. We're also on MySpace, Digg, FriendFeed, and tumblr.

Photo of 'Confettit in a ball' by flickr user ingermaaike2, used via a Creative Commons license. Interactive graphic: Jennifer Peebles, Texas Watchdog.

Note: This report by Texas Watchdog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. It is authored by Mike Cronin and Jennifer Peebles. Click here to view the story on the Texas Watchdog website.

Texas state housing chief resigns; agency failed to use Hurricane Ike rebuilding funds, oversaw faulty stimulus program to fix up low-income homes

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Gov. Rick Perry has accepted the resignation of the head of the state’s housing agency, which has failed to handle billions of federal dollars to rebuild homes in the wake of Hurricane Ike and oversees a federal stimulus program plagued by questions of fraud and mismanagement.

Michael Gerber, executive director of the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, tendered his resignation, effective Aug. 31, as Perry yanked nearly $3 billion that has yet to be used to rebuild thousands of homes, roads, public utilities and buildings damaged or destroyed in 2008 by Hurricane Ike.

The program, administered together with the Texas Department of Rural Affairs, has been shifted to the state’s General Land Office. Timothy Irvine has been named interim chief at Housing and Community Affairs.

Crushed beneath billions of dollars in federal disaster and stimulus weatherization funds, the housing agency is still scrambling to spend more than $92 million in what has been a troubled stimulus Weatherization Assistance Program, reported on extensively by Texas Watchdog.

The agency has taken more than two years to spend the rest of the $327 million allotted to it. It hasstripped funding from a handful of its 44 original contracting agencies and has investigated dozens of instances of alleged fraud and bad workmanship. Out from under the burden of the Hurricane Ike disaster program, Irvine is confident the agency will not have to return any of its weatherization funding to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Gerber is on paid vacation until his departure date. A call by Texas Watchdog to his cell phone number was not returned as of Thursday morning.Michael Gerber

In addition to Gerber’s departure, Perry asked J. Paul Oxer, a member he appointed in March, to take over as chairman of the Housing and Community Affairs board. The Legislature abolished the Department of Rural Affairs, a move recommended in 2005 by the Sunset Advisory Commission, turning over its duties to the Department of Agriculture.

The Governor originally designated two agencies to handle the Ike money because the Department of Rural Affairs administered the state’s Community Development Block Grant program through which federal disaster funds flow. Rural Affairs was to handle the infrastructure, and TDHCA was to handle the housing recovery.

“The problem had to do with putting the Ike recovery funding in the hands of two agencies, each with their own bureaucracies,” Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Perry, said Wednesday. “The General Land Office has played a role in disaster recovery in the past, and the governor has confidence in Jerry Patterson (Texas Land Commissioner) in getting this taken care of.”

Gary Hagood, chief financial officer for the Land Office, pledged Wednesday to have all of the HUD money spent no later than December of 2015. While insisting on not dwelling on past performance, Hagood expressed impatience that after nearly three years two agencies managed to spend just $200 million while Hurricane Ike victims lived in trailer homes.

“I don’t care about the history, I’m interested in streamlining, and if there’s stuff in the way I’m going to move it out of there,” he said Wednesday. “You had a bunch of people working with contracts that had no milestones. Now, we’re going to say if you don’t hit this milestone, we’re going to terminate your contract.”

Adding the Weatherization Assistance Program to an agency unprepared to get into the disaster recovery business was an unsustainable blow, Irvine said. With its welter of state and federal requirements and the cross-purpose goals of spending hundreds of millions of dollars quickly, efficiently and well, “We very quickly found out that drinking from a fire hose wasn’t that easy,” Irvine said.

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Note: This report by Texas Watchdog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. The author is Mark Lisheron. Click here to view the story on the Texas Watchdog website.