WHAT IS THERE TO HIDE?
Tue, 2015-10-13 21:46
News Staff
SHARY ISD WON’T RELEASE AUDIT
By G. Romero Wendorf
As a follow-up to last week’s Advance News’ front-page story (TEA investigates Shary ISD – Is school district guilty of violating bid laws?), the Texas Attorney General has sided with the school district: it does not have to release an internal audit to the public or the media.
Why a public school district, funded with taxpayer dollars, would want to shield an audit from public disclosure can only be surmised.
Apparently, after an investigation was completed last year by an outside PI firm that Sharyland ISD had hired to investigate alleged bidding irregularities, Hildreth Investigations, it hired a former Shary board member and CPA, Guillermo “Mo” Reyna, to conduct an in-house audit. Now apparently the district doesn’t want to release the audit findings, even though it was completed approximately six months ago.
Former Shary ISD Board Trustee Virginia Townsend, who spent nine years on the board and more than 40 years as a member of the OWLS (Objective Watchers of the Legal System), which keeps a grassroots eye on public spending, says it sure seems odd to her that a school district would work so hard to keep from releasing a school district audit to the public.
“It does strike me as strange,” she said during a phone interview last week.
Both Townsend and The Advance News Journal have filed open-records requests with the district to gain access to the audit, but to no avail.
In response to the open-records request, Shary ISD forwarded the requests to the state attorney general’s office. Townsend said she got a letter back, saying in the AG’s opinion, Reyna’s audit was indeed public info. So she said she called the district’s human resources department to ask when she could pick up a copy.
“But I was told they hadn’t yet gotten around to it,” she said.
Another week went by.
And then she got a second letter from the Office of the Attorney General, saying the first letter had been rescinded, and Shary ISD does not have to release the audit to Townsend. Or by extension, to the media or the general public at large.
The second letter said the AG’s office was rescinding the first opinion because her first open-records request didn’t contain enough information, said Townsend. But the attorney who helped her fill it out said it most certainly did.
“Call her,” Townsend tells this reporter, referring to her attorney. “She’ll talk to you.”
Leaving one to ask the cynical question: were there any politics involved in getting the AG’s office to change its mind? And if so, who has that much political sway?
Last week’s story that included details of the Hildreth investigation from 2014 left out the name of the vendor alluded to in the finished report. The Advance wanted to contact him first before publicly naming him, but has had no success in that regard. But his name is Homero Flores.
In the story published last week, it was pointed out that the district’s former assistant superintendent of business and finance, Jesus “Jessie” Muñiz, admitted to handing out school work to Flores that was worth more than $50,000 without putting the work out for bid, as required by law.
Today, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) is investigating the district to see if did or did not violate bidding laws over the past several years. Muñiz oversaw the school’s finance department for approximately 12 years.
In the Hildreth interview, Muñiz admitted to giving more than $150,000 worth of landclearing work to Flores without putting the work out for bid. Over the span of approximately three years, Flores was paid approximately $1.49 million dollars by Shary ISD, sans any bid, according to his interview with Hildreth, which was done while he was under oath with an attorney by his side.
By the time the Muñiz/Flores business arrangement came to an end in early 2014, after a new superintendent came on board in 2012 and started questioning the district’s bidding habits in 2013 (she resigned under pressure shortly after the Hildreth interview was presented to the school board in August of 2014), the two had apparently grown close, taking several trips to Vegas together.
When asked why the two Muñiz and Flores – had been seen passing unmarked white envelopes between the two of them while parked on school grounds while sitting in their respective vehicles, at first Muñiz said the envelopes contained money for some “football numbers” that he was playing, and he was probably trying to get “something paid up.” But then he recollected, according to the Hildreth interview, that those white unmarked envelopes that he had been seen passing back and forth between himself and Homero Flores, clearer of land and concrete worker for Shary ISD, had actually contained “flyer information from the superintendent’s office” for a foundation she was working on that brought a top artist to the district.
But never, said Muñiz, was any money passed between the two of them.
For his part, Homero Flores declined to be interviewed during the Hildreth investigation.