Brownsville Needs to Pass the Quintanilla Test

 

by Jim Barton on Friday, November 11, 2011 at 7:29pm

   

      In Mark Twain's tale "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" a town faced temptation for the first time from a stranger using the lure of riches.  The town in Twain's story failed the test.   The jury is still out on Brownsville.  Carlos Quintanilla is "The Man Who Would Corrupt Brownsville".  Please don't laugh at that.  Our previous mayor and city commission were poised to approve the ass-backwards Fly Frontera deal April 5 with Quintanilla, the convicted racketeer as the front man.  It was on the agenda as an action item with easily enough votes for passage.  To refresh your recollection, the deal rewarded Fly Frontera Airlines for FAILURE,  with the city of Brownsville responsible for the first 23 tickets on every flight NOT SOLD.  It provided $500,000 startup money for the 4 day old company to buy fuel, parts, pay fees, etc , then subsidized to the tune of $1,000,000 per year for the first two years.  A few angry citizens gave the city commission pause, causing them to table the deal for 21 days.  As Anthony Troiani admitted that night the company had not even been properly vetted by the BDEC.  How many other deals and companies come before the city commission without proper scrutiny from the board anointed to scrutinize them?   Even after the BDEC evalution was finally done, coming back negative and killing the deal, former commissioner Atkinson argued vociferously for weeks for its revival.  The vision of calabaza implanted in Atkinson's brain by Quintanilla fueled his desire to close the deal despite red flags all over the place.
     The $500,000,000 dollar budget of BISD has Quintanilla sniffing all around.  Is there not a grown-up person at BISD that will ask "Why are we involved with a convicted racketeer?  Why is Catalina Presas-Garcia, the board president palling around with him?  Why is Quintanilla allowed to call the shots to the point that he calls trustee Luci Longoria a "bitch" when she hesitates to obey?  Quintanilla is not an educator, not an administrator.  What business does he have around our school officials?
     Do you remember the whirlwind first few days after Carlos Montoya was named interim superintendent?  On Montoya's first day, actually first hours in his office, before he even knew where the coffee machine was, he suspended Chief Financial Officer Tony Fuller.  Two days later, still finding his new parking spot with difficulty, he demotes Human Resources Director Susan Fox, who worked in the job 15 years, replacing her with the much-travelled Sylvia Atkinson.  It's obvious these were not Carlos Montoya decisions.  He hadn't been on the job long enough to evaluate two top officials' performance.  Some are telling me, these moves were orchestrated by Carlos Quintanilla.
     Will Hadleyburg, I mean Brownsville, pass the Quintanilla test?