Should Any Future Agreement Between the University of Texas System and TSC Include Payment for Back Rent?

"I slip on out the back door and down the streets I go

 She a-howlin' about the front rent, 

She'll be lucky to get any back rent, 

She ain't gonna get none of it"

John Lee Hooker

"One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer"

University of Texas Regents

Not only does the University of Texas system not need a handout from the City of Brownsville, they likely have more revenue than many countries.  Mean Mister Brownsville commented on the so-called P.U.F. on February 3, 2013:

"The University of Texas is an extremely wealthy university by any measure despite what their fundraising appeal literature implies. The Permanent University Fund or P.U.F., which includes the oil and mineral rights generated on over 2,000,000 acres of Texas land came in at 8.8 billion in 2008 and is now certainly higher, yet that is only 8% of UT's total funding."

I used the 2008 figures because UT included a pie chart showing the P.U.F. to represent only 8% of annual funding.  For those of us not comfortable with figures, that means that the overall annual funding was over 110 billion dollars.  Put succinctly, the University of Texas could build whatever-the-hell they want to build on 58 acres of "surplus" land deeded to them by the City of Brownsville.  They do not need a handout of third rate ropa usada buildings from the city to field a campus.   

What the University of Texas system may need is temporary class and administrative rooms until their new satellite campus is indeed built.  A logical landlord is Texas Southmost College, which now, by some accounts, has underutilized buildings on its campus.  A primary hindrance to TSC entering into a deal to lease buildings to UT is that UT has a reported arrearage of from 10-17 millions, in other words, unpaid back rent.  

Bobby Wightman-Cervantes of the BROWNSVILLE VOICE mentions this in his blog today:  

"TSC needs to hold their ground and call UT Systems bluff that they can get a better deal from the city. Let them try - TSC must demand a fair deal which includes Texas paying its past rent. As a tenant UT has been a disaster. You do not lease to a tenant who owes you $10-17 million dollars already unless you have real assurances you will get paid that which is already owed."

Mayor Tony Martinez

Certainly, Wightman is not the only one to have mentioned this.  The fact that Mayor Tony Martinez is not livid over UTB's deadbeat status is illustrative of how little he actually cares about the real needs of the taxpayers.  His only concern, his only emotional stimuli is jumping to pacify any request from Juliet Garcia, Fred Rusteberg or Carlos Marin, the players behind the United Brownsville shadow government.  For Tony, the whims of UTB supercede any real need of the citizens, employees and administrators of Brownsville.  Martinez' willingness, his drive, his plan to displace city administrators, employees and citizens from the near-perfectly suited City Plaza and stuff them in a dusty, antiquated ropa segunda building, Casa del Nylon, is evidence of this warped, non-public servant type of thinking.  

There are two elements, loopholes if you will, that UT has utilized to avoid their obvious financial responsibility to TSC and subsequently Brownsville and Cameron County.  One of these loopholes was discussed in a Mean Mister Brownsville article dated June 12, 2013:

"During the entire UTB/TSC relationship, UT acted as if their hands were tied with respect to financial support for that combined institution, citing a rule that P.U.F. funds were only available for pure UT branches, not those affiliated with another entity, like TSC.(No mention was ever made that UT easily had enough funds to alleviate some of the burden of one of the poorest cities in the United States.) So Brownsville, as always, was allowed to suck it up and assume the tremendous financial burden of perhaps as much as 1 billion dollars by 2034 to pay for the infamous Juliet Garcia's extravagant ways. Please don't forget that when Garcia's request for a 105 million dollar bond issue was rejected by the taxpayers in favor of a more modest 65 million, she went ahead and spent 105 million anyway. Yes, arrogance beyond belief!"

So, for twenty or more years, UT acted as if they couldn't support the UTB-TSC partnership because of one of their own arbitrary rules, that branches eligible for support not be connected to any other non-UT facility.  But, in reality, it wasn't a case of being unable, but simply unwilling.

The nonpayment of rent was even more sinister.  According to Wightman, Trustees Trey Mendez,  Rene Torres and others, the original rental agreement between UTB and TSC, orchestrated by Representative Rene Oliveira, called for UTB to pay its rent when the money for such rent was "funded."  So, by technically never acquiring the "funding" UTB skirted its obligation to pay rent to TSC for two decades.  UT has literally been a tenant from hell for Texas Southmost College.

If UT satisfies its back rent obligation, the old agreement between UTPA and TSC may set a model for a possible, workable agreement between the two entities.  One old student described it this way:  "UTPA did not actually rent buildings from TSC.  The college provided whatever classrooms UTPA needed and was paid by the student day.  A classroom surcharge was included in UTPA tuition to cover this.  If a student could prove that they were both a TSC and UTPA student, they got a refund for that amount."