A Threat To Their Power
A lawsuit hasn’t yet convinced the city of San Benito officials to start following the law. But we’re beginning to know why they think we are A THREAT TO THEIR POWER.
A Threat to Power
“I just wanted to show everybody what’s happening right now at the fairgrounds here in San Benito,” said Cristina Garcia, San Benito Public Relations Officer.
Maybe there is just something in the water in the Resaca City.
When we first arrived in San Benito ten months ago, the law-breaking had already begun.
The city secretary, Ruth McGinnis, had ignored requests, multiple ones, to see campaign finance records for a over month.
That’s illegal.
“No, it’s not, sir,” David Favila told Wayne Dolcefino.
“It absolutely is,” replied Dolcefino.
“No, it’s not,” Favila responded.
“You want to test it in court?” Dolcefino asked.
“Sure,” Favila answered.
The guy paid by San Benito taxpayers to deal with media folks like us wouldn’t let us see the records either.
“Can I tell you something? I don’t play games,” Dolcefino said.
“Neither do I. Do I need to call the police?” Favila responded.
“Go ahead, call the police,” replied Dolcefino.
The local cops wanted no part of it.
Later that day, I spoke to San Benito’s city commission.
“Even in the most corrupt towns, they know that campaign finance records are public records,” Dolcefino told city commissioners.
Boy, it’s gone down from there.
Why are we such a threat to the power in San Benito? Maybe it’s because they continue to disrespect the people who are paying the bills.
“Hey everyone, I’m Cristina,” Cristina Garcia said in a video.
You had to feel bad for Cristina Garcia. The San Benito public information officer was live on the city’s Facebook page, trying to put on the best face possible on the final day of the Hog Waddle.
Lucha libre wrestlers attracted a small crowd.
“A lot of people have shown up today. Thank you all so much for coming out,” Garcia said.
But you could see behind her that a lot of the fairgrounds were totally empty. Even though admission was free.
“Across the RGV, event organizers say the San Benito Hog Waddle had to be canceled because of the rain,” a news anchor said.
Three of the big concert days had been a washout. It was raining, unusually cold.
Glad we didn’t make the trip down.
But we could have met Cristina, hired last November.
“And we’re here to answer any questions that anyone may have,” Garcia said.
She had refused to respond to a single one of our questions since then.
So when I saw her valiant Hog Waddle report, I sent her a message on Facebook.
“Hey, return my calls someday,” the Facebook message read.
I had even sent her a message on LinkedIn.
“You’re the media person paid by the city of San Benito, yet you ignore our questions. Stay tuned,” the message read.
“I love San Benito,” Fred Sandoval said.
City Manager Fred Sandoval illegally withheld emails from us.
Some had been deleted on his computer.
But, we still got them.
Garcia complaining that message I sent felt like a “subtle threat or an attempt to intimidate.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Dolcefino told the camera.
Garcia apparently needs help dealing with me.
In November, the city hired the Margulies Communications Group as public relations counsel.
And it’s clear they want to know about me and my investigative video stories that have now been seen by hundreds of thousands of folks down in the Rio Grande Valley.
“Wayne just posted,” this Margulies’ email proclaims.
“At least it has become more obvious who he is working for,” the email read.
“Enlighten me: how does this bizarre preoccupation with me help San Benito taxpayers?” Dolcefino asked.
A contract we have shows Margulies was paid $9,500 for the first month and $5,500 a month after that.
We found no evidence the commissioners ever talked about or voted in public on such a agreement.
But Cristina apparently thought the timing of my post was interesting.
It was January 10, days before a judge signed a court order accusing city officials of a civil conspiracy in that Resaca Village fight.
Taxpayers are now on the hook for nearly $150,000 just for lawyers in that case.
Multiple judges have told the city they can’t stop the developers from finishing Resaca Village. Trying to take their multi-million-dollar investment away was wrong.
“Hey Cristina. You worked a little while in news, so it’s not really that complicated. We call out fraud, injustice and corruption wherever we see it. This Varco case, it’s going to end badly,” Dolcefino told the camera.
Here’s another issue we’ve reported on: the city has paid tens of thousands of dollars in taxes on unused property because the developer in the Epicenter deal—curiously planning a concert venue and—abandoned the project.
Sandoval is now pushing a city-run concert venue at the fairgrounds instead.
It’s already benefiting his longtime friends from Pharr.
That’s one of the reasons we’ve now sued the city after months of serial violations of state public records laws.
“The city of San Benito either doesn’t know the Texas Public Information Act or doesn’t care,” attorney Kelsey Galbraith said.
The depth of Sandoval’s connections to his buddies was only exposed because the city’s lawyers turned over emails he was hiding illegally.
“He has shown who he is. Your videos have shown who he is. Why are they working so hard to protect him?” Galbraith said.
Jose Morales had been accused by developers of trying to shake them down.
“They pulled the rug out from under us in trying to complete this,” Paul Serafy of Varco said in court.
His wife had appointed him to the EDC board, ignoring potential conflicts of interest.
“Why did you appoint your husband to the board?” Dolcefino asked Deborah Morales.
The attorney general ordered Morales to give us his phone records.
He refused.
We still don’t know how much was spent on the Hog Waddle.
Weeks after the event, the city says they can’t even tell us.
But we know because of a $13,000 insurance policy, the bands that got canceled will still get paid.
Concert promoters will get their money too—Sandoval’s buddies.
Since we discovered these relationships, a can of worms has been opened.
From court records, we learned Sandoval had been accused hiding more than a million dollars from the Sylvan Learning Centers.
He owned some of their franchises.
He failed to pay back a $650,000 note to a nonprofit, failed to pay back a government loan of more than $1 million.
Most of the records were publicly available before Sandoval got hired.
The city commission has been silent on these revelations, but they have showed support for their beleaguered city manager, holding up fathead signs.
“It’s part of the city’s campaign to change the subject, to attack the messenger, to call me names,” Dolcefino told the camera.
The city took to its Facebook page on Dec. 19 last year to accuse us of trying to “profit from a tragedy.”
We had told you the story of a young San Benito family forced to escape their burning home with two small children in the middle of the night, right before Thanksgiving.
“And when I got up and I stepped out of our room, our kitchen was on fire. It was pretty bad,” Julio Mata told Dolcefino.
One of two fire hydrants near their house had low water pressure and could not be used to help battle the blaze, which could have easily spread to neighbors’ homes.
The city accused us on Facebook of misleading this young family to make them believe their home could have been saved if not for the faulty fire hydrant, pointing out that I “must have been accustomed to my comfortable position and have likely never fought a fire or driven a fire truck.”
So what?
The city clearly missed the point. Fire hydrants are supposed to work.
“I thought all fire hydrants had to have water in there. I thought it was the city’s job to make sure everything was up to date,” Julio Mata told Dolcefino.
“Just imagine, if we wouldn’t have woken up or nobody would have woken us up, we would have been dead in there,” Mystiqua Mata said.
Mystiqua learned after the fire she was already pregnant again.
And I have bad news for the fathead Freddy gang, she’s not mad at me at all and doesn’t feel misled.
But she does have a message for Mayor Rick Guerra, one of Sandoval’s bosses.
“As mayor, you should do your job. If you are wanting to take care of San Benito, take care of us. Take care of everybody here,” Mystiqua said.
Mystiqua reacted to the much bigger story of neglect we’ve now uncovered.
Less than two hours after we asked for a fire hydrant inspection and repair records, the city posted all the work they were doing on a brand new fire hydrant.
“Our public works department is always hard at work,” a facebook post said.
I’m sure they are, but the city ignored the bigger headline.
What we learned when we actually look at those fire hydrant records we finally got, even when the city knows fire hydrants are broken, Sandoval’s public works department is often taking months to fix them if they fix them at all.
In the last two months of the year, the fire department inspected 270 hydrants, nearly half the city’s total.
They found 138 hydrants that were either in need of repair, totally broken, or had low pressure readings that could affect their ability to help fight a fire.
That’s dangerous.
The Public Works Department had only repaired 17 of those hydrants in the six weeks prior to our request, and I know Freddy won’t admit this, but our investigation is already helping folks that may have the same disaster the Matas did.
Our request for hydrant records was delivered on December 10th.
Look what happened. There were a flurry of repairs.
29 new work orders were put in. 11 hydrants fixed in just three days.
Look at this map we made to help Freddy out.
There’s the Mata house in blue. You could see how many fire hydrants were still reported broken or with low pressure at the first of the year, including many that had been broken for at least two months.
Before the city proceeds to spend millions of dollars in precious taxpayer money on Sandoval’s amphitheater project, they should demand real neighborhood redevelopment first.
If the commissioners would do their job, there would be a state of the fire hydrants at their next public meeting.
And they should stop ignoring the talk of the town—Sandoval’s financial misconduct before he was hired in San Benito.
Why his buddies from Pharr are now getting city contracts.
If they questioned Sandoval at a public meeting like they should, it wouldn’t cost taxpayers a single penny.
Instead, the Sandoval sound machine is being allowed to waste critical redevelopment money on lawyers in real estate fights.
Multiple judges have told the city they will likely lose.
They are illegally withholding public records, spending money on PR experts to help them with damage control.
“Hey there, San Benito. My name is Rudy Mireles. Today I am speaking with City manager and director of the Economic Development Corporation for the city, Mr. Fred Sandoval,” Mireles said in a video.
Even paying one former Rio Grande Valley TV anchor $1,000 just to do a staged softball interview with Sandoval on social media.
“I know you don’t have a whole lot of time running the city of San Benito, but tell us a little bit about your experience working in city administrations in the past,” Mireles asked Sandoval.
Hey, Freddy, I’ve offered to interview you for months.
You won’t do it.
I won’t charge you a penny.
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