Abuse Of Power

Share this story:
Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


The City Manager in the Rio Grande Valley town of San Benito won our CRYBABY OF THE YEAR AWARD! But what we are about to expose is no joke. Hiding the truth from taxpayers is an ABUSE OF POWER.


It’s early on a Wednesday evening in the Rio Grande Valley… and we are watching as the top two economic officials from the city of San Benito hit up a McAllen sports bar…

Twin Peaks they like to say has scenic views…

“I love San Benito. Just remember, I love San Benito.”

That’s city manager Freddy “The Lover” Sandoval…

“What are you doing? Why are you blocking me?”

And the guy we’ve nicknamed The Laugher… Sandoval assistant economic director Mario Palomo… who tried to block us from questioning the mayor.

But are we about to watch a meeting about the future of San Benito… because this is an unusual place for a government meeting.

Or is this just a night out with some longtime friends?

The city manager is sure having a fun time.

For the next three and a half hours they’ll down a bunch of beers with two other guys…

One of them we can’t identify… maybe our viewers can.

But we confirmed who that guy is from his license plate… he’s Rogelio Roy Garcia… he worked under Fred Sandoval when he was city manager in Pharr a decade ago, but resigned from the city to avoid a drug test…

He was also according to tax records Sandoval’s next-door neighbor… lived right across the street on Cynthia Lane.

But before we write this off as old friends just having fun… it’s important you know what company Roy Garcia owns…

It’s Carpe Nox Entertainment…

And since Fred Sandoval got his new contract in San Benito, he has gotten the ok to send tens of thousands of dollars to his former neighbor…multiple deals.

Garcia is not a city employee. But he stands to make a lot more taxpayer money.  An EDC contract to handle events up to ninety thousand dollars a year…

He was in charge of last year’s Resaca Fest. Records show the city lost $50,000 on that event.

Carpe Nox was hired to coordinate last year’s two-day-long Hog Waddle…

Carpe Nox used that money to pay vendors like the $25,000 payment to La Famiglia.

The Carpe Nox proposal said the city could make tens of thousands of dollars in profit if the event was sold out…

But the city didn’t bring in $180,000 as expected.

The Hog Waddle brought in just $37,000…

Expenses of the city lost nearly $115,000 last year…

In September, commissioner Deborah Morales suggested the money being lost on festivals could be put to better use…

“Like the animal problem we have, our food bank has an issue, Friends for the Library have issues I would like to see some of this money put there instead of going to these events.”

The local paper cited critics suggesting this year’s Hog Waddle will cost $500,000 to put on… Sandoval disputes that… saying it will cost $150,000.

But that doesn’t seem possible… that’s what it cost last year, and the two-day festival is expanding to four days of fun this year…

Emails the city was forced to release show Carpe Nox proposals of more than half a million dollars…

Maybe San Benito taxpayers think these events are worth it even though they take a bath…

But it’s time San Benito taxpayers get some transparency…

“How much transparency do you want?” Mayor Guerra once asked us.

I just love that question…

Well, you can start with Sandoval coming clean about his relationships. It’s not his money… it belongs to the people of San Benito.

Last February, San Benito city commissioners chose to go behind closed doors to discuss the Hog Waddle in secret.

Ignoring complaints from Commissioner Carol Sanchez that might be a violation of the Texas Open Meetings Act…

That law doesn’t seem to matter here…

“It might be illegal,” affirmed Sanchez.

And when San Benito commissioners came out of that executive session… Sandoval announced the city was getting rid of the company that had been providing the concert work…

“And consideration and possible action to ratify the contract with Carpe Nox Entertainment LLC for Hog Waddle.”

Sandoval didn’t mention the owner was his buddy… his former neighbor… at least not least in public…

In June, Sandoval first publicly revealed his vision for San Benito… to turn the place into a musical Mecca….

Take the run-down San Benito fairgrounds and turn it into a concert venue…

San Benito is after all the home of Conjunto King Freddy Fender.

“We’ve got the heritage, and we’ve got the history and we really need to play this up,” Sandoval said on the occasion.

We saw one plan in the e-mails Sandoval was withholding that shows a thirty-plus million-dollar investment…

The city cited an economic study done by the University of Texas Rio Grande.

When forced to turn it over we learned it was just a few pages long….

And to ever make money for taxpayers’ tens of thousands of people would have to be willing to come to this part of San Benito.

The track record on festivals isn’t good. But hiding your plans from taxpayers isn’t right either.

But here’s the problem…. It assumes tens of thousands of people will come to this place. Of San Benito executive it took a month for the city to produce it.  It’s only a few summary of that report… and you can see those profit numbers assume the kind of attendance that’s never happened in San Benito.

The entire population of San Benito is less than 25,000.

Who did Sandoval hire to do the $15,000 feasibility of the fairgrounds plan?

You guessed it… Carpe Nox… who stands to benefit from big city contracts.

“This is a great, great idea.”

Commissioner Tom Goodman was all for it but was cautious…

“I just wanna make sure that we see what we’re doing completely when we go into this,” he suggested.

“I just didn’t know the qualifications of these people,” Goodman added.

Let’s listen to Freddy… He doesn’t share it that often.

“The team that we’re going to work with here has a wealth of experience not only doing concerts and promotions but also has an engineering and professional component. That’s actually gonna be the driving force behind the numbers.”

Sandoval announced the city will spend up to $1.6 million on the fairground…

Including renting a stage for $650,000… upping the ante significantly.

At that same meeting, Sandoval proposed a contract to provide production services for another city festival the Resaca Fest…

The bids weren’t revealed to taxpayers at that meeting. But Sandoval apparently didn’t want the low bidder to win the job…

Sandoval wanted Carpe Nox.

“So it is a little bit more than the other folks, but they bring a lot more to the table,” he claimed.

Mayor Guerra… he just wanted to make sure Sandoval was having fun.

“Well, hopefully our city manager will be a big kid again”.

A 57-year-old kid who is making sure his old friends in Pharr benefit from San Benito tax money.

And this ambitious new music venue.

But have no fear. Sandoval predicts San Benito will be the biggest concert venue south of Houston.

“I’ve done this before… it was an indoor venue… we did it in my previous post.”

He sure did… and the big gamble was a financial disaster.

The city of Pharr lost more than half a million dollars a decade ago when they couldn’t sell enough tickets for a concert by Toby Keith…

They sold ten thousand less tickets than Sandoval said they would…

He resigned months after that failure…

But the lawsuit over the concert have gone on for almost eight years… costing taxpayers in Pharr a bunch of money.

We don’t know if the concert failure was one of the reasons the former mayor of Pharr complained back then that Sandoval had wasted millions of dollars on failed ideas.

The city had split the cost of the Toby Keith concert with a music promoter named Raul Garcia of Pajaro Promotions… in Spanish, pajaro translates to a bird… Hidalgo County Court records show Garcia has been sued multiple times for alleged fraud…

And that’s another reason why this get-together at Twin Peaks raised so many questions for us…

Because Roy Garcia and Raul Garcia are business partners.

In September, secretary of state records show Roy Garcia started another company called Carpe Nox Industries…

And the next month the San Benito EDC gave his company a contract for $7500 hundred a month… up to $90,000 in a year. Did you know that?

But we followed that company’s trail… records show Carpe Nox Industries was organized by another entity called Zarco Wealth Group.

Follow the records some more and that links you back to a guy named Raul Garcia…

We don’t know if the two Garcias are related… or if that other guy at Twin Peaks was Raul… Freddy could tell us… but he ignored our questions… but we do know the two Garcias have been business associates for at least a decade.

Hidalgo County tax records show that back in 2015 Raul Garcia and his company were sued for allegedly ripping off an investor related to a Wiz Khalifa concert on South Padre Island. The court records show Roy Garcia was accused of being part of that alleged fraud.

And that’s why we are connecting dots in San Benito… city manager Fred Sandoval needs to explain these relationships we’ve uncovered…

There is no good reason not to tell taxpayers exactly how much you are spending on the city’s big festival event.

In late December, the commissioner went into a secret session again to discuss the planned community event.

There’s a contract with a company called Empowerment Endeavors for Hog Waddle Professional Services… but what services, they didn’t say.

“We really need to move on this.”

We looked… the secretary of state says the company was formed only five months before the vote by a special education teacher Jeronimo Saldana who lives near Pharr.

His connection to Sandoval is unclear.

City emails we now have show Saldana’s company is being given $135,000 to book some of the bands. Like Los Cardenales de Nuevo Leon.

But not the headliners.

If you go online to buy tickets for the upcoming four-day Waddle… it says the promotion is being handled by another company called Bird Promotions…

And yes… that’s Raul Garcia’s company… guess he likes birds.

So many ways to make money.

We wanted to call the lawyer who helped the city of Pharr defend the lawsuit after Sandoval left town.

“I have no comment.”

But Robert Drinkard is the same lawyer now defending Fred Sandoval and San Benito in the lawsuit with Varco developers over the Resaca Village shopping center…

Two separate judges have told the city to stop interfering with their shopping center construction… one has signed an order calling it a conspiracy… a shakedown.

The city has just ignored the rulings.

The city complains in Facebook posts that the shopping center isn’t finished… but the only reason it’s not finished is because the city issued a stop work order in August.

Varco says the finished buildings are 95 percent leased…

If San Benito city leaders were smart, they would get rid of the lawyers and help bring visitors to the local businesses that are in the shopping center.

They are sending a horrible message to other companies who might want to come.

San Benito is spending tens of thousands of dollars already on property they own.

But why should the city care about the dramatic cost of this legal fight…? They’re spending your money… now well north of 100,000

You got to love small towns…

We leave you with a video shot as Fred Sandoval finally left Twin Peaks that night more than three hours after getting there…

Where did Sandoval end up… his home in Pharr.

“I love San Benito.”

That’s right… Sandoval continues to live in Pharr nine months after promising to move to San Benito as required by the city charter…

Sandoval tried to change the charter, but the election was voided because the city broke the law in announcing it.

Voters still made it very clear Sandoval must live in the city. Sandoval promised he would.

“I will be bringing an RV here.”

We don’t know if this whole RV thing will ever materialize

But every time we’ve watched Sandoval he doesn’t go home to the city that’s paying him… he goes to Pharr… guess the charter doesn’t matter either…

Because Fred Sandoval loves San Benito…. Maybe that’s why the city paid nearly two thousand dollars to send Roy Garcia to a Nashville convention of entertainment buyers in October.

We know city officials will be watching this report. Wayne has posted, this city e-mail exclaimed. They even paid a PR company to transcribe what I said on the San Benito shakedown…

Hey guys, we put all the words on our website for free…

Keep up with us on social media:
Facebooktwitterlinkedinrssyoutubeinstagram