Birds Of A Feather
What do they say about BIRDS OF A FEATHER? They flock together. And in South Padre Island its the birds that have drawn attention to the financial funny business going on with the proposed new convention center.
Birds Of A Feather
For the singer Billie Eilish, the phrase “birds of a feather” are lyrics in a popular love song.
“And when you watch our investigations on social media, you get to see all the love we get along the way,” Wayne Dolcefino told the camera.
“I think what I’ll do is I’ll have you arrested if you don’t get away from me. How about that?” Rex Linberg said in an interview.
“Ok why don’t you do that,” Dolcefino said.
“When I think about birds of a feather, I think about all the public officials I’ve met along the way who come up with schemes to misuse or abuse your money,” Dolcefino told the camera.
Like the clearly corrupt expansion of the convention center in Pasadena, Texas. It is now mired in scandal.
“What the hell was going on there?” Dolcefino asked.
“That’s a great question,” Mayor Thomas Schoenbein said.
We already busted the former mayor.
A company run by his next-door neighbor got a five million dollar contract in the deal. What a coincidence.
But it’s not the only place where a planned convention center project clearly has a stench to it.
In fact, we’ve found a lot that smells on South Padre Island.
“And the way you guys brush aside questions we put forward to you, Joe. Like, ‘Hey, I’m the king here, so nobody ask me questions.’ That’s ridiculous,” Barry Patel said.
Barry Patel is no island beach bum.
He has developed more than 30 hotels in the Rio Grande Valley.
Nine properties on South Padre Island alone. He’s the former mayor of the town.
“I think it’s wrong to spend all this money in a small town like ours. We have one shot at this, folks,” Patel said.
And he’s crying foul about the projected cost of a new convention center.
“Who is going to insure a 120 million dollar convention center on a barrier island in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico?” Patel said.
Patel knows who’s orchestrating this expensive project. It will wipe out all the venue taxes collected in the city since 2016.
It’s the guy hiding behind a column so you can’t see his face.
“Can this island support that big of a convention center?” Dolcefino asked.
Oh, there he is… Joe Ricco.
“What’s the big hurry?” Patel asked.
“I don’t know what we are going to do here. You want to cancel the contract?” Patrick said.
The convention bureau started spending money on architects, before they did the obvious.
Ask the Cameron County commissioners if it was OK, because the convention center is built on land owned by the county.
Guess what happened.
“Today the Cameron County Commissioners Court voted to deny South Padre Island’s request to expand their convention center” from a news story.
The city had ruffled a lot of feathers with their first proposed design.
Because it would have put a new amphitheater on land now used by migrating birds. Mother Nature is one of the big draws for tourists.
An army of birders descended on City Hall.
“Next up is public comments,” McNulty said.
“Sadly, South Padre Island is almost completely developed, and there is basically nowhere else for them to go,” Tiffany Kirsten said.
South Padre City Council had voted to hire Gignac Architect for the proposed convention center design, but even councilmembers had been kept in the dark about the invoices for money already spent.
While South Padre has been playing games with requests for public records, we know almost three million has been spent.
The convention bureau president Blake Henry has refused to talk to us.
“We’ve gotten pretty good at examining and exposing smelly government contracts, and there is something we saw in the South Padre Island documents that scream red flags to us,” Dolcefino told the camera.
It’s the bidding for what is called a CMAR; a Construction Manager at Risk. The company charged with making sure the price doesn’t keep going up after the project starts.
“We need to hire a CMAR so we can try figuring out what the true budget is for what this thing is and what we can do and all that stuff,” McNulty said.
There were two bidders: SpawGlass and Fulton Construction.
“A scoring committee of six was formed to review and evaluate presentations, and I am happy to report that Fulton Construction was selected for our project,” Blake Henry said.
The Corpus Christi company does a lot of work with school districts, and they’ve made the news in the Coastal Bend too.
“The FBI conducted simultaneous raids in Corpus Christi yesterday, one of them right here at Fulton Construction company,” said in a news story.
We took a closer look at the scoring sheets on that bid.
And we spotted this.
Suspicious in our kind of work. Changes to the numbers after the initial scoring was turned in.
The totals changed for Fulton days after the original scoring by at least four of the six scorers.
City Manager Randy Smith, another guy who won’t talk to us, awarded Fulton the full 20 points for their interview more than a week after others had already voted and turned their sheets in.
But there’s something else, the dramatic escalation in what Fulton planned to charge South Padre.
In their first bid in March of ’24, it was 5.5 million, a percentage of the total construction cost.
But by July, the cost had gone up to 7.8 million dollars.
But look at the bid for SpawGlass — 6.8 million dollars.
“I’m not that great in math, but I think I can figure out. That’s a million dollars less,” Dolcefino told the camera.
South Padre Island convention planners apparently don’t care much about the price.
It was only five percent of the total scoring.
Yet look at the scoring awarded for price.
Five out of the six island officials involved in the scoring gave Fulton the best possible score — 5, a total of 28 points.
The company that was the better financial deal for taxpayers, they somehow got less — 21 points.
“We’ve been asking for weeks how is this possible, how someone can bid a million dollars less and still lose the contract?” Dolcefino told the camera.
We called the politicians, and the bureaucrats who signed those scoring sheets, and we got nothing in return.
We were told to direct our questions to Nikki Soto, the city secretary.
“Well ye, ‘cause media interviews do go through me,” Nikki Soto said.
So we asked her and we got silence from her too.
The natives are getting restless in South Padre, they should be.
The Cameron County District Attorney has opened up an investigation into the possible illegal withholding of public records in South Padre.
We have filed complaints alleging a systematic pattern of official oppression and misuse of city employees,
designed to harass and drive out competitors to Joe Ricco
and his business partner, Mayor Patrick McNulty.
Voters should consider conflicts of interest when they go back to the polls.
“Maybe we need a new set of leaders to take it forward. I don’t know. Maybe it’s time to throw in the towel and let someone else try this,” Barry Patel said.
Leaders that should know it is a crime to abuse their government office.
“If you want to take your camera out of here, you need to be very quiet about doing it, or we are going to stop this meeting for you to leave, okay?” McNulty said.
“Why are people scared of you?” Dolcefino said.
“I can’t answer that. I’ve never heard that,” Ricco said.
“Are you a tough guy? Are you a mean guy?” Dolcefino said.
“Do I look like it?” Ricco said.
“No,” Dolcefino said.
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