City Hall Lies
It’s a CITY OF LIES… Ok – I know that could be a lot of places! This time it’s Pasadena, but we have a new mayor in City Hall helping us expose.
City Hall Lies
We now know the City of Pasadena, Texas, bald-faced lied to its own citizens for two years.
They lied to us too.
“Let me give a piece of advice to all the folks who try to lie to us folks at Dolcefino Media—Don’t do it. We’re going to find a way to fight to get to the truth and expose you,” Wayne Dolcefino told the camera.
“This is the first time you’ve seen these records,” Dolcefino asked.
“Yes, this is. This is the first time we’ve seen these records,” Mayor Thomas Schoenbein said.
As he promised, the new Mayor of Pasadena, Thomas Schoenbein turned over records illegally withheld from us for nearly two years.
“One of the things I want to provide to our citizens is true transparency,” said Mayor Schoenbein.
“Breaking news from Pasadena: The city’s mayor was rushed to the hospital for a medical emergency,” from a news clip.
Just three days after that interview, the new Mayor collapsed in his office at City Hall. He was flown by LifeFlight helicopter to the hospital. We are grateful he’s ok. First responders got there quickly.
“But what if it had been a young mother driving on Spencer Highway or Pasadena Boulevard or a grandmother having an attack on Raspberry Lane?” Dolcefino told the camera.
It crystallized why it is critical to public safety to get an ambulance to your call for help, so you can get to the hospital alive. With a fighting chance.
We already had a copy of the city contract with Acadian Ambulance. It required the Louisiana company to get to the scene of a Priority One emergency within eight minutes and fifty-nine seconds, ninety percent of the time.
After proving Acadian had submitted falsified response time records in the Golden Triangle, we wanted to find out if the company was violating their agreement with Pasadena taxpayers.
Acadian charges more than a million dollars for its 911 service. Price has more than doubled in just five years. And the company makes most of its money, not from 911 calls, from insurance payments and a big share of private ambulance business.
“The current contract does not require Acadian to have a set number of ambulances in the city dedicated when there is a call for help, the new Mayor doesn’t like that,” Dolcefino told the camera.
“Yes, ambulances should be dedicated in a city of our size,” Mayor Schoenbein said.
“You may remember that our first request for records was in December of ’23, the city fought us for months,” Dolcefino told the camera.
But the Texas Attorney General ruled the response time records clearly were public.
Look at what the city then told us—they had no records.
The former city administration fought us again when we asked for the records in April of 2025.
“It was all a lie, a betrayal to taxpayers. The city had these ambulance response time records the entire time, they simply lied to us,” Dolcefino told the camera.
We finally got to analyze three months of detailed response time records over three years.
Response times over 8 minutes and fifty-nine seconds are in red, and you can see there is a ton of them, but this was the worst we saw.
A heart attack reported at the Parkway Senior Apartments on Fairmont Parkway. It took the ambulance 57 minutes—nearly an hour—just to get to the scene.
There’s no evidence the City Health Department ever opened an investigation to find out why.
Look at this document, it shows in yellow all the months Acadian violated the city contract. The Pasadena Health Department had this record all along. They just kept it from us.
The city had the right to collect financial penalties for every month marked in yellow. Look at them all. But no one tried to get a penny from Acadian.
“Instead, the City Health Director renegotiated the contract, not to watch Acadian more closely because of all the failed response times, but to make it easier for them to pass. It’s like the company wrote the new contract. Boy, that stinks,” Dolcefino told the camera.
It gave Acadian the right to use other vehicles to measure their response time as long as a paramedic was on board, even in an SUV. But it’s the ambulance that takes you to the hospital in an emergency. That’s the response time that matters.
“Is that satisfactory to you?” Dolcefino asked.
“No, not at all. Not all,” Mayor Schoenbein said.
Just hours after Schoenbein was sworn in, he presided over his first City Council meeting, but the agenda that day was Wagner’s.
Also on the agenda was a scheduled vote to extend Acadian’s contract past September of next year. The Mayor stopped it.
The vote to keep using Acadian through September of ‘26 was last year. The new Mayor was on Council then, but he says they were kept in the dark about the fine print.
“We’re going to go in, look at the language line by line, and see what we can do to salvage the situation. Our citizens need quality care in a time of emergency,” Mayor Schoenbein said.
The new Mayor has spent his first weeks in office trying to piece together the reckless spending.
The city has fired the company handling the construction of the new convention center. They’ve been paid millions.
The budget ballooned 85 million dollars without the knowledge or permission of City Council.
The head of the EDC in Pasadena retired before the axe came.
“We’re looking at every aspect of the contracts that were laid out there. We’re going to follow the money,” Mayor Schoenbein said.
“I do want to be the mayor, and I will be the mayor in spite of you,” said Rex Lindberg in an old interview.
That kind of campaign arrogance wasn’t smart politics.
“I think what I’ll do is I’ll have you arrested if you don’t get away from me,” said Lindberg in an old interview.
It was an idle threat, but days after that viral social media moment, Rex Lindberg lost the mayor’s race just southeast of town.
The day after the election, Lindberg took vacation till the end of his employment.
“I’m on vacation, I’m out here working,” said Lindberg in an old interview.
He hadn’t claimed a single vacation day in eight years until the final days of the campaign.
Sure.
The former Mayor Jeff Wagner disappeared too from City Hall.
“It was all a final slap in the face to taxpayers who deserve a seamless transition when a new mayor takes over in any city, not a disappearing act,” Dolcefino told the camera.
But the tips of where to look for Wagner administration misconduct are coming in to the new Mayor.
“When we started asking questions, it gave us a treasure chest full of information that we could go and start exploring so that we can make our city better,” Mayor Schoenbein said .
“You know who else disappeared before the axes started to fall?” Dolcefino told the camera.
That guy, Chris Cortinas, the City website director, and it’s the Cortinas connection that has prompted complaints to the Rangers and the FBI.
Campaign reports show in his final weeks in office. Jeff Wagner continued to funnel tens of thousands of dollars in his campaign money to a company Cortinas ran on the side, called Cavalier Concepts. Look at all the payments for campaign consulting, for a guy who wasn’t running for reelection, he had no campaign.
Wagner literally drained his campaign account in the final weeks.
But what exactly was Chris Cortinas doing for all that money, it’s been a bit of a mystery. Cortinas won’t tell us.
“Boy, I wish I had subpoena power,” Dolcefino told the camera.
We know Rex Lindberg also paid Cavalier in the final weeks of his failed campaign.
20 grand. For fundraising consulting.
While Cortinas supposedly worked full time for Pasadena City Hall.
“I’ve got a tip for the investigators looking at all this—follow the money,” Dolcefino told the camera.
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