On The Road Again
We battle injustice, fraud and corruption for a living. So, we get in a fighting mood when government officials take advantage of someone just to help their friend. All while spending your money to do it. That’s why we’re ON THE ROAD AGAIN to get an apology.
On The Road Again
We hoped our investigation two years ago helped fix the justice system in the Piney Woods.
Our Kicking Asphalt reports led to the resignation of Angelina County District Attorney Janet Casells.
We helped drive out Commissioner Terry Pitts amidst allegations he cheated taxpayers on asphalt.
But we are on the road to Lufkin again because five years after we first started our work here, the injustice against the people of Angelina County continues.
“They made the assumption that I am a stupid Mexican that does not know real estate law,” Arturo Mendoza said.
And now there are calls for Angelina County Judge Keith Wright and County Commissioners to apologize to Arturo Mendoza after he was forced to take his fight over his own property all the way to the Texas Supreme Court.
We think that apology should happen at their next meeting.
When they made the *Popeye* movie, all the sailor man really wanted was an apology from these guys.
“What we have here is a county government that violated the United States Constitution and the Texas Constitution by trying to take somebody’s property — a citizen’s property — without consent or without compensation, and just take it, and that violates everything that we know,” Bob Flornoy said.
“They treated me like a dog,” Mendoza said.
Arturo Mendoza never wanted to be the victim of a county road system that continues to be corrupt.
Back in 2017, his family bought 69 acres here. It included a private road that cut through the middle of his land to a house owned by a powerful Angelina County family on landlocked property.
Mendoza honored their right to use his road but noticed Commissioner Terry Pitts would occasionally send county equipment there to maintain it.
And when he tried to put fences up to protect his property, Angelina County government tried to teach him a lesson.
Terry Pitts and County Judge Keith Wright decided Arturo Mendoza’s road wasn’t his — that it belonged to Angelina County instead.
A road that also led to property bought by a Baptist church, a church that Judge Keith Wright’s family attended.
They got the Angelina County Sheriff, Troy Sehlman, to send Mendoza this threatening letter after deputies arrived to tear his fence down.
So Mendoza did what you would do: fight for his property. He sued.
“They need to go ahead and be removed from office, from their positions,” Mendoza said.
But this is Angelina County, and the local District Judge Robert Inselmann ruled for the county even without giving Mr. Mendoza a simple court hearing.
A Texas appeals court ruled that Mendoza’s property was illegally taken.
And the Texas Supreme Court apparently agrees.
An important victory in court that’s been ignored by the local paper.
The county has refused to say how much of your tax money they wasted on this fight against private property rights.
“All the Mendozas ever wanted, even after they came to his place and tore up his fence and scared him and his wife, was an acknowledgment that it was their property — and he never got that,” Flornoy said.
Because of a Texas law that makes it downright hard to sue government, Angelina County Commissioners will not be forced to pay damages to Mr. Mendoza for what they did to him, or even reimburse his $50,000 in legal fees.
“But commissioners, you should apologize right away. Because what you did to this guy was simply wrong, and a reminder of the corrupt grip Angelina public officials continue to hold on the roads they were elected to simply fix,” Wayne Dolcefino told the camera.
“You know corruption, you know my buddy system, you know you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” Mendoza said.
“You think they’re doing something because of the new owner of that property?” Dolcefino asked.
“Correct,” Mendoza said.
“I guess we are done here,” Dolcefino said.
“We are done,” Terry Pitts said.
No, we are not.
Arturo Mendoza has now filed a lawsuit against you, claiming you can be held liable for damages because what you did was a crime — he says, a crime.
The misuse of county equipment was very similar to complaints made when you built a private dock, and the use of the sheriff was a way to weaponize the justice system to cover up a crime.
“So I guess the county is going to be spending more money defending Pitts, and he was really the cause for primarily the whole thing, and then the county judge, of course, trying to cover it up and trying to help his friends,” Flornoy said.
The bad roads will haunt Judge Keith Wright as he tries to run for reelection.
The spending on the roads has quadrupled since he became county judge.
Of course, more miles of road have been repaired, but some of that money, it seems, may have been wasted because of the way the road work already looks.
Look at the way the road comes up on Memory Road after just a couple of years.
And it should help Angelina County taxpayers remember the biggest fail for Judge Wright.
“You about to get me aggravated,” James McMullen said.
Hiring this guy, James McMullen, was the mistake we warned folks about at the time.
We watched him mishandle a bid for a simple tractor.
“You refused to talk to me. You refused to take my phone calls. You ain’t even went out there and looked at your shoddy work, ’cause I can tell you now, if you was on my job site, I would have wrote you off.”
McMullen was finally fired a few months ago.
And while commissioners look again for an actual engineer to run the roads, Judge Wright wanted to promote this guy to take over the job, at least for now.
“Coming out of executive session, we’re going to item 26 — actually appointing an interim road administrator for the Angelina County road system.”
You all remember Clint Caton.
He’s the guy who was demoted just a few years ago after he fixed roads without commissioners’ approval, including the two roads in front and back of now-former Commissioner Steve Smith’s house.
The only new streets in Smith’s entire neighborhood that got paved. How do you think that looked?
“What’s y’all’s pleasure?” Keith Wright said.
It was apparently not the pleasure to promote Caton, but by default, he’s now in charge anyway as Wright and the commissioners try once again to find an engineer to do the job.
But Wright begins his reelection campaign trying to explain to voters why, five full years after they voted to stop the political corruption involving the roads, it’s all been so mismanaged.
Why Wright never asked for a formal audit, even after the first engineer the county hired to do the roads blew the whistle and documented financial discrepancies.
Asphalt favors for friends. That’s why our *Kicking Asphalt* investigation began.
Remember Chuck Walker? He was fired after his road measurements seemed to prove that something really stunk in a six-million-dollar road improvement project.
Money that commissioners had borrowed with interest.
Guess where the biggest discrepancies were? In the precinct of now-former Commissioner Pitts.
And it was a complaint from Pitts that led to Walker being charged with a crime for misusing property, not Pitts.
A full three years later, those charges are still pending, but the county has already voted to pay fifteen thousand dollars to Walker to settle his whistleblower lawsuit.
“Stay tuned, because coming soon, the latest developments from those politically tainted prosecutions in Angelina County,” Dolcefino told the camera.
“It’s going to be painful. It’s going to be difficult,” Wright said.
Not exactly a Chamber of Commerce moment when Wright detail the road problems that continue to harm economic development in Angelina county.
“When you go down a road that you can hardly drive down because there’s so many potholes and so many base failures, you don’t want to build a house there,” Wright said.
Four years after being elected county judge, Wright will enter a Republican primary for reelection with a politically dangerous message.
The Judge took to social media this week to complain that “disagreement has become hate, discussion has become argument, politics has become character assassination.”
In Popeye, the folks lived in an over taxed place called Sweet Haven. Ruled by a mean guy named Bluto.
“Hey judge, I don’t think you’re Bluto but you do know the slang word for money, don’t you? It’s spinach,” Dolcefino told the camera.
And some of Angelina County’s precious road tax money will likely have to be spent now to fix up the roads that were so badly repaired the last few years.
While Angelina County taxpayers are remined of the other road injustice that continue to haunt this Texas County, like the illegal one, the right administration pulled off on a guy who simply was protecting his own land.
That’s not character assassination, judge. That’s called the Texas Supreme Court.
“And that was just a plan that they have to use the entire justice system to cover up what they have been doing wrong,” Flournoy said.
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