A loyal reader sent this to our attention:
EPISD previously created a public facility corporation under Texas law.
They did this to pay for the new central office facilities.
The way it works is that the public facility corporation can authorize and sell bonds without voter approval. They simply place notices in the local newspaper (how many people subscribe to the newspaper, and of those who do how many ever even look at the classifieds?). If a voter petition that objects to the issuance does not get filed within 60 days they can issue the bonds. The petition must bear the signature of 5 percent of the registered voters in the district.
After all you didn’t complain did you?
From there the public facility corporation builds the building and leases it to the school district.
Nifty huh?
We deserve better
Brutus
Generally, a public bond issue requires a public TEFRA hearing that is posted in the legal notices and that no one ever shows up for. But even if one person does and protests, that will appear in the official bond transcript that investors use to evaluate the credit quality of the bonds. Someone buys those bonds.
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What’s legal is not necessarily moral or ethical. Special purpose entities and PFCs are perfect examples of just how much legal and financial engineering elected officials and public executives have done to disenfranchise the taxpayers who have to pay the bills created by officials who are acting unilaterally without taxpayer consent. Don’t ever forget that the Texas Legislature made this possible.
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Typical EPISD. Lie, deny, deceive. Go around, over voters, TAXPAYERS any way they can get away with. Waiting any day for them to jack up the GIVE AWAY to Cabrera to a cool MILLION$$$$ . With schools CLOSING, where are OUR tax cuts?? Maybe they just go out buy extra donuts, expensive dinners for everybody? Something, anything other than GIVE BACK to the PEOPLE. Need FBI Agents, Texas Rangers assigned INSIDE the EPISD.
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There was one other step, the EPISD sold the land the building is going to occupy to the to the Public Facility Corp and PFC will lease it all back to the EPISD.
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Who oversees the board? Looking at all the new positions (waste) Cabrera keeps on creating, I can’t help but wonder who is approving them? The C&I department has grown exponentially as well as other departments. They’ve created a “Transformation Zone” department as well with very high salaried employees. How can they get away with it?
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