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March 23, 2006

Secrets
By Jack D. McNamara

Last week’s Big Bend Sentinel published an accurate front page news story of the hearing regarding the Texas Open Meetings Act (TOMA) lawsuit initiated in federal court by Alpine City Council members Avinash Rangra and Anna Monclova. They are represented by attorneys Dick DeGuerin, Rod Ponton and Texas Tech law professor Dennis Olson.

The first hearing was conducted March 14 in U.S. District Court in Pecos before U.S. District Judge Robert Junell, who declared that a trial will begin July 25.

Much of what transpires in such a hearing is unintelligible to the average citizen because he is not familiar with the intricacies of the laws and the increasingly complex legal applications which afflict our 21st century society. Before such a hearing as that of March 14, there are numerous filings of petitions, briefs, affidavits, authorities, etc. The lawyers must familiarize themselves with this blizzard of paper (and now electronics) in order to argue their side before the judge.

The argument concerning the TOMA is especially complex because it concerns the issue of free speech in our daily lives. It is easy to become transfixed in arguments about old cases of disputes long forgotten.

Fortunately, the facts in this case were not ignored. In an exchange between Texas Attorney General representative James Todd and DeGuerin the specifics of the February 2005 indictment of Rangra and former Councilperson Elms-Lawrence were discussed. Todd asserted that the purpose of the TOMA was that public business be conducted in public, not in secret. In a written statement to the Sentinel for last week’s story the Attorney General said that the law forbids secret discussions as a quorum. The subject of the email for which Rangra and Elms were indicted concerned Alpine water plans.

Secret discussions?

We looked at our Alpine city agendas for the period from May 2003 when Avinash Rangra was elected through the end of 2004 when the effort to indict him and Katie Elms-Lawrence was secretly well underway. Over that period of 20 months there were at least 30 occasions when the subject of Alpine’s water business was publicly discussed. After March 2004 these public meetings and public discussions were videotaped by the city of Alpine. Most of them were also videotaped by either Mrs. Emily Scown (who has a lawsuit against the city for a water issue) or Amit Rangra, the councilman’s son. Three area weekly newspapers published numerous stories concerning the debate.

The Alpine and the Big Bend public have been deluged with public discussion about water for a half century, since the notorious 1950s’ seven-year drought. Much of that discussion concerns public policy about what to do to ensure our community’s water supply. But much of the policy dispute concerns the effort by Rangra and a majority of the council since 2003 to discover the facts of our water distribution system, the principal source of revenue to the city including Rangra’s unanswered query about how many gallons the wells produce.

On March 27, 2004 the new city manager, Karen Philippi estimated that the city was “losing” as much as 50% of the water pumped, several hundreds of millions of gallons annually. From May 2003 until right now (!) the council majority has struggled to publicly disclose the costly inefficiencies and possible corruption of city hall employees and special interests. Avinash Rangra and other councilmembers were elected to do just that job.

Instead, the 83rd District Attorney and the Brewster County grand jury indicted Avinash Rangra and Katie Elms-Lawrence just before the 2005 election and “threatened” Anna Monclova and Manuel Payne, as Professor Olson argued.

DeGuerin and Ponton’s filings recount these facts.

Judge Junell, a native of San Angelo where water in a desert is also an issue, acknowledged that he had read the briefs by making reference to Mark Twain’s famous quip, “Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.”

As the hearing in Pecos was concluding, the Attorney General’s representative said to DeGuerin, “We accept your facts.”

There were secrets aplenty here and some certainly remain.

In late April 2002 the El Paso office of the Texas Council on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) visited the 800 block of Alpine’s South Walker Street in Ward 4. They measured a water pressure of 25 pounds per square inch (psi). The state standard is 35 psi. The information was suppressed by Alpine’s city hall bureaucracy.

In August 2002 there was a secret meeting with no public notice in Alpine among City Manager Bill Lewis, city contracted engineer Steve Dennis of GSWW Associates, Pete Doles of the Albuquerque Office of the Army Corps of Engineers and others, probably a representative of the Marfa Sector Border Patrol. At the meeting they decided to change the route plan of a major water line from the western well field in Sunny Glen. Rather than take the line down the right-of-way of FM 1703 into the city, the group decided to cut across the country, bore under the railroad track and deliver the line to a new Border Patrol station on West Highway 90. From the BP station they then bored under the highway to deliver the line to commercial properties on the south side of the highway, properties developed by a senior Border Patrol officer, Dave Durant.

In March 2003 with the secret circumstance of unsatisfactory water pressure in the southeast ward of the city of Alpine the Alpine City Council quickly funded the water and sewer project with $1.35 million in revenue bonds voted by the incumbent city council. The council agenda for March 3, 2003 specified that the bonds would be discussed and considered but one of the bonds had already been sold before the council even sat down. (City Manager Karen Philippi later explained to me that it was a “negotiated sale” … but the public wasn’t in the negotiation).

Beginning with the May 2003 election the citizens of Alpine have replaced that city council which sat so quietly while the “negotiated” sale of a revenue bond flew past them. Three members of the 2002 council were defeated in elections and two departed under term limits. The only remaining member of the council who passed the March 2003 bonds is Mayor Mickey Clouse (who has no vote unless there is a tie).

Indeed, there have been secret deals here in Alpine. But District Attorney Brown and his Brewster County Grand Jury may have nabbed the wrong perps.

And that, on the facts, is what the TOMA case is about. Our local elections concern the question why do lifelong residents suffer with 25 psi water pressure while bond issues are floated for Border Patrol stations outside of the city limits? Water is what we want to discuss around here. Water is the principal function of the city of Alpine. Two “professional” city managers have come and gone in five years because they were too incompetent to deal with this very political issue. Any law which chills such discussion is bad law. •