Rojas Chickens

10/14/02 Rojas Chickens come home to roost!

Might be that the DISD Board settled prematurely with Lounge Lizard Bill Rojas. DallasArena.com

From Exoneration:

Then there's Lounge Lizard Rojas getting more of our money, when he's the bad guy. It's understandable that we could have won that lawsuit and spent a lot more money in legal fees getting a moral victory. We certainly could not have made Rojas pay us for our costs because he has no money. But, it doesn't feel right to be giving that Lounge Lizard $135,000. Dr. Lois Parrott was fulfilling her fiduciary duties as a DISD Trustee when she questioned his use of DISD issued credit cards, but that was not his only issue against Dr. Parrott.

DISD settles with Rojas for $135,000
Agreement resolves ex-superintendent's defamation lawsuit
08/31/2002 By TAWNELL D. HOBBS / The Dallas Morning News

. . . The Dallas school board agreed Friday to give the former superintendent $135,000 to drop his defamation lawsuit against two trustees. Dr. Rojas also will receive $90,000 in severance pay that has been held up in escrow. . . . District officials say paying their former leader was cheaper than battling him in court. . . . Jeff Tillotson, Dr. Rojas' attorney, said . . . . "He's happy to have this part of his life over," he said. "He was profoundly disappointed in the way things turned out. He wishes the board of trustees and Dr. Moses well." . . .
Dr. Rojas also alleged that trustees Hollis Brashear and Lois Parrott had defamed him by publicly accusing him of misusing a district-issued credit card for alcohol, personal trips and other wrongdoing. . . . "He believes that he's been tarnished because anytime he applies for or seeks a position in the education field people say, 'Yeah, you're the guy who went through the stuff in Dallas.' "

Lounge Lizard Rojas can't get a job because he left behind chaos and deficits in several school districts where he was hired to bring order and stability. Compared to the things in print in San Francisco (search for "Rojas" to get links to those stories), anything Brashear or Parrott may have said about Rojas would be considered complimentary.

Here's my problem with all this. We are selling out justice for cost efficiency. In the DISD/Rojas situation, that East Coast bum loaded up the administration with his gang from California at incredibly high salaries. He pushed the Edison Project through, and that has turned out to be a mistake. He did charge alcohol on his DISD card. It doesn't matter if the Lounge Lizard reimbursed us for it or not. He knew the rules. He could have used his own credit card to buy his drinks. He's a Ph.D. He ought to be able to read the name on a credit card.

The Trustees did the right thing by settling with Lounge Lizard, but it doesn't feel right. It just doesn't feel as wrong as letting Old Al get away with taking bribes from at least two different bribers -- and getting away with it.

Well, the folks in San Francisco are not Exonerating or Absolving Lounge Lizard Rojas. They just arrested some of his co-horts, and the

S.F. schools scam alleged Ex-Rojas aide, wife arrested -- 3 others still at large
Jaxon Van Derbeken, Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writers

Thursday, October 10, 2002

A onetime top aide to former San Francisco schools Superintendent Bill Rojas was arrested Wednesday on charges that he conspired with a North Carolina heating contractor to skim $850,000 from the financially troubled school district.
     Tim Tronson, a $1,000-a-day consultant who ran the district's facilities division until current Superintendent Arlene Ackerman canceled his contract in 2000, was charged along with his wife, his brother-in-law, a business partner and two former employees of the North Carolina company, Strategic Resource Solutions Corp. The company is charged with malfeasance as well.
     Prosecutors say Tronson was at the heart of a scheme to raid district money set aside for a $30 million energy efficiency project. Tronson is accused of 22 felony counts, and if convicted of all of them, the 45-year-old Redwood City resident could be sentenced to as much as 21 years in state prison.
     "Basically, it was stealing, stealing from children," said school board President Jill Wynns
. . . In addition to the alleged theft, the charges accuse Strategic Resource Solutions of using $25,000 in district money to make an illegal political donation to a soft-money committee that was boosting Mayor Willie Brown's 1999 re-election.
. . . San Francisco, salesman Thomas C. Marnane, 40, of Maryland and former executive Gregory B. Gabrilson, 55, of Arizona. Both were still at large Wednesday, as was Tronson's business partner, Alpha Omega Bibbs III, 54, owner of a Foster City company called Covenant Enterprises.
. . .Prosecutors say Bibbs and Tronson, who owned an interest in Covenant, conspired with Marnane and Gabrilson to file false documents that resulted in $500,000 in school district money going to Covenant illegally.
. . .The defendants fleeced the school district for another $350,000 through "an amazing web of false claims and schemes," said District Attorney Terence Hallinan.
. . .School district officials expressed satisfaction about Tronson's arrest Wednesday.
    "It's been a long time coming and has cost us in terms of the public trust, " said Ackerman, who initiated the investigation shortly after arriving in San Francisco two years ago.
     Wynns recalled that Tronson had presented the contract to the school board as a great deal: energy savings at no cost to the district.
     But the board saw few specifics, something she said was typical under Rojas, the district's superintendent from 1992 to 1999. . . . "Tronson was his guy," Wynns said. "Tronson was a wheeler-dealer, the guy who could always get things done by using his connections. Rojas thought that was good."
     Rojas left to be superintendent of Dallas schools but was fired after 11 months on the job. He could not be located for comment Wednesday night.
     A sidelight to the alleged scheme involved what prosecutors called an illegal contribution to Brown's 1999 campaign.
     According to an affidavit supporting the charges, Bibbs told prosecutors that Strategic Resource Solutions had wanted to donate $25,000 to Brown. Bibbs said Marnane had told him to bill the school district $35,000 via a contract change order, and then to use $25,000 of that to make the donation. . . . Once he had the money, Bibbs said, he met with Carolyn Carpeneti, then the mayor's political fund-raiser and now the mother of Brown's year-old daughter. According to the affidavit, Carpeneti told Bibbs that he could not directly donate $25,000 because of a city law capping individual donations at $750 per candidate.
      She suggested that Bibbs instead give the money to the San Francisco Democratic Party, which had mounted an independent campaign to re-elect Brown. Such donations are legal. . . . In one account to the investigator, Bibbs said he had delivered the check at the party to Edwin Lee, the city's purchasing director. . . . It was unclear how the money was ultimately delivered, but the Democratic Party reported receiving a $25,000 donation from Covenant, the affidavit says.

Chronicle staff writer Lance Williams contributed to this report. / E-mail the writers at jvanderbeken@sfchronicle.com and nasimov@sfchronicle.com.

Too bad for these crooks that they didn't do their crime in Dallas. If they had taken their payoffs here and got convicted, they would not have to do their time and instead would get accolades from all the big shots in town.

The more things change . . .