WESLACO — Recently, 75-year-old Estela Robles Flores sat at her dining room table inside a tidy trailer on East 19th Street that she calls home.
Her daughter, Susana Flores, who is also her neighbor, had walked over to eat lunch on a day where gray clouds blanketed the sky but held little promise of rain.
Robles Flores and her daughter live on the same street where, nine years ago, The Monitor met with a woman named Maria Montoya.
At the time, Montoya was forced into making hard choices — pay her exorbitant water bill or other necessities, like electricity.
The city had twice raised its water rates in order to repay the massive debt load it had incurred while trying to repair its water and wastewater infrastructure.
TIMELINE: The long, costly history of a public corruption scheme | MyRGV.com
THE HISTORY
Prior to 2013, Weslaco had drawn the ire of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state’s water regulator.
Between 2004 and 2010, the city had racked up multiple TCEQ citations for being over capacity, for problems with water storage, treatment and more.
City leaders buried their heads in the sand, opting to ignore the pressing need for improvements.
In 2011, the city commission — led then by mayor pro tem John F. Cuellar — declared the situation an emergency, which paved the way for the city to approve repair contracts while circumventing the competitive bidding process.
Weslaco hired San Antonio-based Briones Engineering to design the project.
The city also hired CDM Smith, a Massachusetts-based engineering firm, to serve as both builder and manager of the project in what is known as a “construction manager at risk,” or CMAR.
It was a novel concept that the company promised would save Weslaco money through charging a “guaranteed maximum price.”
The city soon set about financing the project’s $38.5 million GMP — loans whose repayment was predicated on increasing water rates.
For residents of limited means, like Montoya and her family of nine, that meant water bills that spiked into the hundreds of dollars.
Residents have had to contend with higher-than-normal water rates ever since.
“So many people ask us, ‘Why do you pay so much for water?’” Robles Flores said in Spanish nearly a decade after Montoya spoke with The Monitor.
For Robles Flores, who lives on a fixed income after retiring as an adult daycare center cook, it’s not unusual to get a $125 utility bill, she said.
Robles Flores occasionally asks one of her daughters for help — $40 here, $50 there.
“Sometimes, I struggle to pay it,” Robles Flores said.
CONSPIRACY EQUALS COST
Something had been awry in 2011. And savvy residents took notice at the time.
In 2013, The Monitor published a study showing how the cost of Weslaco’s CMAR-based project far outpaced other municipalities working on similar projects — by millions of dollars.
“I had moved to Weslaco in 2012 and we quickly realized — we being me and my wife — that we were paying crazy water rates,” District 2 Weslaco Commissioner Gregory “Greg” Kerr said recently.
“I realized, after looking into it, that something seemingly illegal had happened,” Kerr said.
Those suspicions led Kerr, an attorney, to run against — and unseat — John Cuellar in the November 2014 election.
He, alongside a new group of city leaders, including David Suarez, who took over as mayor in 2013, began to seek answers for their suspicions.
In January 2016, the city filed a lawsuit against Briones Engineering, alleging negligence, fraud and breach of fiduciary duties.
Weslaco settled with Briones for $1.9 million in January 2018.
While the city had been litigating against Briones in 2017, federal investigators had begun to unravel a much larger story — one that involved CDM Smith and Briones funneling millions to middlemen, who would in turn pay bribes to some of Weslaco’s elected officials.
The bribes went from the contractors to three key players: Leonel J. “Leo” Lopez Jr., Arturo “A.C.” Cuellar and Ricardo “Rick” Quintanilla.
At the time, Lopez served as the Rio Grande City municipal judge, but was also employed as a “consultant” for Briones.
A.C. Cuellar, cousin to John Cuellar, served as the Precinct 1 Hidalgo County Commissioner. And Quintanilla was a cross-border businessman selling supplies to Mexican maquilas.
The trio, in turn, greased the palms of John Cuellar and other commissioners — including David Fox and Gerardo “Jerry” Tafolla — to cast their votes in favor of the water plant project and its steep costs.
In the spring of 2019, the house of cards at last began to fall.
Federal prosecutors announced bribery charges against Lopez, Tafolla, the two Cuellars and Quintanilla.
Lopez, Tafolla and John Cuellar pleaded guilty that same year; however, A.C. Cuellar and Quintanilla continued to maintain their innocence.
On Oct. 20, a federal jury found both men guilty on a litany of bribery, money laundering and other charges.
LASTING IMPACT
Nearly a decade after the Weslaco water plant fiasco started, however, residents still pay more for water and sewer service than in neighboring cities.
“It cost the citizens of Weslaco, the ratepayers, a lot,” former Weslaco City Manager Mike Perez told The Monitor.
“Weslaco is paying about $1 per thousand gallons more … than McAllen is paying because of that water plant,” he said.
Suarez, the mayor, brought Perez in to clean up the city in 2014.
When he got to the city, Perez immediately noticed that the cost of the water plant project seemed “not normal.”
Not only had the city leveraged a substantial amount of debt to fund the projects, but it has also begun cannibalizing money from other funds to try to keep up with payments.
“We were $2 million short, (and) had to borrow money from the sanitation fund,” Perez said.
Weslaco continues — and will for years to come — to pay down that debt today.
But the bribery scheme has had ancillary effects that stretch far beyond the debt burden.
“It has taken away the elasticity that the city should have should they need to borrow money for improvements in infrastructure,” Perez said.
Weslaco has had to get creative in doing the types of routine infrastructure upkeep that any city must attend to — all because the water plant fiasco ate up whatever financial flexibility the city had.
“We’ve done a lot of those improvements in-house because we can’t afford to bid it out,” Perez said.
VINDICATION
The unanimous guilty verdicts on the combined 70 counts against A.C. Cuellar and Rick Quintanilla are just the first step toward closure for Weslaco residents who began to suspect something was awry more than a decade ago.
“I think it vindicates a lot of the citizens who used to come in saying things were not done right and as a result, they’re having to pay for it,” Perez said, referring to the verdict.
“It was maybe a sense of relief knowing that we were finally starting to see the results of the yearslong investigation,” Kerr said.
For Suarez, the verdict meant that “justice was served.”
Sentencing for A.C. Cuellar and Quintanilla has been set for Jan. 18, 2023.
John Cuellar, who testified against his cousin, is slated to be sentenced the same day.
As for Tafolla — who testified against his lifelong friend, Rick Quintanilla — he and another former Weslaco commissioner, David Fox, are slated to be sentenced on Jan. 19, 2023.
The court has also set a forfeiture hearing this coming Tuesday to determine how much of the nearly $1.5 million in illicit proceeds A.C. Cuellar and Quintanilla will be ordered to turn over to the government.
But the saga still isn’t over.
Quintanilla has already begun the initial steps to appeal his conviction by filing a request for the entire transcript of the eight-day trial.
The Weslaco businessman is also facing additional charges regarding a $300,000 pay-to-play scheme with a man who sought to build a Motel 6 in Weslaco.
Quintanilla’s codefendant in that case, Sunil Wadhwani of McAllen, pleaded guilty in May 2020 and awaits sentencing.
And Weslaco remains embroiled in a civil lawsuit against the contractors in charge of the water plant project.
After settling with Briones in January 2018, the city filed a new lawsuit against him that October.
Weslaco expanded the new lawsuit to include CDM and its subsidiaries, along with McAllen-based LeFevre Engineering and Management, A.C. and John Cuellar, Quintanilla, and Leo Lopez, who has since died.
However, Weslaco’s civil fight has hit several roadblocks since its filing four years ago.
CDM tried to have the suit tossed using the state’s frivolous lawsuit statute known as the Texas Citizens Participation Act.
When the 139th state District Court denied the motion, CDM appealed the decision all the way to the Supreme Court of Texas.
But the high court refused to hear CDM’s petition and, last October, sent the case back to the Hidalgo County Courthouse. The lawsuit is tentatively set for trial in August 2023.
Weslaco has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars litigating the civil suits. But, Perez hopes the bribery scheme will “flush out” in the civil trial as it did in the criminal one.
“Someone needs to be held accountable for what was done,” Perez said.
Kerr agreed, saying that the conspiracy continues to send out ripples today.
“What people I think don’t forget, is that — even though this fraud happened years ago — we’re still paying for it. And you pay for it every month the day you pay your water bill,” Kerr said.
