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The Trials of Ralph Hernandez

Next time you pick up a copy of the Buffalo News and read a story critical of West District School Board member Ralph Hernandez, you can bet he’s recently done something to upset Superintendent James A. Williams.

When Hernandez called for the superintendent to resign following an explosive. closed-door executive session in February, he didn’t receive much support from his colleagues. Instead, their response was to set in motion an ethics committee investigation to examine a four-day trip Hernandez had made to New York in October 2006, paid for by the school district.

The investigation alleges that Hernandez skipped meetings at the Conference of Big 5 School Districts while in New York City. Hernandez counters that he had no commitment to attend those events and was serving instead as the district’s delegate to the New York State School Board Association’s annual convention—which occurs at the same time, in the same city. This was the role he understood he was to play as a representative of the board, and there he attended several workshops and a separate, day-long meeting.

At the time, Hernandez viewed the board’s charges as an attempt to discredit him. After all, he has been outspoken on a number of issues, including a lucrative team sports equipment contract that was awarded to a vendor that had made a large donation to the superintendent’s Buffalo Public School Foundation. It was his criticism of the bidding process that led to the expletive-filled, closed-door session in February that prompted Hernandez to call for Williams’ resignation.

It should be noted that all information pertaining to the Buffalo Public School Foundation is difficult to verify through the superintendent’s office due to the fact that, when called, they do not answer any questions regarding the private foundation. And you can’t file a FOIL request on a private foundation. According to a source outside the school system, a check for $17,500 to the foundation accompanied the winning bid from Ad Pro Team Sports of Buffalo. However, a March 11 article by Buffalo News sports writer Jerry Sullivan indicates that the winning bidder had donated $105,000 to the foundation. Other articles in the Buffalo News seem to place the value of the check at $50,000.

School board CFO and COO Gary Crosby explains that the contribution to the Buffalo Public School Foundation came straight from Nike, not Ad Pro. The amount promised to the foundation from the corporate giant is $17,500 per year over six years. In return, all Buffalo high school athletes would become little billboards for the Nike brand whenever they suited up with gear purchased from Ad Pro of Buffalo for the next six years—a great bargain for that kind of brand placement. So it looks like the total is Sullivan’s $105,000 figure, spread out over six years. However, Crosby says, no money has come from Nike yet, even though an initial order was placed and some student athletes are currently sporting Nike gear.

Here’s why. In January, consistent with Hernandez’s view, State Supreme Court Justice John A. Michalek determined that the bidding procedures used in that case were “impermissibly vague” and in violation of bidding rules approved by both the New York State Comptroller’s office and state education officials. As a result, the Buffalo School Board was ordered to re-bid the contract. Not content with the State Supreme Court ruling, the school district formally filed an appeal last Friday, March 23. If their appeal is successful, the contract will stand and the checks from Nike will begin to arrive as the city places more equipment orders with Ad Pro.

But sports equipment is not the only issue that finds Hernandez at odds with both the superintendent and the board. An audit published March 2 by the New York State Comptroller’s office examined the district’s internal controls relating to professional services for the period between July 1, 2001 and June 30, 2006. The report focuses on the district’s dealings with the Center for Applied Technology in Education (CATE) and the Education Innovations Consortium (EIC). Both are affiliated with the University at Buffalo, and Donald Jacobs is the executive director of both organizations. He is the same Donald Jacobs who served as the school district’s interim chief operating officer from September 2001 to January 2002—a point of some concern to the comptroller’s office. When contacted through the CATE office, Donald Jacobs declined to return phone calls.

In the comptroller’s report, both the district and the university are strongly criticized for shoddy record-keeping. After testing 30 payments to CATE and EIC, the report concludes that no contracts were executed between the district and either vendor for $6.3 million worth of work. Many times the district approved payment for un-itemized work and sometimes paid the vendors in full before their services were provided. In a number of cases the comptroller’s office could not even determine what services actually were provided. For instance, the district paid $585,529 in grant money to CATE in October 2003. However, district officials were unable to provide documentation of the services the district received.

Mary Harley Gresham, dean of the UB Graduate School of Education, stated the following in a February 9 letter to Superintendent Williams, after extensive consultation with UB’s legal counsel: “Because the comptroller did not find a single piece of paper called a ‘contract’ for each category of services, the OSC inappropriately and irresponsibly concluded that as a matter of law, no contractual obligation existed. This ignores the fact that detailed documentary records substantiating each CATE/EIC project exist and were made available to the OSC audit staff.”

In a conciliatory letter to Albany dated February 13, Williams responded to the comptroller’s investigation. In it, he is quick to point out that the audit issues originated prior to his administration and goes on to list five points implemented in the last 18 months that are designed to improve the way the district does business with vendors. Among these five new policies, vendor invoices must now detail the services provided and the amounts billed for each of the services.

This concept is better known among laymen as “getting a receipt.”

For obvious reasons, the superintendent, the board and UB would like to put this humiliating audit behind them. They’ve issued responses, made adjustments, instituted corrective action and would like to move on now.

But some people, Ralph Hernandez among them, would still like to find out what the school district received for that $6.3 million. To that end, Hernandez issued a letter to New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on March 21, requesting a criminal investigation to determine if the comptroller’s audit may indicate criminal activities. “The misuse of public funds,” wrote Hernandez, “will surely continue unless individuals and corporate entities who knowingly capitalize on grant misappropriations are exposed and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Further, parents and taxpayers want to know why $6.3 million in grant funds never made it into the classroom, as were intended.”

He sent copies to the superintendent and members of the Board of Education.

The next day, Hernandez received a phone call from Buffalo News reporter Peter Simon. Simon was looking for his reaction to new ethics charges being brought against Hernandez by the board—that he had improperly intruded into the purchasing practices of the district by introducing two district employees to prospective vendors. These accusations were being added to the existing ethics probe regarding Hernandez’s travel to New York City.

This was the first time Hernandez had heard of the new charges, and, stuck for a quote, he requested some supporting documentation before speaking on the subject. What he received from the News were two letters.

One was from Gary M. Crosby, dated March 16, addressed to outgoing board member Donald Van Every, chairman of the Audit Advisory Committee for the Buffalo Board of Education. The letter describes the experiences of two unnamed district employees. In both cases, Hernandez is alleged to have introduced prospective vendors to these anonymous employees.

The second letter, dated March 21, is from Donald Van Every to board president Florence Johnson and copied to Superintendent James Williams, board CFO/COO Gary Crosby, board clerk James Kane and Hon. James MacLeod, the head of the ethics panel. The letter accuses Hernandez of “reaching down into the supervisory ranks of the organization to promote the cause of vendors, friends or individuals who may do business the district could be involved in.” The letter includes a handwritten note to the reporter at the News which reads: “Embargo until I am able to speak with the Board about this issue. I will call you this evening ASAP.”

Artvoice’s phone calls to Van Every were not returned.

Neither the vendors nor the complainants are named in the letters or in the Buffalo News article, but Artvoice has learned that one of the potential vendors referred to in the probe is Hector Gil, a financial services professional who has known Hernandez a long time. According to Gil, he and Hernandez were having lunch on Monday, March 12, when he asked him how bids are made to the school district.

From the lunch table, Hernandez called Benefits Manager Mary O’Shei on his cell phone and asked her if she would call Gil to explain the procedure. He then gave her Gil’s phone number. Gil never heard back from O’Shei, and when Artvoice called her on Monday, March 26, her machine indicated that she would be out of the office until April 2. Gary Crosby would neither confirm nor deny the anonymous employee’s identity.

If O’Shei is in fact the anonymous source of one of the complaints, then it could prove one thing: Hernandez could be guilty of complicating “the process” by giving the benefits manager more work to do. Instead of contacting the interested vendor, someone—possibly O’Shei—complained to Crosby that she was “appalled” by a March 12 phone call from Hernandez and worried that a newer employee might feel compelled to be responsive to such a request.

Gil said he felt terrible when he read the story in the Buffalo News. Reading it, he said he assumed that he was one of the anonymous vendors alluded to in the piece. He maintains that nothing resembling coercion or intimidation had taken place during the brief phone call to O’Shei. He is a financial services professional, and part of his job description is to scout leads. Gil agreed to be named in this story and expressed dismay that he hadn’t been contacted for the initial story in the News.

For whatever reason, that didn’t happen. What the News published was a story filled with more anonymous informants than a spy novel and the salacious headline “Ethics panel to investigate Hernandez.”

That’s not the kind of headline any politician wants to see when he’s up for re-election in a month.