Two Texas Contractors’ Guilty Pleas Delayed by Tropical Storm

DALLAS — Two contractors accused of bribing a board member for the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District in Texas in exchange for business in 2002 were expected to plead guilty yesterday, but the hearing was postponed because of Tropical Storm Erin, officials said. Attorneys for Jose “Joe” Lopez, an architect, and Pedro Armando Gutierrez, a masonry contractor, sought a postponement because of heavy rain caused by the storm. The federal courthouse in McAllen in the Rio Grande Valley is near the Gulf Coast of Texas where Erin made landfall.U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Hinojosa granted the continuance, and no date for the hearing has been set.Lopez and Gutierrez were accused in the February indictment of bribing PSJA trustee Rogelio “Roy” Rodriguez of Alamo. Rodriguez, awaiting trial in November on multiple charges, was accused of receiving cash payments totaling $65,000 from Lopez and Gutierrez between 1997 and 2004 in exchange for favorable votes on contracts on bond-funded projects.Rodriguez and Lopez were also charged with two counts of extortion and two counts of bribery in relation to a federal program. Rodriguez is also charged with Gutierrez in two counts of extortion and two counts of bribery in relation to a federal program. Rodriguez alone is charged with six counts of money laundering in which he is accused of concealing the source of bribe payments.The indictments were part of a series under U.S. attorney Don DeGabrielle in cases investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation beginning in 2003.The first set of indictments came in 2005. Former school board member Guadalupe Jaime Santa Maria and contractor Al Cardenas pleaded guilty to those bribery charges.The most recent indictments came in June, adding to Rodriguez’s charges.Indicted along with Rodriguez in June were two current PSJA trustees, the husband of a PSJA trustee, the superintendent of the PSJA school district, and two contractors for soliciting and receiving bribes in exchange for taking official action benefiting contractors.Other trustees indicted with Rodriguez were Roy Navarro, 58, of San Juan, and Evangelina “Vangie” De Leon, 46, of Alamo. Also charged were trustee DeLeon’s husband, Ricardo DeLeon, 44, and long-time PSJA-ISD superintendent, Arturo Guajardo, 59, of San Juan. All of the defendants are collectively referred to in the indictment as “public official defendants”. The indictment also charges two persons, referred to as “contractor defendants” — Donna Independent School District trustee George Alonzo Hernandez, 50, of Donna, and Harlingen insurance agency owner Arnulfo “Arnie” Olivarez, 57, of Rancho Viejo.Hernandez is charged as a contractor not as a trustee at Donna ISD.All of the defendants in the third set of indictments are expected to go to trial in November.Despite the allegations of misuse of bond money, voters in the PSJA district have continued to approve bonds, most recently a $35 million issue passed last May. That bond money was needed, the district said, because the $70 million approved last year proved insufficient.The PSJA investigation included the criminal investigation division of the Internal Revenue Service and the Dallas office of the U.S. Department of Education’s inspector general, as well as the FBI.