Attorney: School board member to plead guilty in corruption case

McALLEN — Donna school board member George Hernandez intends to plead guilty to charges stemming from the ongoing Pharr-San Juan-Alamo school district corruption case, his attorney said Tuesday.

The former board president’s admission of guilt would make him the last of six indicted defendants to strike a plea agreement with federal prosecutors and bring the 2-year-old case to an end without a jury trial.

“We are still working out the details of the plea agreement,” his attorney L. Aron Peña said Tuesday, a day after filing notice of his client’s intentions in a McAllen federal court.

FBI agents arrested Hernandez, PSJA Superintendent Arturo Guajardo and three other board members in May 2007 alleging they colluded with one another in a bribes-for-votes scheme that governed school repair work, construction of new buildings and insurance contracts for more than six years.

Hernandez’s charges stemmed from his work as a private roofing contractor and construction consultant and had nothing to do with his elected role with the Donna school board, investigators said at the time.

Prosecutors allege he paid PSJA school district officials at least $40,000 in kickbacks to secure their votes on construction contracts while serving as a middleman for an unnamed general contractor seeking business with the district.

He reportedly escorted board members on trips to Las Vegas, where he picked up the tab for air travel, hotel rooms, gambling and tickets to a Cher concert. He then faxed memos to the contractor who bankrolled the vacations to report on opinions and information he gathered from the officials, according to court filings.

But as all of the other defendants entered guilty pleas, Hernandez had continued to maintain his innocence even while prosecutors piled on more charges against him.

In February 2008, a federal grand jury re-indicted him on an additional count of witness tampering for allegedly trying to persuade another contractor who had informed on him to the government to withdraw his statements. He was indicted again six months later for purportedly lying to federal investigators about the case.

Hernandez also faces four other counts of conspiracy and extortion from the original indictment, but it remained unclear Monday whether he would plead to any of the specific allegations made by prosecutors, Peña said.

“It will be a negotiated plea — slightly different from all the others,” he said. “Until it goes down, though, I couldn’t tell you.”

If Hernandez pleads to a felony count, he will have to give up his position on the Donna school board.

News of his intentions caught the school district’s superintendent, Robert Loredo, off guard Tuesday.

“I haven’t talked to him,” Loredo said. “He hasn’t talked to me.”

Depending on the count to which he pleads, Hernandez could face a maximum sentence of five to 20 years in prison. A date has not yet been set for his re-arraignment hearing.

His co-defendants all face sentencing hearings scheduled in the next three months.