The decision to push out one company in favor of another for a contract with the Border Children's Mental Health Collaborative was driven by 65th District Court Judge Alfredo Chavez, said the program’s former director and others involved with the collaborative.

LKG Enterprises Inc., which is headed by Ruben "Sonny" Garcia, a longtime friend of Chavez, received the contract to perform evaluations for the program at a rate of $50,000 a month, twice what the previous company was earning. The county now is suing LKG for alleged fraud to recover more than $600,000, and Garcia is considered a target in the FBI public corruption investigation.

Chavez, who is challenged in Tuesday’s Democratic Primary runoff election for the 65th District Court by Assistant County Attorney Yahara Lisa Gutierrez, consistently has denied allegations that he was responsible for LKG receiving the contract. On Saturday, he repeated the denial, saying that a committee made the recommendation and the County Commissioner's Court the final decision.

“All these decisions were not made by me, they were made by the governance team,” he told an audience at the Ray Pearson Forum.

But several people, including the collaborative's former director, and county officials involved in the program, say that doesn’t tell the whole story. And a series of documents provided to Newspaper Tree, including letters from Chavez in June and July 2005, show Chavez’s deep involvement in the process of replacing Tri-West, which held the contract before LKG.

“He had no reason to do it (replace Tri-West),” said Lisa Tomaka, the collaborative's former director, who provided the documents. “He initiated it in June (2005). I told him it wouldn’t be a good idea. He told me to do it anyway.”

Chavez expressed “concerns” about Boulder, Colo.-based Tri-West's performance in a June 16, 2005 letter to Tomaka asking for minute details about the contract that took Tomaka five pages to provide in a reply a week later.

In that response, Tomaka strongly urged the judge not to replace Tri-West because it had invested heavily in and become an asset to the collaborative.

But on July 1, Chavez wrote back stating that the Tri-West contract and others would be canceled and rebid. [see chavez letters and Tomaka response via links below the article]

In the July 1, 2005 letter, Chavez specified that all requests for proposal be sent to his office.

At candidate forums, Chavez said representatives of Tri-West lied to him and County Judge Dolores Briones at a meeting and that was the reason they decided to fire the company.

“Just flat lies were given to us by this evaluation team,” Chavez told the Ray Pearson Forum last Saturday. “Judge Briones and I decided that we could not work with this team that was not providing upfront information to us that we needed.”

Tomaka said she was at that meeting, which took place in April 2005, but Briones was not. And, Tomaka said, Tri-West’s three representatives “told no lies” in presenting their report on the collaborative’s status.

Chavez, Tomaka said, didn’t refer to the issue of lies -- which involved the program's finances and sustainability -- until a September meeting attended by parents who demanded to know why Tri-West was being fired.

“There was nothing to justify this,” she said. “But I truly believe the information I gave him (Chavez) was used by LKG to respond to the request for proposals.”

Chavez, who addressed the issues during the Saturday forum and in an interview after, was not available for follow-up interviews to respond to Tomaka's comments.

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The collaborative’s mission was and is to find ways to keep El Paso County children who have severe mental illnesses from being sent out of town for treatment at great expense to county taxpayers.

It is funded by SAMSHA (Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) through a six-year, $9.6-million grant, for which Chavez has taken credit for obtaining.

At Saturday’s Pearson Forum, Gutierrez criticized Chavez for his role in getting rid of Tri-West and contracting with LKG.

Chavez refuted the criticism and denied that his actions were responsible for the problems that nearly brought the program down in 2006.

“My conscience is clear,” he said. “I would not have done anything different.”

Chavez continues to defend LKG’s performance even though a federal audit report in 2006 found that LKG lacked the personnel, expertise and credentials necessary to carry out its duties under the contract and failed to provide required reports for a year. [nov. 13, 2006 npt audit report]

“From what I was informed, the report that was submitted, there was nothing that LKG was lacking in other than some discrepancies that the federal government pointed out,” Chavez said at last Saturday’s forum.

Gutierrez, a juvenile prosecutor in Chavez’s court, accused him of lying to the group.

“When he says that LKG was doing their job, no they weren’t,” she said. “For an entire year, LKG did nothing, nothing.

“When the feds came to audit his friend, they saw that LKG was not qualified from the very beginning. Sonny Garcia was running this out of his home.”

Garcia could not be reached for comment, and no telephone listing or Web site for LKG could be found.

***

In June of 2005, as Chavez raised the concerns about Tri-West, Tomaka questioned Chavez's direction. In her written reply to Chavez on June 21, 2005, Tomaka warned that getting rid of Tri-West could endanger the entire program.

In a July 8, 2005 e-mail to Tomaka, so too did Michele Herman, project director of the office at the U.S. Health and Human Service’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Tomaka said that Herman followed that up with a letter to County Judge Briones, who as “principle investigator” had responsibility for the grant at the county level. Tomaka provided a draft copy of the letter with Herman’s name at the bottom that reads, in part: “I encourage you to consider carefully any decision to replace the current evaluation contractor.”

Briones could not be reached for comment.

The letter noted that any significant change in the grant personnel or operation had to be approved in advance. The county had not sought approval to fire Tri-West and hire LKG.

“I would not want to jeopardize the integrity of the evaluation by bringing on a new evaluation team at this critical time for the ongoing success of the program,” the letter concluded.

LKG, however, was hired by Commissioners Court to take over the contract to provide evaluation reports in October 2005.

Before that meeting, Commissioner Dan Haggerty said, “Lisa came to me and said, ‘Don’t do this. We don’t need to change.’"

But when the issue went before Commissioners Court, he said, “I asked, ‘Are you sure you want do this? She said yes.’

“After we voted for the change, I asked her why. She said, ‘Briones wants this, and Chavez wants this. They brought me to the party. I’m certainly not going to do something different.’”

Haggerty added, “Everyone was so afraid of retaliation by Briones and Chavez. They were all afraid of losing their jobs.”

Bea Huml, who was a member of the collaborative’s governance team and is the current director of the county’s Child Welfare Department, said the Commissioners Court vote to hire LKG was unanimous.

So Haggerty’s vote, not infrequently on the losing end of a 3-1 majority, would not have mattered.

“Haggerty was going to vote no,” Huml said. “Lisa said to hire them. It passed. Lisa had been threatened to lose her job. That’s what she told me.”

After LKG took over the evaluation contract, months went by, and the company never submitted a monthly report of the program’s activities.

Tomaka said she questioned both Chavez and Briones about why she was paying LKG, and was told by Briones to keep on paying and watch what she said.

In August, 10 months into the LKG contract, Tomaka said she went to see Chavez and told him she could not continue as director and resigned.

Soon after, Haggerty said, “Briones went in there and fired everybody and blamed them for everything that went wrong.”

To date, Tomaka says, she has not been contacted by the FBI about the payments to LKG.

But, she said, the public blame for the collaborative’s early failures landed on her, ending a 17-year career in the children’s mental health field.

***

The collaborative was overseen by a governance team, made up of more than 20 service providers and parents.

Although Chavez said that the team made the key decisions, Huml said that Chavez did not consult with the group on the evaluation contract.

“The Tri-West issue never went to the governance team to fire them. He just called us in and told us he was firing them,” Huml said.

Huml conceded that she could be putting her job on the line by speaking publicly about Chavez, and said he has called her a thorn in his side for years for challenging his actions.

“His involvement in the process was deep,” she said.

When he told the governance team he was letting Tri-West go, Huml said she told him, “You’re pulling the rug out from under these parents’ feet. They and their children will be without the collaborative.

“He said he was only answerable to his constituents, and he walked off,” she said.

Chavez, speaking after the Saturday forum, pointed out that the governance team put together a six- or seven-member committee to review the proposals submitted by Tri-West and LKG and make its recommendation to Commissioners Court.

But Tomaka, Huml and Rosemary Neill, director of the county’s Family and Community Services Department, say that Chavez appointed that committee, which voted 4-2 to go with LKG.

Neill was one of the two who voted against shifting the contract to LKG.

“There seemed to be some sentiment to look at the local company to do this work, but that could not be part of the criteria,” Neill said.

She said LKG appeared to have personnel with backgrounds in juvenile justice but not in mental health.

“Since this was for the evaluation of a mental health project, I thought that research experience was very important,” she said.

And finally, Neill said, there was no reason she could find for not giving the contract back to Tri-West.

“I was the contract manager for Tri-West … and they were performing in all ways on the contract,” she said, adding she never understood why the county had rebid the contract in the first place.

***

On Dec. 12, 2007, the county attorney’s office filed a lawsuit against LKG Enterprises and Garcia to recover more than $600,000 the county paid for services that, the suit alleges, LKG failed to provide. [dec. 14, 2007 npt lawsuit review]

Haggerty said the problems created by LKG nearly wrecked the collaborative and have cost the county more than $1 million that the county either had to spend or lost because it was not drawn down from the federal government.

“LKG did no work,” Haggerty said. “They never sent us anything and now we are in a huge lawsuit with them for all the money that was ripped off.”

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David Crowder can be reached at dcrowder@epmediagroup.com and (915) 351-0605.

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