UTRGV Parking and Transportation salaries, accounting revealed
$600k of 2024 permit and citation revenues ($2.4 million) was "transferred" to campus police, over $1 million spent on salaries, only $175k spent on parking improvements
Report | 1000 Words | 5 Minute Read
Introduction
A quarter of all revenues (over $2.4 million) generated from parking permits and citations in fiscal year 2024 at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, or $600k, was “transferred” to campus police. While only about seven percent, or $175k, was used for parking improvements. Over a million dollars, $1.166 million to be exact, was spent on salaries. And over $300k went to parking technology including license plate recognition technology. The smallest expense was for a line-item, “Scholarships and Fellowships” for $1,134. All this is according to financial breakdowns obtained from UTRGV through the Public Information Act.
Background
This report is a follow-up to a series of articles I wrote last month, published February 12 and 13, in which I revealed the amount of total revenues received by the UTRGV “Parking and Transportation” Department. The first article, titled “UTRGV parking and transportation made $2.5 million from permits and citations in 2024”, revealed the figures released by the university via the same law. The second, titled “University parking director responds to questions”, showed the responses by the executive director of the department to questions posed before the first article published. The ED, Rodney Gomez, listed a number of things to which funds accrued from permits and citations go without listing how much went where. This is a common tactic of Gomez and others in his department to assuage rightful suspicion that monies are misused. Even in one of the documents released, the university attempted to inflate the amount of money spent on parking improvements by lumping it in with the police transfers and transfers to the transportation side of the department. (Documents are published in their entirety at the bottom of the article.)
Gomez and others suggest to gullible student representatives and cowardly faculty representatives that the monies are used judiciously for things like parking improvements and other beneficial services, though again they never say how much is allocated to what. Thankfully through the Texas Public Information Act, a statute placed into law in compliance with the federal Freedom of Information Act, the public has a right to demand that institutions like UTRGV open their books for inspection by the people. These laws, passed during the 1970s as a result of the mighty Civil Rights Movement which demanded that the people possessed the right to know what the government was doing in their name, serve as a victory won in class struggle. But the capitalist media, which takes orders from the police on what to cover and what not to, rarely use this mechanism because doing so would upset their cozy relationships with cops and politicians who offer corrupt journalists special privileges and entry into their social clubs. Managers for the capitalist class, who hold graduate degrees in nonsense fields like “business management” and “educational leadership” and hope to earn six-figure salaries, do the bidding of their masters.
The inimitable and satirical atheist, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), put it best when he said:
“It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.”
Parking and Transportation Administrative Salaries
I, and others interviewed in the first article published Feb 12, speculated on how much the tops within the university’s parking and transportation department earned. I, too, received their specific salaries. Executive Director, Rodney Gomez, was paid $108,220. His underling referenced in the reports, Pablo Aguilar, was paid $75,176. Director of transportation, Maribel Contreras, was paid $88,400. These were the three highest paid administrators within the department, while the rest were supervisors and transit drivers who earned salaries nearer the median national wage (between $30k-$60k).
Further Research Needed
Some remaining questions are: Does the $600k transferred to the cops cover the salaries for all police, or this is on top of money they are already given? Another is, what are “designated funds”, as line itemed on the last page shown down below? “Designated funds” were listed as a big money transfer into the transportation department, although they don’t specify what that money is.
Discussion
These disclosures serve to demonstrate how institutions of the capitalist state, in this case UTRGV, run away with public funds to pay themselves exorbitant salaries and to funnel a nice chunk of it back to their (not “our”) police. They also expose the big lies they tell to the people, so as to maintain the illusion that the monies extracted from students and staff is used in a benevolent manner, for things like parking improvements which made up well-under ten percent of all expenditures. The way for working-class students and their allies within the faculty and staff to fight this is by organizing independent campaigns demanding that parking be free of charge to students and staff, as is done at other colleges and universities. We now know that their lies are just that, and that the vast majority of the monies accrued go to paying bloated salaries of administrators and the cops. Boycotts of parking permits is one tactic that can be used as well.
In the long-term, however, the true remedy to being gouged by the capitalist state is for working people to have a revolution and take political power away from the parasitic capitalists and their upper-middle-class managers. Struggles like this, exposing and making demands of the administration in order to advance the class interests of working students and hourly workers on campus, will prepare us and raise our collective class consciousness for the ultimate seizure of state power when the hour arrives. This is the only road, as attempts to work on equal footings with the rulers will only be met with sabotage, police repression and spying. This class-struggle road can only be forged through independent working-class organization, free from the two big capitalist parties (Democrats and Republicans) who are irreformable or any of their ‘third parties’. The ultimate goal would be to help build and spread the program of the Socialist Workers Party, the only revolutionary party in the United States. Read more at TheMilitant.com
Documents
