Socorro Forensic Audit Point to Gandara Actions

I'm a little late to the party on this one because I had forgotten about it until I saw something the other day on Facebook and I decided to check it out.

Back when Jesse Gandara and the rest of G-Unit were kicked out of office by the voters, there were a lot of rumors floating around about alleged wrong-doing. One of the first acts of the new city council was to implement a forensic audit.

What I find most remarkable about the audit is that they mention on more than one occassion that the scope of the investigation is limited to things that are (were at the time and may still be) under investigation by the El Paso County Sheriff's Office.

The results of the forensic audit are posted on the city's website. There were some interesting findings regarding the now famous drive-way project along with some other findings. One of the allegations leveraged against Jesse Gandara was that the driveways were only for registered voters. Jesse flat-out told me that, but he has since denied it publicly. At any rate, it turns out the forensic audit turned up a couple of things.

The audit says that not only was the idea that Gandara was pushing for the project for political favor but that Gandara indicated that all citizens were on the list to receive a driveway. The audit showed that 89% of the driveways went to registered voters. Oopsie...


But of course, there is more. Another issues raised in the audit was whether driveways were being constructed on the city right-of-way. That is important because public dollars can not be used to improve private property. That is a big time no-no.

For those of you who live in the valley and see the pump trucks come and pump water out of the roads after a big flood, but wonder why they don't pump out water from vacant lots or private homes, that is the reason.

The audit says that the Public Works Director for the City of Socorro Sam Leony never received a request from the contractor for the right-of-way limits and therefore inspected one of the driveways to ensure that the driveways weren't unlawfully being built with public dollars on private land. While he was taking pictures of the alleged violation, the audit says Jesse Gandara got wind of it and called Leony to ask him what he was doing. According to the audit Gandara then instructed Leony to stop taking pictures and to not have anything more to do with the project.

Thats right, Gandara didn't want the city's public works director to be involved with a public works project.

Leony went to his boss about the issue, Manny Soto who has the city manager at the time, and informed him of what Gandara had instructed. The audit indicates that Soto also instructed Leony to not have anything to do with the project. This call all be found in the first paragraph of page 6 of the audit.

The audit also indicated that close Gandara allies Refugio "Fugi" Orta, Jose Alvarez, and Jesse himself received oversize driveways that "exceeded the city's street right-of-way".

Sadly, that is just one of the issues that was outlined in the audit. There's more....