Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 140
I was glad the students had good facilities in which to work out; I wished I had had them
when I was at school. My objection was, and continues to be, the compulsory nature of
marketing the facility. If one is to be a student at TAMU, one must first buy a
membership in the so-called recreational center. I submit that exercise is a personal
choice, like eating. On a given day one may exercise in the garage, run on the streets,
play ball at the park, go to the gym or not exercise at all. To force all students to buy a
membership as a condition of enrollment is anti-competitive, expensive to the students
and detrimental to the local governments that lose tax base. It is also a great tool for
bureaucratic empire building, for it gives administrators a new excuse to hire more
people and increase their budget requests to the state, thereby entrenching another
constituency.
It is embarrassing that not one so-called “fiscal conservative” politician had the courage
to find a more equitable solution. Having served on public agency boards with more
than local responsibilities, somewhat akin to a state university board, I understand the
duty of these organizations to improve and institutionalize the area-wide services they
provide. In my view, the responsibility of a good steward is to temper these
requirements with the interests of the economy at large, such as the effect unfair taxexempt
competition has on small business.
The main reason any concessions were granted was not my effort but the fact that the
then chairman of the board of the university, Ross Margraves, and one of his top
administrators, Robert Smith, were convicted of corruption. After exhausting their
appeals, both were given probation and the former was disbarred. The power intrinsic
in their jobs was great, but in their greed they wanted even more. In their search for
more, they made somebody angry enough to blow the whistle on their wrong doings
and the district attorney called them to justice. A good precedent was set. Fearing more
scrutiny, the new replacements and the leftover executives demonstrated a little more
flexibility in settling pending issues with me and others.
Needless to say that when TAMU opened its “Rec Center,” membership in the private
clubs evaporated overnight. As a result, five out of the seven clubs in the community
went out of business in less than a year. Aerofit, being the larger, most diversified and
economically more stable, survived largely by cannibalizing the non-student
membership and some equipment of the failing clubs. The losers were not just the club
owners and their employees and users. All local governments such as the school
districts, cities and county lost a steady source of revenue from lost property taxes. The
state and the cities lost their share of sales taxes. Neither was replaced by TAMU.
I am still taken aback by the overwhelming lobbying power a state institution such as
Texas A&M, which lives off taxpayer funds, applies in Austin and even in Washington,
to grab even more of the people’s money, distorting the good judgment and diluting the
courage of otherwise sensible pro-business politicians. Until this unfortunate
experience, as I relate in other parts of this book, I had been a very committed and
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