Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 233
Deborah Bell is a smart and outspoken, transparent, reliable and courageous person.
Not much would have happened without her on the board. The greatest battle she and I
managed to win in the early 1990s was to amend our by-laws to limit the term of office
holding within the board to only two years. In the past, a director appointed to lead the
powerful internal board committees or be chairman of the board would usually stay in
that position until his term as director expired. This practice had allegorically ossified the
BRA. The change we created gave an opportunity to any and all of the 21 directors to
contribute effectively to the organization. It also exponentially increased the discussion
of issues and ideas. But the road to nimbleness was slow; we were still in a minority on
most other issues.
The BRA derives most of its income from the sale of bulk water. Most of those sales are
based on negotiated long-term contracts with specific buyers, such as power
generators, cities, industrial plants and irrigators. We needed to find a way to
accumulate cash from these sales to position ourselves to supply water to new
customers building up in the basin. If we didn’t provide water to them, someone else
would. Without a stronger income stream we could not obtain an adequate surplus from
our operations. We could not even go to the bond markets to borrow money for future
undertakings. We were totally dependent on the credit of our water buyers, who
historically guaranteed the debt we took to build projects to serve them. The inherent
rigidity this policy gave us demonstrated the already suspected future insignificance of
the BRA.
Over the years, some of the newly appointed directors, including me, realized that these
were great new challenges and that we needed to find solutions. However, the inertia of
past management continued through the next chief executive we hired, who was
promoted from within the organization. My group saw opportunities to make a difference
lurking in our future but we were in a minority. I began proposing that the BRA adopt
policies that would allow it to increase its financial reserves. I even suggested concepts
that would achieve this goal without significantly increasing the price of new water sales.
Despite the support of a good number of directors, I was voted down each time.
Management advocated the status quo and there were enough directors who would
never go against the staff’s advice. They couldn’t see future needs, or, if they saw them,
believed that someone else would resolve them. I also suspect that some of my
opponents were not so much moved by disagreement with my ideas as by personal
motivations.
In 1995 Governor George W. Bush reappointed me to the board and he also appointed
a few outstanding new board members. With them on board, I thought we were finally
ready to be a responsive, fit and nimble organization. I attempted to persuade my
colleagues to elect me chairman of the board, but lost by one vote when a director
changed his mind at the last minute. It took a second batch of directors appointed at
mid-term by Governor Bush to finally reach a majority. With the open and clear support
of Nancy Raab from Round Rock and Rudy Garcia from Alvin, in 1997 we elected
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