02.12.2014
It's the largest county in the Rio Grande Valley with more than 3,000 employees in positions from maintenance to clerical, law enforcement and administrators.
But what you may not know about Hidalgo County is that not everyone who works for the county gets a criminal background check before being hired.
"Certainly law enforcement or head start and work with kids, any security sensitive positions like it and those positions.It justn't hasn't been the practice of the county to have everyone submit to criminal background checks."
Jaime Longoria is the executive administrator for county Judge Ramon Garcia's office and said Hidalgo County has never had a written policy about background checks, but it's known they don't require one for every single position.
"For instance somebody who is out filling potholes on a daily basis, the county at some point made the decision that wasn't a position that required that."
This is the application for employment. There's a section that asks if the person applying has been convicted of a felony, and the employer takes it on good faith that the prospect isn't lying.
But there's been at least one employee who slipped through the cracks and since his position didn't require a background check, the convicted sex offender started working in the streets of Hidalgo County under county commissioner AC Cuellar.
Action 4 News first alerted commissioner Cuellar after a concerned viewer questioned the Donna man's employment since he was convicted back in 2002 for sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl.
The employee in question served two years behind bars for the crime and fulfilled his probation according to state records.
"I didn't do anything wrong and the county didn't do anything wrong," Cuellar said.
Cuellar said the man isn't a threat to society and should be allowed to make a living. But did he lie on his application about his past crime?
"The application does ask if you've been convicted of a felony in the past 10 years and the gentleman did not lie on it because it's been 12 years," Cuellar said.
Cuellar says the sex offender holds a low level position with the county which is why a criminal background check wasn't done.
"He's a hard worker. He's a good guy. I think he paid his dues for whatever he was convicted for," Cuellar said.
The county employee was convicted of raping a child and is now filling potholes and doing other maintenance work on roads across the county,in neighborhoods,near schools. A criminal background check would have picked up on his offense.
"It's just too expensive to do background checks on everybody. We have thousands of an employees and we can't check all of them," Cuellar said.
But the tides may be changing in Hidalgo County now that we brought this issue to light.
"What I will say is we are currently updating our policy manual and looking at all of our personnel policies, and I certainly have been reassured by our HR director that as these types of situations come up they will bring them up for review," Longoria said.
Is this something that should be changed? Would you the taxpayer be willing to foot the average 15 dollar fee for each of the thousands of background checks that would have to be done if policy is changed? That would average about $45,000 for background checks in hidalgo county alone.
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