By ENGR101.com staff

Posted September 10, 2010

AUSTIN – Texas’s state purchasing system and the firing of three state employees have now come under scrutiny.  Reportedly, the three state workers had heroically protected the State of Texas taxpayers from the actions of at least one of Gov. Rick Perry’s cronies.

The three state employees had skipped a meeting with an outside vendor of goods and services who was trying to sell a product to the state.  Gov. Perry’s office had evidently wanted the state to purchase the product from the vendor at taxpayer expense.

The three state employees, evidently unaware of Gov. Perry’s alleged involvement in the matter, had reportedly not attended the meeting because they knew the state was out of money and that they should not make the purchase.

So far, neither Perry nor co-Republican-Comptroller Susan Combs have

By ENGR101.com Staff
Published August 13, 2010

Austin, TX – State agency-spy and whistleblower, Ms. Brooke Kamaka, PE, might be back at work after all. We had read that she was no longer employed at the Texas Board of Professional Engineers and was in the process of taking another job.

However, a new document has now come to light. As part of our continuing investigation into corruption at the Texas Board of Professional Engineers, ENGR101.com is now in possession of a letter written by a former Executive Director of the Texas Board who retired soon after our investigation was announced.

The letter reveals, in part, how the Board has distanced itself from its statutory duty to protect the public from dangerous and unethical engineers. Now the Texas Board actively protects dangerous engineers who work on behalf of exempt industries.

Exempt industries include large corporations that do not fall under the statutory provisions of the Engineering Practices Act and that engage in construction of petrochemical facilities, oil drilling platforms (such as the one that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico), federal contracting, insurance and housing construction – the kinds of industries whose executives would pay large sums of money to Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

All of the members of the Texas Board of Professional Engineers have been appointed and/or reappointed by Gov. Perry during his numerous years in office. As a result,

By T. June Melton, PE

June 30, 2010

Many Texas-licensed professional engineers are already aware that the Gov. Rick Perry-appointed Texas Board of Professional Engineers has passed a rule that requires engineers to designate a primary discipline of practice, which, under threat of discipline and license revocation, violates the individual engineer’s constitutional rights to practice his or her profession after having received a license.  A civil rights lawsuit against the Texas Board has been recently filed in Travis County as a result of the Texas Board violating an engineer’s rights of free speech and due process.

Now, the Gov. Perry-influence is rearing its ugly head elsewhere, as Texas corruption crosses into an adjoining state.  Oklahoma taxpayers, consumers and professional engineers now face a corporate-state awakening.

A similar rule change at the Oklahoma State Board of Licensure for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors threatens all professional engineers licensed in Oklahoma while simultaneously making way for the narrowly-educated less-competent engineering practitioners who follow the demands of corporate bosses instead of protecting the public.   The Oklahoma Board rule change endangers the public the same way that the Texas rule change does.

The rule change is an effort to pigeonhole Oklahoma professional engineers into one or two disciplines even though the engineer might already be qualified to practice in several disciplines.  In this way a Board employee, a former employer, an angry spouse, or a lawyer opposed to the engineer’s opinions, can easily file a bogus complaint alleging that the engineer touched on an additional discipline that he or she has not listed with the Board, and therefore the engineer is to be disciplined and considered to be incompetent.

The adverse impact of the Gov. Rick Perry administration on the concept of professional licensing