Houston's Largest Teachers Union Paid Nearly $500K In Legal Fees To Union Chief's Son: Records

Houston’s largest teachers union has paid nearly a half a million dollars in legal fees in recent years to the longtime union president’s son, who is a lawyer, records show.

The Houston Federation of Teachers paid James Fallon III , the son of federation president Gayle Fallon, $477,687 between 2006-10 for “legal counsel to members,” according to disclosures the local union filed with the U.S. Department of Labor.

That is almost as much as the $521,755 paid to the other five law firms hired by the 7,000-member local union during that same time period, the disclosures show.

It also means the union paid Fallon more in legal fees than it paid its own general counsel, whose firm was paid just $232,000 in the same time frame.

Gayle Fallon and her son, James, both told Texas Watchdog that nepotism is not prohibited by the union.

“It’s not a conflict with us,” Gayle Fallon said in a telephone interview. “Unions employ union family members … The idea is they grow up in the union, and you want them to be good union members.”

She added that the HFT board approved hiring her son 14 years ago, and that James Fallon charges the union a discounted hourly rate that is much lower than those charged by the other firms the union employs. She said the forms on file with the Labor Department don’t tell the whole story.

Like his mother, James Fallon said one of the reasons the union turned to him to represent teachers who have been fired is because few lawyers have the appropriate expertise.

“There’s a very narrow group of people who have that knowledge with K-12 school systems,” James Fallon said. “It’s hard to find many that defend teachers. (Most) work for school districts.”

James Fallon’s mother, Gayle Fallon, has been president of HFT for 30 years. As the head of one of the state’s largest teachers’ unions, she’s also one of the state’s most prominent public education advocates.

She’s also got a prominent friend living in Austin who would really like to relocate to Washington, D.C.: Gov. Rick Perry. She’s publicly supported some of his education policies, including his decision last year to keep Texas out of the running for megabucks federal education funding in the “Race to the Top” competition.

Dave DeBlasio, a former HISD teacher, counselor and assistant principal, and a critic of Fallon’s, said union nepotism is problematic.

“Generally, I don’t think family members need to be involved at all in each other’s business – especially to the tune of $500,000,” DeBlasio said in a phone interview. “That’s probably one of the reasons why the union isn’t as efficient as it should be. It’s part of the culture of HISD that needs to change.”

Some at the Houston Independent School District are reeling from questions about ethics. School board members President Paula Harris and Larry Marshall have been accused of arranging meetings between friends and acquaintances and HISD officials to set up business agreements.

Joshua Trevino, vice president of communications at the libertarian Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin, described nepotism as “an intrinsic wrong.” The organization has been critical in the past of some public employee labor unions.

And nepotism was part of the issue in Baltimore’s teachers union in the mid-1990s, when it was revealed that two union officials’ children had been made full-time employees on the union’s small staff.

That local union had deep and abiding problems – as one teacher described in a letter to the Baltimore Sun at the time, “nepotism, cronyism and outright corruption.” Two top union leaders were being paid several times more than the average teacher, along with interest-free salary advances and $200,000 annuities. The Baltimore union chief was voted out of office and the national union group undertook an audit of the local’s books.

Judy Nadler, a senior fellow for government ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said one family member employing another family member in any organization raises a host of questions.

“Did this lawyer possess skills that others didn’t have? Was the hiring a fair and open process?” asked Nadler, a former mayor of Santa Clara, Calif. “Was this individual given preferential treatment because of the relationship?”

The national union HFT is a part of, the American Federation of Teachers, also paid James Fallon an additional $56,000 in the 2010 reporting year, the national union’s form shows.

HFT members pay dues of about $345-$530 a year, according to the Labor Department filings. Other than Fallon, who was paid about $80,000 in the most recent reported year, it has about nine paid staffers. Houston ISD is the nation’s seventh-largest school district, with about 200,000 students, with an annual budget of $1.6 billion.

Gayle Fallon pointed out that if her son had not performed well, the union’s board would have fired him.

“I’ve seen him at hearings” representing teachers who are fighting to keep their jobs, HISD school board member Mike Lunceford said of James Fallon. “He’s very competent.”

A trained criminal-defense lawyer who has been practicing law for 15 years, James Fallon provided a list of accomplishments.

He said he won all three cases last year in which he defended three employees at HISD’s Key Middle School accused of wrongdoing. He said he possesses at least three times the trial qualification necessary to become board certified in administrative law, the area of law relevant to defending teachers and school district employees.

And, in 2007, the most recent year to which he had data, James Fallon said he saved the jobs of more teachers facing termination than any other Houston lawyer in the same specialty.

The Houston teacher’s union pays a $4,000 monthly retainer to James Fallon, Gayle Fallon said.

She said that only about half of the amount paid to her son according to the forms filed with the Department of Labor actually came from HFT — the other half came from liability-insurance payments from AFT’s national office in Washington, D.C. AFT is part of the AFL-CIO.

“It’s hard to find lawyers versed in school law,” Gayle Fallon said. James “grew up in it.”

She said employing her son saves the union money because other lawyers, such as lawyers from Dallas’ Strasburger & Price, charge higher per-hour fees. Strasburger & Price lawyers charge $400 an hour. James Fallon charges $150 an hour, and Chris Tritico, the union’s general counsel, charges $190 an hour, Gayle Fallon said.

She also said the Labor Department forms don’t accurately reflect how much each lawyer paid by HFT actually made. For example, she said Tritico “is lousy about getting his bills in.”

The forms also don’t show the breakdown in what each lawyer receives from the local union and what each lawyer receives from liability insurance payments from the national union. The national insurance payments could be much more and not reflected on the Labor Department forms, Gayle Fallon said.

“It’s very hard to assume any one lawyer made more than another (based on the Labor Department forms),” Gayle Fallon said. “I guarantee others (beside her son) made a lot on insurance” payments.

The forms also don’t reflect national union payments to each attorney for criminal cases they might have worked on, she said.

“People would watch him closer than anyone else just because we have the same last name,” Fallon said of her son.

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Contact Mike Cronin at mike@texaswatchdog.org or 713-228-2850. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelccronin or @texaswatchdog. Contact Jennifer Peebles at jennifer@texaswatchdog.org or 281-656-1681. Follow her on Twitter at @jpeebles or @texaswatchdog.

Photo of Gayle Fallon from Gov. Rick Perry’s website.

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Houston Federation of Teachers LM-2 Forms Years 2010 Back Through 2006

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