When Pasadena Mayor Johnny Isbell defended the city's economic development corporation at a February meeting, he repeated an oft-cited statistic: that it had spent more than $40 million on the more impoverished, and predominantly Latino, north side of town.

"That's where the needs are," Isbell said. "I think they've done a great job."

The only problem with that number: It's not true.

After that February meeting, the Houston Chronicle requested a list of projects by the Pasadena Second Century Corp., the city's sales tax-funded economic development agency. Paul Davis, the board's executive director, provided a list totaling $63 million - including nearly $40 million for projects north of Spencer Highway, the unofficial boundary between the north and south sides of town.

That, Davis said, showed PSCC had spent 62 percent of its funds on the north side.

PSCC's check register does show expenditures of nearly $62 million since its founding in 1999.

But the Chronicle compared that to Davis' list and found he had included projects on the city's north side, worth millions, that were never funded or were scaled back drastically.

And millions more were spent on the city's south side, including at least $1 million for Pasadena's rodeo arena and convention center. Those projects were not included on Davis' list.

Since Isbell was elected to his last term in 2009, PSCC has spent about $29 million, according to the check register. Millions went toward administrative costs and water and wastewater infrastructure projects across the city. Of the remaining roughly $18 million, at least $4.2 million went to projects on the north side of Spencer Highway, records show. More than $13.7 million - or about 75 percent - was spent on the wealthier south side of town.

PSCC also has purchased millions of dollars' worth of land, but those transactions do not appear in the register. And year-end audits show PSCC made transfers to the city, but it's unclear how those funds were spent.

The Chronicle repeatedly sought clarification on the discrepancies between the project list provided by PSCC and its payment records.

Davis said questions would have to be submitted in the form of a public records request, per city policy. The Chronicle requested a copy of that policy a month ago, but never received a response - a violation of state public records law.

Davis later said he'd never seen the agency's check register, which the Chronicle obtained through a public records request.

The city's finance director, Andy Helms, recently provided the Chronicle with a modified project list, minus some that never came to fruition, but still noted it did not account for how PSCC spent its funds.

"It's embarrassing that we don't give out factual information," said City Councilman Ornaldo Ybarra, who recently was appointed to the PSCC board.

He said the Chronicle confirmed what he has suspected for years: that Second Century was spending more on the south side, while saying more money goes north.

The city's north-south divide was at the heart of a federal voting rights lawsuit that challenged a redistricting plan pushed by Isbell. A federal judge ultimately found the plan discriminated against Hispanic voters and ordered the city to keep its old boundaries in the recent election.

PSCC's new chairman, Steve Cote, and Ybarra said PSCC plans to closely review all of the proposed projects this summer.

"You really have to start from scratch with Second Century," Ybarra said. "It's such a huge mess."

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PSCC is a municipal "Type B" corporation that dates to 1999, and collects about $10 million a year in sales tax. Such corporations were initially authorized by a 1991 law that legislators tailored to finance a new Texas Rangers baseball stadium. In the years since, the rest of Texas has come to the trough. More than 500 corporations brought in nearly half a billion dollars in sales tax revenue in 2015.

According to Pasadena's annual audit report, PSCC's "sole purpose is to provide economic resources to fund the City's capital projects such as repair and improvement of streets, sidewalks, sewer and water lines, drainage systems, and parks that stimulate the City's business climate, promote new and expanded business enterprises, and improve residential quality of life."

Type B corporations can hand out cash incentives to companies with little oversight, especially in a city like Pasadena, where the mayor selects and the council approves PSCC appointments.

The Chronicle's investigation into the PSCC also uncovered a trail of potential conflicts of interests - not recorded with the board - involving the former chairman, Roy Mease, whose term recently expired.

Mease, 78, is an attorney, a developer and a longtime friend of Isbell's. Mease said he'd been asking Isbell for a while to allow him to step down from the economic development board. He also serves as a Houston Port Authority commissioner and holds Pasadena's delinquent tax and ticket collection contract. The city has paid him more than $4.4 million since the late 1990s, records show.

Mease built a multimillion-dollar development in League City known as Victory Lakes more than a decade ago and hired Richard Cansler with Civil Concepts Inc. to do the engineering and surveying.

Civil Concepts was working on that project as recently as 2014, according to planning and zoning minutes.

Civil Concepts received more than $1.1 million from PSCC during Mease's tenure, which started in 2009.

Mease's business ties with Cansler, whose wife is one of Isbell's top campaign donors, were not mentioned at PSCC meetings, according to a review of board minutes. Board members are supposed to comply with state conflict-of-interest laws, which require disclosure in the form of an affidavit, according to PSCC's bylaws. In response to a public records request, city officials said they had no such forms for vendors and provided no affidavits filed by PSCC board members.

Mease said he did not need to file any conflict-of-interest paperwork, because he didn't pick Cansler's company for the PSCC jobs.

"He was hired by the city of Pasadena. We may have paid him, because we had the project. But did I go hire him? No."

Cansler did not return calls seeking comment.

Last November, Civil Concepts and an architecture company put on two presentations for PSCC board members and about two dozen others at the Pasadena Convention Center.

That prompted complaints by council members who were not invited and an investigation by local prosecutors into a potential violation of open meeting laws. Mease said he didn't call that meeting; it was Helms, the city's financial planning director, he said.

Helms insisted it was not a meeting. "They (contractors) wanted to update the board about what was going on with the projects that had been awarded, so rather than come out at night and have a meeting, I said, 'We'll set up a time when you guys can come and make presentations.' "

Helms said he "suggested" to Mease that he notify the board members to come in two groups.

"It wasn't a posted meeting, because it wasn't a meeting. It was just a presentation. But to make doubly sure, we didn't want to have a kind of quorum show up."

A quorum is the majority of a governing body. In this case, investigators are looking at whether PSCC had a "walking quorum" - which is when a governmental body attempts to avoid complying with the state's open meetings law by not having a majority of officials physically in the same place at the same time.

Mease described Second Century as largely taking orders from Helms and Robin Green, the public works director.

Green did not return phone calls for comment.

"There's an agreement where the city can do the work for Second Century," Helms said. "Second Century just writes the check or pays the bills to pass through for the city to do the actual work most of the time."

Mease was absent from a PSCC meeting in the summer of 2013, when three businessmen came to make a deal. In exchange for a $100,000 "economic incentive," they said they'd buy 17 acres on the south side, build a big building and employ at least 100 workers.

There was just one wrinkle, Davis noted before the vote: The land in question was owned by Mease, who had purchased it in 2012. Davis said Mease would not have voted on the deal if he'd been at the meeting.

The board unanimously approved the deal, and two weeks later, Mease deeded the land to DFG Enterprises for more than $2 million, records show.

"Paul (Davis) put that deal together," Mease said, in hopes of getting the company to relocate from La Porte.

Mease said he was one of several landowners that sold to DFG.

Under PSCC bylaws, which incorporate state ethics rules, a board member with a substantial interest in a property before it is required to abstain and file an affidavit documenting the conflict of interest.

"No one saw a conflict," Davis said.

The jobs never materialized. DFG sold off chunks of the land after a merger and eventually returned the $100,000 to the city.

"What you see in Pasadena is that, for the most part, the people who get contracts, the people who do business with the city, they're all connected," Ybarra said. "They're all friends. They all contribute to political campaigns. … There is nothing secret about that."

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At a recent PSCC meeting, Davis gave a new list of 13 proposed and ongoing projects to the board.

That list included two on the north side.

One of them was a joint project with Harris County for infrastructure improvements on Pasadena Boulevard.

The other - the long-awaited North Pasadena Redevelopment - had no price tag, design consultant or contractor listed.

Mark Collette and Kristi Nix contributed to this report.