As a committee works to shut down the Dallas County Schools agency, officials hit a new roadblock with the failure to locate some of the surveillance cameras that were the root of DCS' financial collapse.
The dissolution committee, formed after voters in November elected to dissolve the century-old agency, sent teams to El Paso and San Antonio last weekend in an attempt to find some of those cameras.
The cameras, attached to school buses, were supposed to capture motorists illegally passing the buses, generating tickets that, in theory, were supposed to generate revenue.
Instead, the $70-million program ran into problems, costing DCS millions in taxpayer dollars.
"They weren't very successful," Alan King, CEO of the committee, said of the search for cameras outside Dallas County.
King said all of the cameras have been accounted for in Dallas County.
But that's not the case, he added, in El Paso and San Antonio, where school districts also reached agreements with DCS to run the program.
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"We purchased … 5,800 camera kits. And there's 12 cameras per kit. We don't know where they're all at," King told other committee members.
DCS officials told NBC 5 Investigates the reason for the unaccounted cameras was because the previous administration simply took the word of the vendor that they had actually been delivered.
That vendor is now the focus of an ongoing federal investigation.
One person connected to that vendor has already pleaded guilty in what prosecutors describe as a bribery scheme that allegedly funneled millions of dollars in bribes from the camera company to a top DCS official.
