Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

A huge public corruption inquiry in El Paso has resulted in a second guilty plea.

Elizabeth Flores, a former El Paso County commissioner, made the plea on Friday in Federal District Court to six federal charges of mail and wire fraud. Ms. Flores confessed to accepting cash bribes for commission votes on construction contracts, a hospital bond initiative, a lawsuit settlement and other issues. Court records did not indicate how much money was involved.

The plea by Ms. Flores, who faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 per charge, follows that of John Travis Ketner, the former chief of staff for County Judge Anthony Cobos, on four counts of bribery and conspiracy to commit fraud, including attempted rigging of the district court system.

Veronica Escobar, who succeeded Ms. Flores as Precinct 2 commissioner in January, said she expected more indictments from the inquiry, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. ''It's clear that there's more to come,'' Ms. Escobar said. ''I believe they're closing in on folks.''

Mr. Ketner's testimony implicated 17 city, county and school officials and business leaders. The F.B.I. has informed about 200 people that their telephones were tapped.

The investigation became public in May of last year when about 65 agents of the F.B.I. and three other federal agencies raided the plant of the National Center for Employment of the Disabled, taking 1,000 boxes of documents and computer data.

An examination by The Oregonian newspaper in Portland, Ore., of executive pay and benefits at the largest contractors in the federal nonprofit Javits-Wagner-O'Day program had found that 8 percent of the center's employees, instead of the 75 percent required, were severely disabled.

The company lost contracts and laid off about 1,000 employees. Its president and chief executive officer, Robert Jones, who was nominated as El Paso's entrepreneur of the year in 2004, was charged with using the center's money to finance other business ventures and with paying more than $4 million into a management firm controlled by his family trust.

In September, the F.B.I. descended on the homes and offices of Luther Jones, a former state representative and ex-El Paso county judge, and Frank Apodaca, president and chief executive officer of Access HealthSource, which is the city's leading administrator for public health benefits and was once owned by the disabled employment center.