Faced with a neighborhood filled with residents who didn’t want an 18-wheeler dealership in their backyard, last year Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) hatched an unusual plan to bring the land within city limits and make it available for restaurant and commercial uses instead.
Though the plan ultimately failed, on Tuesday the city’s Ethics Review Board slapped the councilman with an ethics violation and condemned his maneuvering as unfair to the business, Doggett Freightliner.
“I think it was worth it,” McKee-Rodriguez told reporters after the board voted. “Too often these corporations, these developers, this real estate, is treated above my constituents, and they’ve suffered for that.”
Leading up to an Oct. 17 vote on the issue, McKee-Rodriguez had long been in talks with Doggett Freightliner about the company’s plans to use an East Side property for a dealership.
To make it possible, various city panels needed to agree to adjust the “urban living” designation given to part of the property by the city’s comprehensive development plan, approve a rezoning request to allow for the dealership functions, and annex part of the property in San Antonio’s extraterritorial jurisdiction — all as separate actions.
Despite previously indicating to the company that he would delay the vote, on Oct. 17, McKee-Rodriguez sought to approve the annexation request while rejecting the zoning matter — meaning the company wouldn’t be able to withdraw the ask and wouldn’t be able to use the land as planned.
“It was decided for my district, not by my district, that we would become a hub for warehouses, truck stops, car washes and landfills,” he explained to the Ethics Review Board on Tuesday. “I feel like I’ve been tasked with the impossible mission of reversing this trend, and protecting my residents from the growing harmful impacts of industrial development.”
The vote was ultimately kicked to a later date where an amended deal was approved by the full council, including McKee-Rodriguez, who struck an agreement with the company fund some neighborhood improvements for surrounding residents.
But his moves surrounding the vote appalled several of McKee-Rodriguez’s council colleagues at the time, and an ethics complaint was later filed by a person who claimed to have no stake in the issue other than protecting “the delicate trust” in local government.
The city hired an outside attorney to review the matter with a panel of three Ethics Review Board members.
On Tuesday those members presented their findings to the full Ethics Review Board, concluding that McKee-Rodriguez had “impeded on the private interests of a third party” by addressing residents’ concerns in a way that was “not transparent and/or collaborative” with Doggett Freightliner, which their report said “is also a constituent.”
All six members in attendance voted to affirm the panel’s results and recommended actions. Since the board has little teeth to come after council members who violate the ethics code, McKee-Rodriguez’s punishment amounts to a letter of admonishment and a referral to ethics training.
A full report outlining the decision is expected to be available to the public on Wednesday.
McKee-Rodriguez said after the meeting that he conferred with city staff and the city attorney’s office about his plans for the Oct. 17 meeting well ahead of that vote.
“[If] they had let me know that any action that I could take was going to be unethical or unlawful, I wouldn’t have done it,” he said.
Nevertheless, he stood by his unconventional methods of putting a finger on the scale for residents in a commercial zoning dispute.
“They’ve been marginalized, they’ve been under invested in, they’ve been exploited,” he said of the residents in his East Side district. “I would time and time again fight for them the way that they want me to.”
