In a lengthy Facebook post that included emails exchanged by San Antonio policymakers, citizen watchdog group InfuseSA accused District 1 Councilwoman Sukh Kaur of violating the Texas Open Meetings Act by convening with five other council members to form a consensus outside of a public meeting.
The alleged violation occurred prior to a June 18 council meeting, during which Kaur and a majority of council voted to delay discussion of a proposed 33% rate hike by San Antonio Water System (SAWS), according to emails and text messages between Kaur and other involved parties obtained by InfuseSA.
Kaur declined to comment on InfuseSA’s document dump.
“I am staying focused on District 1 resident requests and concerns during this tough budget season,” Kaur told the Current via text message.
However, two former San Antonio City Council members, Adriana Rocha Garcia and Greg Brockhouse, appear to agree with InfuseSA’s assessment of Kaur’s actions. Even so, Brockhouse told the Current he doubts the councilwoman will face any legal repercussions.
“This is what [City Council members] do routinely,” said Brockhouse, a two-time mayoral candidate who ran on a populist platform. “And they find new and creative ways to do it.”
University of Texas San Antonio political scientist Jon Taylor also expressed alarm after reviewing the documents obtained by InfuseSA.
“If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck …” Taylor told the Current. “When you have people who are not part of the process, like Rocha Garcia, saying it was a walking quorum, then that suggests to me that it was. But, proving it and prosecuting it are two totally different things.”
Listing council concerns
Before the June 18 meeting on the proposed rate increase, Kaur met with five colleagues to discuss concerns about SAWS’s proposed rate hike, according to emails InfuseSA obtained through an open records request and shared in the group’s Facebook post. In those emails, Kaur listed the council members’ concerns and sent them to top SAWS officials.
“We are sharing a letter drafted by several colleagues that outlines challenges we have collectively experienced, along with specific requests we ask to be addressed prior to any approval of any rate increase,” Kaur wrote in a June 17 email to SAWS CEO Robert Puente and board member Jelynne LeBlanc Jamison. “We look forward to partnering with you to move a rate increase forward once these requests have been met.”
Kaur CCed five council members on the communication: District 2’s Jalen McKee-Rodriguez, District 4’s Ric Galvan, District 6’s Edward Mungia, District 7’s Marina Alderete Gavito and District 10’s Marc Whyte.
In a separate email, Kaur arranged to have lunch with Puente at Pearl-area restaurant Down on Grayson on June 17 to discuss the concerns outlined in the letter.
Under Texas state law, government bodies are prohibited from conducting votes out of public view and from deliberating in secret ways that could influence the outcome of public business. Such violations are considered an illegal “walking quorum” if policymakers hold substantive deliberations outside a posted meeting.
The question in this case is whether the council members identified in the email based their votes on the SAWS rate hike on the list of demands Kaur sent to SAWS.
Although Galvan was CCed in Kaur’s email and was invited to her lunch with Puente at Down on Grayson, the councilman ultimately voted in favor of allowing SAWS to undertake the rate increase.
Similarly, District 9 Councilwoman Misty Spears, who wasn’t included in Kaur’s email, was among those who voted to delay discussion of the proposed rate hike until October.
SAWS is seeking the increase, which could run residential water users an additional $200 annually, to make long-needed repairs to its infrastructure and pipes.
‘You can’t do that’
In text messages, former District 4 Councilwoman Rocha Garcia, who now serves on the SAWS board, expressed concern that Kaur may have violated the Texas Open Meetings Act.
The day after council voted 6-5 to postpone discussion of the proposed rate hike, Rocha Garcia texted Puente’s chief of staff, Jaime Castillo, to voice her concerns about the exchange, according to messages obtained by InfuseSA.
“No wonder they’re all squirming,” Rocha Garcia wrote. “And if [City Attorney] Andy [Segovia] tries to say it’s not a walking quorum, I think he may be wrong … . I don’t see how it wouldn’t be a walking quorum.”
Rocha Garcia continued: “It’s the equivalent of walking and building support for or against something.”
Rocha Garcia served on City Council’s Ethics Review Board for nearly three years.
Kaur’s document came up several times during council’s June 18 public meeting, and some on the dais, including Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones and District 3 Councilwoman Phyllis Viagran, said they were unaware it existed.
Complaint filed
After the June 18 discussion of Kaur’s letter, Joseph Brantley — who runs the muckraking Facebook page Citizen Veteran Journalists of Bexar County — filed a formal complaint against Kaur with the Bexar County District Attorney’s office.
“The complaint does not ask your office to assume a violation occurred,” Brantley wrote in his June 24 complaint. “It asks your office to review whether the reported conduct satisfies the elements of Texas Government Code § 551.143, including whether the series of communications collectively involved a quorum and whether participating members knew the communications would constitute deliberation once a quorum was involved.”
Officials with the Bexar County DA’s office said in an emailed statement that Brantley’s complaint didn’t “provide a sufficiently reliable basis to support the filing of criminal charges.”
“Criminal allegations requiring factual development are generally filed with the appropriate law enforcement agency for investigation and, if supported by the resulting evidence, only then submitted to our office for prosecutorial review,” the DA’s office said.
Contacted for comment by the Current, former District 6 Councilman Brockhouse said he believes Kaur organized a walking quorum in violation of Texas state law.
“She had to have taken these deliberations to write the memo,” Brockhouse said. “You can’t do that; it’s plain as day.”
He continued: “It’s very telling because in her email, she wrote ‘from several council members.’ She knew exactly what she was doing because whenever I’ve written a memo to anybody, I list the members that are on the memo with me. Copying or CCing people for knowledge is different than ‘This is coming from us.’”
If found guilty of violating the Texas Open Meetings Act, a misdemeanor, Kaur and any alleged co-conspirators could face fines of up to $500 and up to six months in county jail.
Even so, Brockhouse said it’s unlikely that anything will come of the complaint.
“It was so offensive that I stopped going to Executive Session meetings because I felt like the entire thing was a violation of the Texas Open Meetings Act law,” Brockhouse said.
If Brockhouse’s claims that City Council regularly engages in such behavior holds true, the body risks investigation, UT-San Antonio’s Taylor said.
“What’s concerning is this supposed pattern,” Taylor said. “You are not supposed to be doing this stuff in the shadows. Eventually, somebody at some point, particularly the Texas Attorney General’s Office, might actually get involved.”
Sign Up for SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
Related Stories
However, San Antonio voters are still likely to get a say on project via an infrastructure bond election.
The Spurs offered the city some $2.5 million annually as part of the public financing deal for the team’s new arena. Some on council want to see the details.
One attorney said it would be hard to prove, while another expert said an exclusive email list created by District 1 Councilwoman Sukh Kaur deserves a closer look.
Source link
