SAN ANTONIO – Venting his frustrations on social media, a San Antonio councilman laid out his opinion on “what the hell is wrong with City Council right now.”
By his reckoning, a big part of it is council members’ discord over Project Marvel and the proposed, downtown Spurs arena leeching into everything else they do.
Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) posted a series of videos Thursday night after he said another councilmember “really pissed me off” by pushing an item on a senior center in his district to late into a more than six-hour meeting and then leaving the dais for part of the public comment portion of another item. Though McKee-Rodriguez did not name the councilmember, the actions matched Phyllis Viagran (D3).
The East Side councilman accused Viagran of pulling his item because she wanted to “teach me a lesson” over his stance on a special tax capture district, which council members agreed to extend and use to buy land for the proposed Spurs arena, as well as fund other projects.
McKee-Rodriguez said that was the issue when Viagran was absent for part of the public comment.
Her actions, he said, showed a “total disrespect” for the people who had signed up to speak and “seniors who did not deserve to be held hostage over political debate.”
“But the root goes back to how personal Project Marvel has become. Some council members feel like you are shooting their cousins if you disagree with them on Project Marvel,” he said near the end of his third video of the night.
“And if we can’t have a real conversation, if I can’t disagree with you, if I can’t make an amendment to an item that impacts my constituents, without you trying to f— me and my constituents over, I can’t work with you. And unfortunately, that is where most people are with each other at this point.
“Even though this is the first time that it’s impacted me in this significant of a way, there is this culture of sabotage that I absolutely hate and don’t know how to heal.”
Viagran has been one of the staunchest advocates of the plan to bring a Spurs arena to Hemisfair, while McKee-Rodriguez has been a skeptic.
He and Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones were the only votes at Thursday’s meeting against the extension of the Midtown Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ) and funding for the Spurs arena land purchase and other projects at the San Antonio Zoo, Botanical Garden, and Brackenridge Park.
McKee-Rodriguez’s opposition was already known heading into Thursday’s meeting where there were multiple TIRZ-related votes on the council’s consent agenda, which is used to pass non-controversial items en masse, without debate.
One of those votes was to an extend the life of the Inner City TIRZ and use to help build a new senior center and aquatics center in McKee-Rodriguez’s East Side council district. The councilman said his office had coordinated bringing about 20 older residents to the meeting to see it happen.
But after Jones pulled the Midtown TIRZ vote off the consent agenda for discussion, Viagran pulled the Inner City TIRZ as well. McKee-Rodriguez then pulled a vote related to a TIRZ in Viagran’s district.
Later in the jam-packed meeting, which included the confirmation of a new police chief and approval of a new contract for officers, Viagran insisted on discussing agenda items in numerical order, effectively pushing both her and McKee-Rodriguez’s TIRZ items to the very end.
“That means that by the time we get to this item, my seniors will have been sitting in the crowd in this cold-a– building for six hours,” he said on social media.
When it was time to take up the Midtown TIRZ issue, 26 people had signed up to speak to council, but McKee-Rodriguez noted during the meeting Viagran and Marc Whyte (D10) weren’t at their seats when staff initially started their presentation.
There was at least one other period of time, while members of the public were speaking, that Viagran’s seat was empty.
McKee-Rodriguez said when he went to a back room of council chambers during that second occasion to tell Viagran and Whyte to return, “she starts laughing and talking s—. So I’m like, ‘nah, you have constituents to listen to. You wanted the order of the day. So come get your order of day.’”
Video of the meeting shows Viagran returned before the end of public comment.
In his social media videos, McKee-Rodriguez claims everything at council traces back to “two foundational conflicts.”
The first he described is due to conflicting shake-things-up versus stay-the-course schools of thought, stemming from the election of an outsider mayor but reelection of incumbent council members.
“This manifests in tension between the mayor and council naturally,” McKee-Rodriguez said. “Especially as any new mayor would expect to set a new tone, while existing council members have taken time to build a workplace culture over several years and would resist that new tone.”
But he also said Project Marvel — the city’s plan for a sports and entertainment district, which is often reduced in arguments to the arena project at its core — “is the underlying thread that stitches almost every conflict that we’ve had.”
It represents differing philosophies on how public dollars are spent and conflict “between residents and lobbyists and developers and special interests and those who are most vulnerable,” he said, and has led to the council getting “lazy” in assessing larger issues.
“If (Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones) mentions a TIRZ one time, half of the council is going to tune out. If she mentions Project Marvel, they tune out,” he said.
“If (District 4 Councilman Edward Mungia) or (District 8 Council
