SAN ANTONIO – Two Bexar County commissioners are butting heads, but over what depends on which one you ask.
Precinct 3 County Commissioner Kevin Wolff sent a memo to the entire Bexar County Commissioners Court on Aug. 24, blasting Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert. Calvert, he said, gives orders to various department heads managers, often “in direct opposition to the County Manager’s directives,” and has also tried to “force county purchases from his pick of vendors.”
“For whatever reason, Commissioner Calvert has decided he knows better than us and wants to go around the existing structure that we have,” Wolff told KSAT on Friday.
In his memo, Wolff claims Calvert ultimately wants to eliminate the County Manager organization of government. So he says he will bring forward an agenda item to reaffirm the current organizational structure that “will include specific language in the County Manager’s contract barring any individual directives to the County manager or other staff from individual commissioners.”
For his part, Calvert doesn’t think much of the accusations in Wolff’s memo.
“It was a weapon of mass distraction,” Calvert said Friday. “It was uninformed, and he didn’t know what he was talking about. And it was a pretty insane tirade.”
Instead, Calvert believes Wolff’s message was driven by something else -- scrutiny of the Bexar County Military and Veterans Service Center, which Wolff oversees.
“He’s upset because it appears as if the Texas Veterans Commission is going to release records to KSAT 12 that will verify that things might not be going so well,” Calvert said.
In a July 15 memo to County Manager David Smith, Calvert said the center’s director, Karen Rolirad, “inflated the amount of veteran compensation claims the Bexar County Military and Veterans Service Center attained” and requested Smith’s office and the county auditor investigate.
A county spokeswoman confirmed that an audit by the county auditor is ongoing.
Wolff called the audit “superfluous” in his memo and told KSAT he sees it as “just another example of behavior that’s been ongoing,” and that Calvert is just trying to deflect from the other allegations Wolff leveled in his memo.
“I know that it’s Tommy’s desire to make this personal, but sorry, it’s not,” Wolff said.
Wolff is in his final term on the commissioners court after deciding not to seek reelection.
Precinct 3 Commissioner Kevin Wolff won’t seek reelection to focus on family