SAN ANTONIO – Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez’s (D2) reluctance was clear on Thursday as he took official action to green-light a semi-truck dealership at the far edge of his East Side district.
“As I promised to my neighbors, I would like to convey the spirit of sadness and lost hope that they have expressed, as I make this motion to approve these nasty little items,” McKee-Rodriguez said.
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His council colleagues complied and voted to bring a 35-acre property at the corner of Interstate 10 and Weichold Road, just outside Loop 1604. The property is fully within city limits, which gives it the zoning necessary to build a new Doggett Freightliner dealership.
The property is backed up against the Paloma subdivision, whose residents did not want the dealership.
However, McKee-Rodriguez said they had decided Doggett’s backup plan to use it for parking was “the greater terror.”
‘Liar’
McKee-Rodriguez had controversially tried to kill both options during an Oct. 17 meeting.
Doggett’s land use attorney, Ken Brown, said McKee-Rodriguez had told him a vote scheduled for that day would be pushed to a later meeting. Instead, McKee-Rodriguez pushed to annex the property into the city limits without the zoning Doggett was seeking.
By not telling Brown about his plan until it was too late, McKee-Rodriguez ensured Doggett couldn’t pull its request for annexation ahead of time.
Had a majority of the council gone along with McKee-Rodriguez, instead of choosing to delay the vote, Doggett would have been unable to use the property as either a dealership or semi-truck parking.
McKee-Rodriguez said it had been a “last resort” to stop a project that had been hanging over the neighbors' heads for more than a year.
The maneuver prompted an ethics complaint from a North Side resident with no apparent connection to the project, who called McKee-Rodriguez “a liar.”
Oscar Zepeda specifically accused the East Side councilman of violating the city’s ethics code by damaging public confidence and impeding Doggett’s private interests.
“This is about a councilman’s refusal to be transparent and his choice to not deal with the public fairly,” Zepeda wrote in his complaint.
The City of San Antonio hired attorney Nadeen Abou-Hossa to review the complaint as an independent compliance auditor and counsel to the Ethics Review Board. A city spokesman confirmed Thursday that Abou-Hossa had forwarded the complaint to the board for consideration.
McKee-Rodriguez has until Dec. 4 to file a response.
After the complaint was initially filed, McKee-Rodriguez told KSAT in a text message, “I have trust in the process and am confident that this complaint will resolve itself quickly. My constituents continue to place their trust in me and my team, and that’s something we’ve earned and take pride in.”
When KSAT contacted him again on Friday, the councilman said he planned to file a response and would wait until the hearing to comment further.
‘I will be supportive of the council member’
The ethics complaint confuses Brown, who has said Doggett would “never pursue anything like this.”
“I don’t know how someone files an ethics complaint that wasn’t involved,” Brown said Thursday. “I mean, they don’t know all the facts. So I will be supportive of the council member during that process.”
After the initial clash at the October meeting, Brown said he and the councilman quickly called a truce and began negotiating.
“I didn’t think we had meaningful, really meaningful conversations until the council member got involved,” Brown said after Thursday’s vote.
McKee-Rodriguez rattled off several measures ahead of Thursday’s vote to which he said Doggett had agreed, including the size of the setbacks, a 10-foot masonry wall, no semi-trucks on Weichold Road, keeping trees along the property line and no on-site fuel storage.
Brown said it would likely be six to eight months before any work on the site begins, which likely wouldn’t be operational for 18 months to two years.
More coverage of this story on KSAT: