Phone Call on February 1st, 2021
On the morning of Monday, February 1st, I missed a call from Jeff. He left as message asking me to call him back.
At this point, I was dreading having another conversation with him, because I felt I couldn’t trust whatever he might tell me. I had been frustrated that I couldn’t prove that he was telling everybody different narratives, so I decided that I would install a call-recording app on my phone before I called him back, just in case I ever needed proof of what he had told me. I looked up Texas’ laws on recording conversations and found that Texas is a “one-party consent” state, meaning that any person involved in a conversation has a right to record the conversation without telling the other party or receiving consent for the recording.
I called Jeff back, with the app recording both sides of our conversation. I had feared that his pattern of telling me one thing and other parties something else would continue, but I had no idea that he would outright lie on that phone call.
He started off by requesting to have an item on the agenda for the upcoming board meeting to discuss the CEO's employment. In doing so, he referenced our earlier phone call when he had said he would be more forthcoming and direct, and said it was “pretty clear from the council what direction they want to go”. He offered to have the city’s attorney, Joe Gorfida, available for the meeting, in case a decision was made to “change” the CEO’s employment, which I declined. He then stated matter-of-factly, in order to “not be coy”, “Council is looking for a change”.
I asked him to clarify why the council wanted a change. One reason he gave was the lack of progress, and he quoted an unidentified councilmember who lodged a criticism of the CEO which even Jeff acknowledged wasn’t totally fair, that the CEO hadn’t brought anything to the city. Jeff’s acknowledgement that the criticism wasn’t fair should be all that you need to hear to understand just how absurd that criticism was. If Jeff knew the criticism from other councilmembers wasn’t fair, had he informed the councilmember that they weren’t being fair? The other reason Jeff gave was “personnel issues” regarding Ben Walker (name changed to protect his anonymity), which I’ll cover in-depth later in this blog.
Almost as an afterthought, he brought up that council felt that the CEO should have been involved in negotiations with PMB, the developer working on a large parcel on the President George Bush Turnpike (PGBT). That was a particularly absurd criticism because, as far as we had heard in board meetings, the city was running those negotiations in-house under the city manager, Gina Nash, and they had no need or want of EDC involvement. If council was unhappy that the EDC wasn’t invited to participate in those negotiations they should have pointed the finger at the City Manager for not involving the SEDC. To be clear, the BoD and the CEO would have been very happy to be involved in the development along the PGBT, as we had championed that development for years (including funding the sewer work to make the parcels developable), but Gina Nash sat in our meetings month after month as the CEO told the board that the city had taken on those negotiations and Gina never gave any indication that she wanted the EDC to take a larger role in the efforts. As I recall, Gina justified running the negotiations herself based on the fact that the process required substantial input from several of the city’s departments, and Jeff was there when that fact was repeatedly discussed.
He concluded his answer by saying “that was the best direction I got.” But, as I learned later, he had never received any “direction” from the council as the council had never even discussed the issue.
That phone call was recorded. It's been up on YouTube since 2022, at https://youtu.be/9sbIEvwldtw