San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
City Council hopeful is challenging ex-boss
Even with three weeks left in the filing period for City Council races, it’s already clear who this year’s most fascinating candidate will be.
Jalen McKee-Rodriguez is a former council aide running against his former boss, East Side Councilwoman Jada AndrewsSullivan.
He is a 25-year-old gay Black man who teaches math at Madison High School.
He is a self-described military brat who grew up in places as disparate as Honolulu and Kentucky.
During his college days, he proudly served as UTSA’s mascot, Rowdy the Roadrunner.
In his very first bid for political office, he already has raised more money than the combined haul of his eight opponents.
McKee-Rodriguez is galvanizing young progressives and his backers include H. Drew Galloway, the former executive director of MOVE Texas, former council candidate Michael Montaño and former West Side council staffer (and current community activist) Jennifer Falcon.
If armchair politicos hadn’t previously taken notice of McKee-Rodriguez’s insurgent candidacy, his recently released fundraising report surely got their attention.
He raised $17,584 in a span of six weeks from 423 donors: 161 of the donors were from San Antonio and many others were old friends from the various places where he grew up.
Knocking off a council incumbent is a heavy lift, but when it works — as in Ana Sandoval’s 2017 win over Cris Medina — it’s generally because a grassroots movement of young idealists decided they were fed up with the status quo.
In 2019, McKee-Rodriguez worked to get Andrews-Sullivan elected and spent 5 1⁄2 months as her communications director. But he says the experience was deeply disheartening.
“I worked for her because I believe wholeheartedly in getting regular people into office and I did put a lot of faith in Jada,” McKee-Rodriguez said. “But it took getting into office to realize that her heart was not in the right place. Every day in that office was a losing battle.”
McKee-Rodriguez said Andrews-Sullivan initially supported a controversial zoning request for VisionQuest to open a migrant detention center on the East
Side, before he and other staffers dissuaded her.
“We had to convince her to take meetings with organizations like TOP (Texas Organizing Project), because she didn’t want to take meetings with people who didn’t support her,” McKee-Rodriguez said.
“We would do research for her to make informed decisions on the dais, but she’d ignore it or she would wait until the last minute to read it.”
McKee-Rodriguez also alleges he was subjected to homophobic verbal attacks from the councilwoman’s chief of staff, Lou Miller.
“He would make comments about my hair and my clothes not being masculine enough,” McKee-Rodriguez said. “He’d imply that my behavior wasn’t manly. We had a big staff and he would target me.”
Both Andrews-Sullivan and Miller declined to comment on McKee-Rodriguez’s allegations.
“Unfortunately, we cannot comment on personnel issues,” Miller said in a text.
McKee-Rodriguez said when he made AndrewsSullivan aware of his experiences with Miller, she responded with “intense retaliation” designed to freeze him out. “They moved me out of City Hall into the North East office,” McKee-Rodriguez added. “They’d prevent me knowing important information I needed for press releases, they’d take my job duties and give them to interns who didn’t know what they were doing.”
McKee-Rodriguez said he is determined to prevent other council aides from experiencing what he went through, but doesn’t want the campaign to become a personal grudge match between him and his former boss.
He wants to concentrate on the infrastructure needs of District 2 neighborhoods (including street lighting) and intends to advocate for investment in commerce and culture on the East Side.
“Right now, we have to leave the district to spend our money,” he said. “We have so much talent. We have entrepreneurs, we have artists. We have people who want to start businesses, but we’re not investing in those.”
The District 2 field includes some past candidates, Dori
Brown, Walter Perry and Norris Tyrone Darden III; a force in the local Black Lives Matter movement, Pharaoh Clark; and a former VIA board member and
West San Antonio Chamber of Commerce president, Kristi Villanueva.
It should result in the strongest, most vigorous exchange of ideas we’ve seen in District 2 in years. It also seems likely to send the race into a runoff.
With the name-recognition advantages that come with incumbency, you’d have to expect Andrews-Sullivan to secure one of those runoff slots. That could turn the council campaign into an eight-way battle for the second runoff spot.
It’s way too early to know how the race will shake out, but there’s an undeniable energy around McKee-Rodriguez’s campaign. I wouldn’t bet against him.