San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
MOONLIGHTING
Despite potential conflicts, such dual roles are legal
Restless City: Commissioner Justin Rodriguez supplements county job with bonds work.
Justin Rodriguez has always had to make his own way. Growing up on the West Side next door to St. Mary’s University, he bagged groceries at an H-E-B to help pay his tuition at his Catholic high school.
After graduating from Antonian College Prep in 1992, he paid for a couple semesters at San Antonio College out of his own pocket. He earned a business degree from the University of the Incarnate Word while working for USAA, filing paperwork and taking customer calls.
He’s worked hard to get into the thick of things.
Now 46 and a newly elected Precinct 2 Bexar County commissioner, he fits comfortably into a political system that relies for its survival on webs of relationships and loyalty. That system allows elected officials to draw government salaries and hold second jobs — including jobs that involve putting together bond deals for cities, counties and other arms of local government.
That’s what Rodriguez is doing. By his own estimate, he puts in more than 50 hours a week serving his constituents on the West Side and in the inner city, at a salary of $131,000 per year with a $9,000 annual auto allowance.
He also works part time for the powerhouse law firm Locke Lord LLP. He declined to disclose how much he’s earning there.
Why is Rodriguez moonlighting?
“For me, it’s to keep the cobwebs off my law license. The way I see it, these things aren’t forever — I don’t know where I’ll be in a few years,” Rodriguez said of holding elective office. “And to be completely honest, I’ve got two kids in college and one headed to college.”
He and his wife have a daughter at the University of Texas at Austin and a son at UTSA.
Dry, technical, lucrative
What Rodriguez is doing is allowed under Texas law and the state constitution. One of the few restrictions on county commissioners in Texas is that they can’t vote on anything in which they have a financial interest.
In April, a month and a half after Rodriguez won the Democratic primary in Precinct 2, Locke Lord announced what amounted to a small coup. The firm, which has offices across the country and one in London, had hired three public-finance attorneys from Norton Rose Fulbright, another powerhouse firm. Rodriguez was one of them.
The Bond Buyer, chronicler of the U.S. debt market and its players, picked up the story. It noted that Locke Lord had hired Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson in 2019, two months after he was elected.
Bond work is dry, technical stuff, and lawyers play multiple roles in it.
On the one hand, there’s bond counsel for the governmental entity that wants to sell debt. Those lawyers scour securities and state law, meet with government finance departments, draft a lot of dense documents and render the all-important opinions that tell potential investors whether bond issues satisfy applicable laws and how their interest payments would be taxed.
Not all bond attorneys work directly with public officials. Some deal with the investment bankers who structure and sell the bonds. That’s what Rodriguez does. His title is senior counsel.
Bond revenue is the lifeblood of nearly every new street, sidewalk, library, senior center and publicly-financed stadium, and lawyers and investment bankers keep it flowing.
They operate almost entirely behind the scenes — but having a former or current elected official on the payroll is a huge benefit for law firms that do bond work for local governments. Successful politicians bring a constellation of valuable connections. They can secure hard-to-get meetings. And they know how to talk to other insiders, some of whom they’ve done favors for.
Hiring politicians with law licenses to do bond work is permissible, though Gov. Greg Abbott made noises about outlawing the practice during his 2014 campaign against Democrat Wendy Davis. Why? Because her law firm, Newby Davis PLLC, advised numerous local governments on bond transactions, including a nearly $319 million bond deal for
the Tarrant Regional Water District.
Abbott’s disdain for the practice appeared to dissipate after he crushed Davis at the polls.
For law firms, it’s smart business.
‘Possibility of self-dealing’
But what’s permissible and what’s right aren’t always the same thing. The problem with hiring a politician to advise clients on bond sales is the potential for conflicts of interest. Voting in a way that benefits his or her employer would be the most blatant example.
Beyond that, it gets gray. If elected officials pitch their law firms to other public agencies — and if those agencies do business with the governmental body the officials lead or depend on it for funding — is that a conflict of interest?
Yes, but that’s just my opinion. “It’s an area of such incredible complexity,” said Don Kettl, a professor at UT-Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs. He researches public finance and “policy processes and institutions.”
“Which side of the street is the person walking on?” he asked. “The risk is that there’s the possibility of self-dealing.”
Rodriguez said he’s been careful to avoid conflicts of interest on Commissioners Court — “I don’t cut any corners with respect to that.”
Larry Roberson, head of the Bexar County district attorney’s civil division, which serves as the commissioners’ counsel, backs him up.
“This particular commissioner has been pro-active,” he said. Commissioners facing votes that would clash with their private business interests have to file an affidavit and not vote on the matter, a process known as recusal. “With this commissioner, I’ve never seen a conflict that rises to that level.”
It helps that Locke Lord has no contracts with Bexar County, the county-owned University Health System, the San Antonio River Authority or, for that matter, the