The point: It’s getting to the point where you can’t believe anything the Mayor of Odessa says.
Well, fairytale time with Odessa Mayor Javier Joven continues.
Last week, we called out Joven for spinning a web of lies about the liberal effort to “take down conservatives.” He’d written an opinion piece for the Midland Reporter Telegram attacking the Odessa American and Texas Monthly and accusing both publications of spreading false narratives.
We reminded readers our stories are based on open meetings and records requested through the Texas Public Information Act.
We also detailed how Joven accidentally revealed why we haven’t received a single email between himself and T2 Professional Consulting – a firm that was miraculously hired to help replace City Manager Michael Marrero within mere hours of Marrero and City Attorney Natasha Brooks being fired.
We requested the emails because we wanted to know more about this mysterious company, how Joven came to know about them and most importantly, when he began working with them.
During a Feb. 14 interview with an OA reporter, Joven casually mentioned emails.
“The one thing that I was taught, you get an email, you destroy it, you don’t keep anything,” he said. “This is what’s being taught in every faction, destroy this, this, this and this, you just delete. You keep nothing.”
Click here to hear that conversation.
Public officials are required to keep their email dealing with public business regardless of whether the email is related to a government-issued email address or a private one.
Well on Monday morning, Joven went on a local radio program to continue his far-from-facts tour.
During the interview a listener texted a question about deleting his “official government emails pertinent to T2.”
Here’s his response at the program’s 7:21 mark:
“I didn’t. I don’t have any government official emails. This is a false narrative once again by the local paper to be able to create something that is completely false. I have over 3,000-4,000 emails and we know that some of our IT people have been leaking our emails and they’ve been going through and the thing is, it’s been vetted. That is a completely totally false narrative by the local paper.”
OK, which is it? He doesn’t have any government official emails to delete or he has 3,000-4,000 emails? And if it’s the latter, why hasn’t the OA received a single one pertaining to T2 despite at least two separate TPIA requests?
To be clear, the law states elected officials must keep all email relating to public business. That means ANY email not just an official government email. We know Joven routinely uses his private gmail account for official business. In fact, the T2 contract instructs them to send all correspondence to [email protected]. All of those emails are subject to the public information act.
Joven also suggested the OA called Texas Monthly, asked them to write a story attacking the council and even fed them questions. Not only did we NOT do that, but what an insult to Michael Hardy, the reporter who wrote the Texas Monthly article. Obviously he’d been reading about the shenanigans of the council and decided to check it out on his own. What he saw at the Jan. 24 City Council meeting he attended obviously made him think a story was warranted.
Jan. 24 was the day a handful of local attorneys stood up in defense of Municipal Court Judge Carlos Rodriguez, whose job appeared to be on the chopping block. The attorneys tagged-team the council and also questioned them about the salaries of the new interim City Manager Agapito Bernal and interim City Attorney Dan Jones and expressed shock Jones got the job despite having been sanctioned by now-retired Ector County District Court Judge James Rush.
Attorney Gaven Norris also expressed outrage Joven went way outside his lane to give Rodriguez direction on how to handle underage drinking cases. Joven wrote, “I request that you consider the maximum penalty for any social host violations and for any minor in possession citations.”
The Texas Monthly article was well done and insightful, in our opinion. It is also embarrassing that these yahoos are running the city, and we are glad a national publication has also pointed that out.
Joven ducked out on the Texas Monthly reporter and didn’t actually do an in-person or phone interview but instead responded via email with a short statement about “unsubstantiated claims.” That may be better than Councilwoman Denise Swanner. At least Joven was not quoted in the article as saying he wanted some sort of control over Odessans and the media. Huh?
Yes, that’s right. Asked what her top priority was on the City Council, Swanner told Hardy: “Well, you know, if you had any control over the public and the media, [my priority] would be to control them in some form. But that’s never going to happen.”
Downright embarrassing — and frightening — indeed.
As an aside, Joven isn’t the only one acting shady. When Swanner recently met with a local constituent and realized an OA reporter, Kim Smith, was going to be present, she strenuously objected to being recorded before eventually relenting. It turns out, she or her husband secretly recorded the conversation themselves. It was making the rounds via email within the week! Texas law, by the way, states only one side of a conversation has to consent to being recorded, so she didn’t do anything illegal, just shady.
Joven also took the opportunity to lie, again, about the OA’s ongoing open records lawsuit against the City of Odessa. He went on and on about how the OA is suing the City because we want public records “immediately” and how we should go to state lawmakers to change the rules rather than waste taxpayer money going through the courts.
We did not sue to get public records immediately. We sued to get the City of Odessa to release unredacted reports in a reasonable time frame. If those reports cannot be released within 10 days, the law states government entities must request an Texas Attorney General’s opinion and state which exceptions apply.
We’re OK with that time frame, but when we filed our lawsuit three years ago, the City was redacting information that was defined, by law, as open to the public. Moreover, they weren’t meeting the 10-day time limit in every instance. And what is worse is that the City sometimes sent public records requests for Attorney General review in cases that didn’t warrant AG review because the material requested was basic who-what-when-where, criminal incident information, which has to be produced for public inspection.
It also bears repeating, yet again, that Joven consistently lies when he says the City won that case.
The City did not win. The judge in the case dismissed the lawsuit based on the City’s claims that it eventually gave us the documents we sought.
To be clear, the City only turned over the documents after we initiated legal action. In other words, we believe the City was gaming the system, delaying the timely release of public information and ultimately doing so when it looked like they were getting into some legal hot water. Meanwhile, the public, who owned the information in the first place – was left to feel like a penny waiting for change.
The judge did NOT state the City was right to withhold the records in violation of Texas law or to redact them in the first place. And that is why we appealed the ruling. We want the Texas Court of Appeals to definitively say the City was in the wrong SO THEY CAN’T DO IT AGAIN.
Oh, and by the way, Joven lied yet again about our parent company, apparently in an attempt to make us look as though we’re outsiders who only care about money, not our community. AIM Media is not from the midwest. AIM Media was formed in Texas and its leadership — and many of its investors — live in Texas, including right here in Odessa.
Joven also lied when he described eight stipulations we asked for while trying to settle the lawsuit. We didn’t ask the City of Odessa to provide the daily weather to us. Yes, that’s right, he told listeners we requested that. That’s just flat-out ludicrous. At some point along the line, someone casually mentioned weather reports are always considered open records and that weather conditions are sometimes part of police reports. Yet, Joven just had to twist it into another false narrative.
Joven also used his radio time to brag that the City Attorney’s Office is a well-oiled machine now despite losing four of its six attorneys since December.
“We had a $1.2 million payroll within our legal department, 16 employees. We radically reduced it,” Joven said. “So the thing is, it’s promises made, promises kept. We’re making our city government smaller, leaner and more effective and more accountable.”
Talk about a fairy tale!
“We radically reduced it,” Joven said.
Sure, they fired City Attorney Natasha Brooks, but Assistant City Attorney Laurie Means accepted employment elsewhere. Senior Assistant City Attorney Monique Wimberly resigned citing the “disintegration of work environment; political process became too intertwined with position” and another senior assistant city attorney, Jan Baker, said she was “ready to retire.”
Baker has since elaborated on her reasons for quitting. “It was too dangerous to be there,” she said. “I’ve had my bar license for 30-plus years and I didn’t want to lose it with what the mayor and his people were doing. They always blame legal when things go wrong and I didn’t want to lose my license over what they did. I didn’t trust them and I didn’t want to lose my reputation or my license.”
And if the two lawyers left in the office were easily handling the work load, why is it a new attorney was recently hired, and why is there another assistant city attorney position listed on the city’s website?
The City’s legal department has not been made leaner and more efficient due to council stewardship. It has been decimated because of a toxic and rabidly political junta supposedly led by Joven, who sees himself as king but is, in reality, merely a water boy for a group of power-hungry zealots, some of whom are too cowardly to let themselves be seen publicly playing their malicious games.
Joven also conveniently avoided mentioning exactly how much the City is now likely paying OUTSIDE attorneys to handle legal matters. Kevin McKethan is spending his days prosecuting folks in Odessa Municipal Court and Jones is running in circles doing Joven’s bidding (including taking T2 reps out to lunch at the Barn Door). But who is vetting contracts? Who is answering city staff’s legal questions? Who is overseeing Texas Public Information Act requests to make sure the proper things are being redacted and the law is being followed?
Just how many TPIA requests get filed by random citizens, journalists and lawyers?
Haha! We filed a TPIA to find out.
Nearly 4,000 TPIA’s were filed in 2022 and just under 900 had been filed as of Wednesday this year.
According to city documents, the City Attorney’s Office has sought the Texas Attorney General’s opinion in 198 of those requests, which requires an attorney to lay out all the legal reasons why they think records should be exempt from disclosure. It’s a lot of work.
So again, who is doing all of that work?
What we can say is the council has contracts with Davidson Sheen for $195-$375 an hour and Kelly, Hart & Hallman for $450 an hour. We know Davidson Sheen was hired to investigate the bullying claims filed by former Downtown Odessa Executive Director Casey Hallmark and to re-investigate an already closed investigation into injuries suffered by Odessa Fire Rescue cadets.
Kelly, Hart & Hallman was hired to defend the City against the Gaven Norris lawsuit filed after Brooks and Marrero were fired.
At those rates, we would certainly hope the City hasn’t also signed contracts with them to handle the routine legal matters of the City! Especially since the City has already spent more than $254,000 defending themselves against a lawsuit the OA should never have had to file in the first place.
The Odessa Development Corporation is also considering hiring outside attorneys to look over contracts on occasion.
Promises made? Promises kept? Smaller government? That doesn’t appear to be true. How much will all these new contract attorneys cost?
Don’t worry, we have filed a TPIA to find out if new contracts have been signed, what other firms they’ve hired and how much has been spent on them. We’ll report what we find out as soon as the City responds.
We also suspect the price tag for lawyers is going to explode exponentially if former Assistant City Manager Aaron Smith files a whistleblower lawsuit against the City. He was fired last week and his attorney, former Ector County District Attorney Bobby Bland, said they believe it was in retaliation for asking the Texas Rangers and Texas Attorney General’s Office to see if Joven violated the law by signing the T2 contract and violated the open meetings act.
Asked about Smith’s firing following a council meeting Tuesday night, Joven had this to say:
“I want to make a statement. I have been advised that I cannot. There’s an ongoing investigation. But I will tell you one thing, it’s not what was reported,” Joven said. “I’ve asked when will this start and conclude because we need to make a statement.”
Joven said he doesn’t know who is investigating Smith.
“I don’t know. That’s all I’ve been told. I can’t say if it’s HR or PD,” Joven said.
He went on to say the “separation of Aaron Smith had nothing to do with the City Council.”
Bland on Friday said neither he nor his client have been advised of any investigations of Smith.
Joven has previously declared he didn’t even know who Aaron Smith was or when he was hired. He claimed he learned of his hiring from a community member. He’s just adding to the narrative that he and other council members were kept out of the loop on city business by Marerro. It’s a lie. Joven, and every other elected official and city employee, were sent an email on Nov. 15 about the hiring of Smith.
Again, Joven needs to stop with the fairy tales. The OA and the Texas Monthly aren’t trying to take down conservatives.
We’re just trying to inform our readers.
Want another example of hyperbole? Check out the following comment Joven made during the radio show.
“I think conservatives across the country, across the state, especially when they see this, they see what the rhetoric is. They see through the veil, this fake facade of the Texas Monthly and I think what we’re learning is that there are more communities that want their local entities like their council, their school boards to be more conservative because this is the first line of defense from us losing our communities, losing our children, losing our freedoms.”
The sad and scary reality is that Joven and the gang he is with have turned the time-honored purpose of city government on its ear. They see city leaders’ role as political in nature, molding City workings around a political agenda. In reality, city government has always been intended to be apolitical, designed to help a city run: patching potholes, protecting the citizenry, fighting fires, paving streets, fixing busted water pipes. It ain’t sexy, but it is oh so vital. And political party ideology should not have a place in the job description. The consequences are now clearly on display for all to see.
And, um, how exactly is the Odessa American going to take anything away from the city by merely reporting facts gleaned from public records and meetings, King… er… Mayor Joven? We are merely providing information every single man, woman and child has a right to know. In a free society, that is.
Puh-lease. Stop the fairy tales.
