SAN ANTONIO – A local Republican Party official who filed an ethics complaint against Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones over her pursuit of bringing the Democratic National Convention to San Antonio wants Jones to offer the same opportunity to his party.
“Look, if she does both, that’s phenomenal. I will withdraw my entire thing,” Bexar County GOP Vice-Chairman Kyle Sinclair told KSAT during an interview Monday. “My advice to her is to do both. Be fair to the city, and that’s all I’ve been saying since I’ve been the vice chair.”
Sinclair filed an ethics complaint against Jones on July 16, more than two weeks after the new mayor sent a letter to top Democratic officials promoting San Antonio as a destination for the party’s 2028 national convention.
Sinclair argued it was improper for the mayor to use her position and city resources to pursue a “partisan political event.”
An outside attorney for the city, Nadeen Abou-Hossa, has reviewed the complaint and allowed a portion of it to proceed for the city’s Ethics Review Board (ERB) to consider.
The mayor’s use of the city seal and letterhead on the letter, she wrote to Sinclair, “may” fall under a portion of the city’s Ethics Code that forbids the use of city property or resources for private or political purposes.
So far, the ERB has not scheduled a hearing on the complaint.
Sinclair said his concern is that Jones, who ran twice for Texas’ 23rd congressional district as a Democrat, only reached out to the DNC.
“By doing it to one, you look highly partisan,” Sinclair told KSAT. “You ran a nonpartisan race as a partisan candidate and your very first action is to go after partisan organization. So, to get away from that, you should have done it to both."
The Republican National Convention already announced Houston as the site of its 2028 convention two years ago.
Sinclair confirmed Tuesday he hadn’t been aware the RNC had already selected its next convention site, but he said his offer still stands if Jones were to pursue the RNC for 2032.
“By only going after one, you stake the highly partisan political realm is what you’re doing,” he said in a follow-up phone conversation. “You are a nonpartisan mayor. You represent both. Go for both. Represent both. Be the mayor for both.”
Jones, who was sworn into office on June 18 after defeating former Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos, maintains she didn’t do anything wrong.
“The Mayor plays a legitimate role in bringing major conventions of that scope to the City and the letter to the DNC was reviewed by the City Attorney and no legal issues were identified,” a spokeswoman from her office told KSAT in an emailed comment.
The spokeswoman had no additional comment on whether the mayor planned to reach out to the GOP.
The chairman of the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Political Science and Geography Department, Prof. Jon Taylor, called the complaint a “tempest in a teapot.”
"Simply put, this is not politics, per se. Yeah, she’s a Democrat. She ran as a Democrat for Congress,“ Taylor said. ”That’s not politics, per se. It is about economic development, about actually attracting a very large group of individuals who are gonna spend a lot of money in downtown."
This is not the first time a political convention has stirred up debate in San Antonio.
There was pushback in 2018 when then-Mayor Ron Nirenberg didn’t want to pursue a bid for the 2020 Republican National Convention.
The former mayor has also provided a separate example of why the stakes are likely low for Jones in this case.
Nirenberg was accused of violating the same section of the Ethics Code by using city resources to create communications for a campaign-controlled Facebook page.
Though a panel of the Ethics Review Board decided during a Sept. 15 hearing he had violated the code, the only punishment they handed him was a “letter of admonition.”
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