In any other city, in any other jurisdiction, if one of your workers or a subordinate selectively released information that was meant to ridicule the boss or cause the city's reputation and its public officials to be cast into public disrepute, the city manager (or administrator) would fire the individual on the spot.
But this is Brownsville, and when former Brownsville Fire Department Chief Carlos Elizondo released highly selective, and heavily edited recordings taken with his cell phone to use against his superior, city commissioner Cesar de Leon, nothing has happened.
What's more, he released them when he knew De Leon –a member of the board of the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation – and his fellow commissioner Ben Neece were with interim GBIC Director Gilbert Salinas in Toronto, Canada on a trip that had been planned for months.
Is it any surprise, knowing Elizondo, that the release was timed when both men were out of town and they could not respond to the questions that were bound to surface once the doctored recordings were released to the four winds?
Undoubtedly, some of De Leon's views of his city commission colleagues, members of the board of the board of trustees of the Brownsville Independent School District, media types like us, black attorneys with the Cameron County District Attorney's Office which he slurred with the "N" word, fellow attorneys and even some members of the judiciary were not only intemperate, but sometimes odious.
But think about it.
You have an underling (Elizondo), a city commissioner (De Leon), and a local bail bonds man who is a member of the Public Utilities Board (Armando Magallanes) sitting around in a secluded ranch and the city employee is secretly making recordings of his boss with the idea of using them in case he feels his job threatened.
And that is exactly what happened right after Elizondo was demoted from his position as fire chief and he is facing possible termination of his employment. Someone said that now that he is not the chief, he is covered by the civil service rules that protect the rank-and-file firefighters. That is true, but insubordination is a good cause for termination regardless of whether one is civil service or not.
The contents are salacious and some of the statements made by the commissioner can't be defended in polite company. But only De Leon's comments have been published in mass media and the Internet. What did the other two say? This would never be allowed as evidence in a court of law. Is it possible that he goaded and led De Leon into making some of those outrageous remarks while he secretly recorded them and nudged him along?
This should give other public officials with whom Elizondo has been related on a confidential basis. Has he been recording them along? And what about his interaction with his fellow trustees of the BISD and the administration? Do they feel comfortable that their remarks in executive session or in confidence are not being recorded? Who else has he recorded without their consent?
De Leon will have to answer for his remarks in the court of public opinion, a forum that has rules of evidence which are less rigid than those that apply in a courtroom. We understand that the commissioners at last night's meeting asked city manager Charlie Cabler to resign and he refused.We also understand that he is in the middle of an expensive construction project in his home and that local contractors are falling over each other to please the City of Brownsville's gatekeeper to the riches of its treasury. Was this the reason that Ernie Estrada – with vast connection with building contractors locally – was the man appointed assistant fire chief despite the fact that he lacked experience and rank in the department?
If Cabler does not act immediately to address this outrageous insubordinate behavior from a city employee under his direction, the city commission would be within their right to step in and do the job for him and consider him useless in his position and terminate him as well.