A call for the City of Brownsville to vote on creating an an all-inclusive coordinator position would oversee all activities, awareness and other accommodations for the special needs community is coming a bit late for former city employee Sandra de Leon.
De Leon, who is disabled, said she could have used such an advocate when she worked for the city two years ago after 15 years employment and was terminated by insensitive supervisors for what she says were reasons related to her disability.
According to city commissioners Jessica Tetreau and Cesar de Leon, Brownsville receives many calls asking for officials to increase accessibility throughout the area. They are asking the commission to vote on creating an all-inclusive coordinator position who they say would oversee all activities, awareness and other accommodations for the special needs community.
"The special needs community should be represented and these families have different needs than what ours are. So, I just want the city to cater more and make these children and community members know that Brownsville is an all-inclusive city," Tetreau told the local daily.
The city agreed with Rodriguez and kept her from using the handicapped parking space and De Leon said she had to threaten to contact a lawyer to initiate a legal defense before Rodriguez and the city relented and allowed her to use the handicapped parking space.
While she was there, in September 2012, fellow city employee Willie Gonzalez was involved in a shooting at a local nightclub. News accounts at the time indicated that Gonzalez had been involved in a late-night altercation and that, feeling threatened outside in the parking lot, pulled out a gun from the glove compartment of his car and shot a man and injured a woman. The man was left permanently disabled.
(Gonzalez, by the way, was the son of longtime city secretary Lydia Gonzalez who had a close relationship with city manager Charlie Cabler.)
That was on a Wednesday. On that Friday, after working hours, employees were called to an informal meting and told Gonzalez would be returning to work on Monday and were asked not to talk about or mention the shooting under threat of a formal reprimand or termination. De Leon, who had run-ins with Gonzalez in the past because of his inappropriate comments about her disability, stayed at work typing a letter to her supervisor expressing her concern and fear about him returning.
As a result, the city a had a guidance counselor sit with her for six sessions and came to the conclusion that she was in an unsafe environment.
That, and the fact that she felt it was unfair when Rodriguez transferred a woman he knew on a personal basis from her job answering calls at the Brownsville Animal Shelter to the City Plaza Building.
Those events led to then-Asst. City Manager Jeff Johnston to move De Leon to the Parks and Recreation at the old Boys and Girls Club on the corner of Eighth and Tyler streets.
That's when her real troubles started. Since the building was not ADA compliant, she suffered an ankle injury. Then-director Chris Patterson was trying to help her with Traffic when he left the city. Incoming director Damaris McGlone started using the handicapped space and told De Leon she could not enforce it since there was no signage on it.
But the parking space was the least of her worries at the time. Her overriding concern was the rat infestation in the building. On August 2014, she asked that two traps be placed near her desk to control the rats' spread. By October, the traps were being replaced almost daily and the number of traps had been increased to five.
One of the rodents had dropped from the ceiling and got caught in a sticky trap that city workers had placed near her work space.
After a month from November to December without traps, the infestation had become too great and the rats had eaten through the wiring between the ceiling and the roof.
For the next three weeks the department was without phones or Internet. That's when a decomposed rat was found underneath De Leon's desk and she was placed on a breathing machine to clear the resulting spores from her lungs.
The result was that the city had to replace the ceiling, wiring and roof to rid the building of the pests. De Leon, whose disability was compounded by the infestation, bothered her supervisors and she was given a performance evaluation on June 2015 and scored 13 even though a score of 9 is required for probation.
She was nonetheless placed on probation after 15 years employment and when she asked them if it had been her complaints about the rats that had triggered that determination, the reply was that the building was old and that "this sort of thing was to be expected."
She was also told her performance was not "up to par."
The next week, Parks and Recreation was awarded a grant that for which De Leon had written the application. Two days before Thanksgiving , De Leon was terminated. As a result of the bad evaluation and termination, prospective employees have turned her down.
It is good and well that the city commission is considering the hiring of an all-inclusive coordinator position to advocate for Special Needs residents and employees. Unfortunately, for De Leon, the move comes one job short and two years late.