SAN ELIZARIO — An incident involving a San Elizario municipal employee at the center of rising tensions between the mayor and some members of the City Council is the subject of a criminal investigation, City Marshal Jose Soliz told El Paso Matters after a sometimes raucous council meeting Monday night.
Soliz said the investigation was being conducted by an “outside agency,” which he declined to identify. The Texas Rangers often investigate alleged offenses involving local governments.
“Anything that we can do to support them, we’ll do it. But in the meantime, we’re not interfering with the investigation and I’m not at liberty to discuss anything because it’s not my investigation,” Soliz said.
Mayor Miguel Chacon told El Paso Matters that the investigation involves a now-fired city employee, identified at Monday’s City Council meeting as Claudia Villegas, whom he said admitted to creating false documents in response to an open records request to the city.
Villegas could not be reached for comment by El Paso Matters.
In a highly unusual move, the City Council voted to exclude Chacon from a closed-session discussion Monday about a grievance filed by Villegas against the city. The council acted on the advice of Desiree Duarte, an attorney representing the city, who said Chacon’s presence in the closed meeting “may be adverse to the city’s interests when it comes to Ms. Claudia Villegas.”
“The mayor has released attorney-client privileged memorandums and communications to this terminated employee. The mayor has informed the city attorney that he will give the former employee everything she needs to sue the city,” Duarte told the council. “The mayor has shared his city email account login information with this terminated employee, and the mayor has indicated to staff that he’s willing to assist the former employee in a lawsuit as well.”
San Elizario Mayor Pro Tem Thomas Black and Mayor Miguel Chacon briefly argued at a special city council meeting on Monday, Nov. 10. (Brandy Ruiz / El Paso Matters)
In an interview with El Paso Matters, Chacon said he didn’t believe the City Council followed the appropriate process when it voted last month to terminate Villegas, an administrative assistant for the city.
“I believe that every employee, no matter what they have done, it should be done accordingly and with due process,” Chacon said.
The mayor allowed Villegas to retain access to his city email and calendar after she was fired, which he acknowledged was a mistake. Mayor Pro Tem Thomas Black, after discovering that Villegas had access to the mayor’s email, ordered the city’s information technology department to change the password to the mayor’s account – without telling Chacon.
That move angered the mayor, whose relationship with Black has been deteriorating for months. The two argued briefly about the password issue at Monday’s meeting, angrily talking over each other at points.
Alderman Lorenzo Leyva ended the squabbling by saying: “This is a bunch of crap, OK? We’re all freaking adults. Put our shit aside.”
Chacon told El Paso Matters that Villegas was fired after she admitted to creating documents in response to an open records request from former Mayor Isela Reyes, who he ousted in the 2023 election.
The request involved Chacon’s decision to hire Emajj, an El Paso marketing company, to handle San Elizario’s social media accounts. He said he did so after learning that former city officials, including Reyes, had access to the city’s social media accounts.
Chacon said he hired Emajj without a competitive bid, citing an emergency.
El Paso political blogger Jaime Abeytia reported that the city’s response to the open records request included three one-page documents purporting to be responses from El Paso marketing agencies to a request for proposals for social media services. Chacon confirmed that account to El Paso Matters, and said Villegas later admitted to city human relations officials that she had fabricated the documents.
The mayor said he didn’t instruct Villegas to fabricate the documents, and he didn’t see the documents before they were released after the open records request.
When asked why Villegas shouldn’t have been terminated after admitting to falsifying records, Chacon said: “I’m not arguing if she should have been terminated or not. What I am opposing is the way she was terminated. We didn’t follow procedure.”
San Elizario Mayor Pro Tem Thomas Black listens as city accountant Adriana Gaucin discusses cash flow issues facing the city. (Brandy Ruiz/El Paso Matters)
After Monday’s City Council meeting, which included three separate closed-door sessions, Black said he believed he had gotten important points across.
“I wanted council to understand better what was going on. I hope that the community can now move forward from that and understand that there’s things that happened, but we figured it out and we took a stand,” he said.
Monday’s special meeting of the City Council came after months of escalating tension between Chacon and Black and followed revelations about the city’s finances and longstanding governance problems in the city that was reincorporated a decade ago.
Once political allies in the 2023 election, Chacon and Black grew increasingly divided over how the city was being managed. The rift deepened when Black ordered city staff to change Chacon’s email password without informing him.
San Elizario, with a population of 10,000 people, was founded in 1598 and at one point served as the El Paso County seat. The city was reincorporated in 2015 and has faced governance struggles since then.
During Monday’s meeting, the council unanimously voted to keep Black as mayor pro tem after Chacon asked that he be replaced. The mayor pro tem serves as the city’s leader in the mayor’s absence.
The council also approved a proposal by Black to develop a cybersecurity policy to prevent unapproved access to city systems.
Chacon said Black’s criticism of his leadership is deflecting attention from the city’s financial challenges.
He said the city for several years has been exceeding budgeted expenses for legal services and interlocal agreements, especially for animal control services provided by El Paso County.
Adriana Gaucin, the city accountant for San Elizario, told the council that the city had run into a cash-flow problem in recent weeks that threatened its ability to make payroll later this month. She said the immediate problem was solved by expediting some payments of money owed to the city and delaying payments to some vendors.
That should get the city through the next few weeks until property tax payments start arriving in December, she said.
Gaucin said there was no need for layoffs, one of the potential responses listed on the City Council agenda.
She said the root of the cash-flow issue was the City Council failing to create a reserve fund. That puts the city at risk of cash-flow challenges while it awaits the bulk of its revenue from property taxes, which arrives in the first few months of the year. That’s four months or more into the city’s fiscal year.
City records show that the San Elizario City Council approved spending more than $1 million of “carryover funds” in fiscal year 2023-24 – a third of its $3 million annual budget. The council approved spending another $835,000 of carryover funds in fiscal year 2024-25, about 29% of its $2.9 million budget.
The budget of $2.3 million for the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, includes $160,000 in carryover funding. Gaucin told the City Council that the city had just over $105,000 in the bank as of Monday, 41 days into the fiscal year.
City Council members voted 5-0 to schedule a budget workshop for early January to further explore the city’s financial situation.
Chacon told El Paso Matters after the meeting that the City Council needed to focus on solutions to the city’s financial issues.
“I was very vocal on saying where we are overspending, but we never hear strategies on how to minimize that overspending,” he said.
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