My Removal from the SEDC's Board of Directors
Item on Council’s Agenda to Consider Removing Me
On Friday, March 4th of 2022, I got a text from a citizen at 6:05pm. It said “Just saw the agenda. Are you ok?” That was the first indication that I received that the council had put an item on their agenda for the following Monday to consider removing me from the Board of Directors. I told her that I hadn’t seen it yet and asked her to send me a photo of the agenda, which she did.
Phone Calls with Councilmembers
I spoke to Cullen King, Chance Lindsey, and Frank Millsap over the weekend leading up to my removal. Several of them said that if I had an issue with something Jeff had done then I should file a written complaint against Jeff. It seemed pointless to me, as I held out no hope that the council under Mike Felix would ever allow Jeff to be held accountable for his misconduct, but I spent a few hours writing up a complaint and got it notarized.
Frank told me one very telling thing. Frank recounted a conversation he had had with Mike Felix, at some point prior to my email to Jeff. In that conversation, Mike warned Frank that the election was going to get ugly, and spoke to him about the possibility of removing the entire SEDC board. It was a radical proposal and really showed where Mike stood. Mayor Felix wouldn’t allow us to talk about Jeff’s actions at that first joint meeting, and he wouldn’t help resolve our concerns about Jeff’s misconduct, but he was willing to remove all of us from our appointed positions. It was the action of a bully. If we wouldn’t fall in line and shut up about Jeff, he would remove us rather than address Jeff’s misconduct.
City Council Meeting on March 7th, 2022
I spoke to a lawyer that morning, a family friend I had served with in the Texas State Guard, to discuss the possibility of him attending the council meeting with me. Unfortunately, it was Spring Break week and he was out of town. As I had been given no advance notice of the agenda item I had insufficient time to find an alternative lawyer.
I had no idea how my removal would work, so I contacted the city secretary to confirm that I would be given a chance to speak on the item.
I then spent several hours writing a complaint to file at the meeting, about the lie that Jeff Bickerstaff told me which started the process which led to the CEO’s removal, and about his improper interference with the Board of Directors’ authority over the SEDC.
I had been trying to get the council to investigate Jeff’s actions for over a year at this point but had been unsuccessful, but as soon as Jeff asked them to come after me it was on the very next meeting’s agenda. It’s good to be the king. Situations like this show why it’s so hard to fight City Hall -- they hold all of the power.
I had hoped that the meeting would at least give me a chance to get some answers out of Jeff and the council about what had happened.
Going into the meeting I heavily suspected that my fate had already been decided. Jeff wouldn’t have had the item put onto the agenda unless he had already “taken the temperature” of enough councilmembers to know the outcome. Mike Felix and Brett Franks had already made it clear to me that they were not going to investigate what Jeff had done or hold him accountable, and Michelle Howarth had joined them in voting down the joint session and approving Jeff’s by-law amendment (hours after I raised concerns to them about his conduct) so I assumed they would approve his request to remove me. I did wonder where Cullen King would fall. I had spoken to him the day before, and though he had reached out to me I don’t think he had tipped his hand about how he would vote. I didn’t really know what to expect from Chance Lindsey or Frank Millsap either, though both had sounded supportive of my call for an investigation of Jeff’s actions.
At the meeting, Jeff began the discussion. He read my email into the record, and he stated "I really wish he would have reached out to me. I don't, I think if he had we might have not had to do this tonight." But I had reached out to him, twice including my email. Once in a phone call from February 25th of 2021, when I asked him to stop pursuing the CEO's removal (I was already aware that he had been dishonest at that point), and he had made it clear he would not stop and would use every avenue he had available to him to have her removed. And then I had reached out in that email from February 23rd of 2022. The email he was using to have me removed was literally me reaching out to him.
Michelle Howarth spoke after Jeff introduced the item and alleged that I had violated Texas Election Code by “coercing” Jeff not to run. I don’t believe my email violated the law and I would point out that I have never been charged with a crime. The law Michelle referenced defines coercion very specifically and I don't believe my actions qualified as "coercion".
Michelle’s allegation of criminal conduct on my part really limited what I could say in response, as I did not have a lawyer present. As I stated earlier, I had not been given any advance notice of this agenda item so I was unable to arrange for representation. I felt like my lawyer would have told me not to get into discussion of any legal points, so I felt I could make no attempt to address my email from that point forward. It was suddenly like the council was not just discussing my removal, but was also prosecuting me for a crime, and they were the judge, jury, and executioner.
There was discussion of whether or not Jeff should have felt threatened when I had only stated I was going to reveal the facts about his conduct. If Jeff felt threatened by the facts then it was because he knew the facts showed he had been dishonest.
Cullen King called me up to the podium to ask me a couple questions and I took the opportunity to submit my complaint, handing it to the City Secretary, and I spoke for a few minutes about the complaint. I didn’t know if the council would cut me off at the three minute point, so I kept my comments under the three minute limit afforded to citizens speaking on an agenda item.
Later in the meeting, Brett Franks said "I think if you would have gone through, through the proper channels before you sent this, um, these allegations whether it be truths to you, I think that would have been a whole different issue but the, the theme at which the email was sent and the implication that all Council as a whole helped cover it up that's just bad form so I, I'm in support of removing him." But I had gone through the proper channels, and Brett Franks had explicitly told me (in that phone call from June 5th of 2021) that he didn't want the council to get involved in sorting out what Jeff had done. I had told Brett that Jeff's story was not true, and that Jeff had lied repeatedly to the board of directors. Brett said that other directors had also told him Jeff's story wasn't true, but Brett made it clear that he was not supportive of having a meeting to address what had happened with the EDC. In his words, "If we have a joint meeting to do this that's going to be a two-hour meeting about where at the whole process break down and that's not going to solve anything, in my opinion. That's just Brett. Cuz that would drive me up the wall." Later in the call he reiterated it, "What I don't want to get into is a two-hour meeting about "he said/she said" and it's just not productive." Brett knew I had in fact raised these issues "through the proper channels" when he criticized me for not doing so at my removal meeting.
Also at my removal meeting, Mayor Mike Felix made several comments as though I had deprived Jeff (and the city's voters) of their rights, which is simply not true. He implied that I told Jeff he "couldn't run for office", and talked about free elections as though I had violated that very basic right. "We demanded free elections in this country, period. We've earned that right and we've got it today. We don't need people telling us we can't run..." He also said "Many people gave up everything they could so we would have this right to vote and a right to run for office” and “People worked hard to have us this right to run for office and for the voters to be able to vote." It was absurd that he implied I was denying Jeff some basic right, or that I was disenfranchising voters.
The city's attorney had apparently made it clear to the councilmembers prior to the meeting that they were not allowed to discuss what Jeff had done to cause me to write my email. Several councilmembers stated that they thought it was relevant, but they were pressured by the attorney to stay on the topic of my actions. If the council was not allowed to draw a conclusion of whether or not my email was warranted by Jeff’s misconduct, how could I mount any defense? Clearly my actions should have been discussed in the context of the events around me. Jeff’s actions were clearly related to my email, and the attorney should have allowed that discussion.
During the meeting, it was clear that I wasn’t going to get any answers from Jeff, as he was “off-limits” to the discussion. It was frustrating that the citizens still weren’t getting any answers about what Jeff had done.
During the meeting, the city attorney also improperly cut off a citizen, Jeanie Marten, from discussing what had happened with the CEO's removal. The citizen had a first amendment right to speak her mind but the city attorney stopped her.
The item on the council’s agenda had read “Consider removal of Spencer Hauenstein from the Board of Directors of the Sachse Economic Development Corporation pursuant to section 505.01 of the Texas local Government Code.” It was not limited to discussion of my email to Jeff. Council could have factored in virtually any aspect of my service to the city, or even broader issues related to my conduct. Any topic that the council members felt was relevant to the discussion of my potential removal would have been legally permissible, despite the attorney's stated restriction. They could have decided my haircut did not represent the city well, or they could have decided based on my service on the Board of Adjustment 15 years prior. Broadly, anything that had happened during my 9 years on the Board of Directors should have been allowed in the discussion, including my interactions with the Board Liaison. It was improper for the City Attorney to bar the councilmembers from discussing or considering how Jeff’s actions had affected my actions.
After much heated discussion, Michelle Howarth made a motion to remove me from the Board of Directors. After a long pause waiting for a second of the motion, Jeff Bickerstaff seconded the motion.
In the end, Mike Felix, Brett Franks, and Michelle Howarth sided with Jeff. The vote was 4-3, and I was removed. By the time I got home my access to my SEDC email account had been revoked.
It’s important to note that the three councilmembers who sided with Jeff to remove me were the same three who had joined Jeff in voting down the joint session the previous March, and they had voted for Jeff’s by-law amendment. Every decision they made aligned with Jeff’s goals, and they prevented his lies from being exposed.
I had served the council as a volunteer for over 17 years, and in the end all I got for it was public rebuke which lasted almost an hour. It felt like I had been publicly tarred and feathered. They had publicly shamed and discredited me, all while preventing any discussion of Jeff’s unethical actions.
You can watch that portion of this meeting at https://youtu.be/dhSxi8Bz4cQ.
Legality of my Removal?
I'll point out here briefly that my removal was illegal under Sachse's Home Rule Charter, which is essentially like they city's Constitution.
The Charter lays out a specific process for removing citizens appointed to boards, and it is a broad provision which covers all citizens appointed to any board by the City Council. That process was not followed at all in my case.
The City Attorney pointed out in the meeting that the charter narrowly restricts the removal of appointed members but incorrectly states that they can follow the broader removal authority from the state.
This is contradictory from the guidance provided by Texas Attorney General John Cornyn in opinion JC-0349 related to the powers of councils over their appointees to EDC boards, which stated "Moreover, if the city charter, an ordinance, or a resolution includes a provision that would bar the reappointment of a director to the corporation, the city governing body must comply with that restriction." The same point applies to removals as it does to the appointments the AG was addressing in that opinion.
The City Council operates strictly under the Home Rule Charter which created it, and has to abide by restrictions duly placed upon it by the citizens. The council is not the highest authority in the city, as the citizens have an absolute right to define what powers the council has and how they can be executed. Texas’ statute on EDC’s does not overrule the restriction placed on the council’s removal authority over citizens appointed to boards. Even the Attorney General stated that the governing body (the city council) must comply with charter restrictions in dealing with EDC directors, and he went further saying that the council would even be bound by ordinances (local laws created by the council) and resolutions (policies and positions formally stated by the council).
Are we to believe that Sachse’s City Attorney is more qualified to rule on the supremacy of state law than the state’s Attorney General?
I would summarize the Attorney General’s guidance like so: “The council must abide by local restrictions to its powers over EDC directors whether they are in a home rule charter, a local ordinance, or a resolution.”
It is not a gray area. Jeff and his supporters on the council knew they would not meet the 80% threshold required by the charter for my removal, so they ignored the valid restrictions placed upon their removal powers by the home rule charter, but the City Attorney allowed it to happen with bogus reasoning that sounded plausible.
There are only a handful of cities in Texas with similar charter-based restrictions on a council's removal authority, but I reached out to a municipal attorney with experience in one of those cities and he confirmed that the restriction would cover EDC directors. In his words "given that [the city] is a Home-Rule city operating pursuant to its Charter, it has the right to implement it’s own procedural rules regarding advisory board membership, which may be stricter than state law regarding votes needed for removal."
If the council doubts my assertions of the illegality of my removal I would encourage them to contact external un-biased municipal attorneys to get an honest answer. They have access to free legal advice from the Texas Municipal League for starters.
In Texas, all restrictions put in place by a proper authority must be followed by those under that authority. The people of Sachse implemented a restriction on its City Council, and the council was legally obligated to follow that restriction. The fact that the state allowed a broader removal authority is irrelevant in Sachse.
Think of it this way, if the state said all city hall buildings must be red or green, Sachse's Charter could mandate that our city hall would be red, and that rule would be upheld in courts because it doesn't contradict the state law.
I know a lot of the people who read this will refuse to believe I'm correct about the illegality of my removal, but I assure you I've spoken to multiple lawyers about this. If you haven't spoken to a qualifed un-biased attorney then I suggest you do so before you dismiss what I'm reporting.
Jeff and his supporters on the council needed me gone, and they needed me discredited, so they had to get me removed. The Charter restriction stood in their way, so they chose to illegally ignore it.