The National City City Council is moving to censure Councilmember Jose Rodriguez for allegedly violating the city’s code of conduct less than two weeks after Rodriguez won re-election to a second term in a landslide.
The council will vote next week on whether to initiate the censure process, which Mayor Ron Morrison said stems from “a pattern” of unethical behavior, including what Morrison termed Rodriguez’s use of city resources to aid his re-election campaign, and disparaging remarks Morrison said Rodriguez made about other city officials during the campaign.
A censure by fellow Councilmembers would not change Rodriguez’s status on the Council, Morrison said. Rather, the vote would put Rodriguez “on notice that [his] fellow elected officials are disapproving of [his] behavior.”
The city’s code of conduct for elected officials prohibits councilmembers from using “public resources not available to the public in general, such as City staff time, equipment, supplies or facilities, for private gain or personal purposes.”
Morrison said Rodriguez used city-funded staff members to stage events that purported to focus on city business but in fact seemed intended to elevate Rodriguez’s public profile or provide video images for his campaign.
“No one ever saw [the assistants] doing city work,” Morrison said.
The code of conduct also prohibits councilmembers from “slandering” or “disparaging” other city officials or members of the public. Morrison said that during his re-election campaign, Rodriguez accused his opponent, National City Planning Commissioner Randi Castle-Salgado, of being a “Trumper,” even though Castle-Salgado is in fact a registered Democrat who said she never voted for Trump.
Morrison said Rodriguez also used a photo of Trump signs at another planning commissioner’s house to falsely imply in a campaign email that Castle-Salgado supported Trump. “We can’t allow someone who openly supports Trump to make decisions for our community,” the email said.
Morrison said other Councilmembers asked him to initiate the censure process after “talk[ing] to Jose and try[ing] to get him to stop.”
In a statement sent by text message, Rodriguez called the censure vote “all politics and sour grapes, Trump-style. Ron Morrison supported a losing candidate in this past election and he’s mad because the community rejected him and his candidate by the largest margin of any contested city council race in the county.”
“We won by over 73 percent, get over it, Ron,” Rodriguez said in the statement. “Election is over, get to work.”
Other Councilmembers did not respond to a request for comment. Rodriguez declined to respond in detail to the allegations prompting the censure vote.
In response to a previous Voice of San Diego story about some of the alleged ethical violations Morrison referred to, Rodriguez said he had never used city resources for personal or campaign purposes and had always governed for the benefit of residents in his district, which includes some of the city’s lowest income neighborhoods.
Rodriguez won re-election last week with more than 73 percent of votes counted so far. In a post-election interview, he thanked residents for “giving me the opportunity to continue serving as a Councilmember” and said he would prioritize maximizing affordable housing in his city and protecting undocumented residents from possible deportation by federal immigration officials.
During his first term, Rodriguez was a frequent target of residents, who accused him of mixing public and personal business, favoring the interests of big-money campaign backers and leading an effort to award City Councilmembers annual $100,000 expense accounts, which critics called a “slush fund.”
During his re-election campaign, Rodriguez raised more than $40,000, much of it from out-of-town organized labor groups. He used that money to hire one of San Diego’s most prominent campaign consultants and send out a steady stream of mailers, emails and social media messages.
Rodriguez also used his $100,000 city expense account to hire three personal assistants and an intern to help him with what he called “community outreach.” Two of those assistants had worked as campaign videographers for Rodriguez during his unsuccessful 2022 run for mayor.
Rodriguez said in the earlier interview that he took care to distinguish between the city-funded time his assistants spent helping with outreach and the time they spent working on his campaign. One of the assistants, National City school board candidate Cindy Lopez, along with intern Luis Vasquez, were present with Rodriguez at an Election Day get-out-the vote rally Rodriguez participated in at an organized labor meeting hall on the morning of Nov. 5.
Asked about the timing of the censure vote so close to the election, Morrison said he had wanted to request the vote earlier but held off because a pre-election vote “would have looked entirely political.”
“This has been a culmination of a lot things,” Morrison said. “You can’t be doing this stuff.”