Elections NASTY in Windcrest

¡PURO SAN ANTONIO!

Things are nasty in Windcrest; time to vote

GILBERT GARCIA OPINION COLUMNIST

If you think the presidential campaign has become too ugly to bear, you might want to stay away from Windcrest over the next few days.

A nasty feud between forces aligned with and against Mayor Alan Baxter has escalated over the past three weeks, with police being called in to settle political scores and the rhetoric getting uglier by the day.

The most recent incident happened Saturday afternoon. Karl Amrhein, a 70-year-old Democratic activist, was arrested at Takas Park for “assault by contact,” after Councilman Gerd Jacobi called police to say Amrhein grabbed Jacobi’s wife, Edith, around the neck and tried to jerk her campaign pamphlets out of her hand. Edith Jacobi has been wearing a neck brace since Saturday.

Amrhein was handcuffed and held in a police Tahoe for more than 20 minutes, before being handed a citation. (Assault by contact is a Class C misdemeanor and carries a maximum fine of $500, according to the Texas Penal Code.)

Amrhein acknowledges that he got in the middle of a crowd of pro-Baxter people trying to sway a voter with whom he’d been conversing. He said he’s not sure if Edith Jacobi was part of that crowd.

“I may have touched her during that incident, but I don’t have any memory of that,” Amrhein said. “If I touched her, there wasn’t any energy involved.”

Two weeks before the Takas fracas, Bel McFall, the wife of Baxter ally (and council candidate) James McFall, drove kids around Windcrest neighborhoods in a golf cart, so they could place fliers — consisting of harsh attacks against the anti-Baxter slate — on residents’ doors. When a resident started videotaping the kids, Bel McFall called the police.

The knock on Baxter is that he is a foul-mouthed bully who rewards his friends and punishes anyone who fails to meet his loyalty test. Exhibit A is the recording of his 2015 phone conversation with Erick Vargas, then the head of the Windcrest Volunteer Fire Department.

On the recording, Baxter launched into a profanity-laced tirade and warned Vargas, “You decide who you’re going to be loyal to.” When Vargas resigned last year, he said Baxter pressured him to purge the department of firefighters who backed Baxter’s opponents.

Timothy Wilson, the mayor of Kirby, ran against Baxter in a 2014 Republican primary for Bexar County Commissioner. Wilson said Bel McFall yelled at his wife at a Windcrest polling site, and Baxter supporters hurled so much abuse at his volunteers that Wilson had to hire a polling worker to protect them.

The pro-Baxter faction on the council consists of Gerd Jacobi and Jim Shelton, with Pamela Dodson and Kim Wright in opposition.

Part of Baxter’s effort to consolidate his control over the council has been a recall effort against Wright, a first-term council member who knocked off James McFall for the Place 4 seat last November.

Wright has some strange notions. In a 2015 application for a place on the Windcrest ballot, she crossed out “United States” and declared herself a “citizen of Texas.” In a March 16, 2016 tax filing, obtained by the Express-News, she replaced the line stating “U.S. Citizen” with “Texas resident.”

Wright also showed a lack of sensitivity when she blamed the academic challenges at Windcrest Elementary on an influx of kids “from undesirable neighborhoods outside of our city.”

But the recall-election attacks against her have been excessive. An anti-Wright flier distributed to Windcrest voters has described her as “against education & children” and “against equal rights.” It drives home its points with a bizarre image of a turkey vulture picking at a dead armadillo, with a nearly subliminal backdrop of a confederate battle flag.

The worst thing about this effort is that it has exploited Wright’s situation to lump the rest of the anti-Baxter slate — Dodson, Frank Archuleta and Joan Pedrotti — in with her controversies.

Pedrotti, a former Bexar County court administrator, has been astounded by suggestions that she doesn’t support the police.

“My husband is a homicide detective,” she said. “So I’m pretty much pro-police.”

Pedrotti, who is running against James McFall for Place 2, added, “I worked in the courthouse for 20 years. I’ve put up with a lot of stuff. I have never dealt with anything like this.”

On that point, at least, she and James McFall can agree.

“It’s crazy,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Hopefully, Windcrest won’t see anything like it again. ggarcia@express-news.net Twitter: @gilgamesh470