Three men on Marfa’s city council faced calls for their resignations at a Tuesday evening meeting after a recording surfaced of the group seeming to discuss only considering male candidates for a city job.
In the recording, published by the Big Bend Sentinel Tuesday, council members Eddie Pallarez, Mark Morrison and Raul Lara talk and laugh about looking at male candidates for a city job.
The conversation happened at a special council meeting last week where members were discussing a vacant city administrator job. As the Sentinel reported, the brief conversation happened after the mayor and interim administrator stepped out of the room, with nobody in the audience.
“Guys, I’m looking at males,” Pallarez whispers in the recording, laughing and adding, "Shhhh.”
“I didn’t hear nothing,” Morrison responds, later adding amid more laughter, “But I ain’t saying you’re wrong.”
“Because with all these women,” Lara can be heard saying.
“Just between us men,” Pallarez says in the recording.
The remarks prompted heated criticism at Tuesday’s city council meeting, with multiple locals echoing council member Travis Acremen’s calls for the three men to resign.
“You should resign, and anyone else on this council that shares these opinions that women cannot hold these jobs, or the man could just do it better because he’s a man, you should pack your bags and go with ‘em,” Marfa resident Dana Goolsby told the council.
“The women, nonbinary people and gender-fluid people of this community deserve better,” Lisa Kettyle said. “We deserve a city council that truly represents all Marfans, not just men.”
Morrison and Lara apologized for their remarks. Pallarez told the packed room at Tuesday’s meeting that the other members had “nothing to do” with his comments. He said he had apologized to women who work for the city, but would not apologize to members of the public.
“My comment was not supposed to be derogatory,” Pallarez said. “We had 10 applicants, nine were men, so if it was a giggle, if it was laughter or anything like that, it was misconstrued.”
That prompted an outcry from people gathered at the meeting, with one exclaiming, “We heard the tape!”
None of the three men indicated they would resign.
Marfa Mayor Manna Baeza was absent for the entirety of the conversation; he had stepped out of the room to recuse himself from a discussion about a separate agenda item related to an AEP rezoning proposal, but never returned to the meeting.
Lara, at times holding back tears, said he was “deeply sorry to all the women.”
“I’m deeply, deeply sorry, because that’s not the person I am,” he said.
Morrison reiterated comments he had made earlier to the Sentinel, saying the conversation was “absolutely wrong, inappropriate.”
Tuesday’s meeting grew particularly heated at one point, when Morrison’s husband, Patrick Daly, took the podium to defend the three men.
“Everybody’s complaining about the council members, but how many of you have chosen to run for council? Who here hasn’t said derogatory things,” he said, prompting jeers and interruptions from the crowd. “I would like to thank the council members, they’re not perfect people, they make mistakes.”
After his remarks, Daly had a brief confrontation with Goolsby she later described as him clapping “right up in my face,” prompting a Marfa police officer to escort Daily out of the building.
Acreman, the council member who first notified the Sentinel about the recorded conversation, expressed concerns Tuesday about the city’s hiring process.
“I don’t know how we repair the trust with the city, as we go forward with hiring decisions, that they will be made in good faith,” he said.
Editor’s note: Lisa Kettyle is a volunteer music program host at Marfa Public Radio.
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