McCamey Put Kathy Campbell on Probation Over a Facebook Post

McCamey’s city council put code enforcement officer Kathy Campbell on 90 days of probation on July 19, 2024, over a Facebook post residents tied to the Trump assassination attempt. The same vote took 30 days of her pay and ordered social media classes. Mayor Pedro Rosales said the line was vague and that the council did not believe it was about the shooting.

The post, later deleted, said the “world almost a better place today.” In a town that still sends code complaints to a hall on East 6th Street, that sentence and that denial landed in the same week.

McCamey Docked a Month of Pay for a Post It Called Vague

The council did not wait for its regular second-Monday meeting. It called a special session on Friday, July 19, 2024, six days after the July 13 attack on Donald Trump. Campbell was the city’s code enforcement officer. Residents read her Facebook line as a wish that the shooter had succeeded, and they said so out loud.

THE WEEK AFTER THE ATTEMPT

1. July 13, 2024: Donald Trump is wounded in an assassination attempt; the day is a Saturday.
2. July 13-18, 2024: Campbell’s Facebook post circulates in McCamey; she later deletes it.
3. July 19, 2024: The council, in a special meeting, imposes probation, unpaid time, and social media classes.
4. August 18, 2024: The 30-day stretch without pay runs out.
5. October 17, 2024: The 90-day probation term runs out.

The package was not a slap on the wrist dressed up as concern. Unpaid leave is a paycheck. Probation is a job held on terms. Classes are an official finding that her social media use needed correction. Rosales still told a reporter the post “could’ve meant many of things.”

THE JULY 19 SANCTIONS

Those are three different tools, and they do not match a council that had already decided the post was harmless small talk. You do not pull a month of wages for a sentence you insist was about something else.

Thirty Days With No Code Officer on the Street

While Campbell was off the clock without pay, the city told residents to bring dilapidated-building complaints and other code problems to City Hall on East 6th Street. That is 207 East 6th Street, the same address on the municipal roster, with the city phone at (432) 652-3333.

In a place this small, code work is not a distant bureau. It is one person looking at yards, junk cars, and porches, then writing it up. For 30 days that person was gone, and the workaround was a walk to the hall. The council kept the job on the books. It also made the officer disappear from the street for a month, which is what a firing looks like if you squint and what a defense looks like if you do not.

McCamey does not even run its own police force. The city website describes an inter-local pact with the Upton County Sheriff for law enforcement. A town that already borrows deputies still found time for a Friday special meeting about a Facebook status.

Why Did the Council Punish Speech It Disowned?

Asked whether the post referred to the assassination attempt, Rosales answered in one run-on breath that tried to close the case and keep the penalty.

No it was not, that post was very vague it could’ve meant many of things and we as a council don’t believe that’s what she meant.

Pedro Rosales, Mayor of McCamey, after the July 19, 2024 meeting

If that sentence is true, the classes are theater. If the classes are real, the sentence is a shield. The people who commented under the local news post spotted the seam the same day: a council that did not believe the Trump reading still treated the post as conduct that cost pay. Others said it was free speech and to leave her alone. A third group wanted her fired, not parked on probation.

The council chose the middle door. It refused the meaning that had the town angry, and it still marked her file. That is how a tiny government gets through a weekend of screenshots without a termination letter and without a full defense of the employee. Mayor Pedro L. Rosales is still the name on the Texas Municipal League city roster, with Mayor Pro-Tem Noe Marquez and aldermen Cindy Zuniga, Chris Myles, Ilda Lujan, Juan Galan, and Angel Armendarez. Marquez had taken office on May 7, 2024, barely two months before the special meeting. City Secretary Patty Jones is listed on the same roster. None of them published a later public notice that Campbell had been dismissed.

1,831 People, One Badge, and a $100 Permit

McCamey counted 1,831 residents in the 2020 census. It is a General Law Type A city in Upton County, incorporated in 1927, meeting on the second Monday at 7 p.m. The city site still calls it the Wind Energy Capital of Texas. Code power in a place that size sits close to the people it is used on.

MCCAMEY AT A GLANCE

• Population: 1,831 in the 2020 census, on about 2 square miles.
• Form: General Law Type A, mayor and six aldermen, city secretary Patty Jones.
• Hall: 207 East 6th Street, McCamey, TX 79752, phone (432) 652-3333.
• Police: Upton County Sheriff, under an inter-local agreement, not a city PD.

The municipal code still funnels construction through a building commissioner. It is unlawful to put up or remodel much of anything, other than a fence, without a permit when building work that costs over $100 is involved, and the commissioner can stop a job that is off the permit. New-construction fees run $0.15 per square foot with a $25 minimum. That is the legal neighborhood Campbell worked in: small dollars, close neighbors, a badge that can halt a porch.

A code officer who has just been read as celebrating a shooting is not a neutral visitor on a weed complaint. Even a 90-day watch, even a month off the street, leaves that reading in the file the next time she knocks. The council’s “vague” line does not travel with her onto the stoop. The screenshot does.

Upton County Later Counted 1,149 Votes for Trump

The special meeting happened in July. In November 2024, Upton County’s presidential canvass recorded 1,149 votes for Donald Trump and 146 for Kamala Harris, about eight Trump votes for every Harris vote in that pairing, with 5 more for Jill Stein. That is the electorate that had already spent July arguing about Campbell’s post.

A Facebook line that can be read as relief that Trump had almost been killed is not an abstract culture-war prop in a county that votes like that. It is a municipal employee talking, or seeming to talk, about the man most of her neighbors had just watched take a bullet on live television. Rosales’s claim that the words could have meant “many of things” asks those neighbors to un-hear the calendar. July 13 was the attempt. The post used the word “today.” The meeting was July 19.

The council did not have to adopt the residents’ reading in a resolution. It only had to live with it. Probation plus unpaid leave is how a West Texas dais lives with a reading it will not speak.

The 1987 Ruling on Hoping a President Would Die

Texas has already taken a version of this fight to the Supreme Court. On March 30, 1981, Ardith McPherson, a data-entry clerk in the Harris County constable’s office, heard a radio bulletin that President Ronald Reagan had been shot. Talking with a co-worker, she said she hoped the next try would succeed.

if they go for him again, I hope they get him.

Ardith McPherson, Harris County clerical employee, March 30, 1981

Constable Walter H. Rankin fired her. In Rankin v. McPherson, decided 5-4 on June 24, 1987, the Court held that the discharge violated the First Amendment. McPherson was not a sworn officer, did not deal with the public, and had made the remark in a private conversation. The majority found her statement plainly dealt with a matter of public concern, and that the office showed no real disruption. Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote for the Court that a remark can be ugly and still be speech about public affairs.

The Texas Municipal League’s legal staff still walks cities through that case when it explains adverse action for an employee’s speech. The league’s memo, by Evelyn W. Njuguna, director of legal services, and Caroline Bush, then a law clerk, puts Rankin next to Pickering and Garcetti: speech as part of the job is not protected; private speech on public issues is, unless the employer’s need for a functioning workplace outweighs it. Campbell’s post was private in form. Her job was the opposite of McPherson’s clerk desk. Code enforcement is public contact. That is the lever McCamey could have used without pretending the words were fog.

WHAT CITIES WEIGH BEFORE THEY DISCIPLINE A POST

• Speaker role: Was the employee talking as a private citizen, or doing the job out loud?
• Public concern: Was the topic political or civic, or only office gossip?
• Disruption: Did the post actually impair the work, the staff, or the public’s trust?

McCamey answered the third question with a month of unpaid leave and a training order. It answered the meaning question with a mayor’s denial. Those answers cannot sit in the same folder without one of them being for the cameras.

At City Hall the Post Still Has a Shadow

Social media class does not unsay a line that neighbors already copied. Deleting the post does not either. The city never released the full screenshot, the exact time stamp, or Campbell’s own account of what “today” referred to. It released a penalty and a shrug.

By October 17, 2024, the 90 days were over. By then Upton County was weeks from handing Trump 1,149 votes. The city’s own pages in 2026 still show Rosales as mayor and still point code-style problems, in that older instruction, toward the hall on East 6th. They do not publish a biography of the code officer and they do not post a termination. The public record of what the council did on July 19 is the record: probation, 30 days without pay, classes, and a mayor who said the post was too vague to be about a shooting that had happened that same week.

The badge still has to work in a town of 1,831, where a $100 job needs a permit and the sheriff’s office handles the guns. A Facebook sentence from July 2024 is a long time to carry on that route.