Two Arrests, Water Quality Problems, and TOMA Violations: My Current Trinidad Timeline

In the last week, Trinidad has charged a journalist with a state jail felony over a Facebook post about water, cited a protestor outside City Hall for their "language" and a sign that read "Fuck Bad Cops," and given a Texas First Amendment law firm enough material to publish two formal press releases in forty-eight hours.

Some of you have followed the events on Facebook. Some of you have read the article I published last weekend about the arrest of Jennifer Combs of Kerens. Some of you watched my livestream on Tuesday afternoon when a Navarro County activist was cited at Trinidad City Hall. Some of you watched Dan Pass's two livestreams the same day. Some of you read the press releases from CJ Grisham at GFA Law on May 12 and May 14.

What you may not have is the connected story.

I have been covering Trinidad since the middle of March. In that time, I have attended meetings, filed open records requests, watched livestreams, recorded my own, interviewed people on the record, listened to people off the record, and read every set of city council minutes I could get my hands on.

This article is that connected story. It is what brought me to Trinidad, what I have seen since, what other people have told me, and what I plan to do at the next council meeting on Tuesday, May 19. It is not a complete record. It does not name everyone. There are details I am not yet ready to publish, and there are claims I am not yet ready to confirm. The things I do publish here are things I can support with public records, with on-record interviews, with public Facebook posts, or with my own first-person observation.

If you live in Trinidad and you do not know who is on your council, when they meet, or what they have been deciding, I hope this article helps. If you live somewhere else and you are watching, I hope it helps you too. The patterns here are not unique to Trinidad.

What Originally Brought Me to Trinidad

I started covering Trinidad in mid-March 2026. The first thing I noticed, before I had attended a single meeting, was that the city had cycled through three city administrators in roughly two years.

Terri Newhouse, who had served as the city's secretary and administrator for years, departed sometime in mid-2025. The audit reports she had been responsible for had findings the auditor described as material weaknesses. Those findings repeated, in some cases verbatim, across multiple years. After her departure, an interim administrator served briefly. In August 2025, the city hired Lindsey Patterson as its new administrator. Six and a half months later, in late February 2026, the council voted four to zero to terminate Patterson. The mayor confirmed on the record that the termination was without cause.

The same week Patterson was placed on administrative leave, a sitting councilmember named Paul Kern resigned. He cited his health. Paul Kern had been appointed to the at-large council seat in November 2025 on a unanimous vote of the seated council; his resignation was accepted, also unanimously, at the February 27 meeting. This is the same Paul Kern who will appear later in this article on scene at Trinidad City Hall during the events of May 12, and whom several commenters on my own livestream that day referred to as "Santa."

At the next regular council meeting after Patterson's termination, on March 17, 2026, I signed up to speak. Specifically, I signed up to speak on the citizens comments slot and on most of the individual agenda items. There were close to twenty items on that agenda. The reason I signed up that many times was simple. The Texas Open Meetings Act requires that the public be able to address each item the council is going to act on. Trinidad's own posted rules allow it. So I did. I spoke on the items. I cited public records. I asked questions. I did not make accusations. I asked the council, item by item, whether what they were about to do was consistent with the law that governs how they have to do it.

Some people called what I did that night a filibuster. I called it a citizen participating in the public-comment process that the city's posted rules say I can participate in. Either way, it took most of the meeting.

That meeting is when I knew I was going to keep coming back.

The Timeline as I Understand It

The story of Trinidad, as I have been able to piece it together, goes back further than the last six months. It goes back at least to the city's FY2018 audit, which was delivered roughly sixteen months late and identified the first in what would become six consecutive years of material weaknesses in the city's books. The same person was named in the corrective action plan, year after year, until she was no longer with the city.

In late summer 2025, the city brought in a new auditor, a new municipal CPA, and a new city administrator. The auditor told the council on the record that the city had, in his words, serious bookkeeping problems. The CPA was authorized to spend most of a year cleaning up records. The new administrator, in her first months, documented thousands of dollars in operational savings and identified the basic financial questions she had been hired to answer.

In the same window, the council hired a new police chief, took up a third-party audit of the police evidence room, reverted a controversial change in the city's retirement plan that had been adopted three years earlier, and signed off on a series of contracts that addressed long-deferred issues with the water plant.

By November 2025, the city had elected its fifth mayor in five years. The Planning and Zoning Commission was dissolved for stated Open Meetings Act reasons and reconstituted with new members.

I was not in Trinidad yet. I started paying attention shortly after.

What I Have Seen Since I Started

I have attended several council meetings. I have collected published agendas, signed minutes, audits, and budgets going back years. I have read the comments under the city's official Facebook posts. I have interviewed a sitting EDC and Planning and Zoning member on the record. I have spoken with people off the record. I have filed open records requests to help trace the issues through factual public records.

The water question has shown up everywhere. It has shown up in the city's own audit notes. It has shown up under the city's official Facebook posts. It has shown up in a Trinidad Police Department post in early April. It has shown up in a city-issued Boil Water Notice fifteen days after that police department post.

I have read residents who said their water has been bad for decades. I have read residents who said the city told them years ago not to drink it. I have read a long-time resident who said she is selling her home and attributes cancer in the community to the water. On a public Facebook thread less than two weeks ago, the city's own contracted water and wastewater operator, Jeremy Crocker of Aqua Services, wrote a substantive on-record explanation of what is happening to Trinidad's water right now.

Crocker explained that the city is in the middle of an active chemical conversion intended to clean the pipes. He said the city is following that up with, in his words, "probably some of the most flushing the pipes have ever seen." He confirmed that most of Trinidad's pipes are old cast iron and that the buildup inside them is the source of the discolored water residents have been photographing. "Once this stuff breaks off the inner walls of the pipes it has to be flushed out," he wrote. "There is so much of it that it is getting in people's lines as well." He said the flushing will continue for approximately another month, and that crews had already been at it for more than two weeks. When asked publicly about a longer-term fix, he wrote that the city plans to follow the current conversion with a second step that changes the chemistry of the water to be "more scale forming" so that a protective coating reforms on the inside of the pipes and helps contain iron particles. He called the work "a lengthy process."

In other words, the city's own contractor characterizes the brown water residents are seeing right now as the expected by-product of an active cleanup of a long-neglected system. Per the same contractor speaking on the record at the April 9 council meeting, the water plant itself has been brought up to standard. The distribution lines, the pipes that carry the water from the plant to people's homes, are the part still being cleaned out.

That is the city's explanation. I want to offer a contrasting perspective.

My own observation, watching the brown-water photos as residents have posted them, is that the discoloration has tended to heighten during and right after rain. After a recent Kerens City Council meeting, in an unrelated conversation, I described that timing to Kerens Mayor Jeffrey Saunders. Mayor Saunders has spoken publicly about his own background in water systems, and from what I understand he keeps pressure monitors in his own yard that he uses to watch the Kerens water system. When I told him about the rain-and-brown-water timing I had been seeing in Trinidad, he told me that the pattern I described to him sounded like infiltration. I asked him the obvious follow-up question. If a water system is always under pressure, how does outside material infiltrate the pipes. The most he could offer in response was that it sounded like a serious problem Trinidad needs to jump on as soon as possible.

I am not a water-system engineer. I am noting what the city's contractor has said publicly, what my own observation of the pattern has been, and what a sitting mayor in a neighboring city told me when I described the pattern to him.

You may contact Kerens Mayor Saunders yourself to verify this conversation occurred.

The April 9 Council Meeting

The next thing I want to walk through is the regular council meeting on April 9, 2026. I attended in person.

The mayor opened the meeting by saying that he did not consider the agenda in front of him legitimate. He said he objected to all of the action that would be taken if the council proceeded. He said he had thought long and hard about whether to gavel the meeting in at all.

A resident then delivered a prepared statement about the water. He described brown, flaky, sediment-filled water. He cited the kind of chemistry that happens when chlorine disinfectants meet the protective scale inside old cast-iron pipes. He asked for a written remediation plan with a timeline.

After he sat down, the police chief responded. The chief told the room that posting on Facebook about people being hospitalized due to bacteria in the public water supply could be charged as a state jail felony.

The chief made other statements that evening. He accused the mayor of several things in open session. A resident in the room described being approached at a barbershop by someone seeking to be installed on the council long enough to vote the mayor out. The resident speaker named Marie Bannister, who was actively sitting as a council member at the dais, as the person who had done the recruiting. He told the room she had asked several people in town to take the seat. It is an allegation Marie Bannister has denied. The allegation itself was made in open session, on the public record, while Marie sat at the dais.

Two action items on the agenda were tabled. One was the city's effort to reduce the hours of the municipal judge. The other was an ordinance that would have defined the duties of the mayor. Both items had been on prior agendas. Both were dropped from action without a public vote on the substance.

At one point during the back-and-forth, I asked the mayor directly, from the audience where other residents were also speaking out of turn, to stop the meeting and reconvene at a properly-noticed time. The discussion in front of him had moved well beyond the bounds of the posted agenda. He declined to end the meeting. It continued.

I am not going to characterize the rest of that meeting in this article. All I will say is that the meeting was an incredibly unique demonstration of how Texas local government should not operate.

From April 9 to Today

Twelve days after the chief's April 9 statement about water Facebook posts, the City of Trinidad issued a Boil Water Notice on its own Facebook page. The Trinidad Police Department shared that notice on the same official page that had earlier warned about state jail felony charges for water-bacteria reports.

Two and a half weeks after the Boil Water Notice, Jennifer Combs of Kerens was arrested by Kerens Police Department on a Trinidad Police Department warrant. The charge was False Alarm or Report. She was booked into the Navarro County Jail at 5:36 PM on Friday, May 8. I published a full article about that arrest on the evening of Saturday, May 10.

Two days after the Combs booking, a Trinidad resident posted new brown-water photos to a community Facebook group, and the city's contracted water operator replied on the public thread confirming the cast-iron-pipes problem on the record. Another resident in the thread asked, in real time, whether the recent arrest in Kerens was related to the same topic.

On Monday evening, May 11, CJ Grisham, a Texas First Amendment attorney with GFA Law, PLLC, announced publicly that he was about to file a third lawsuit against the City of Trinidad and the Trinidad Police Department.

On Tuesday morning, May 12, Grisham was blocked from the Trinidad Police Department's public Facebook page. He gave the department until noon to unblock him. They unblocked him within hours. By mid-morning, he had announced that a formal press release for Jennifer Combs was coming the same day. That press release went up that afternoon.

On Tuesday afternoon, May 12, the same Trinidad Police Department cited a Texas local government activist named Winston Otto Noles for disorderly conduct after he stood outside Trinidad City Hall with a sign that read "Fuck Bad Cops" alongside a "Back the Blue" sign. He sat in handcuffs in the back of a patrol car for approximately an hour. The Trinidad chief was at his home when the incident began. Officers from Malakoff Police Department were the first to respond. The chief eventually arrived. The chief, on a public livestream that I was running from the scene, explained the basis the city was using for the citation. The Trinidad Police Department alleges that, before the citation, Noles went inside City Hall and caused a disturbance that offended and frightened the female city employees who work in the office. That is the basis the department has stated, on the record, for the citation.

Around the same time, Harvey Freebird, a Galveston-based police-accountability activist and cop-watcher who operates a large public Facebook page focused on First Amendment work, contacted CJ Grisham and connected him to Noles on the scene. Grisham's subsequent call, made on Noles's behalf, came together because of that introduction.

I showed up to Trinidad that afternoon after I saw Otto's livestream go up and was notified by BZ Watchdog that police were responding. I made my way to City Hall and started livestreaming as soon as I arrived. Paul Kern, the former councilmember I introduced earlier in this article, was on scene during the incident. Several commenters on my livestream that day referred to him as "Santa."

On Wednesday afternoon, May 13, CJ Grisham drove to Trinidad himself with his law partner Ryan Franceschina, his equal partner at GFA Law, PLLC. They stood in front of City Hall. They were threatened with citation for saying "fuck" aloud at City Hall, the same word that appeared on the sign Noles had been cited for the day before. Grisham posted that incident to Facebook with a photograph.

On Thursday morning, May 14, GFA Law issued a second formal press release. It named Otto Noles. It listed the federal authorities under which the firm was prepared to act, including a federal civil rights claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The press release described, in the firm's own words, a documented and escalating pattern of retaliation by the Trinidad Police Department against critics of the department.

That is roughly where we are.

What Tuesday Night Looks Like

The next regular meeting of the Trinidad City Council is Tuesday, May 19, 2026, at 6:00 PM, at Trinidad City Hall, 100 Park Street, Trinidad, Texas.

Trinidad allows up to five minutes of citizens comments during the standing public-comment slot at each regular meeting. You can use that slot to speak on whatever you want.

You can also sign up separately to speak on individual agenda items. That second option is one most people I have talked to in Trinidad do not realize they have. You can be the resident who shows up, signs up for items 5, 8, and 13, and asks specific questions about specific items. You can be the resident who only signs up for citizens comments and uses five minutes to tell the council what you think. Both are legitimate. Both are protected by the same Texas law I have been quoting in this article from the beginning.

I plan to sign up to speak during citizens comments on Tuesday. I also plan to sign up to speak on a few specific agenda items. I will be reading from the published agenda, and I will be asking questions about specific items the council is being asked to act on.

If you live in Trinidad, and you have a grievance with the way your city government is running things, I would like you to consider doing the same thing. You do not have to be confrontational. You do not have to make accusations. You can ask questions. You can read directly from the public record. You can simply remind the council, on the record, that the public is paying attention.

If you cannot attend in person, I plan to livestream the meeting on Facebook. I will also record it offline in widescreen with better audio, and that recording will go up on watchtowerci.com sometime after the meeting.

The Trinidad story does not end Tuesday. It does not start there either. Tuesday is the next chance for the public to participate, in the room, on the record, in real time.

How to Reach Me

I am always gathering information.

My focus right now is Trinidad, Seven Points, Kerens, and Italy. I am active in other Texas cities and I am open to any and all credible leads from any small town in Texas. I may not reply to every email, but I do see everything. My contact information is on my profile and the Watchtower website.

Confidentiality is the default. If you ask me not to publish what you tell me, I will not publish it. If you want to be quoted, I will quote you. If you want me to verify what you tell me against the public record before I print it, I will do that, and if it does not check out I will tell you and not print it.

Thank you for your time, your patience, and your attention to this complex timeline. I know it is a lot. I know not all of it makes sense yet. I am working on the parts that do not, and I will publish more as more becomes clear.

I will see you Tuesday.