Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’ premium playoff tickets came from an attorney with close ties to the Spurs and last year’s pro-arena funding campaign.
However, the mayor, who has been skeptical about Project Marvel and the deal to help fund a new Spurs arena, says she can “absolutely” still be unbiased. And the attorney who gave her his own, third-row tickets for Game 6 of the Western Conference finals says he wasn’t trying to influence her anyway.
“I mean, one, those tickets wouldn’t influence anybody about anything. They’re rapaciously expensive, but they’re two seats, you know, down near the floor,” J. Tullos Wells told KSAT.
Wells is a longtime season ticket holder and said he didn’t know how much the value of the tickets were, but “I’m sure two tickets for that game were probably in the mid-four figures.”
Wells is currently the co-chairman of the Tobin Endowment, a private charitable foundation, but he was also the outside general counsel for the Spurs from roughly 1994 through 2014, during which the Spurs secured public funding for their current arena, the Frost Bank Center.
He is also the treasurer of the Win Together Political Action Committee, a largely Spurs-funded campaign that pushed voters to approve county funding for a new $1.3 billion Spurs arena in Hemisfair and the overhaul of the county property around the Frost Bank Center for when the team leaves.
Both measures passed in the November election.
Wells, though, said he doesn’t represent the Spurs organization or anyone else with business with the city.
“I mean, we’re friendly,” he said of the Spurs. “I try to help them if I can be helpful, but no, they haven’t paid me a dime in a long, long time.”
He told KSAT he offered the tickets to the mayor during a meeting in a hotel lobby a day or two before the game, which he believes was about her trying “to build trust relationships with the business community and other folks in the community.”
“And so during the course of our conversation, I asked her if she was going to the Spurs game,” he recounted. “And she said ‘no,’ that she’d never been invited. And so I shot my mouth off and said, ‘You’ve never been to a Spurs game? You’re the mayor of the city. The mayor needs to be at a Spurs game. I’ve got two tickets for this next game. I’m going to be in Boston. You need to go to the game. You need to show that the mayor is supporting the Spurs.’”
He said the mayor’s staff also contacted him before the game to ask about his connections.
“‘Are you receiving any money from anybody who would be influenced or could influence her’ and so on and so forth?” he said of the questions. “The answer was ‘no, no, no, no.’”
‘Gina Ortiz Jones cannot be bought’
KSAT broke the news of the mayor’s free seats the day after the game, after receiving a photo of the mayor in the stands.
The mayor’s spokesman and acting chief of staff, Andrew Fuentes, said at the time “the tickets were gifted to her in accordance with the City’s ethics and gift rules,” but did not respond to questions about who had gifted the tickets, who had attended with her, and whether the mayor had been given tickets or attended any other Spurs games during the 2026 playoffs.
Speaking with KSAT anchors Myra Arthur and John Paul Barajas during a weekly Q&A on Tuesday night, Jones was dismissive of KSAT Investigates’ story, using “investigative reporter” in air quotes. However, she also confirmed she was a guest of Wells in the “expensive seats.”
“I think it is fair for some folks to say, ‘Well, if you accepted those tickets, can you still be unbiased towards this?’ Absolutely,” Jones told Arthur and Barajas.
“Gina Ortiz Jones cannot be bought,” she said later. “Let’s just make sure everyone understands that.”
Wells and Jones relationship
Wells said he had not offered tickets to any other elected officials in the current playoff run, though he has taken others to games before.
“Most of them had one thing in common,” he said. “That is, like with the mayor, I already had kind of a friendly relationship with her. So it wasn’t like I was just saying, ‘I know you’re the mayor of San Antonio, come, let me give you a couple of tickets.’”
Their rapport is a recent one. Wells contributed the maximum $1,000 to Rolando Pablos in both the original mayoral election last year and the subsequent runoff with Jones, and Wells doesn’t believe he even met her until an event at Port San Antonio “some months ago.”
After that event, Wells said former Mayor Bill Thornton had apparently suggested Jones speak with him. The mayor called him up, he said, and they had a previous lunch meeting at which they discussed her goals and information on how the business community works and building relationships within it.
They discussed Project Marvel during that first meeting, he said, though not at the most recent one where he offered her the tickets.
“I gave her my best thinking as to how she could be successful with helping the Spurs do what they needed to do and the city do what they needed to do,” he said.
“And how I gave her, frankly, advice about ‘go talk to former County Judge Cyndi Krier,’ who, when she was county judge, she worked really, really hard to make sure the Spurs won the election, and then she worked really, very hard to negotiate the best deal the county could get.”
Best deal
Jones has repeatedly questioned whether the rough funding plan for a new arena, passed over her objections last summer, is the best deal the city can get.
The cost of the arena would be covered by the city paying up to $489 million, the county paying up to $311 million, and the Spurs paying at least $500 million.
The team would pay the city $2.5 million annually for 30 years as part of a community benefits agreement, though the mayor has repeatedly brought up the idea of “revenue sharing,” including in her Tuesday appearance on KSAT.
“I’ll be honest, as I was sitting there watching the game — but even as I’m looking at all of this happening — it just reminds me, you know what, if we had revenue sharing y’all, we’d be getting a cut of each of these tickets. We’d be getting a cut of concessions. We’d get a cut of parking, all the things, right?” she said.
“And I say all that because, as I have said, we can cheer for our team hard, like we do, and we can also make sure the city gets the best deal possible.”
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