1. Major flooding returned this week, and new systems bought after last summer got their first test. Four days of tropical rain put South Central Texas back underwater. An EF-1 tornado tore across the Northwest Side near The Rim on Wednesday, Uvalde ordered mandatory evacuations, and by Thursday morning the Guadalupe at Comfort was at 37.08 feet (above last July's record) with two deaths confirmed as of Thursday night. Kerr County's new sirens sounded around 2 a.m. Thursday, reportedly for the first time, and more than 80 people were evacuated from riverside campgrounds ahead of the crest. On July 4 of last year, the county sent no cellphone alerts and Kerrville got 26 minutes of effective warning. San Antonio barricaded 20 low-water crossings by Wednesday afternoon, and thirteen months after 13 people died at crossings like them, Bexar County has reported no flood deaths as of Thursday night. We're watching because this is an early audit of what is different from last year: in the coming weeks we'll be asking, system by system, what worked, what wasn't built yet, and what still needs to be done.

2. San Antonio’s housing bargain is real, but getting more complicated. Last week we noted that San Antonio home prices were falling, making it easier to buy a house. New data this week shows what happens after closing: the Houston Chronicle reported roughly 6 percent of FHA-backed loans in Texas were at least 90 days delinquent in April, up from 3.7 percent a year earlier, as average home-insurance costs have climbed 80 percent since 2020. San Antonio has more first-time buyers than most large markets and a lot of entry-level inventory, which makes the warning especially relevant here. It is also why a new federal cap on institutional investors' purchases of single-family homes will matter locally: investors bought nearly 16 percent of the market last year, typically at the lower end. We're watching because "housing affordability" is the sale price PLUS property taxes, insurance, SAWS rates and CPS bills, all on the same household. A cheaper house is a real advantage but the cost to carry the home is still a factor.

3. The Bonham Exchange is asking for more time and says the mayor’s fundraising assistance never came. The Bonham Exchange says it cannot make its Aug. 1 sprinkler deadline and is asking the city for more time. The club has secured a loan covering the full system and is finalizing the installation contract, work its contractor expects to take five months, and the city has already extended another nightclub’s deadline after it showed progress on permits and construction. When we wrote about this fight in June, it had already caused a postponed council vote, a confrontation, and ultimately the first censure of a San Antonio mayor in modern history. What it had not produced was the money. The Bonham signed its compliance agreement only after Mayor Jones publicly committed to help raise the ~$550,000 needed for new sprinklers, and general manager Joan Duckworth says that promise was why she signed. The fundraising help never materialized and the club ultimately borrowed the money itself, five months of construction too late to make the deadline. We’re watching because if Aug. 1 arrives with no extension and no explanation, the Bonham loses its certificate of occupancy.

The Civic is independent, nonprofit, and nonpartisan. We are supported entirely by our readers and our Charter members. Consider supporting our work.

The Reframe

ERCOT nowhere near meeting Texas goal for residential demand reduction (Express-News) → Your thermostat is failing as a power policy. Texas targeted a 20 percent reduction in power usage from homes enrolled in programs that let utilities ease demand during peak hours. The program is failing in two ways: in the rare windows where enough households even participated to measure, ERCOT found 2.5 percent saved against a 20 percent goal, and in the vast majority of peak periods it couldn’t be measured at all. Voluntary conservation programs are useful but clearly they are not an answer to industrial load growth, and the article itself notes that most projected demand is coming from data centers and other large industrial users, not homes. As thousands of megawatts of proposed data-center capacity move toward San Antonio, CPS and state regulators should recognize that curbing residential usage is probably not a solution.

Mayor Jones’ voting commission recommendations merit civic consideration (Express-News) → Turnout measures how much people care, and City Hall cannot make people care. The Mayor's Commission on Voting, a 12-member advisory group Jones convened this spring, released its 56-page report last week. As we wrote in our newsletter, the recommendations mostly create permanent municipal machinery: a new Office of Civic Participation, a permanent commission, a nonprofit coordination roundtable, and critically: a grant fund for civic-engagement organizations. That is a publicly funded get-out-the-vote operation, and running one is not the city’s job no matter your political views. The column’s own acknowledgement that such work must be “impeccably nonpartisan” is actually a huge problem. If this new infrastructure needs to be policed to stay neutral, which it absolutely would, the city government shouldn’t run it. And all of this is window dressing. At the end of the day, if people care enough to vote then they will vote—a problem with turnout is primarily one of apathy. Besides, the mayor already pulled the one lever that really matters: her December win moving city elections to November will do more for participation than everything in this report combined.

Hey, Greg Abbott, make passenger rail between Austin and San Antonio a reality (Express-News) → Doable is not the same as worth doing… Or fundable. The argument leans on TxDOT's new study of the San Antonio-Austin rail corridor, which lays out service options on the existing Union Pacific-owned line. The most ambitious option would serve up to eight round trips a day at about two hours end to end: only slightly faster than what Amtrak's current run takes now, and slower than a car outside rush hour. Even with thousands of total riders, it would not compare to the interstate that moves six figures of vehicles a day. The price is as high as $1.9 billion, before the overruns the editorial itself concedes governments inevitably produce, so call it $2 billion, for capacity that wouldn’t make a meaningful difference. But the real problem is a legal one. TxDOT's constitutionally dedicated money like the gas tax, registration fees and the Proposition 1 and 7 billions cannot be spent on rail. A train isn’t going come out of general revenue, and the editorial asks for an appropriation when the rail fund Texas voters approved in 2005 has never once received one from the legislature. A meaningful rail connection would stitch the two cities together, but this isn't the answer and its not likely to happen.

Study: Texas residents face more financial stress than those of almost any other state (San Antonio Current) → When money is this tight, the most valuable thing a city can do is get out of people’s way. WalletHub’s index is not exactly concrete but its direction matches the harder numbers above: FHA delinquencies doubling, insurance up 80 percent. The Current frames the ranking as midterm ammunition, and it’s true that Austin and Washington will spend the fall litigating whose inflation this is. But a San Antonio household experiences it as bills and a lot of them run through City Hall. The recently proposed trial budget balances on the first property-tax-rate increase since 1993, with the city owned utilities planning rate hikes on top. Even if it’s a modest increase per household it’s the wrong direction in a year like this. The test for every budget line (and really every government decision at City Hall) should be simple: does this make living here easier or harder? The city cannot gift prosperity but it can stop taxing the margin of people already at the edge, and it can clear the fees, delays and compliance costs it alone controls.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

Balcones Heights Jazz Festival

The Balcones Heights Jazz Festival turns 33 tonight, which makes it one of those local institutions easy to overlook until you realize how long it has lasted. Trumpeter and vocalist Ilya Serov opens at 7:30, followed by Lubbock-born saxophonist Tom Braxton at 9. Both admission and parking are free.

Bring a lawn chair and arrive early. Friday, July 17, 7:30–10:30 p.m., Wonderland of the Americas, 4522 Fredericksburg Road. Given this week’s weather, check the official page for updates before leaving.

Thanks for another week. Follow us on your platform of choice: X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Story tips and reader notes go to our reporter Jarrett Whitener at jarrett@thecivic.com, and my inbox is always open.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

Enjoy your weekend and see you Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

By the only standard that matters—outcomes—San Antonio has a better claim than nearly any big city in America to getting homelessness right. The downtown homeless count fell as much as 77 percent in the years after Haven for Hope opened in 2010. More than 300 American cities have sent delegations to study it, and California counties have even formed grassroots groups pushing to replicate it. When Las Vegas decided it wanted a comprehensive homeless campus of its own, it recruited Haven's CEO to move there and build one.

Per capita homelessness in Bexar County has risen 0.4 percent since 2014 despite a national increase of 10.7 percent over the same decade (and 15.3 percent in Travis County.) The fact is, San Antonio has the lowest street count of any major Texas city, and over two-thirds of our homeless population is indoors on a given night, despite its size. Last month, Haven released a 15-year review of the more than 50,000 people who have stayed on its campus since 2010, with good results. Roughly two-thirds came once, most for under 90 days, and more than 90 percent of them never returned to the system.

For the majority of people who fall into homelessness here, San Antonio has a machine that catches them once and lets them go home.

And yet, every December, a crowd gathers at Milam Park to read names for every person who died while homeless in San Antonio and Bexar County. Last December there were 270 names. The year before, more than 360 names were read. The year before that, 322.

And other numbers aren’t entirely a source of optimism. The January 2025 point-in-time count found 3,625 people homeless on a single night in Bexar County, which was the highest figure in a decade, up roughly 14 percent in two years. The number of people actually sleeping outside jumped 28 percent in a single year, from 888 to more than 1,100. On the night of the count San Antonio was 641 beds short of a bed for every person outside.

Haven’s own data tells us that the third of its clients who came back two or more times trend older and report significantly higher rates of disabling conditions: severe mental illness, addiction, and very often both at once. They are a minority of the homeless population and a rounding error against the city’s 1.5 million people, but they are also close to one hundred percent of what residents and visitors mean when they say San Antonio feels overrun with homeless.

But why are they still out there?

Somewhere over the past generation, American homelessness policy absorbed the premise that the man having a crisis in traffic is exercising a choice, and the respectful posture is to offer services and wait until he is “ready.” The premise, interestingly, has a version on each end of the spectrum. On one end, it’s their choice, we owe them nothing. On the other, it’s their choice, so we owe them deference. Both are a form of abandonment.

A 2018 study followed homeless adults for a decade and found death rates nearly ten times those of the general population, and roughly three times those of homeless people sleeping in shelters. Across the research, people experiencing homelessness die around age fifty, decades ahead of schedule. Every month spent “waiting for someone to be ready” is a month that the odds of death grow: an overdose, an assault, untreated wounds or illnesses, or even the August heat. For the chronically street homeless, non-intervention is a deadly trajectory.

This is the truth: it is dangerous and harmful, not ethical, to leave a person to languish “free” on the street.

California, of all places, is going in the opposite direction. San Francisco just posted a 22 percent drop in unsheltered homelessness over two years after instituting real accountability and expectations attached to its encampment response. Nearby, San Jose's decline in unsheltered homelessness accelerated once mandated shelter visits became part of its encampment code of conduct. Tom Wolf, a recovery advocate who was homeless himself, summarized the shift in City Journal: "accountability and recovery." For too long we have prioritized the latter over the former.

San Antonians have ranked homelessness a top-two issue in three consecutive city budget surveys. In 2023 it ranked first in nearly every council district. Downtown, the visible disorder registers wildly out of proportion to our actual numbers which are actually quite good for a large city, considering the problem.

This is because the perception is cemented in place one encounter at a time. Our aggregate numbers are the best in Texas, but nobody experiences a city in aggregate. People experience the homeless face to face, at street level, and that experience compounds and travels home with the tourists. What they perceive is a city that has decided to let a specific set of very sick people deteriorate in public. A city that visibly tolerates that will be assumed, not unreasonably, to tolerate other failures too.

Finishing the job means the street stops being one of the options. Not as punishment, but as the same principle we apply to every other human being in mortal danger from an illness. The chronic few are chronic for a reason, they have already refused our help. They are waiting on someone with the authority to stop taking no as a final answer. We need better tracking, more beds for our homeless, and probably countless other solutions, but the most impactful thing we can do is to decide to do the right thing and get our homeless off the street. The secondary infrastructure can and will follow.

San Antonio literally taught the country how to shelter people at scale. Other cities hired our people to copy what was built here. The final lesson requires surrendering a story we like telling about our own kindness. This December, they will light the candles at Milam Park again and read the names aloud. Fewer names must be the goal, and that follows getting people off the street.

1. Toyota is investing $3.6 billion in its Southside campus. Truly the story of the moment: $3.6 billion total investment, a second assembly line, a 2.5 million-square-foot expansion, and an estimated 2,000 jobs by 2030. The project will push Toyota's total investment in San Antonio to $8.3 billion, when it was already among the largest companies in San Antonio by total investment. To land it, the city, county, and state assembled a total incentive package worth at least $303 million, which works out to more than $150,000 per job. That said, the total investment is huge, and the vehicle line being reshored is the Tacoma—the same truck Toyota moved from San Antonio to Mexico in 2021. A company reversing its own relocation is about as clear an economic development win as it gets. We're watching because as big a win as this is, no single project is enough and sustained momentum is necessary to solve San Antonio's problems. Will we land more?

2. The police department changes hands this weekend, and the replacement search now has an incumbent. William McManus's last day is today and Assistant Chief Jesse Salame, a 26-year SAPD veteran, takes over Saturday as acting chief while the city searches for a permanent one, with interviews expected in August and a selection in September. City Manager Erik Walsh says he has full confidence in Salame. McManus went further, telling the San Antonio Report that Salame has "every quality that the next chief should possess." We're watching because the acting chief will run the department through budget adoption and up to the September 30 expiration of the police union contract while auditioning for the permanent job, carrying the outgoing chief's public blessing and the city manager's endorsement.

3. The Mayor's Commission on Voting has delivered its report on expanding voter turnout. Of its nine recommendations, the load-bearing ones build permanent infrastructure: a new Office of Civic Participation, a permanent 13-member successor to the commission itself, a nonprofit coordination Roundtable, and a Community Civic Engagement Fund housed at the San Antonio Area Foundation, plus a mandate attaching "civic participation touchpoints" to city contracts, permits, and subsidized development. Almost none of it is priced, the only hard number in 56 pages is $10,000 for the Roundtable. The natural grantees for a new fund are the voter-engagement nonprofits whose leaders stood with the mayor when she announced the commission in February. We're watching because the two vehicles that would carry this are moving now: the arena CBA negotiation is open—the report's most time-sensitive ask would write an annual payment into it—and the budget is being worked on now. Whether council takes the recommendations seriously is the question, as this could easily turn into another unnecessary funding vehicle for local nonprofits.

The Civic is independent, nonprofit, and nonpartisan. We are supported entirely by our readers and our Charter members. Consider supporting our work.

The Reframe

San Antonio schools need culturally relevant physics instruction (Express News) → Physics is universal, and it’s the whole case against this essay. The argument: San Antonio students would do better in physics if instruction were culturally relevant. Here’s the thing, though: physics IS universal. Newton’s laws are the same all across San Antonio, as everywhere else, which is precisely what makes the subject worth our time. The best argued examples like teaching energy through Texas heat and the electric bill and letting students explain a concept in their own words before formalizing it aren’t even cultural frameworks. That’s just good teaching, and good teachers already do it in every subject. The questions that decide whether a San Antonio student is good at physics look like: how many campuses offer physics at all? How many classrooms are led by a capable teacher? How many students are proficient at algebra? Those are staffing and math-pipeline problems, not cultural problems.

Organizer from the conservative Americans for Prosperity nominated to serve on appraisal board (SA Report) → Ask what’s actually news here. Is his affiliation really news? Strip the framing and you have: a Marine veteran with an MBA and mid-level field job applied for a temporary seat on a board doing administrative, non policy-setting work. A committee, including the board's left-leaning official, interviewed fifteen applicants and chose him as the one with the clearest grasp of what the appraisal district actually does. She praised the pick and said the board benefits from ideological diversity. That's just a good process, not a scary story. When was the last time that a nominee's employment at a progressive advocacy nonprofit led a local story? Just because there's a "Koch-backed" modifier should not inspire panic.

San Antonio already knows how to build public trust around major civic projects. We did it on the river (Express-News) → Oh joy, another committee. The argument: the arena district should get a standing citizen oversight committee like the one that shepherded the river improvements. The diagnosis here is correct, the arena district project should be visible to the public on a regular schedule. But why is our reflex always to convene some kind of standing government body? San Antonio already has an oversight committee for billion-dollar public commitments: it’s called City Council and it’s backed by a professional city staff, a finance department, an internal auditor, and a payroll of consultants hired for exactly this project. If those institutions will not hold the project accountable, a volunteer stakeholder committee will only absorb responsibility and diffuse it. This summer has already produced a listening tour, a commission recommending a permanent commission (see the Mayor's announcement), and now we want to add a proposed committee? At some point, we need to trust the government we have rather than making more.

San Antonio retail occupancy at record high as tenants fill vacant storefronts (Express-News) → Two stories in one. The first is genuinely good: 95.3 percent of the metro’s tracked retail, around 50 million square feet, is occupied, the fifteenth straight year above 90%. Saks OFF 5TH closed at The Rim in January and the space was promptly taken by Cavender’s, two closed Gold’s Gyms are becoming a Crunch Fitness and an EOS Fitness, and a Taiwanese entertainment operator picked Park North for its largest American location. All happening naturally due to market forces. And Blackstone paid $440 million for an H-E-B-anchored center on the North Side, which is a strong endorsement from out-of-town capital. The second story is the ratio itself: occupancy is a fraction, and the denominator is still growing relatively slowly. This year’s 727,000 square feet of new construction would be the post-pandemic high but it still trails 2019. Inflation, interest rates, and tariff-priced materials have made new builds expensive, so demand waits for closures instead, and owners, the brokerage cheerfully notes, get to “push the rents.”

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

CineFestival at the Carver

The nation’s oldest Latino film festival turns 47 this weekend, and it never left San Antonio. Founded in 1976 as the Chicano Film Festival, CineFestival runs through Sunday at the Carver Community Cultural Center with its largest hometown showcase yet: 22 San Antonio-made shorts in the Vistas de San Antonio program, and more local Mesquite Award nominees than any prior year. It closes Sunday at 6 p.m. with American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, this year’s Sundance audience award winner on the director behind Zoot Suit and La Bamba.

More than half the screenings are free with a reserved ticket, all-access passes are $40. Through Sunday, July 12, Carver Community Cultural Center, 226 N. Hackberry.

Thanks for another week. Follow us on your platform of choice: X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Story tips and reader notes go to our reporter Jarrett Whitener at jarrett@thecivic.com, and my inbox is always open.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

Enjoy your weekend and see you Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

Data can be arranged to tell you almost anything you want to hear. Here are some numbers for San Antonio, pulled from our new data dashboard:

San Antonio is the most affordable city in its peer group, with prices five percent below the national average and more than seven points below the cities we compared. A typical home here costs around four times the median household income while the measured peer group is a little over five times median household income. We are consistently at the forefront of the last major American metros where a median family can buy a median house. Rents are also the lowest in the listed group of cities and our unemployment rate sits below the national one. Life expectancy is also above the peer average, and violent crime has fallen for the past two years. A sane, livable city. Book the parade!

But you can also make another argument. The median San Antonio household earned $13,245 less than households in peer cities, and the gap is not closing over time. Our poverty rate has run above the peer average for a decade and sits nearly 20 percent above it now. We are dead last in the share of adults with a bachelor’s degree among peer cities. Violent crime, though dropping, still runs 65 percent above the national rate. Obesity runs 17 percent above our peers, diabetes a third above. And San Antonians start new businesses at a rate lower than the vast majority of compared cities, twelfth of thirteen, ahead of only Phoenix. Cancel the parade. Convene the task force!

Every number in both paragraphs is public. So which story is real? That is the wrong question. The right one: without the data, how do you know what to think at all?

Without data, you only know what to feel, and what you feel about public questions tends to be decided for you by other people. Media statements and press releases highlight the optimistic framing. The honest numbers, which might paint a more accurate picture, are scattered across different government agencies and websites.

So, starting today, The Civic has a data dashboard, available at data.thecivic.com or by clicking the tab on our main page.

Each graphic is built from primary sources and every chart benchmarks San Antonio against a selection of peer cities so both the damning details and the flattering ones stand out. All sources are listed, the date of its data is public, and the feedback button goes right to our inbox.

Unfortunately, there is no public dashboard for most city issues. The numbers exist, but only inside the city departments themselves, and whether they ever come out is currently a matter of institutional generosity.

Go to data.sanantonio.gov, the official data portal of the “seventh-largest city” in America. It was launched (in beta) in 2018 and administered by city policy to this point, not by law. As of today it holds 162 datasets with the majority of them map layers. And unlike our dashboard, it’s basically a repository of data files that you have to parse through on your own. To the city’s credit, several files were updated as recently as yesterday, which means someone at the city is publishing similar metrics as we are, but nothing requires them to keep doing it.

For comparison, look at New York. In 2012 the city council there passed Local Law 11, which made open data a legal requirement. Every agency and every public dataset is available on one portal, over 2,400 datasets, with annual compliance plans filed every summer, and independent audits of three agencies a year… And a rule we particularly admire, requiring agencies to consider publishing, for everyone, any dataset they produce in answer to a records request. Great!

A decade ago New York’s portal already held more than a thousand datasets. And then, in 2024, their city council decided that the comprehensive public data was not enough and began issuing report cards of every city agency. Meanwhile, we need to decide whether 162 files, two-thirds of them maps, constitutes a real portal.

City staff is assembling the next budget right now and what it will look like is the question of the summer. Every department will present performance measures it selected for itself, in a document designed to justify its own funding. Council should demand two things on top of this: first, an open data ordinance with the same features New York requires. Second, an annual report on each department’s metrics and their spending, delivered to council and the public on a fixed date. New York has required exactly this, done three agencies at a time, twice a year for decades, a habit instituted shortly after the city nearly went broke.

Nothing would please us more than for our dashboard to be obsolete a year from now because the city made it redundant. San Antonio could decide to become the most transparent city in America with every department’s numbers published on a schedule, benchmarked against the same peer cities every year. No rival city offers that, which is precisely why it is an advantage for all of us; the business deciding where to expand or for the council member trying to govern on something more exact than an educated guess. And it is about to become a necessity. A fiscal crunch has hit City Hall and everyone knows it. To be responsible about what we spend, and what we cut, we need to know what is and isn’t working. So we built the free version, and the city should build the real one.

New York started decades ago—San Antonio should not wait any longer. No dashboard will tell you how to feel about the city, but it can tell you if what we are doing is working. Those are different questions, and the second one is more important.

1. The aquifer is climbing out of last year’s record lows, but the hard months are just starting. A year ago the Edwards Aquifer’s J-17 index well fell to 624 feet, within a dozen feet of its all-time low, and the Edwards Aquifer Authority declared Stage 5 pumping cuts for the first time in its history. After a wet spring, the well now sits at around 643 feet. That is meaningful recovery, but it is still 17 feet short of the 660-foot mark that returns SAWS customers to year-round watering, and July and August are when the aquifer historically falls fastest, as rain stops and irrigation peaks. We’re watching because if the recovery holds through summer, SAWS could exit drought restrictions for the first time in years and the delayed rate increase loses one of its justifications. If it doesn’t, council returns in August to a budget fight and a strained aquifer at the same time.

2. San Antonio is losing its police chief nearly three months early. William McManus, longtime SAPD chief of police, was expected to retire September 30; instead he leaves July 10 for a role as VP of safety and security at Silver Ventures, the developer behind the Pearl. He departs shortly before council takes up a budget that will likely fund no additional officers. An acting chief will be named from within SAPD, with a selection expected in September. That sequence means the next chief inherits a budget shaped entirely without them. We’re watching because the September pick is the first major personnel decision of the post-recess season and a test of whether the city is optimizing for continuity, reform, or politics. And the exit itself is informative: the police union contract expires September 30, the day McManus was originally set to leave, and he is leaving before both the negotiation and the budget are final.

3. San Antonio home prices are falling while every other big Texas metro’s are rising. Homes.com data for May puts the metro’s median sales price at $310,000, down 3.1 percent from a year ago. That’s $25,000 below the 2022 peak, and the steepest decline among Texas’s major markets while Dallas, Houston, and Austin all dropped. This is affordability improving in a city whose pitch is that you can still buy a home here, and sales held steady while every other major Texas market declined. But the tax system runs on the same numbers. A slowdown in property values helped push the city towards a possible first tax increase since 1993 and handed the county its worst revenue forecast since the 2008 crash, and officials have now budgeted for a bad stretch. We’re watching because if May is a blip, the forecasts hold and the affordability is a clean win. If it’s a pattern, and analysts already expect a slow fall and winter, the question stops being whether the forecast was grim and becomes whether it was grim enough.

The Civic is independent, nonprofit, and nonpartisan. We are supported entirely by our readers and our Charter members. Consider supporting our work.

The Reframe

San Antonio’s 2019 climate plan reboots for an increasingly tough political environment (SA Report) → Before rebooting the plan, ask the question: why does a city have one? The climate is not a municipal problem. San Antonio emits about 17 million metric tons of greenhouse gases a year—China’s emissions pass that mark roughly every twelve hours. Nothing this council does, or refrains from doing, will register in the only metric that the plan is aimed at. Even the advisor for the update concedes that net zero by 2050 is “not a reasonable goal to achieve,” and the state has already stripped most of the tools the plan assumed. So here’s the question: why did the city sign off on a goal we now know to be unreasonable? What remains is a document that cannot change the temperature but can absolutely change your utility bill, because this city owns CPS Energy and SAWS, and that is where climate planning becomes rate policy. A city that hamstrings its own growth to gesture at a planetary problem is not focused on real governance. The best end for this plan is an early retirement.

TAMUSA’s first doctoral program now accepting applications (SA Report) → The university’s growth is good news but this credential deserves scrutiny. A first doctorate is a real milestone for the Southside campus (whose student journalists impressed us last week) But look at what’s actually on offer: a fully online Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership built for working principals, assistant principals, and superintendents. Principal quality matters enormously for students. The doctorate is another matter: do we really need more Doctors of Education? Is this truly one of the limiting factors for San Antonio’s students? For contrast, we recently learned Alamo Colleges is seeking approval for the city’s first land surveying certificate, which is a cheap and tangible path into a new occupation and what seems like an institution listening to the labor market.

German aerospace manufacturer Blackwave to open first U.S. factory at Port San Antonio (Express-News) → Success finds the institutions that put themselves in its path. Last week we noted Port San Antonio spending its own money to chase the Air Force’s cyber command rather than waiting to be picked. This week we get to note a big win: a German rocket-component maker, Blackwave, surveyed 20 Central Texas sites and picked Port San Antonio. Their facility will be operational by fall and is on its way to roughly 250 jobs and a $99 million annual impact. And no incentives package changed hands: Blackwave decided, in the words of greater:SATX chief executive Sarah Carabias Rush, that “the Port provides some pretty great, kind of built-in, incentives, if you will.” The Port campus sits inside a foreign-trade zone, which matters to a German firm that says tariff uncertainty drove it to build here rather than ship from Europe.

Bexar County launches budget town halls as officials warn of future shortfall (KENS 5) → The county is asking what you think, and its budget office has already told you what it thinks. Bexar County is running a round of town halls and a survey, open through July 22, to gather input on a $2.8 billion budget, and the budget director’s stated priority is to “maintain the expenses as best as we can, and avoid cuts.” Meanwhile, the county projects a $148 million gap by 2028 in its worst property-tax revenue stretch since the 2008 crash, existing property values just fell by $4.8 billion, and the county manager has pledged to try not to touch the tax rate, extending a longtime streak. No new taxes, no cuts, and no revenue growth: pick two. Last week’s UTSA poll found residents favoring cuts over taxes seven to one. If the town halls are real, that math should survive them.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

Stars & Stripes on Houston Street

The country turns 250 on Saturday, and downtown marks it with its first Fourth of July fireworks in roughly fifteen years. The day runs start to finish: a 5K at 8:30 a.m., the parade down Houston Street at 10, a food and music festival at Civic Park at Hemisfair through the afternoon, and the Downtown Spectacular at 9 p.m., fireworks over Civic Park. A full day, downtown, to mark America’s birthday.

Free, except the 5K, which requires registration. Saturday, July 4, 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., Houston Street and Civic Park at Hemisfair.

Thanks for another week. Follow us on your platform of choice: X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Story tips and reader notes go to our reporter Jarrett Whitener at jarrett@thecivic.com, and my inbox is always open.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

Enjoy your weekend and see you Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

Nothing will get a San Antonian more defensive than a comparison with Austin.

But, from a purely economic standpoint, the breakout of Austin is absolutely undeniable. If you looked at both cities in 2010 they were very close on many key economic metrics. But, just 16 years later, it is a very different story:

Of course, Austin is one of the great growth stories in America. It hasn’t just surpassed San Antonio, it has taken power from many cities. Like Seattle in the 1990s, it has reached a critical mass of activity that attracts and retains talent and capital at an ever growing rate. The flywheel is spinning.

How should San Antonio think about this dynamic?

The typical response goes something like this: “good for them, but they have lost their soul in the process! We don’t want to be Austin!”

Welcome to a world of trade-offs. Want non-stop flights to Europe? Want your kids to move back (or stay) after college? Want more career choices? How about a more vibrant arts and entertainment scene? Then you better want a bit of what Austin has: a high growth economy.

Instead of being bitter about Austin’s success, the opportunity for San Antonio is to draft off of it. Let’s stay who we are but get some of the benefits.

As the Austin culture gets more corporate, San Antonio’s looks more interesting and authentic. Think of how Portland emerged in Seattle’s shadow—as a refuge for those looking for the “old” Seattle—more quirky and soulful. And, as prices rise and traffic grows, the quality of life of San Antonio looks better and better. We could be to Austin as San Jose is to San Francisco—the place where families go to escape the chaotic city. And, these are indeed two of our great assets: we are culturally rich and a great family town.

The quickest way to take advantage of these assets is to truly connect our cities. Imagine what would happen if you could live in San Antonio but work in Austin. Or vice-versa. We would attract a lot of people given our strengths as a city. And, in time, more offices would just open here in addition to Austin. The single market aspect akin to San Francisco and San Jose could become reality.

Of course, we have no Caltrain (the core connector of those great markets). And Lone Star Rail is not happening. But, we have to find a way. Transportation is on the cusp of a revolution and we should get in the middle of leading it. It’s surely too early for air taxis, but two other models could be explored rapidly. Tunnels are possible and real—they are happening in Nashville, Las Vegas, and other places. The emergence of self driving cars will open up new possibilities. Forget carpool lanes—imagine self-driving only lanes guaranteeing safe high-speed passage, point to point. Both could offer express service between cities. Surely there are other ideas.

We should be pushing aggressively to study our options and make this advance happen. Make Austin-San Antonio the new model of connectivity—let’s do it first and lead the way. What do you say, Mayor Jones?

Truly connecting ourselves to the fastest growing market in America would be a quick way to drive real growth and opportunity. And, we can do it without selling out our rich culture. Do we have the leadership to make it happen?

Editor's note: Lew Moorman is chairman of the board of The Civic San Antonio. The Civic's board does not assign, review, or direct editorial coverage. This piece was published on the same basis as any other guest contribution and was neither solicited nor required by his role. We welcome outside perspectives—to pitch a guest post, email Philip Reichert at philip@thecivic.com.

1. The knives are out for Mayor Jones. The Express-News Editorial Board has described Mayor Jones’ first year as “marked by [a] failure to lead.” Bob Rivard, in his midweek newsletter, says that she has suffered from “a year of misfires.” She has been censured, drawn the ire of her colleagues, and reliably earns negative national media. If the status quo continues, she could be relegated to another year or more with no political capital. If she continues to trend downward, it would not be out of the question to see a serious effort to recall her, though it would be prohibitively difficult to garner the required number of signatures to begin. We’re watching because Mayor Jones’ political capital is near rock bottom. This impedes her ability to push her policies, emboldens future mayoral candidates and her opponents, and also makes it difficult to survive any serious future scandal.

2. City council is out for the month of July, but work on the budget continues. City council took its one public pass at the trial budget last week, and now the budget moves into the background until August, with the next budget session not until August 13, when the city manager presents the proposed budget and council takes up the tax rate. The time in between is where the budget is actually hammered out in meetings between the city manager and staff, and in the district town halls where members collect constituent feedback on the cuts. By the time council is back in public, the budget will have largely taken shape. We're watching because the resolve council showed in June—refusing the rate hike, delaying the SAWS increase—is still being tested. The rate increase is the path of least resistance, and whether June's resistance to an increase survives the recess remains to be seen.

3. Despite recent setbacks, Port San Antonio is paying to chase Air Force cyber command. Port San Antonio has been trying to land the Air Force’s cyber headquarters for several years. Port President and CEO Jim Perschbach has pitched relocating Air Forces Cyber, the 16th Air Force, from its aging facilities at JBSA-Lackland to the tech campus three miles away: a $1 billion-plus building the port says it could deliver through an intergovernmental support agreement rather than traditional military construction, saving taxpayers around a billion dollars. There have been numerous setbacks: Pentagon turnover, the Air Force cut Biden-era plans to elevate the command, and Gov. Abbott vetoing $50 million in state support last summer. The port pressed on anyway, signing an MOU with the Air Force last month to formally explore the move and allocating $1 million on Wednesday to develop design, engineering, and financing proposals. We’re watching because the port is one of the city’s most impactful institutions, and here it’s chasing after an opportunity instead of being passive. We hope the bet pays off.

The Reframe

When Hill Country town lost its newspaper, students stepped in to fill the void (Express News) → Beyond a feel-good story, this points to the cheapest way to get a reporter back in the room. San Antonio is generally underserved by journalism despite its spot among the top 25 large metros in the U.S., and standing up a publication to fix that takes resources most people would put elsewhere. But we have numerous geographically dispersed universities and colleges that could serve as micro-hubs, diffusing the work across infrastructure that already exists, making the process cheaper. The Cypress, a newspaper operated by students out of Texas A&M - San Antonio, shows that students can restore presence and be a body in the room at the school board and city council of underserved areas. Done well, it's also a public good that could draw community and foundation support to the universities themselves.

Mayor Jones wants to defund San Antonio Botanical Garden as city’s budget deficit looms (SA Current) → In this instance, the mayor is unpopular but correct. We must prioritize core services. It’s always worth crediting the mayor when she’s correct and it costs her to be. Staff proposed trimming just $200,000 of the garden's $1.2 million subsidy; Mayor Jones asked, why not cut all of it? This isn't really a question of whether the Garden is entitled to public money, it’s just smart prioritization. A garden that draws 400,000 visitors a year (and charges a ticket fee) will, in the mayor's words, "be okay," and a $1.2 million operating subsidy is exactly the discretionary cost that should give way when the alternative on the table is cutting core city services. Even when the discretionary spending is on something people like, like the botanical garden.

UTSA poll: Facing budget cliff, Bexar County residents are split on raising taxes (SA Report) → Don’t be fooled, the “split” is largely rhetorical. Force the binary: cut spending or raise taxes, and 46.8% of residents favor cutting only, against 6.3% who favor raising taxes only. That’s 7-1 in favor of cuts. Read inclusively, 87.7% want at least some spending cut, while about 47% would accept at least some tax increase. Still nearly two to one in the same direction. Whichever way you do the math, the public clearly shows an appetite for cutting spending and the “split” only survives if you ignore that both framings lean toward cuts. It’s interesting, given this result, that nearly all of our institutions reach reflexively for more revenue when it’s against the public preference.

North East ISD passes budget as voucher projections cloud financial outlook (Express News) → What is a challenge for the district is born out of a choice for the families. Our public school system is a tremendously valuable piece of civic infrastructure, with hundreds of thousands of students across the city literally growing up in it. But when presented with a genuine choice, families will choose what's better for them, and if they keep choosing other options—driving enrollment and funding down—it falls to the public schools to build a more compelling product. Critics say that's impossible with reduced funding, but even a recent Brookings analysis finds spending to be a far weaker lever than the funding fight assumes: improving schools is "not, in general, a mere matter of money," and the real question is how well the dollars are spent. Competition has stripped the district's ability to coast; whether it converts that pressure into improvement is now the measurable question.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

The Sound of Freedom - America at 250

The country turns 250 this Fourth of July, and First Baptist Church of San Antonio is marking it the night before with a free concert with patriotic music—two hours, all ages, free parking. A straightforward, local way to mark the anniversary.

Free, with free parking, but you can reserve a spot. 7:00–9:00 p.m., 515 McCullough Ave, San Antonio, TX 78215. Reserve a spot here.

Thanks for another week. Follow us on your platform of choice: X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Story tips and reader notes go to our reporter Jarrett Whitener at jarrett@thecivic.com, and my inbox is always open.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

Enjoy your weekend and see you Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

Over the weekend, Mayor Jones posted that she supports canceling the Ye concert scheduled for the Alamodome on July 4. The artist formerly known as Kanye West was revealed last week to be performing in San Antonio as a late addition to a tour that has been turned away across Europe; tickets are currently on sale.

Ye’s record is genuinely repugnant: selling swastika merchandise, releasing a song titled “Heil Hitler,” and open praise for Nazism are just a few of the lowlights from his many years of controversy. He published an apology in the Wall Street Journal in January, but that changes very little.

Precisely because of that record, the mayor’s instinct to oppose Ye and his rhetoric is completely understandable. Indeed, San Antonio should support a public official making it clear that antisemitism is not welcome. That said, condemning Ye is very different from using her office to cancel him. She is wrong that this is the right fight for her office, and wrong that it is a fight worth having for the city. There are two major problems with the mayor's statement.

The first problem, and the more important one out of the two, is that this simply isn’t and never should be the job of the mayor.

Mayor Jones cannot by herself cancel this show. She is one vote on an eleven-member council, and she presides over its meetings, but which performers are booked at the Alamodome is not an issue that city council usually takes up. When the mayor says she supports canceling this show and makes a media firestorm out of it, she is not exercising any power she holds. She is instead merely broadcasting a preference she knows the city is unlikely to act on.

It comes across as fundamentally unserious to focus on fleeting controversy (for political points no less) as the things that actually matter to residents are actively under discussion right now: affordability, economic development, water security, and so on. And the share of San Antonio that would call a Kanye West concert one of those pressing, genuine problems is vanishingly small. It is certainly dwarfed by the share that thinks it is the price of free speech, a concert worth attending, or even just an economic benefit to the city.

And it is a concrete economic benefit. The show was tracking toward a sellout of a stadium that holds over 70,000 people, and San Antonio collects the rental, the surcharges, the parking, and the concessions. That is real money that the mayor wants to forgo, without the authority to do so, for a gesture she can't enforce. A fleeting statement of resistance chosen over the substance is exactly the trap.

Then there’s the more practical problem: the whole idea is unconstitutional. A government that refuses a booking at a public venue because of the speaker’s views is discriminating by viewpoint, which is precisely what the First Amendment forbids the government from doing. In a Monday interview with Texas Public Radio’s The Source, the mayor said that she supports canceling the concert because she thinks “there’s a difference between free speech and hate speech,” something that the Supreme Court has consistently disagreed with. A decision to cancel almost certainly loses in court and is an ironic one to make in Military City USA, home to so many who have sworn an oath to the Constitution.

In Florida, Senator Rick Scott pressed Tampa to cancel Ye’s shows at its own publicly funded stadium. The Tampa Sports Authority declined: it condemns antisemitism “from any source,” it said, but “we also respect free speech rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, even when we disagree with that speech.” San Antonio would be the outlier, the “anti-free-speech” city.

And who is to say where that precedent would lead us? The standard that feels appropriate and justified when aimed at a controversial hip-hop artist is the same that could one day be aimed at a pro-Israel speaker, or a conservative, or a controversial author, based entirely on whoever holds office next. In the same TPR interview, she floated giving council more oversight over which performers get booked, the exact precedent this argument warns against. We do not want to be that city.

So what San Antonio is left with is a mayor commanding immense national media attention to demand a thing she cannot do alone and the city cannot do at all: a veto over who is allowed to perform in its public buildings. That is not a power that becomes legitimate in the right hands, and a city that reaches for it looks like a place that just polices speech, no matter how justified it may seem.

The mayor is right that Ye deserves the harshest criticism. She is simply wrong about whose fight this is, and whether it is one to have in the first place. The Alamodome will likely host him regardless.

1. City Council got its first look at the FY2027 trial budget on Thursday. Inside it: the first proposed property-tax rate increase since 1993. The catch—it balances the budget for the next two years, but raises rates to do so and even maxing the rate doesn't close the structural gap the city's been warned about for years. It’s worth noting that the trial budget treated the overwhelming majority of city spending as untouchable, which would make significant cuts very difficult if council continues to signal an unwillingness to increase property taxes. We're watching because this is the first hint at what the city could cut, because council may push harder to avoid a rate hike, and because the numbers could be revised as the budget review process continues into August.
   
   Read The Civic's full coverage of the trial budget council session by Jarrett Whitener here.
   

2. City staff gave council a Project Marvel update Wednesday. The city aims to lock down roughly $91 million in downtown land purchases by the end of the year, including the site where the new arena will eventually be built. Staff still have to finalize financing, leases, and construction timelines, even as Mayor Jones pushes for Michael Dell to cover the city’s share of the arena bill (an awkward request considering previous interactions with the Spurs part-owner). We're watching because Project Marvel is a complicated, multi-step plan and remains a political controversy. Each step must be executed properly to avoid disrupting the whole project, or its scope. See the cooling plant debacle that nixed the Project Marvel hotel plan. If too much of the overall plan is disrupted, the outcome could look nothing like the entertainment district promised, and taxpayers are still on the hook for the arena.

3. Saying it needs more time, city council narrowly voted to reconsider a SAWS rate hike in October. In a 6-5 vote Thursday, members delayed the water utility's proposed rate hike until October, after a long session spent hammering CEO Robert Puente over a lack of trust, construction delays, and the 16 billion gallons SAWS lost last year. The meeting was contentious: as Jalen McKee-Rodriguez asked Puente, why does SAWS only have a plan to fix its problems now that it needs the money? But the delay doesn't make things any cheaper—Puente warned that pushing projects into 2027 will only raise costs, and the eventual rate increase with them. We're watching because the real question is whether the next few months translate into any sort of reform at SAWS, or just produce a bigger bill in October with nothing changed.

The Reframe

Alamo Colleges District plans to increase property tax rate to balance budget (SA Report) → Nearly every municipal organization defaults to asking for more money rather than cutting spending. Facing a deficit, Alamo Colleges' first move isn't to cut or reform, but to raise the tax rate. This as the city's trial budget leads with the first property-tax-rate increase in 33 years while holding cuts to a minimum, CPS passed a budget which initially assumed a rate increase, and SAWS just asked for a substantial water-rate hike. For a public institution, billing the taxpayer more is the path of least resistance, and there's always a reason the spending can't be cut. The job of forcing the question falls to our elected officials, and this week, to its credit, City Council appeared entirely unwilling to support the city's tax increase without seeing departmental cuts and voted 6-5 to delay SAWS's rate increase. The institutions will always reach for more revenue; someone has to make them consider the alternative.

VA Secretary swings through San Antonio, talks about fast-tracking new hospital (SA Report) → Forget politics, any senior official should be welcome in San Antonio—and the VA Secretary doubly so. VA Secretary Doug Collins came to tour the existing Audie Murphy Veterans Hospital and push a brand new VA hospital—$30 million for land acquisition is already in this year's federal budget—toward the finish line. San Antonio is a natural fit for this project, but natural fits can still lose out when cities give officials a reason to look elsewhere. San Antonio should be courting substantive visits from anyone and everyone in Washington, and refusing to let national politics decide who it does business with. We’re in a political environment where cities sort themselves by party and officials show up only for friendly crowds, so it’s important to be the kind of city that every administration wants to invest in.

San Antonio ranks among nation’s top three markets for first-time buyers as inventory climbs (Business Journal) → A real victory for San Antonio, but affordability is not prosperity. Zillow ranks the San Antonio metro third in the country for first-time buyers—most big cities are simply much more expensive than we are. But, again, affordability isn't prosperity. San Antonio is still one of the most impoverished big metros in the country, and cheap rent doesn't fix that, it just makes it more comfortable. The cities that actually provide opportunity aren't the absolute cheapest ones; they're the ones building economies that throw off capital, corporate headquarters, and high-wage jobs at a meaningful scale. Look at Houston—Houston is the one Texas metro poorer than we are, and it’s nearly as cheap as San Antonio (its cost of living running a mere 3% higher.) With all their poverty, they have 27 Fortune 500 headquarters to our two, and 36 Fortune 1000 headquarters to our four. Which city do you think will generate more opportunity (and tax revenue) for its residents?

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

This week we have two for you: both are on Wednesday, June 24th, and both are aimed at making you a more informed resident.

Runways to Rockets

CNTR/CTY and Tech Bloc close their Emerging Industries Series with a panel on aerospace: the defense, air-mobility, and space sectors already supporting thousands of local jobs. Held at Port San Antonio, one of the economic powerhouses of the city.

Free, but register. 4:30–6:30 p.m., Boeing Center at Tech Port, 3331 General Hudnell Drive. Register here.

Mayor’s Monthly Town Hall

Nearly everything in this brief—the property tax increase, the cuts council wants to see, the delayed SAWS hike—will be argued over the next three months, and this is where you can ask your questions to the person at the center of it. Mayor Jones takes questions at her monthly town hall, alongside District 4’s Councilman Edward Mungia.

RSVP encouraged, not required. 6–7 p.m., Robinette Community & Senior Center, 1423 S. Ellison Dr., Bldg. 2. RSVP here.

Thanks for another week. Follow us on your platform of choice: X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Story tips and reader notes go to our reporter Jarrett Whitener at jarrett@thecivic.com, and my inbox is always open.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

As noted above, we published our first news story this week. It went out by email notification this time, but in the future we will only highlight them in the weekly newsletter to minimize the number of emails you receive from us each week.

Enjoy your weekend and see you Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

City Council on Thursday received its first detailed look at how San Antonio would close a budget gap that its own forecast projects will grow to $130.7 million by FY2028, presenting a recommendation that leans on a property tax rate increase and new fees rather than substantial reductions.

What is not in dispute is the trajectory. FY2027 itself is expected to be balanced, but a forecast presented in May projected a gap up to $130.7 million in FY2028 and $264 million by FY2031 if nothing changes. Trial budget projections balanced the budget in FY2028, while reducing the FY2031 deficit to $156.9 million.

Rather than absorb the gap primarily through budget cuts, staff recommended raising the property tax rate—the first time in 33 years—and directing every dollar it generates, $53.8 million, to police and fire, whose contract and benefit costs are climbing faster than any other part of the budget.

During the presentation, the consensus from the majority of City Council was to show the impact of departmental cuts before the consideration of a tax rate increase. While each council member brought their own list of priorities, the discussion indicated that an increase will not be supported until City Council and city staff do their due diligence in identifying budget efficiencies.

What the trial budget showed

The trial budget is a checkpoint, not the legally required budget. It incorporated the policy direction council set at a May 22 goal-setting session.

Rather than close the gap with reductions, staff recommended raising the property tax rate and adding new fees, and held cuts to a minimum. Drawing on a program-inventory analysis that classified 72.4 percent of the analyzed budget as state- or charter-mandated, the trial budget protected all mandated services and all council and community priorities, and drew its reductions only from “Other City Services,” the roughly 15 percent of the analyzed budget that is neither. Those reductions totaled $11.7 million in FY2027, amounting to $23.4 million over two years, the minimum staff said was needed to balance. The new fees, $21.9 million over two years, included raising the EMS transport fee from $1,500 to $1,700 among other new fees.

Deeper cuts were highlighted as a path the city recommended against. Balancing without a rate increase, staff showed, would require $137.7 million in reductions over two years and the elimination of 132 filled and 77 vacant positions, including $54.2 million in program service-level cuts, a $36.6 million freeze on civilian raises, and department reorganizations. The slide laying out that option was labeled “Not Recommended.”

How the council reacted

The presentation landed into a council already split along familiar lines.

The fiscal hawks have argued the city should cut before it increases taxes. “Property tax hikes should be absolutely off the table,” Marc Whyte (D10) has said, pressing for a “line-by-line examination” of spending. Against that, Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) has questioned whether scrutiny can reach the scale of the gap: “you can penny-pinch and shake our city departments’ piggy banks and find $100,000 here and $100,000 there... but you’re not going to find $130 million in cuts within departments whose budgets are $10 million.” Phyllis Viagran (D3) has called for “a comprehensive approach” combining reductions with new revenue. Viagran was among the only council members who openly recommended the tax rate increase, raising concern with delaying infrastructure projects or programs that are needed throughout the city.

Whyte identified public safety as his top priority, suggesting that the city start with those funding allocations before moving to other program funding. Whyte continued to advocate for 65 additional police officers added in the next fiscal year but was supportive of cuts identified in the staff presentation.

Whyte highlighted that even with the tax increase, the city was still facing a budget deficit in 2031, meaning City Council and staff would be revisiting funding cut discussions.

“A property tax increase; it is just a bandaid to get us through the next couple of years,” Whyte said. “It doesn’t solve the problem. We have a structural issue here with the way our city government is spending money.”

McKee-Rodriguez took an opposing stance to Whyte’s recommendation, saying a reduction in community programs will lead to an increase in crime. McKee-Rodriguez suggested an independent comprehensive analysis look at the police and fire department budgets to identify areas that could be cut in favor of adding additional officers that Whyte requests.

“Cuts to departments are the bandaid,” he said. McKee-Rodriguez later added, “We will not get better services with lesser resources.”

Misty Spears (D9) identified her priorities as public safety and core city services.

“Every dollar we spend should be measured against whether it is improving the quality of life for the taxpayers who are funding it,” she said.

Teri Castillo (D5) said her priorities are on nutritional and healthcare programs that her constituents utilize regularly. A large push from council members, especially those whose districts are not in Northern San Antonio, was a focus on equity, ensuring that lower income districts did not lose services.

Mayor Jones took a similar stance as City Council, advocating for a deeper look at potential cuts and the impacts they could have on city services.

Ahead of the proposed budget, Jones said she would like to look at programs or services that the city subsidizes for private entities. Using the Botanical Gardens as an example, Jones said entities that have a ticket price should be eliminated from the city budget prior to services focusing on nutrition, health care or other public community services.

“If you charge a ticket fee, we should not be subsidizing your thing,” she said.

What’s next

Thursday was just a checkpoint and the budget will likely see meaningful changes as it is developed throughout the summer. The certified appraisal roll, due around July 25, will revise the figures that underpin both the deficit projections and the rate math; the numbers presented Thursday rest on preliminary appraisal data. The formal Proposed Budget follows in August, with council worksessions and district town halls running from mid-August into September.

Budget Director Freddy Martinez said city staff will work with individual departments throughout the summer to determine the impacts that staffing reductions may have on city services. City Manager Erik Walsh said regardless of the path City Council takes, city staff will look deeper at budget reductions, including moving operating dollars into funding for capital projects.

In the coming weeks, Jones said she is looking forward to seeing an operational analysis of the proposed cuts. “It is hard to commit here to supporting a property tax increase, when we’ve just really done a numbers exercise,” Jones said.

Walsh stated the solution to San Antonio’s budget shortfall is a mixture of generating revenue through tax increases and reducing expenses through necessary cuts.

“Our expenses are growing faster than revenues, so we need to decrease our expenses and increase revenue where we have an opportunity,” Walsh said.

San Antonio has not raised its property tax rate since 1993, a streak City Manager Erik Walsh says is “not lost upon me.” This Thursday, City Council will be briefed on a “trial budget” for fiscal year 2027 that is likely built around ending that streak. There's a better answer: take a rate increase off the table, zero-base the entire budget, and stop deferring hard decisions.

The city’s budget forecast shows a $130.7 million hole in 2028, deepening to $264 million by 2031. City Hall presents this as the math of things happening to San Antonio: falling revenues, unavoidable costs, and ultimately no choice. But none of this is a surprise. The city's earlier forecast projected a 2027 shortfall all the way back in April 2024, and by May 2025 council was briefed that the same 2027 gap had nearly tripled to $148 million.

Spending growth is a longtime pattern for San Antonio. The general fund has grown from around $1.1 billion in 2016 to $1.7 billion today, more than half again in ten years, ahead of inflation and population growth. So is the city run that much better than a decade ago? Are the streets that much smoother, the response times that much faster? Even the most optimistic resident would disagree. The overall budget tells the same story: from around $2.5 billion in 2016 to $4.06 billion today, up over 60 percent. Spending simply expands as a rule.

Faced with deficits of this scale, a rate increase fails to solve the immediate problem. Even at the maximum rate, the city’s own forecast still calls for roughly $70 million in reductions over two years, and the 2031 gap only narrows to $196 million.

No, the core problem is that the city always defers the hard decisions by refusing to give serious scrutiny to the budget. Two members of city council described the political dilemma: Councilwoman Phyllis Viagran (D3) has pressed the no-tax-increase side to be specific, to say “where we are going to cut—what you are willing to sacrifice.” And Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) put the dilemma plainly: people don’t want higher taxes, and they don’t want their services cut—“and so where do we go from here?”

Where, it turns out, a colleague had already answered. Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito (D7) said that “all of us up here were elected to do hard things,” and that the council simply needed to make the tough decisions. The other decisions are easy: a new program, more funding, new assistance to announce for your district. Everyone wants that job. Being the elected official willing to say “that’s enough” is harder, and far less popular, and it is every bit as much what the office is for.

The cuts, which council keeps treating as impossible, are anything but. The city’s own May presentation concedes a category of “non-core, non-mandated services,” and staff managed to produce nearly $111 million in reductions over three years for last year’s budget. The savings appear when the will to save appears.

So when council treats a spending reduction as the unanswerable part of the problem, don’t be convinced. Someone who has spent years inside city government, with the whole budget in front of them and a professional staff to pore over it can surely name a reduction. Councilman Marc Whyte, fond of saying the city has a spending problem and not a revenue problem, was pressed in May to be specific. He pointed to $1.5 million at La Villita and $500,000 for analytical tools, then added, “I’m not saying to cut all this.” Why not? He bet there were millions more to find, and he is certainly right.

The mayor, for her part, is doing the other thing a city does to dodge the responsibility of fiscal restraint, floating unpaid fines, a bigger transfer from SAWS, the $2 million the Spurs still owe from the failed MLS bid, and letters asking Spurs chairman Peter Holt and billionaire Michael Dell for help, including a request that Dell cover the city’s $489 million arena bill. Some of these ideas may be helpful in the long run, assuming any at all work out, but even in total don’t solve the problem. It’s long past time to come to terms with reality.

This is what the job is. Not only the ribbon-cuttings, the program announcements, and the new funding that everyone wants to stand up and announce, but the hard decisions. We are in this position because council refused to make those decisions—for more than two years, with the forecasts in hand—and until someone is willing, the spending won’t stop. So council has not earned a rate increase, and does not deserve one before it has shown it can hold the line on a single dollar of what it already takes in. Restraint comes first. The new money, if it ever comes, comes after.

Thirty-three years with no rate increase is the one fiscal promise this city has kept, it should not be traded away when the city still won’t spend within what it takes in. If the trial budget is unveiled on Thursday with a tax increase inside, the right answer is no, we haven’t earned it.

1. City Council will be briefed on a trial budget for 2027 next Thursday. Inside it, the first proposed property tax rate increase since 1993. The city's own forecast shows a $131 million gap by 2028 that deepens to $264 million by 2031, and even maxing out the rate to its highest level since 2007 only raises about $53.8 million, while new police and fire costs alone add $77.2 million to the next budget. Our chart tells the longer story: the budget has more than doubled in twenty years, and the looming fiscal crunch was forecast, repeatedly. Despite this, council kept spending anyway. We're watching because trial budgets are the skeleton for proposed budgets, and this will be the first clue as to what gets meaningful cuts. Our full case for meaningful reductions in the city budget runs next Tuesday.

2. SAWS lowered the ask for its rate increase. After a review by city public utilities staff, the possible rate increase on the average residential bill could rise $3.91 this year instead of the $4.47 SAWS proposed, and the projected monthly increase by 2029 drops from $18.51 to between $14.80 and $16.92. It’s great that savings were found, however meager, but we wish this kind of review was the default posture rather than something a rate request triggers. Worth noting: Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito (D7) asked when the independent audit of SAWS would be done and CEO Robert Puente said it was in progress but rates needed to be increased as soon as possible. So ratepayers fund a multibillion dollar capital plan first and find out how well SAWS spends its money second, while the city weighs its first property tax increase in 33 years and CPS asks for its own increase. We’re watching because this sets rates through 2029 and will reveal how each member weighs today's bills against tomorrow's infrastructure.

3. San Antonio’s students rebounded on the STAAR & Judson ISD froze pay. The 2026 end-of-course results reversed last year’s decline with area passing rates improving in four of five subjects. Algebra I jumped more than seven points to roughly 80%, and South San Antonio ISD gained 18 points a year after dropping seven last year. The numbers aren’t all good—45% of area students scored a zero(!) on expository composition. But then there’s Judson ISD: voting Monday to freeze cost-of-living raises, stipends and retention bonuses for every employee, against a $35 million deficit that has already closed several schools and cut over 500 positions. The fiscal situation will likely get worse before it gets better. But what about student outcomes? We’re watching because those outcomes are hugely important for San Antonio’s future, and the ISDs will all likely have to learn to do more with less.

The Reframe

San Antonio mayor warns Spurs fans in New York to ‘stay vigilant’ ahead of Game 4 (SA Current) → Weak response from Mayor Jones. The Mayor isn’t wrong, but telling residents to “walk in groups” and “look after one another” is little more than a safety PSA. Spurs fans—maybe San Antonians—were chased through Midtown and attacked. Where is the announcement that the Mayor is working with Mayor Mamdani's office and the NYPD, that security commitments are in place around the arena and the watch parties, and that she'll hold them to it? Even the team isn’t safe—fans hurled eggs at Wemby outside the team hotel. Mamdani called the behavior unacceptable, but a statement doesn’t help keep visiting fans safe. The series comes back to San Antonio on Saturday, and visiting fans can expect a better & safer welcome here.

San Antonio apartment rents fall 3.3% as more than 70% of properties offer concessions (Business Journal) → The most effective tool we have for lowering housing costs is increasing supply. Surprise! Rents drop and San Antonio gets more affordable when supply beats demand. The article frames falling rents as a headwind for the market, and for landlords it is. For renters, however, it’s relief: rents are down 3.3% over the past year, and more than 70% of properties are offering some concessions, typically a month or two of free rent. There is no program in the city’s budget that could cut rents citywide by over three percent, but supply did. Important detail: less than four thousand units remain in the pipeline, and rent growth could resume once supply dwindles. If we want relief to last, we have to keep building.

Our Lady of the Lake University (OLLU) students can earn bachelor's degrees in three years (Express-News) → A creative attempt to differentiate in an economy with multiple small universities. Context is king, here: OLLU's enrollment has fallen precipitously in recent years, from around 2,900 students in 2019 to about 1,800 in 2025. OLLU changed the product entirely, cutting required credit hours for certain majors from about 120 to under 100 and the cost of a degree by 25%, to compete on time and price. San Antonio has multiple small local colleges and differentiation is likely the only path to survival for some. Still, expect others to release new and creative ways to attract more students.

UFL owners' decision to exit SA a costly fumble (Business Journal) → The UFL is gone for a reason. There's an arrogance in calling this a fumble when the league knew our attendance numbers when they left. The San Antonio Brahmas drew more than eleven thousand fans per game for a team that went 1-9—only two UFL teams beat that this season—but the owners knew it when the decision was made. "Right from the jump, Mike (Repole) challenged us on venues, to think smaller, more quaint," the league's president said. They looked at strong attendance in a cavernous dome and decided it wasn't worth staying. Maybe the bet fails—league-wide attendance is down and the move may well haunt them, these leagues are notoriously difficult business models anyway. But declaring it their “fumble” skips the truth.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

San Antonio Food Bank Urban Farm Tour

Though everyone may be focused on the Spurs, here’s something that you can do nearly any Thursday or Saturday (space dependent.) The San Antonio Food Bank runs a guided tour of its 25-acre urban farm—the largest in Texas, according to them—complete with greenhouses, fruit trees, rain-catchment cisterns, a commercial teaching kitchen, and the warehouse that moves 95 million pounds of food a year. It’s a big piece of civic infrastructure, and there are even ongoing volunteer opportunities.

Book through Delve Experiences, spots fill quickly. Or better yet, go volunteer. Located at 5200 Historic Old Hwy 90. $15; kids 3 and under free.

Thanks for another week. Follow us on your platform of choice: X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Story tips and reader notes go to our reporter Jarrett Whitener at jarrett@thecivic.com, and my inbox is always open.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

If something here landed, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to someone who should be reading.

Enjoy your weekend, go Spurs go, and see you Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

This past February, under threat of closure, the Bonham Exchange signed a deal with the city to stay open. It agreed to operate on the first floor only, cap its crowd under 300, pay for a third-party fire watch, and spend over half a million dollars installing sprinklers, with the venue liable for any city costs if a fire broke out during the work.

But what is this rule, where did it come from, and why are we forcing expensive renovations on existing businesses?

The sprinkler mandate in question, which requires sprinklers in large bars, nightclubs, and so on, is a section of the International Fire Code (IFC), added in 2018 as a distant response to the 2003 Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island. Every major Texas city, Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio, runs on a version of the same code.

A national committee wrote the code, and a provision that down the line costs a historic venue half a million dollars walked in unnoticed among a host of other changes. Sadly, there’s no sign anyone here looked at it closely. Until we were faced with the closure of local businesses, it’s possible that no one in government really gave it a second look.

San Antonio, and every other city, frequently makes amendments to the fire code to fit local conditions—Dallas did exactly that when it adopted the IFC with a number of regional changes. Had anyone looked into this version of the fire code, there was reason to pause.

The Station fire was deadly because a band’s pyrotechnics ignited flammable foam glued to the walls, the club was overcrowded, and the crowd jammed at the main exit. But the foam and the overcrowding were already illegal, and San Antonio’s code already banned all of it. Sprinklers help, and NIST recommended them, but they are also the most expensive fix for a danger its fire code already addressed several cheaper ways.

We avoid this kind of tradeoff all the time and don’t think anything of it. If preventing traffic deaths were the only thing that mattered, every speed limit would be 10 miles an hour. We accept the “safety cost” because a city has to function.

And the sprinkler safeguard is not cheap. A retrofit runs $2 to $7 a square foot, more for a historic building like the Bonham. Michael Specia of Southtown Joe’s figured a system would have cost him $130,000 to $190,000. In his words, “It would’ve put me out of business,” so he spent two years lowering his capacity below 300 instead.

Once this imposition on local businesses was known, the city had tools to negotiate. Three council members moved to push the deadline to 2027. The Bonham got a compliance agreement, a capacity cut, even a mayor who personally pledged to raise the money. And the mayor framed the rule itself as a done deal, saying “fire code, in my book, is nonnegotiable.” But is it?

Extensions, compliance deals, capacity reductions, even the mayor calling donors for sprinkler money—the city is already treating a “nonnegotiable” fire safety rule as negotiable. While we’re negotiating, someone should have asked whether this provision, as written, should apply to existing historic buildings at all.

Home rule gives San Antonio options: a higher occupancy threshold, a variance for historic structures, hardship exemptions, and so on. The city has used that power to amend the fire code before but has not used it here. Why not?

The Bonham will probably survive, but the sprinkler rule is only one regulation, among hundreds, most of them far quieter and with less obvious tradeoffs. In the name of “public safety,” some iconic businesses may be forced to close, and others may never open at all. All of the setback requirements, parking restrictions, fees, inspections, and, yes, mandatory sprinkler systems add up. Sooner or later you’re looking at a substantial hidden tax on businesses in San Antonio.

The answer isn’t to eliminate fire safety codes or to show blind favoritism to historic venues, but regulators should have to justify the expensive option. Could strict capacity limits plus proper exits get us most of the benefits without forcing businesses to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid closing?

The mayor is right that fire safety matters, but operating a club or bar shouldn’t require a second mortgage just for the sprinklers. Right now, we’re “solving” decades-old tragedies by pricing our businesses out of existence.

1. Texas leads the country in Fortune 500 headquarters. San Antonio just “lost” one. The new Fortune 500 list is out, and Texas now tops every state with 57 headquarters, passing California. It’s a genuine accomplishment for the state—but look at how we got there. The current multi-year story is one of relocations: companies like Tesla, Oracle (and soon-to-be listed SpaceX) and others planting their flags elsewhere in the Texas triangle. None came to San Antonio. Meanwhile we went from three Fortune 500 companies to two. Valero and USAA remain; Rush Enterprises dropped to just outside the top 500. It’s not a perfect measure of prosperity, but it’s worth noting. We’re watching because it’s the whole argument in miniature: a rising Texas tide doesn’t automatically lift San Antonio.

As a reminder, here’s our weekly column on what a Virginia-based Fortune 500 company, Boeing, has built at Port San Antonio.

2. Data centers are expanding around San Antonio. Denver-based Tract is developing three campuses covering more than 3,500 acres, representing over 5,220 megawatts of planned power capacity, stretching from the South Side through Medina County toward Austin. Brant Bernet, an executive vice president at CBRE, puts it plainly: “Texas is going to be the number one data center market in the world.” We’re watching because data centers, and the water and power they consume, are becoming an increasingly politically charged issue, and that argument is coming to San Antonio’s local politics. It’s also why we’re publishing an investigation into San Antonio’s water security later this month.

3. The eighth staffer leaves the Mayor’s office. Policy advisor Sophia Alejandro’s last day was May 29, making her the eighth departure from Mayor Jones’s office since she took office a year ago. Two chiefs of staff and a deputy chief of staff are among the others who have left. Turnover happens in any administration but this many departures in such a short time period is a clear pattern. We’re watching it because continuity is necessary for competence—it is hard to govern properly when your staff keeps leaving.

The Reframe

Passenger traffic at San Antonio International keeps falling (Aviation Dept.) → "Economic uncertainty" is a strange explanation when Austin is doing great. SAT is down nearly 6% in April year-over-year and 4.4% so far in 2026, extending its first annual decline since the pandemic. The airport cites "economic uncertainty” but that economy covers Central Texas too, and Austin-Bergstrom is up 2.77% in January and set new monthly records in February and March. Same region and headwinds, opposite results.

San Antonio businesses shoot to score big during NBA Finals (KENS5) → A national broadcast window like this is an asset, and there’s no sign anyone is running it as one. San Antonio is certainly celebrating the Finals. But look at what’s visible: the watch parties, the pep rally, and the River Walk bridge art are the Spurs organization and its partners. The most visible contribution from the City has been the Mayor trading churros with Charles Barkley on the pregame show. Pleasant enough, but not a real strategy. This run is probably too late to fully leverage but deep playoff runs will be recurring, and a national audience is a recurring asset. The city should establish a standing task force now, with all major stakeholders, to have a marketing plan in place for the next time so San Antonio can capitalize on the attention.

San Antonio dog bite cases rise despite $15 million budget increase for Animal Care Services (SA Current) → No city with major ambitions should carry a reputation for a dog problem. Despite a $15 million increase in the ACS budget, dangerous-dog cases rose 73% between FY2024 and FY2025, dismissed cases jumped 53%, and bite and scratch cases climbed from 3,090 to 3,810. The department points to new changes showing some improvement, and that’s great. But "dangerous dogs" should not be a problem residents and visitors associate with San Antonio. No one expects that of a major American city. It's the kind of reputation that quietly undercuts every pitch we make.

A 54,000-acre Hill Country ranch will become Texas' second-largest state park (TPWD / Texas Tribune) → One of San Antonio’s strongest assets continues to be its access to Texas itself. The state acquired nearly 54,000 acres in the Hill Country—canyons, limestone cliffs, river frontage on the West Nueces, a 30-acre spring-fed lake that will open as Silver Lake State Park, second in size only to Big Bend Ranch. The future park is located about two hours west, within day-trip distance. Worth saying amid a week of fiscal concerns and staff exits: one of the underlooked categories where San Antonio quietly beats its rivals is access to Texas, the place. The Alamo, the River Walk, the greenway trails, and soon a 54,000-acre state park within driving distance. That's a real competitive asset.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

The Orchestra San Antonio: Summer Tales

If you’re looking for something to watch this weekend other than the Spurs, the Orchestra San Antonio closes out the week with Summer Tales at the Tobin. The dramatic music from Carmen, a graceful cello showcase from Tchaikovsky, and Scheherazade, Rimsky-Korsakov's lush retelling of the 1,001 Nights stories. Guest conductor José Luis Gómez leads, with young cellist Cameron Renshaw as the soloist. Show up at 6:30 for the pre-concert talk, where the musicians walk you through what to listen for, a nice primer if a symphony isn't your usual weekend.

Saturday, June 6, at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts (100 Auditorium Circle). Doors at 6, talk at 6:30, music at 7:30. Tickets start at $27.

Thanks for another week. Follow us on your platform of choice: X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Story tips and reader notes go to our reporter Jarrett Whitener at jarrett@thecivic.com, and my inbox is always open.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

If something here landed, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to someone who should be reading.

Enjoy your weekend, go Spurs go, and see you Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

There’s a hangar on the Southwest Side of San Antonio that’s big enough to hold fifteen widebody jets. It is the largest freestanding high-bay aircraft hangar in the world, earning it a Guinness world record.

On any given week it holds C-17 Globemasters, some flown in from Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The enormous airframes move military equipment around the world, but are upgraded here in San Antonio. A single overhaul can run to some 30,000 labor hours, spread across a five-year maintenance cycle. And somewhere in the rotation, since 2014, are the aircraft that carry the President and his cabinet.

Boeing, among the most recognizable companies in America, runs one of its largest maintenance operations at Port San Antonio. Its payroll there tops 3,000, more than 40% of them military veterans. By almost any measure it’s one of the most consequential employers in San Antonio.

But it didn’t happen overnight; Boeing has been quietly building here for decades. When Kelly Air Force Base closed down it left a complicated and open question: what do you do with acres and acres of runway and hangars built for the military once the military is gone? Boeing turned out to be a huge part of the answer.

The first C-17 arrived for work in 1998, back when the base was still preparing for closure and repurposing. Boeing bet on the durable infrastructure left behind: runways, hangars, and the Air Force-trained technicians. Now, every C-17 in the American fleet still comes through here for its deepest maintenance, along with C-17s flown by eight allied operators.

And demand is strong. The sustainment contract behind that work has topped $8 billion, with the Air Force adding another modification this spring, and work on the B-52, under a $2 billion re-engining order that runs to at least 2033, plus the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornets and the Air Force’s F-15s, all running into the 2030s. In fact, it has been such a win for Boeing that the company has reinvested more than $240 million in its facilities over the years.

A whole economy took shape around Boeing’s operations. The campus that grew up with it, Port San Antonio, now counts more than 80 employers and nearly 18,000 direct workers. A who’s-who of defense and intelligence companies at the Port includes GDIT, CACI, Booz Allen, L3 Harris, and Leidos.

Widen the lens and the figures look even more impressive. The Texas Comptroller puts the site's total output at $20 billion and ties it to nearly 84,000 jobs across the state. The Port's own commissioned study is more conservative: $5.6 billion in direct output, $9 billion counting broader regional effects, and about 18,000 jobs on the campus itself. Average pay on the campus runs near $111,000, and the after-tax income it sends into Texas households has reached almost $5.7 billion. A veritable aerospace cluster has formed around Boeing, with StandardAero, which overhauls military and commercial jet engines, and a collection of other aerospace firms moving into the Port.

The work is all federal, of course: airlifters, bombers, and even the president’s plane, but Boeing behaves more like a neighbor than a faceless corporation. The company partners with local food banks, lent its name to the Port’s event space, the Boeing Center, and has invested millions of dollars in local STEM education.

And all of that investment culminates in something valuable: A local kid can go to a technical college and find a path to the floor of a hangar that services Air Force One without ever leaving the zip code.

This city spends a lot of its attention on what doesn't work. On the eve of the NBA Finals, with the rest of the world watching, it's worth remembering that some things do—a company as recognizable as Boeing built one of its largest operations here, lent San Antonio its brand, and has grown with us for decades.

It's also worth remembering how. When Kelly closed it was a blow, but the city and Boeing bet on what was already there: durable infrastructure left by the Air Force, and let it compound. If you're looking for what works in San Antonio, this is a good place to start.

Thanks for reading The Civic. This is the first in Growth Engines, a regular look at the parts of San Antonio that work, held to the same standard we bring to the parts that don't. One scheduling note: as I mentioned last week, our weekly briefing has been moved to Fridays so we can respond to the full week of news before it reaches you.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic.

Love him or hate him, Elon Musk is the most consequential businessman in Texas. SpaceX’s Starbase operations alone have generated over $13 billion in economic impact over the last two years and support over 24,000 jobs. Tesla’s Austin Gigafactory supports another 16,000 jobs.

But those are just the most notable facilities. Tesla and SpaceX are also pouring at least $55 billion into a massive computer chip facility called Terafab, likely to be located in Grimes. Meanwhile, SpaceX is expanding its Bastrop semiconductor facility to build Starlink kits. McGregor is producing rocket engines. Brookshire, just outside Houston, will get a battery Megafactory. Corpus Christi is refining lithium. All come with jobs. And Starbase will hire 4,000 more workers this year. In 2024 alone, SpaceX did business with more than 350 suppliers and injected $147 million into the regional supply chain.

Even Dallas, though lacking a big Musk corporate investment, will be the beneficiary of a Boring Co. tunnel connecting the Dallas campus of the University of North Texas with University Hills, a large development approximately a mile away. Our own tunnel project went nowhere after Boring Co. “ghosted” us.

In sum, Elon’s companies are pouring tens of billions of dollars into the Texas economy. In every direction, the largest private economic force in Texas is building.

What about us?

San Antonio isn't starting from zero on physical technology. We have aerospace, defense, and applied R&D that punch well above the city's reputation. On paper, we are the perfect city for what Elon is trying to do. But every single announcement shares one common detail: not in San Antonio.

Over a decade ago, San Antonio made a serious bid for Tesla’s battery factory, reportedly offering $800 million in local incentives. Though media called us a frontrunner, we lost to Reno, Nevada.

Then, six years later, Tesla came back to Texas to build its next Gigafactory. The shortlist was Austin, Nashville, and Tulsa—San Antonio was not on the list. Austin won the factory, thousands of jobs, and later Tesla’s corporate headquarters.

We competed once, over a decade ago, and lost. Since then, we haven’t been in the conversation even as other cities across the state were picking up the phone and building relationships.

Some may say Elon is too politically charged to work with, but the job of city leadership is to promote opportunity at home. And Elon is creating a lot of it, and it is conspicuously all elsewhere. These other communities are working with him, we should be open for business too.

Former mayor Ron Nirenberg flossed the Tesla logo off of his car. He’s “no fan” of Musk but still drives the Tesla, albeit with a Toyota badge. That this even passes as “news” at all tells you something. One politician’s car badge is meaningless, but the instinct here was to perform for a political coalition rather than to compete for these jobs. He’s not alone.

Opportunity builds lives and it builds cities. Thumbing your nose at Elon may be politically advantageous but it doesn’t help San Antonio. We don’t need to lose jobs and investment to every other city in Texas willing to pick up the phone.

The Reframe

Proposed property tax hike divides City Council (Express News) → This is a spending fight pretending to be a revenue crunch. The solution to our fiscal crisis is simple: Spend less.
The most irresponsible thing that the City could do isn’t spending more, it’s spending more without examining the structural issues with our ever-increasing budget. In 2015, TPR described a recently passed $2.5B budget as “mammoth.” Just over ten years later, we’re “looking between the cushions” for our +$4B budget. Are things nearly twice as good as they were ten years ago? The honest conversation Council must have is zero-basing our ballooning expenditures and asking what’s actually working. This is a spending problem, plain and simple. The good news is that spending problems are easy to solve—just cut spending.

UTSA plans new ballpark facilities as fan support surges (Business Journal) → This is how a commuter school is seen as a real university. Competitive sports with local buy-in is the fastest way an institution sheds an old reputation and builds a brand.
The detail worth catching: 18 alumni put up more than $500,000 for the upgrades. That’s alumni pride and local capital backing a San Antonio institution because alumni believe in it, which is very difficult to build over time. Big schools with good academics accumulate these resources naturally over decades, but UT San Antonio is relatively young and small, and we’re just beginning to see that work pay off. The school is deliberately building itself into something the city can point to. Cities with credible flagship universities recruit better, retain alumni better, and tell themselves a better story. Despite numerous local institutions, San Antonio has been short on a credible flagship for a long time, and UT San Antonio is likely the only institution that can truly fill it.

Property tax changes hit Alamo Colleges finances in 2027 budget outlook (Express News) → Revenue contraction is when good intentions become expensive.
“We’re doing amazing things here at the Alamo Colleges. We don’t want to stop that. We don’t want anything to hinder that,” Alamo Colleges Board Vice Chair Joe Alderete Jr. said. This is the problem with nearly any government program: they all sound great. They all help people, they all have economic impact studies suggesting incredible returns on the investment of public dollars. And despite how important it is to the people of San Antonio, the Alamo Colleges budget and seemingly every other government program in town cannot be based on the idea of perpetual fiscal growth. Our good intentions in fiscal surplus must be paired with good stewardship during fiscal contraction.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

Miles opened last Friday in St. Paul Square

This is getting some buzz, and for good reason. Three San Antonio culinary vets—Matt Garcia, Tatanka Guerrero, and Steven Lopez—and it's the first thing they've owned on their own. In the old Francis Bogside space, rebuilt around a 360-degree central bar. They opened last Friday and are taking reservations now at the Resy link. Drinks-first room, food that holds its own, go check them out.

- Chad Carey, Empty Stomach Group

Starting next Tuesday, The Civic moves to two emails a week. Tuesdays will carry the column on its own. Fridays will be a shorter edition—the week’s reframes pulled into one place and something worth doing over the weekend. All part of our launch plan: more content, more features, and no more of your inbox than necessary. More exciting announcements to come in month 3.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

If something here landed, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to someone who should be reading.

See you next Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

Corporate welfare is bad policy. It rewards political leverage, transfers public money to wealthy private interests, and it’s difficult to measure the impact. Despite this, Project Marvel is one of the rare cases where corporate welfare is necessary.

It is tempting to oppose subsidy entirely. The Spurs are a multibillion-dollar business—it seems entirely reasonable to dig in our heels and force them to pay. But businesses have to remain viable, and the math has to work for them.

Asked directly why the Spurs cannot fund their own arena, Peter Holt told KSAT in October that "we're the 27th out of 30th in market size in the NBA." More than half of team revenues are tied to the home market and those revenues are a direct function of the underlying economy. Among NBA cities, San Antonio is 26th in per capita income, 21st in Fortune 500 companies, and 24th in GDP. Despite that, Sportico values the team at $4.5 billion, 21st in the league. The economic figures are worse than the valuation rank, which implies that the franchise outperforms its market because of operational discipline, not because the market supports it.

This creates a real financial pressure on ownership. Austin, Seattle, Las Vegas—cities dying for an NBA franchise—all rank higher on the economic metrics that determine the profitability of the team. To put it simply, the Spurs would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars more if they moved. The Holt family seems to have no interest in moving, but a different ownership group with no roots here and the same valuation math in front of them would not hesitate.

The math shows that if we want to be an NBA city, we have to help pay for the arena. Of the five least valuable franchises in the NBA, four play in publicly owned, publicly built arenas as tenants. The fifth, Detroit, plays in a publicly owned arena that took roughly a third of its construction from taxpayer-backed bonds and lets the operator keep all arena revenue. In fact, the overwhelming majority of teams in the bottom 15 of valuation play in arenas that received significant public funds. This is the entry cost that every comparable market has had to pay.

Teams that built with private money, like the Clippers, built their arenas in entirely different markets and with different resources. Steve Ballmer is an ex-Microsoft billionaire who privately financed the $2 billion arena project himself, and he did it in the second-largest media market and economy in America. The economics are different in markets that size. Whatever the Intuit Dome proves, it does not prove anything about a small-market arena in South Texas.

Voters remain genuinely split on Project Marvel, but there is a difference between disagreement over public funds and misunderstanding the stakes: whether San Antonio remains a city with an NBA franchise.

The real failure of governance is that San Antonio is negotiating from this position because San Antonio has earned this position. Twenty years of insufficient employer growth, stagnant median income, and a thin roster of corporate customers for arena suite deals put us at the bottom of the NBA market.

We need to make Marvel work. Walking away from a deal where a highly successful franchise is accepting hundreds of millions less than another market would pay doesn't make us more prosperous. The Spurs wouldn’t be the first big institution to leave, and more would follow if they left.

The work of the next 20-30 years is to build the city the market wants, on our own terms—so the next time we have this conversation, we have it from a position the math actually supports.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this piece referred to 'median income' where the underlying data is per capita personal income.

The Reframe

Toyota files plans to expand manufacturing plant in San Antonio (KSAT) → A $2 billion, +2,000-job expansion at the South Side plant is a real win for San Antonio and the economic development teams that landed it.
Toyota's "Project Orca" will add a new assembly line with 2,000 well-paying jobs, plus an average of 600 construction jobs a year from 2026 through 2030, with production beginning in 2030. It may seem inevitable, as Toyota “is already here,” but deals at this scale take years of sustained relationship work to land. Credit to greater:SATX, the city's Economic Development Department, and everyone who kept Toyota engaged & brought this expansion here rather than to another plant in another state.

San Antonio soon to overtake spot of nation’s sixth-largest city, and Philly is crashing out about it (SA Current) → Humor aside, Philadelphia isn’t worried about San Antonio.
We are experts at leveraging statistics to tell the good story. Census data shows that the population of the City of San Antonio proper is on track to pass the population of the City of Philadelphia. It’s a good story, and people are taking it seriously enough in the Instagram replies, but it’s misleading. The Philadelphia metropolitan area has a population exceeding 6 million people, over double the San Antonio metropolitan population of around 2.5 million. The GDP figures are more dramatic: Just shy of $560 billion for Philadelphia and $190 billion for San Antonio—that’s nearly 3x our total economic output and a roughly ~20% advantage for Philadelphia in per capita prosperity. Our population growth is great, but it must be paired with economic growth as well.

San Antonio City Council members call for audit of police overtime (SA Current) → We applaud financial scrutiny for how public dollars are spent. This should be the default posture.
SAPD's adopted overtime budget last year was $17.7 million yet the actual spend was $34.4 million. The department roughly doubled its own overtime budget, and only now—twenty years after the last comprehensive audit, in the middle of a $150 million budget shortfall—is the council asking what the books look like. We commend the councilmembers for looking for financial transparency, but we wish this was the default posture rather than the kneejerk reaction to a higher-than-expected bill. That shouldn’t come across as anti-police, anti-spending, or anti-anything—it should be the norm for use of public funds.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

Eva Marengo Sanchez at the Ruiz Healy Art Gallery

Eva Marengo Sanchez is a San Antonio-based painter, and this is her first solo show at Ruiz-Healy Art. The work is still life done with Old Master technique—meticulous oil on canvas—on subjects you’ll recognize from around here: pan dulce on the breakfast table, HEB and La Michoacana bags after the grocery run, flowers in a repurposed jar, tacos wrapped in foil. The titles tell you what kind of show it is: “Mom and Dad’s House,” “Mom’s beans,” “Here for two seconds,” “Are you sure it’s not allergies?”

The opening reception is Wednesday, May 20, from 6 to 8 PM at the gallery’s Olmos Park space (201-A East Olmos), with the artist in attendance. The show runs through August 22 (Wed–Sat, 11am to 4pm). Worth the trip.

- Chad Carey, Empty Stomach Group

Thanks for another week, and welcome to everyone who’s joined us since Brief #2. Remember to follow us on your social media of choice: X/Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, and Facebook. Story tips and reader notes can go to our reporter Jarrett Whitener at jarrett@thecivic.com, and my personal inbox is always open.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

If something here landed, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to someone who should be reading.

See you next Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

San Antonio spent months arguing about Project Marvel. $800 million in public money for a new Spurs arena. One of the most contentious local policy fights in recent memory—exactly the kind of scrutiny a public commitment of that size should get.

Now San Antonio is committing roughly the same amount of public money to two bus lines.

VIA’s two new bus projects, the Green Line and Silver Line, will cost over $800 million combined, or roughly equivalent to the public cost of Project Marvel. Federal grants cover about half but the remaining $384 million is billed to local taxpayers through a permanent sales tax that was approved by voters in 2020.

And the price will keep rising. VIA’s board just approved another $5.2 million for Green Line design work, the latest increase to a single contract that has grown from $20.8 million to nearly $32.3 million. The Silver Line, meanwhile, is 40% designed, with construction not expected until 2027. That timeline matters—when was the last time one of these projects finished on-or-under budget?

The bus lanes, while public, have barely been a blip compared to the spectacle that was Project Marvel. Voters approved the funding in 2020 and the VIA board decided what to do with it.

The most useful precedent for what an $800 million bet on rapid transit might deliver in San Antonio is VIA’s own track record. The agency’s $25 million Stone Oak Park-and-Ride opened in 2018, styled as a forward-looking hub for commuters. Eight years later, the 400-space garage serves a couple hundred riders per day. VIA CEO Jon Gary Herrera told council in February it was “an example of something you build before demand is there.”

There is a real need to improve transit in San Antonio. The harder question is whether two bus lines are the strongest $800 million answer, or whether the same money spread across different investments would carry more riders, more reliably, to more places. Driverless car service now operates across more than 60 square miles of the city. The environment that produced the 2020 vote is not the one we are building in now.

When you’re dealing with a price tag of this magnitude, some comparable figures may be instructive. $384 million in local money is roughly twenty times the city’s entire Economic Development Department budget, nearly the full Fire Department budget, and more than eight times what the general fund spends on Metro Health each year. Beyond this figure, operations and maintenance are projected to add millions in annual costs as long as we maintain the bus lines. Big bet.

And the city is about to ask residents to pay more. City Manager Erik Walsh has signaled he will recommend San Antonio’s first property tax rate increase in 33 years, against a projected $264 million shortfall by 2031. Even maxing out the rate will require $70 million in cuts over the next two years, the city’s own budget director has said. Bexar County is forecasting its worst year for property tax revenue since the 2008 housing crash.

Are we measuring what we’re getting, and is what we’re getting worth what we’re paying? In a world with robotaxis already on San Antonio streets, a city raising property taxes to keep the lights on, and a permanent car culture reinforced by sprawl, climate, and geography, would you spend $800 million on two fixed bus lines? I wouldn’t.

The Reframe

~160 people in Austin expected to make $100M+ on SpaceX IPO, ~12 expected to clear $1B (Molly O’Shea) → The SpaceX IPO will create more wealth in central Texas than any event in state history, but only cities positioned as destinations, not obstacles, will share it.
SpaceX is going public in June at something north of a $1.5 trillion valuation. When that happens, about 160 people in Austin could stand to gain $100 million or more and a dozen will clear a billion. Money is about to land in central Texas at an unfathomable scale. Here’s the opportunity: new billionaires (particularly in tech) don’t sit on their money, they start funds, back projects, and build new companies. San Antonio sits 80 miles south of where most of it will live, and that’s a real advantage. We could be on the receiving end of some of that new wealth. Tomorrow’s next big company could be funded by this IPO, but only if we compete for it.

San Antonio approves veteran housing protections despite clashes over landlord exemptions (TPR) → Some policies sound good but don’t move the needle. Mayor Jones’ VASH policy seems more symbolic than effective.
Mayor Jones planted her flag on a nice-sounding housing issue: stop landlords from denying leases to veterans using VASH vouchers. Sounds great. She got it done, albeit with carve-outs that watered it down. A few problems. One, there’s no proof veterans face this discrimination. San Antonio’s VASH acceptance rate is 95%, per Councilwoman Teri Castillo, in a market the landlord lobby itself puts at 81% occupancy. Of ~2,000 voucher-holding veterans, nearly all are placed; the rest, Castillo says, are held back by criminal history, credit, rental history, or expired vouchers—none of which this ordinance addresses. Per city staff, more than 1,000 Opportunity Home vouchers went unused in 2023, holders who couldn’t find or qualify for units. The other problem is that the real cost is downstream. Every new compliance hook becomes a tax paid by every renter. Mayor Jones has named housing affordability her top issue, but her signature housing action looks more like a tent-pole policy to show veterans how much she cares. Good politics, less-so policy.

More than 8k San Antonio kids will get vouchers. Many previously were enrolled at public schools (SA Report) → Ignoring the politics of the program, the local data is its own story and the status quo it points to isn’t working.
San Antonio’s districts have been shedding students for years. SAISD enrollment fell from over 56k in 2003-04 to 44.5k in 2021-22—a 21% decline that led trustees to close 15 campuses in 2024. Northside ISD is on track to be about 14,000 students below its 2019 peak of 107,800 and is carrying a $38 million deficit heading into next year. Against that backdrop, more than 21,000 SA-region families applied to the Texas Education Freedom Account program, and 8,676 got awards in the first round. About a third of SA applicants came from public school last year, well above the 25% statewide rate. Ignoring the politics of the program itself: more SA families are looking for education alternatives, at a higher rate than the rest of Texas. That reflects local conditions, not federal politics.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

Magic Tuber Stringband at Echo Bridge

Echo Bridge might be the strangest venue in San Antonio—a 1935 concrete arch over the river near the Mission Reach whose acoustics, completely by accident, sound like a concert hall. The Echo Bridge Appreciation Society sells maybe a hundred tickets a show, and you walk down a dirt path behind Tandem Coffee to get there.

This Sunday, May 17, they’ve got Magic Tuber Stringband—a North Carolina trio playing experimental old-time Appalachian music, with their new record Heavy Water dropping the following Friday on Thrill Jockey. Show starts at 7 & tickets are $20. If you’ve never been under the bridge, this is a good excuse.

- Chad Carey, Empty Stomach Group

Thank you for another week, and to the hundreds of new subscribers since last week—Welcome! Also new to us, our reporter, Jarrett Whitener, started yesterday. You can reach him at jarrett@thecivic.com for story tips or just to get in touch.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose continued generosity allows us to operate.

If something here landed, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to someone who should be reading.

See you next Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

San Antonio has a growing population, affordable housing (yes, it’s true), no state income tax, high quality of life and a rich culture. We have what a city needs to grow. We are not growing. Well, at least not anywhere close to other Texas cities.

Between 2012 and 2022, Austin added jobs at more than twice our pace. Dallas-Fort Worth added them roughly a third faster. In economic terms, Austin’s GDP grew 39% from 2018 to 2023, nearly twice as fast as ours. We are the slowest-growing major economy in the fastest-growing large state in the country.

San Antonio saw big population growth in the year post Covid, but things are slowing down. In 2026, property values have stagnated, sales tax revenue is falling, and home prices are dropping after a long run-up. The city just closed a $21 million gap in this year’s budget through spending cuts and fee hikes, and is facing a $152 million gap next year. Council is now talking about raising the property tax for the first time in over three decades. All while the San Antonio homeowner already pays among the highest property taxes in Texas.

It isn’t just the city. SAISD has lost 20% of its students over the past two decades and closed over a dozen schools. Northside ISD lost over 10,000 students and faces a $35 million deficit. Across the area, school districts are shrinking, closing buildings, and cutting staff because there aren’t enough families.

This is what stagnation looks like up close: a slow but lethal drain that shows up in your property tax bill and closes your kid’s school.

And, the fix seems to be more taxes. But, the more we take from residents, the less competitive we become in the one category we really have going for us: San Antonio is affordable. That is a huge part of our pitch—affordable for families and affordable to operate a business in a good city with no state income tax. Every fee increase and every tax hike chips away at the only advantage we’re actually selling.

What we need is more jobs and more opportunity.

The employers that once anchored the city’s tax base like Rackspace, USAA’s banking arm, and Tesoro have downsized, relocated, or been acquired out of town. The jobs replacing them are less competitive. San Antonio is adding jobs in aggregate but not gaining the kind of jobs that fund a city, and not doing it at the pace of a true dynamic economy.

Austin doesn’t have this problem because Austin has jobs at scale. Since 2018, Austin has attracted 81 corporate headquarters relocations. Dallas got even more. San Antonio didn’t make the list. When good jobs show up, people get hired, buy houses, fill schools, and spend money. More jobs means more homes and more revenue, and no one has to raise anything. Austin’s revenue doubled without raising rates—in fact, they lowered theirs. We’re raising fees to close a gap that grows every year.

Yes, we know we don’t want to be Austin. But we can’t ignore that the growth engine is slowing. The job of city leaders is to make sure the city creates opportunity for its residents. That is the job. Without growing opportunities, a city will decay. This role cannot be delegated to a partner organization and crossed off the list. San Antonio’s elected leadership has spent the last decade treating job creation as someone else’s department—a mission to fund and a brand to support, not the central function of running a city. And growing the job base is not just about courting employers from elsewhere. It is about building the conditions that make new jobs form here in the first place. Both halves are the work, and both halves belong to the people voters elected.

We do spend on these efforts. But the results are mixed at best. $200 million on Ready to Work, which placed around 5,000 people in “approved” jobs at an average salary of $45K—in mostly truck driving and call center work. $802 million committed to two bus lines in a city built entirely around cars. $150 million in affordable housing bonds. Tens of millions in nonprofit grants. What is actually working? What would we stop doing if we had to choose? And what would we do instead to grow?

These are the questions not enough people are asking. At the core: how do we grow? It is beyond dispute that when growth and jobs come, incomes rise, the tax base expands, and the city can invest in schools and streets and the things that make a place worth raising a family in. That is what flourishing looks like. Austin is living it. Dallas is living it. San Antonio is watching.

Stagnate, raise rates to cover the gap, erode the cost advantage, watch jobs and families choose elsewhere, and raise rates again. That cycle has a name in other cities. Detroit. Baltimore. Portland.

San Antonio has everything it needs to grow. Growth just requires choosing it—and so far, we haven’t.

The Reframe

City Council approves $4.5 million for Robert E. Lee renovations (Business Journal) → Subsidized housing is the wrong answer to the right question.
San Antonio doesn’t have an affordable housing problem. San Antonio has an income problem that looks like an affordable housing problem. A handful of subsidized units at six figures apiece doesn’t move the affordability needle in a city where the median home already costs less than most of Texas, and there is plenty of dirt-cheap housing available. What this does is burn civic capital on a symptom while the disease—an economy that isn’t competing with the rest of the Texas Triangle—compounds. If the goal is for more San Antonians to afford homes, the answer is more $75K jobs, not more subsidized apartments. If the goal is truly more & more affordable housing, the solution is simple: build more. Just ask Austin.

Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones outlines tough choices ahead in State of the City address (SA Report) → Mayor Jones is governing as an economic development mayor despite not running as one.
Good. That's the job. The problem is that the city has been late to it for twenty years. For decades, economic development in San Antonio has been treated as something the mayor supports. It has not been treated as what it actually is: the most important function of municipal leadership, because it is the one function that determines whether every other function is funded. Jones is inheriting the consequences of that delegation and appears to be taking the job personally. The Civic’s position: this is the correct posture, and the measure of success is whether San Antonians are more prosperous three years from now.

OLLU to offer no-cost master’s program starting this fall (SA Report) → A shrinking university makes a smart bet on jobs.
OLLU's new free master's program is being covered as a feel-good story. It's actually something better: a shrinking institution making a clear-eyed decision. Enrollment is down nearly 300 students since 2023, and a dozen undergraduate programs were cut last year. Against that backdrop, the university is doubling down on five graduate tracks across business, cybersecurity, nonprofit management, and social work, and giving them away to students who'll actually finish. All five have direct employment pathways in San Antonio's existing economy. Charity doesn’t always materialize as opportunity, but if these students are funneled into higher paying jobs, this just might.

The Pick

Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio

I Still Love San Antone

Garrett T. Capps—San Antonio’s musical ambassador and founding partner of The Lonesome Rose—has released I Still Love San Antone, his most gonzo record to date. It features Santiago Jiménez, Jr., the late, great Augie Meyers (of the Texas Tornados), and Paul Leary (of Butthole Surfers).

He’s throwing the release fiesta Saturday, May 9th, at The Lonesome Rose. Free admission, with Santiago Jiménez, Jr. opening. If you want to know what makes San Antonio music San Antonio music, it’s a damn good place to start.

- Chad Carey, Empty Stomach Group

Thank you for reading our inaugural newsletter. The Civic exists because San Antonio deserves a weekly publication that asks the questions above out loud—what’s working, what isn’t, what we aren’t talking about. Every Tuesday from here on, you’ll get one argument, one Reframe of recent coverage, and one reason to leave the house.

A particular thanks to our Charter members, whose generosity made this launch possible.

If something here landed, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to someone who should be reading.

See you next Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

Friends,

Coming to you with good news: The Civic publishes its first Weekly Brief next Tuesday, May 5th. The opening column, “San Antonio Has to Choose Growth,” lays out the argument we’ll be making consistently: that this city has every ingredient for growth and is choosing not to grow, and that the consequences of that choice show up in school closures, budget deficits, and tax hikes. But, importantly, we can choose to do things differently and San Antonio can be genuinely great if we do.

Many of you know me, but for those who do not: I am Philip Reichert, Editor of The Civic. I’d like to thank everyone for their involvement so far, big or small. The people reading this backed this project before there was anything to read, and we appreciate that immensely. Those of you who generously joined as Charter members are listed on our website.

Two things:

The launch is Tuesday morning. Over the coming weeks, we will have more content delivered every week to your inbox: deep-reported columns, dozens of records requests across every government entity in Bexar County, quality guest writing, and investigations into the programs and policies that shape San Antonio’s future. Our website is fully live at thecivic.com and will quickly fill with content.

We also made our first staff hire. Jarrett Whitener, most recently a reporter at Community Impact, joins us full-time on Monday, May 11th to help us cover everything going on in San Antonio.

When Tuesday’s piece lands, please share it. Send it to at least one person who should be reading us. Word of mouth is how local journalism scales!

More to come.

Philip Reichert