The storm that hit San Antonio on Friday night had winds gusting to 77 miles per hour, significant rainfall, multiple deaths, and it caused significant property damage as it moved through the area. By the time it passed, well over 100,000 people had lost power. As of Tuesday morning, there are still customers waiting for theirs to be restored.

With that as a backdrop, CPS Energy’s Board of Trustees convened yesterday afternoon for its monthly meeting.

Nestled in item 10 of their agenda was a performance update, featuring the word “unrecoverable,” which is how CPS describes its reliability performance so far this year. The data was worrying: their target for average customer power outage duration this year was 73 minutes, but the year-end forecast now sits at 94.16 minutes, with the declaration that the measure “is unrecoverable and will not achieve its year-end target.”

Is that bad? Well, looking back over the last couple of years, the average power outage ran 61.8 minutes in 2024 and then 75.4 minutes in 2025. For 2026, we’re looking at a forecast of 94 minutes, meaning the typical San Antonio outage is on track to be more than 50 percent worse in two years. The ‘reliability year’ was lost even before Friday night’s storm. But the storm happened anyway, and it is only the latest entry in what has become one of the worst stretches for CPS in recent memory.

In June, then-CEO Rudy Garza moved on to the Lower Colorado River Authority, leaving CPS under interim leadership. Then, in July, CPS was ordered to pay nearly $400 million to two pipeline companies over unpaid gas bills from Winter Storm Uri, while customers were already on the hook for a surcharge for the next couple of decades. Then, last month, Governor Abbott likened the utility’s 14 percent transfer to City Hall to a “slush fund” and made it a campaign promise to break up city-owned utilities.

Even the power plants are failing, with the same board agenda packet categorizing plant availability as “Unrecoverable” too, dragged down by errors like turbine and transformer failures as well as cascading repairs.

Why would CPS struggle so much in these categories? Well, it’s certainly not funding. In January of 2022, CPS raised base rates nearly four percent, its first increase in eight years. Two years later it tacked on another 4.25 percent, generating roughly $85 million a year (with over a quarter of it earmarked for “reliability and resiliency”). Even the tree-trimming budget nearly tripled after 2022, past $20 million a year. This year? CPS has already previewed a 5.5 percent increase, with more planned every two years through the end of the decade.

Meanwhile, CPS trustees also approved the regular transfer of revenue to the city, $51.3 million, bringing the fiscal year’s payments beyond a quarter of a billion dollars. The total transferred every year is around half a billion dollars and covers nearly a third of the city’s general fund, which council is preparing to shore up with the first property-tax-rate increase in more than three decades. In this way, your CPS bill is doing two jobs: keeping the lights on and keeping City Hall open, and it seems that only one is working.

Though to be fair to CPS, some of this is unavoidable. It’s expected that a major storm would be problematic, no power company manages hurricane-force winds completely unscathed. And the delay in restoring service is also not unheard of as the restoration work is logistically challenging and physically difficult, and despite that most customers were restored relatively quickly. The board packet also documents more than one thousand miles of vegetation trimmed this year and a long list of maintenance initiatives. Even chief strategy officer Elaina Ball’s explanation, offered to trustees in April, that there have been “more storms than we forecast” is true.

But this is the second consecutive year it has been true, and at some point, more storms than we planned for doesn’t cut it. Storms are not a surprise in South Texas. As it stands, CPS keeps missing on key targets even as it pulls in tens of millions of dollars more for it every other year.

So, yes, CPS is having a tough few months. Let’s not blame the storm, though, because many of these problems are earned. The $400 million judgment is for gas CPS contracted for and then refused to pay, the surcharge is for fuel CPS bought, and the reliability deterioration is measured by CPS against CPS's own targets, managed with its own money, over two years.

Ultimately, this was a year that CPS Energy built for itself, and it is going to ask you for a raise to fund the next one. We would do well, though, to remember that this is what more money bought us.

1. Data centers: no moratorium, but a real zoning debate. At a meeting on Tuesday, city council declined to commit to a moratorium on new data centers, opting instead to keep refining amendments to the Unified Development Code, a slower but more permanent change. Only a few members have publicly backed a moratorium so that will not happen. As such, proposed changes are comparatively modest and subject to change: a proposed 500-foot buffer between data centers and homes & schools is being reworked after industry pushback, with staff looking for other ways to limit noise and light pollution. The changes would also limit data centers to commercial and industrial zones and prevent their development over the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone. Expect it to change again before it reaches a vote—the siting and buffer rules could still get watered down along the way. We're watching because, though San Antonio should never reach for overregulation, the city didn’t immediately take the extreme path like other municipalities have. It remains to be seen if this will continue.

2. Crime is down from its 2023 peak, but “down” is still well above the national average. San Antonio’s crime rate fell to 8,986 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2025, down 13% from the 2023 peak of 10,342, per an Express-News analysis of SAPD data. Violent crime declined, including murder and aggravated assault, and a drop in car thefts drove much of the improvement. There has been a noticeable decline in crime over the last few years—SAPD credits its 2023 Violent Crime Reduction Plan. But on the FBI’s narrower standardized measure, San Antonio still runs about 2.5 times the national crime rate (5,218 versus 2,119 per 100,000 in the most recent 2024 data), with violent crime roughly 65% higher and property crime more than two and a half times higher. And not everything is falling, with various nonviolent categories up since 2021. We're watching because dropping off from an unusually high base is progress but not enough, improvement beyond historical norms will be the real sign of change.

3. San Antonio lands a major deal with IEM, the second major economic win in recent months. Industrial Electric Manufacturing, a California power-equipment maker, will build a $200M, million-square-foot plant at Brooks that the company and greater:SATX call the largest job-generating project San Antonio has landed in over two decades. It’s the second marquee manufacturing win in two months, after Toyota’s $3.6B assembly-line expansion in July. Two have now landed, a real mark in greater’s favor as it just won a $1.4M county contract. We're watching because these two deals together represent a meaningful change in the job creation & company attraction trendline, and keeping it in this direction would be a major shift.

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

The Reframe

City pushing ahead on ambitious bike plan, despite funding challenges (Express-News) → No one bats an eye at a bike plan that will cost anywhere from 3 to 8 billion dollars? Before anything was cut from the upcoming budget, the city walled off certain categories. The budget was, in its own words, "designed to protect essential services" and to fund the priorities residents ranked in this spring's survey. But this just means that the $158 million has to come out of whatever's left, which in this case turned out to represent a medley of small changes plus a tax hike. Facing this budget problem, it seems unusual that we don’t at all scrutinize a $3-to-$8 billion bike plan, or (perhaps most importantly) the decisions that led us there. Note how, just last year, it was defended as only “$21 million to $56 million per year for 25 years” by the Express News Editorial Board as they emphasize the previous, robust $1.2 billion bond. “That doesn’t seem extraordinary” they say. How times change. It’s hard not to feel like city hall is debating minutiae while the bulk of the budget is untouched and already set, meanwhile the bike lanes ride on unquestioned. There’s no way we’re spending $21 million per year on bike lanes, but how much are we spending? What else have we failed to scrutinized?

SpaceX unveils $100B Louisiana Starbase that will dwarf South Texas site (Express-News) → Another major Musk-orbit project, San Antonio still without one. The most consequential builder in Texas just moved a $100 billion project across the state line into Louisiana, and the conversation still didn't include San Antonio. True, we were (probably) never getting a launch pad on the riverwalk, but hundreds of billions of dollars in capital has now picked basically every town in Texas & even left the state before we managed to earn a project of our own. At this point, it’s more embarrassing than anything else. We lost Tesla's battery plant to Reno a decade ago. Austin won the Gigafactory, and then the headquarters. Bastrop, Grimes, McGregor, Brookshire, Corpus Christi… Every direction except here, and now out of Texas entirely. Other cities keep picking up the phone, why not us? Our leadership should be working tirelessly to make it known that San Antonio is open for business, and we haven’t landed a single dollar from this massive economic expansion.

SA airport takes a hit as airlines ground flights (Business Journal) → Mid-construction on a multibillion dollar airport expansion, we’re leaking passengers. San Antonio International lost 4.9% of its traffic in the first half of 2026, more than 256,000 passengers. Just up I-35, Austin's airport grew 4.6% in the same window, to more than double our traffic. Though we face essentially the same macroeconomic circumstances, the traffic for each airport is moving in opposite directions. It’s easy to blame the airport, but San Antonio has a demand problem, plain and simple, and that doesn’t immediately resolve with a new, shinier terminal. The mayor herself calls carrier recruitment "critical," and that may benefit from the ongoing expansion, but the risk is a bigger terminal while the traffic it's built for keeps choosing Austin.

Behind the scenes of the biggest one-year school turnaround in San Antonio (Express-News) → The city’s biggest school turnaround didn’t come from more funding, it came from good management. A lesson, there? Pershing Elementary climbed from an F to a B in a single year, the largest jump in the San Antonio area. It’s a campus where 99% of students are low-income and nearly half are learning English. So, did they get millions more dollars, or the latest technology? Actually, the methods cost almost nothing: teachers reassigned to teach the subjects they're strongest at, a principal who checks in with kids, reading nooks built into hallway corners, multiplication drills folded into PE, and glow-stick dance parties for the students who passed a practice test—all things that "don't cost a lot but mean a lot to a fourth grader." "There's no secret," principal Shelene Livas said. "It's just hard work." It's worth remembering this at the next budget hearing, because it goes against the assumption that better results are tied to more money. And if a campus where nearly everyone is low-income can go from worst to first in a year on competence and effort, the schools that still fail can't blame poverty or budgets alone.

The Pick

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

First Friday at Blue Star, and the opening of Fotoséptiembre

San Antonio's longest-running art walk continues on Sept. 4 this month, and it collides with Fotoséptiembre. That's the citywide photography festival Michael Mehl started in 1995, running Sept. 1–30 across San Antonio and the Hill Country, now in its 32nd year. Fri., Sept. 4, from ~6 p.m. At the Blue Star Arts Complex, 1414 S. Alamo St.

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

Though the ongoing budget negotiations are about the general fund as a whole, if you listen to what the majority of city council is actually fighting about, much of the time and energy spent concerns a constellation of social services. Many are provided by a city entity, but we also spend a significant sum on contracts with local nonprofits.

The reflex here is that nonprofits figure out ways to do good for the community and local government will pay. Homelessness response, workforce pipelines, early childhood programs, arts and culture, and on and on. Watch it work in real time on the Express-News opinion page last weekend: a crisis nursery, built by a coalition of local nonprofits, ran roughly eight months as a pilot on about half a million dollars the coalition raised itself, and succeeded. The natural conclusion is that it deserves public funding. And maybe it does! County commissioners are looking into a major award. The city, mid-deficit, will likely be asked next. This is how these permanent funding arrangements grow as we accumulate contracts with nonprofits.

As we consider how we’re going to manage the city finances, there are two questions. How much do we spend this way? What do we get for it?

You would think that the first is an easy question. But you would be wrong: no consolidated total for these nonprofit contracts exists anywhere in the city’s published books. We see only glimpses: Tens of millions in the Ready to Work contracts. Some $23 million in federal pass-through to housing and neighborhood nonprofits. If you add in the obvious nonprofit spending from the city’s open checkbook portal it yields over $100 million paid (including capital expenditures) to some 150 nonprofits since the beginning of last year. Roughly $6.5 million for the Botanical Garden, $5.6 million for Meals on Wheels, $611,000 for the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, and so on. Add what you can find—conservatively well past a hundred million—and still no total, because the total is not public. San Antonio does not publish what it spends buying services from nonprofits.

And what exactly do we get for this undetermined sum? Austin has tried to answer that—for Austin, at least. In July, Austin’s city auditor pulled a sample of 25 nonprofit contracts for family and social services, looking through about $30 million of the roughly $100 million Austin spends each year with 95 nonprofits, and found the city was paying for services that were not fully delivered. In fact, 19 of the 25 contracts missed at least one performance target and, of the output and outcome measures reviewed, 44 percent went unmet. More than half of those misses were deeply below what the contract required. And of course Austin paid anyway.

Austin’s own leadership owned it as a failure of the city’s management, not the providers’. The city developed those metrics during contract negotiations and… Just never bothered to ensure it was getting what it paid for. Until now. It goes without saying: a performance target that costs nothing to miss is useless. Here in San Antonio we haven’t even bothered to check.

There is one notable exception, and we have written about it at length: Ready to Work. The entire debate was shaped by widely available public data. Sure, some argued on principle rather than that data, but nearly every public voice was able to consult the dashboard and make a determination. We knew how much was spent, why, and what we were supposed to get out of it. With most of these other programs, we don’t have anything close to that. Sometimes we don’t even have granular data, just an aggregate which must be fished out of an obscure city website. We don’t need a dashboard for every dollar, but I think we can all agree that you need to have some transparency.

Now look at the direction the San Antonio budget debate has taken. On one side, reluctance about raising the property tax rate and making life more expensive for residents. On the other, and noticeably louder among the council’s majority, alarm that funding for programs could be impacted. But is there any serious curiosity about whether the programs actually meet their goals? Or whether the goals are fair? If city council intended to maintain accountability, something we would argue is directly within their job description, this sort of thing would be step one. Yet, even now, there has been no serious push for it. The ongoing reaction of this council has been to fight over which unexamined commitments to protect.

So do what Austin did and figure out if we’re getting what we pay for. Direct the City Auditor to run reviews of the contracts for the delegate agencies that carry our human services, the economic development organizations, the workforce vendors, the incentive agreements, etc. We need a real record before the next budget is built (remember, there’s a budget deficit next year too).

A balanced budget is required by law, so City Hall will deliver that in some form. But what use is a legal requirement to balance the books if determining which dollars go where is a nearly impossible task? A balanced budget is useless if even city council doesn’t really know whether we’re getting what we pay for.

So one of two things is true. Either City Hall knows what its dollars buy and which programs deliver, and the information made public is done in such a way so we cannot check… Or it does not know and is choosing millions in cuts blind.

It’s hard to say which explanation is worse. Nothing in the record so far suggests it’s the first.

Either way, the best first step is to check. An audit of the kind Austin just completed is a small ask against spending of this magnitude and it should be the bare minimum for asking San Antonio to accept a rate increase. More than that, it’s just good governance. If we’re going to cut what fails and keep what works, we need to find out which is which and make it public.

1. Project Marvel had its day in front of council, and Project Marvel won. At Mayor Jones’ urging, city council held a Monday special session to debate and ultimately vote on whether the $489 million city contribution for Project Marvel should be put before city voters. After three hours of public testimony, and extensive rehashing of old arguments on both sides, the motion to put this funding on the ballot failed six votes to five. A narrower vote than many expected, but a defeat for the anti-Marvel advocates nonetheless. Though Project Marvel was and remains a contentious issue, this is a very predictable outcome for a proposal which surfaced mere days before the ballot deadline and was championed mainly by Mayor Jones, whose popularity has been trending downward for her whole term. Can we please move on? We’re watching to see if, with the project basically guaranteed to proceed, the Mayor and likeminded councilmembers continue to grandstand when the term sheet returns to council for final approval and the bond debate resurfaces.

2. The budget fight is now in its substantive, final stretch. At Wednesday’s budget work session, staff put the alternative to the proposed tax increase on the table: hold the rate flat for two years by cutting roughly $75 million more, eliminating 171 additional positions on top of the 101 already proposed and reaching into police and fire overtime, library hours, and parks programming. Little unity emerged over what precisely should be cut. The “fiscal responsibility caucus” of Whyte, Gavito, and Spears have been adamant that a rate increase would be a mistake, while nearly every other councilmember took issue with specific cuts, with seemingly every program portrayed as an essential service. At Tuesday's work session, Councilwoman Viagran told her colleagues that "we cannot cut our way out of this deficit." As a matter of arithmetic, that is simply false and staff later presented the $75 million cuts required to do exactly that. “We cannot” and “we should not” are two different things, both wrong. But as no one can agree on precisely what to do, no one will get what they want. It is now almost certain that the tax rate will go up, programs will get cut anyway, the council will remain at odds, and the hard structural decisions will be deferred once more. We’re watching to see if there’s any genuine movement or compromise shown between now and September 17th.

3. Most taxing entities in the San Antonio area continue to pursue tax increases. On Tuesday, Alamo Colleges trustees voted unanimously to advance a 1.75-cent rate increase—larger than the 1.25 cents floated in June, and their first rate increase in over a decade. The very same day, Bexar County presented a budget that keeps its rate flat, as University Health did earlier this month. Add the city’s proposed increase and the November tax-rate elections coming from SAISD (alongside a $600 million bond package), Northside ISD, and South San ISD, and the pattern is clear: nearly every large taxing entity in Bexar County faces the same declining property values, and the easy choice is always to ask for more. The county’s explanation for keeping the rate where it’s at is that it banked money during the good years and stopped issuing new debt when revenue slowed down. Even so, when the choice is between cutting real programs and nudging a rate, the temptation is enormous—and most of our taxing entities are not resisting it. We’re watching to see precisely what the increased burden is on San Antonians when all of this is said and done: between taxes, utility rates, and over a hundred increased city fees.

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

The Reframe

VIA board mulls bus fare increase as costs escalate for planned rapid lines (Express News) → The bus line overruns have already started and the first line isn’t even finished. The Green and Silver lines, our impending rapid bus transit lines, were pitched at $803 million. The estimate is now $878.8 million (surprise!) with the Green Line barely into construction and the Silver Line revised upward twice even before breaking ground. Anyone familiar with projects like these knows those will not be the last revisions, and that’s assuming everything goes according to plan with regard to federal funding. The city has had a lot of open public debate recently: Ready to Work, Project Marvel, taxes… We need to talk about the buses. San Antonio will not become an urban policy analyst's ideal public transportation city no matter how many rapid bus lines we add, and right now we’re signing up for years of construction pain at significant fiscal cost for—let’s face it—little benefit. We should fund what works & what we need, and this isn’t going to be either.

Study finds passenger rail route between S.A., Austin could cost $13.5B (Express-News) → Passenger rail, without a serious push from Austin’s political leadership, will always be a pipe dream. It seems like every other month there is a story about a “viability assessment” or study for passenger rail, and they all say the same thing. Rail is technically possible, but at a cost of billions and billions of dollars. The $13.5 billion for this hypothetical project doesn't even connect the downtowns, it connects Austin-Bergstrom to a terminus outside of downtown San Antonio, like the Frost Bank Center. A line that reliably links the two city cores (probably the only version worth building) would undoubtedly cost even more. And the sticker price is never the full story: look no further than California's rail project, or even VIA here in town. It’s true that a working rail connection to Austin would be transformational—but it would require a capital commitment the state has never shown any serious interest in committing. This study will join its predecessors on the shelf.

Proposed Bexar County budget approaches $3B (Business Journal) → In 2016, the Bexar County budget was $1.8 billion. The county budget ballooned into nearly $3 billion in the pandemic years, juiced by federal relief which, as it always does, became a baseline. The $2.6 billion now proposed is the result of a $200 million cut from last year, but still $800 million above a decade ago. That roughly follows inflation and growth, which is a problem. "We kept up with inflation" defends the growth rate but ignores whether the original rapid spending increase was ever really justified, or even whether we got anything from it. Meanwhile the people paying for it saw their taxable values fall and are facing significant cost increases this year, and household budgets don't work the same way. So ask the only question that matters: what did an extra $800 million buy? Are the county's courts faster, its jail safer, its roads better than in 2016?

Report finds need for homeless shelters, assistance outpacing supply (Express News) → The continually underexplored truth: we have a full-service system in place to deal with the homeless who are willing to accept help. What about those who aren’t willing? We have written about San Antonio’s comprehensive homeless services economy. The logic is simple: keep as many people as possible from becoming homeless while helping the ones who do become homeless find housing and reenter society. The idea that we can “solve” the homeless problem is misguided, however, once you account for the population that refuses help. We have almost no plan for the population that refuses to cooperate with the system in place. Every report on shelter capacity and assistance dollars measures the willing. Until someone solves that fundamental disconnect, homelessness continues (and grows) no matter how much supply we add.

The Pick

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

Congo Falls Night at the Ballpark

This Saturday, August 22nd, at Nelson W. Wolff Municipal Stadium, 5757 W. US Highway 90. The Missions host the Northwest Arkansas Naturals at 7:05 p.m. for a night with the San Antonio Zoo (recently named one of the best zoos in the world by Condé Nast) celebrating Congo Falls, its new two-acre gorilla habitat. Postgame fireworks close the night. Tickets through the Missions' website.

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

Bexar County leaders do not intend to propose a tax rate increase in the next budget, but warn that an increase could be necessary in coming years.

On Aug. 18, county commissioners were presented with the proposed fiscal year 2026-27 budget, keeping the tradition of no tax rate increase in more than 30 years.

Maintaining the current tax rate of about 30 cents per $100 of taxable value will generate nearly $3.67 million less in property tax revenue than last year.

Over the next three budget cycles, the county had projected a $145 million deficit. That projection has since been reduced to about $42 million, according to county staff.

The proposal

Like the City of San Antonio, Bexar County will see a decline in property tax revenue in FY 2026-27. Budget and Finance Director Tonya Gaitan said property taxes make up about 80% of general fund revenue, so declining property values will constrain the budget.

Existing property values decreased by $10.3 billion, while $7 billion in new value was added, resulting in a net decline of $3.3 billion. Of the new value, about $4 billion comes from residential properties, $1.3 billion from commercial properties and $1.7 billion from other properties.

County staff recommends shifting about $20 million from the Flood Maintenance and Operations Tax Rate to the general fund. Gaitan said the change would not negatively affect flood programs because the fund has enough reserves to maintain operations.

The tax rates will support the county’s more than $2.61 billion operating budget. Major components include nearly $905 million in operating expenses and about $565 million for roads, flood projects and other capital projects.

The proposed budget is down from the $2.8 billion adopted budget last year, Gaitan said.

The changes

The proposed budget does not include cost-of-living increases for employees and cuts about $26.7 million from departmental requests. This year, county departments requested 240 new positions, while the proposed budget approves zero net new hires.

“Within the general fund, we are not recommending any new net positions,” Gaitan said.

In December, federal American Rescue Plan Act funds allocated during the COVID-19 pandemic will reach their deadline. Line items funded through those grants will become “contingencies,” which commissioners will consider continuing during future budget workshops.

County Manager David Smith called the budget one of the more challenging he has faced because of declining property tax revenue. Although the upcoming budget is balanced, he warned that future budgets will likely face deficits requiring difficult decisions, including additional departmental cuts or tax increases.

“One of the reasons I’m here today submitting a budget that is built on no change in the tax rate is because I do want the court to begin to consider what I believe will be major challenges that you will face in the future, and they may well require revenue enhancements, significant revenue enhancements potentially,” Smith said.

Smith also pointed to growth in the county’s unincorporated areas, where development will require new infrastructure and flood-safety projects. He said those projects carry significant costs that cannot be financed at the current tax rate.

During a presentation on long-term financial forecasts, Gaitan said earlier projections showed a $145 million deficit in FY 2028-29. For FY 2026-27, the county’s strategy has been to slow spending growth rather than make significant cuts. Under that approach, the projected deficit has fallen to $42 million in FY 2029-30, pushing the shortfall back a year.

Even with the proposed budget, the general fund will require $30 million in recurring new revenue or recurring expenditure cuts in FY 2027-28, Gaitan said.

Commissioner comments

Precinct 3 Commissioner Grant Moody said he will not support a tax rate increase and is concerned about the county using its reserves.

“As long as we are tapping into those reserves, then we are spending more than we are bringing in,” Moody said.

Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert raised concerns about the lack of cost-of-living or payroll increases for county employees.

“My biggest concern right now is no raises for our employees and our retirees,” Calvert said. “It seems unconscionable to me, in this economic environment with things so high, that we don’t take care of our employees.”

County commissioners will continue budget discussions over the next few weeks and are scheduled to make final budget and tax rate decisions Sept. 15. The first budget work session is scheduled for Aug. 25. As of publication, commissioners do not intend to propose a tax rate increase.

There isn’t enough political will to stop a tax increase.

On August 13, City Manager Erik Walsh outlined a proposed $4.4 billion budget featuring the city’s first property tax rate increase since 1993, up 3.9%. Council Member Marc Whyte immediately argued to kill the rate increase on the spot. Only Council Members Marina Alderete Gavito and Misty Spears joined him.

And so, no member of council voted for a tax increase, but no member had to—and we will likely get one anyway. Once a budget is built based on increased taxes, reversing the increase requires some kind of consensus as to which spending programs will be reduced. This council rarely reaches consensus on anything, let alone spending cuts. Case in point: Mayor Jones was more afraid of what could be cut without a rate increase than the rate increase itself, voting for the trial budget proposal despite months of statements about affordability. Freezing the rate now, she argued, would force cuts before council understood what the city would lose. In this way, the hard choice was outsourced to arithmetic.

In June we said that good governance is the discipline of making tough decisions. By that measure, August 13 was a failure. A decision avoided is its own kind of decision, and the result is that some variation of this rate increase will likely pass next month.

But council still has a chance to lead, and it goes beyond a good faith attempt to reduce the rate increase between now and September 17.

San Antonio is becoming increasingly expensive, and while raising the rate is the headline, this budget will also include more than 100 new or increased fees. When combined with rate hikes from other taxing entities, there is one clear direction of travel. But worry not: “I don’t think there’s any major reductions to services that people feel,” Walsh told local media outlets regarding the $89.6 million in reductions associated with the increase. San Antonio’s ceiling of ambition is that you will not realize if things get worse.

This is not what San Antonio owes itself. When government raises its own cost, it creates an obligation to lower everyone else’s cost, an actual affordability campaign pursued aggressively by our leadership. And there are countless ways to be more affordable; a city can always find efficiency. But three areas matter most, and the city holds the cards in all three.

First, make it cheaper to build here. In every way. The state is already acting where the city won’t: since last September, San Antonio cannot demand more than one parking space per home in qualifying small-lot subdivisions. The city’s own reforms stop only part of the way there, with minimums waived downtown and halved near transit. So the city concedes it is good policy, but stops short of extending it. Every mandated space is a tax on housing, we should make parking reform widespread. The city can also fix the permit timeline—a national index recently ranked San Antonio 383rd of 500 cities for permitting red tape. All of this directly contributes to the cost of doing business here. We should identify every unreasonable obstacle to building and endeavor to remove them. And we should run the same audit on the cost of starting a business: every fee, license, hoop to jump through, and wait time standing between an idea and a new or expanded business should be benchmarked and attacked as a barrier for growth.

Second, make a serious effort to raise the baseline income. Affordability has two sides: what things cost and what people earn—San Antonio has under-built what people earn for decades. We have sixteen chambers of commerce, Port San Antonio, greater:SATX, UTSA, the city’s Economic Development department, the county’s, and on and on. The mayor—or a working majority of council—should call every one of these groups into one room and hammer out a genuine vision for what San Antonio is working to become. We need one unified strategy for getting there, one that lasts beyond anyone’s term. High-wage jobs are the enduring answer to affordability and we won’t get there if we have dozens of different groups splitting their efforts and resources.

Finally, we must make government cheaper to run, and the city already took a first step. At Councilman Whyte’s urging, we adopted a hybrid zero-based budgeting model, and the cost savings for this year’s budget is undoubtedly a result of that model. But if we were able to cut nearly $90 million and there won’t be “any major reductions to services that people feel,” there is a lot more meat on the bone. Upgrade it to a full audit of the city on a fixed schedule, every program and every delegate agency justifying itself on published results, reviewed by someone accountable to city council. And take notes from Austin: last month its auditor investigated public funds going to local nonprofits and found that in 19 of 25 contracts reviewed, the organization missed at least one performance target. Austin is still deciding what to do about it but San Antonio should go a step further and tie renewal to results from the start.

Getting out of the way of builders and business, unifying our strategic vision towards raising incomes, and making our government less wasteful. This may sound like it is simply the proper governance of a city, because it is. All of this is largely work that has clearly fallen by the wayside here, one deferred decision at a time. The specific prescriptions can be nitpicked, but the overarching need for San Antonio to make a serious effort to make itself more affordable cannot.

Council was presented with a binary choice: stop the tax increase, or don’t, and they failed. But we choose to be optimistic. Let’s use the opportunity of failure to grow, and to make San Antonio better than it was before it cost more.

After a three-hour discussion that included heated resident comments, San Antonio City Council voted against holding a November election on a Project Marvel ballot item.

A special meeting was called Aug. 13 to consider an election on the city’s $489 million contribution to Project Marvel. The meeting followed a push by Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones to give city residents a say in the deal, one year after Bexar County voters approved the county’s ballot item. Jones did not comment on the proposed ordinance during the meeting.

While the 2025 county election was required because of the use of venue tax funds, the city’s funding mechanisms for its contribution were not required to go before voters.

City Manager Erik Walsh said the city plans to fund its contribution through lease payments from the Spurs and other private development, property tax revenue from the Hemisfair area and hotel tax revenue recouped from the state. Walsh noted that the Hemisfair area currently generates no property taxes and will not do so until development occurs.

When Council members asked what would happen if funding requirements could not be met, City Chief Financial Officer Troy Elliot said certain benchmarks would have to be met before any city bonds could be issued.

Sukh Kaur, Phyllis Viagran, Marina Alderete Gavito, Ivalis Meza Gonzalez, Misty Spears and Marc Whyte voted against the November election. Jones and council members Jalen McKee-Rodriguez, Edward Mungia, Teri Castillo and Ric Galvan voted in favor.

Those supporting the election argued that residents deserved another opportunity for public input, particularly because the project has changed over the past year. Changes include the loss of one hotel development and the potential loss of a land bridge.

Opponents argued that San Antonio residents make up a majority of Bexar County voters and that those who supported the county proposition would have supported a city proposition.

Spears (District 9) said 72% of voters who cast ballots in the county election were city residents. She also noted that voters in seven of 10 council districts supported the county proposition in 2025.

Citizen comments

Over the previous two weeks, Jones hosted five community listening sessions that generated grassroots support for an election.

On Monday, residents both for and against the election delivered more than two hours of public comment.

James Anderson, chairman and chief executive officer of Bartlett Cocke General Contractors, said “uncertainty has a cost” and that delays or complications could increase construction costs or alter the overall project.

“San Antonio has an opportunity to make generational investment in the heart of our city,” Anderson said.

Spurs Chief Executive Officer R.C. Buford said the team has worked to listen and cooperate with the city, county and community. Buford highlighted $165 million in economic activity generated across the city during the NBA Finals earlier this year.

“Last November, the voices of San Antonio and Bexar County were heard,” Buford said.

Graciela Sánchez, executive director of Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, advocated for a November election. She said no one was trying to refute the county vote but that city residents should have the opportunity to weigh in on city-specific funding.

“What we are asking is to allow San Antonio residents to vote on whether the city should contribute $489 million to the arena,” Sánchez said.

Christine Drennon, associate professor in the Trinity University Department of Sociology and Anthropology, called the process “fatally flawed since the beginning” and criticized city officials for being timid or closed-lipped about Project Marvel.

Drennon also pointed to conflicting information being distributed to residents and called for greater public involvement in the sports and entertainment district.

“Show us why it is a good deal, and we will support you. But, so far, you haven’t done that,” Drennon said.

The vote

Last August, San Antonio City Council approved a term sheet for the arena in a 7-5 vote. Between that vote and the Aug. 13 election vote, Mungia (District 4) was the only council member to change his position, voting in favor of the November election.

“I did vote for the term sheet, and I think it is okay to support that and to support the vote to make sure residents are okay with the city’s number on that,” Mungia said.

McKee-Rodriguez (District 2) has been vocal in his opposition to Project Marvel, arguing that the East Side of San Antonio will get the short end of the stick and that the arena could require the city to sacrifice district-specific infrastructure projects in the upcoming bond election. He also pointed to budget challenges that have led the city to cut departmental staff and services.

“I believe we can do two things: we can invest in those beautiful shiny projects that we need, and we can also recognize those problems that will ultimately conflict with our ability to address the larger issues,” McKee-Rodriguez said.

Kaur (District 1) voted against a November election, saying she is focused on issues raised by her constituents. She said the project’s cost and scope have not significantly changed and that the changes do not warrant another election.

“I am a resident of the city, and I am also a resident of Bexar County, so when I am going to the ballot and voting, I am voting SAISD, I am voting for the city of San Antonio, I am voting for Bexar County and Alamo Colleges,” Kaur said.

Ultimately, Council rejected the November election.

The decision does not resolve every issue surrounding Project Marvel. Although the term sheet and county proposition have been approved, San Antonio voters will vote in May on infrastructure bonds related to the downtown district.

1. What we're watching this week is City Council, plain and simple. Yesterday was our first look at what the upcoming city budget will really look like. The details: a $4.4 billion budget with a $1.76 billion general fund, and a tax rate increase is looking much more likely. The proposed cuts run $90 million across two years with more than $41 million of it next year. By the end of the day the council had refused to prevent a rate increase, with only Alderete Gavito, Spears, and Whyte voting to keep the tax rate at its current level. Technically this vote only set the ceiling, and the tax rate could end up at any figure lower than the one council voted on, including the current rate. But the reality is a “no” vote was the only realistic way to enforce a budget drafted around the current tax rate, and now we need a council majority to agree on $30 million in cuts inside six weeks while the budget is already built on the increased revenue.

   Read The Civic’s breakdown of the budget and this council meeting here.

   So after spending most of the summer peacocking about fiscal responsibility, city council will likely move forward with a tax increase—but it’s the cuts that deserve our attention. The budget advertises $90 million in reductions across FY27-28. But reading the breakdown, tens of millions of dollars of that is transferring those expenses elsewhere in the budget, a reallocation rather than a true reduction. Meanwhile, the budget that cuts 101 city positions actually grows the total city headcount, so the city still manages to get bigger despite so-called austerity. Councilwoman Kaur called the proposal a happy medium, though the reality is the budget balances some $90 million in reductions and transfers (nearly a third is just reallocated to other parts of the budget, not even cut) against $120 million in new taxes and fees, hitting residents harder than city funds. Erik Walsh himself said “I don’t think there’s any major reductions to services that people will feel,” which begs the question: if we wouldn’t feel the loss of these programs, why were we funding them in the first place? So Thursday’s budget is the comfortable, and wrong, choice: obligatory cuts on services that should have never existed paired with a rate increase small enough to have a veneer of reasonability, as we continue to defer the difficult choices. But we don’t have to wait very long. Even with the proposed cuts, the next hard choice is actually next year. The math for FY28 only makes sense if there’s a property tax increase again, so we’ve already basically accepted this whole process again in twelve months. We wrote in June that a core part of governing is making hard choices, but what we’re witnessing with the budget is nothing of the sort, just managed decline. The Mayor spent the summer presenting as a champion of fiscal responsibility yet wouldn’t vote to avoid a tax increase. Only three councilmembers made the hard decision and voted to prevent an increase outright—Whyte called the budget bloated by decades of poor spending habits and the increase a Band-Aid, saying it was "frankly unconscionable." Meanwhile, Councilwoman Viagran asked residents to see this as an opportunity to invest in city services, not a tax increase, which feels like little more than cheap marketing. We’re watching to see whether the upcoming hearings function as real deliberation or whether the budget is essentially set.

2. Also at City Council: the Mayor’s push to disrupt Project Marvel will get a vote at city hall. Mayor Jones’ longtime campaign against the arena development plan has culminated in a special session next Monday, where hours before the state deadline for the November ballot, council will debate and vote on whether to put the city spending for Project Marvel to city voters. At least six members of council have already publicly indicated they do not support the measure, so without a flip, it goes nowhere. The Spurs need no public defenders, and the facts have been litigated by nearly everyone in town over the last year, but it must be said: the city funding got the vote that the system requires for it, a 7-4 vote by the elected council last August. If the financing required ballot language, it would get it, and realistically would have won since a majority of City voters approved the county ballot in November. And the money cannot do what the Mayor asks, as the Mayor herself conceded this week, arena dollars are not part of the general fund. In sum, the same week she voted to keep a tax increase alive, the Mayor is demanding an election about money that cannot pay for anything. This is just a kind of episodic activism, from the same playbook that lost us Chick-fil-A at the airport and passed on bidding for the RNC. It is also expensive, because businesses pay close attention to this sort of unpredictability. We're watching Monday's vote to see who joins the Mayor’s performance, and why.

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

The Reframe

A blockbuster $12.5B deal as Josh Kushner and Bob Iger agree to buy the Lakers (Express News) → As we tear ourselves apart over an arena, the market prices major franchises at eleven figure valuations. Not to hammer Project Marvel too much, but look at what these franchises are worth. The Spurs might not be the Los Angeles Lakers (better at basketball lately, though) but they're a crown-jewel franchise in a small market, which is more than you can say about the overwhelming majority of professional sports teams. We're turning a new arena deal, the status quo for all small market teams, into a political crusade. The NBA isn’t a perfectly capitalist system, it’s a cartel that enforces scarcity. With every negotiating advantage in the world, the Spurs are paying over half a billion dollars to be here. They clearly chose San Antonio. That preference has a limit, though, particularly when the opportunity cost is in the billions of dollars. Blow up the deal for political theater and the next Spurs arena negotiation will be in Austin, or Las Vegas (the name works for both!) and their valuation will be better off for it.

Abbott’s move against CPS is about subverting local control, not affordability (Express-News) → It’s hard to judge the proposal on its merits, but Abbott is definitely right about one thing. When we asked for details on the Governor’s energy proposal, which intends to end the energy monopolies enjoyed by CPS and Austin Energy, we were provided what is effectively a campaign flier short on details. The affordability argument won’t convince, given that CPS, by all accounts, does a great job providing affordable energy to San Antonians. But something in that last line has some merit: preventing cities from using utilities as slush funds. Slush fund would be the wrong word for CPS energy revenue, it’s actually a “payment in lieu of taxes.” So roughly a quarter to a third of the general fund is essentially a tax that isn’t subject to any of the processes required for taxes. Look at the budget fight we're covering right now: it has featured months of council sessions and staff deliberation, and will be followed by numerous work sessions, all to raise the property tax rate for the first time in 33 years and collect about $29 million. CPS sends nearly twenty times that every year with none of it. Worth torching San Antonio’s finances over? Probably not—but now would be a great time to have city leadership with influence in Austin.

City leaders hope a Democratic wave election will protect Pre-K 4 SA from future cuts (SA Report) → A twenty-year guarantee would retire the proof point justifying the program. Every defender of Pre-K 4 SA in this article cites recurring voter approval as evidence of its success, but “it’s a clear winner” and “we need to ensure it for 20 years” shouldn’t both be true. The first Pre-K 4 SA cohort graduates high school next year, meaning the first real full-length data won’t exist until 2027. The current schedule would put reauthorization after that evidence exists, when it can be weighed publicly and put to voters. This move puts the vote before the data arrives and cancels at least two future opportunities for voters to decide if they’re getting their money’s worth. If the data comes back strong, they've spent political capital to dodge a test they'd have aced… But if it comes back weak, we'll know why the vote was moved. San Antonio is in a fiscal crunch right now because of an inability to manage its spending, now we want to lock ourselves into a generational financial commitment when the system was working just fine before.

Councilwoman pledges to lobby against SAWS rate hike until utility releases missing financial audit (SA Current) → Among the best decisions made by a public official all budget season. “Ratepayers should not be expected to approve a higher bill based on general assurances, descriptions of capital needs or an unfinished efficiency study.” That’s Councilwoman Misty Spears to the SAWS board chair, and that perspective should be the baseline for every public dollar in this city. The best version of San Antonio is the one where our leadership pays close attention to where our dollars go and holds our institutions accountable. The difficult part is building it as a culture rather than a move deployed selectively.

The Pick

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

Family Night Hike at the San Antonio Botanical Garden

This evening, Friday, August 14th, at the San Antonio Botanical Garden, 555 Funston Place. A guided after-dark hike with the Garden's educators discussing nocturnal animals and the garden itself. Tickets run $13 for kids, $17 for adults.

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

Facing a $158 million budget deficit in fiscal years 2026-27 and 2027-28, San Antonio City Manager Erik Walsh on Aug. 13 presented a proposed FY27 budget supported by the city’s first property tax increase in 33 years.

Alongside budget cuts and consolidation, the proposed tax rate would eliminate projected deficits over the next two fiscal years and reduce the projected FY29 deficit from $206 million to $38 million. During trial budget discussions in June, the estimated FY31 deficit was $264 million; under the Aug. 13 proposal, it would fall to $136 million.

Walsh said the proposed budget provides a foundation for future fiscal years, leaving an estimated $48 million ending balance by the end of FY28.

The proposed property tax increase was approved by all but three council members: Marina Alderete Gavito, Misty Spears and Marc Whyte. The final vote is scheduled for Sept. 17, and the rate can still be reduced during budget workshops and town halls before approval.

Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones said she is happy to see cuts but concerned about where they are coming from. She cited Ready to Work, the San Antonio Book Festival and the San Antonio Botanical Garden as programs she has identified for potential cuts, with the option to “be creative” with the allocation of Ready to Work funds.

The proposed budget

One of the greatest challenges facing the $1.76 billion general fund is declining property values. In FY27, the city projects a 2.71% decrease in total property tax revenue, resulting from a $4.3 billion decline in taxable value.

Walsh said the city has not experienced negative taxable-value growth since 2011. To offset the loss, the proposal would raise the property tax rate by about two cents in FY27.

The FY27 rate includes unused tax increment from previous fiscal years. To further reduce deficits, the FY 28 budget will also need a tax rate increase. This tax rate will use unused increments from FY27 to achieve a similar increased rate.

For the average homestead, the increase would amount to about $2.95 per month, or roughly $35 annually.

Due to a senior citizen tax freeze and other homestead exemptions, 47% of the city’s 257,396 homesteads would not be affected by the rate increase. The revenue forgone through these exemptions totals $156.4 million.

Based on council and community feedback, budget priorities include homeless services, housing services and public safety. Police, Fire and Animal Care Services are expected to receive departmental increases, while other city departments face cuts.

Cuts over the next two years would reduce city staffing by 101 positions, 54 of which are currently filled. Other programs would also be reduced, with total cuts reaching $89.6 million. These cuts are dependent on two budget cycles.

In addition to the tax increase and budget cuts, the proposal would adjust fees for select city services to generate additional revenue. Changes include a library fee for non-San Antonio residents, park rental fee adjustments, EMS fees and other service fees.

Council direction

Three of the 10 council members opposed any tax rate increase.

District 10 Councilmember Marc Whyte said the city has more room to cut from the budget rather than raise taxes. Whyte called the budget bloated by decades of poor spending habits and described a tax increase as a Band-Aid that does not address long-term deficits.

“I am not happy at all with where we are at,” Whyte said. “And the thought that we would raise taxes on the citizens of San Antonio right now is frankly unconscionable.”

Whyte and District 9 Councilmember Misty Spears continue to advocate for increased public safety staffing, citing a heightened need for police and fire personnel.

District 7 Councilmember Marina Alderete Gavito said residents in her district have raised concerns about affordability, and she cannot support a rate increase.

“To me, it is important that we are cognizant of what families are feeling right now,” Alderete Gavito said.

District 3 Councilmember Phyllis Viagran said she has anticipated the city reaching this budget challenge since 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. She said the tax rate increase is an investment in city growth and the services residents expect.

“What we are asking is not for the citizens to be burdened more; what we are asking them to do is to invest in their city,” Viagran said. “Invest back into the city services that they expect and that they deserve.”

Councilmembers who supported the increase highlighted the work city staff did to identify departmental cuts over the next two years.

Sukh Kaur (District 1) called the proposed budget a “happy medium” between cuts and a rate increase. Kaur highlighted the $48.9 million fund balance for the end of FY28 as an accomplishment for city financial planning.

“Moving capital from one space to another that is just short-term isn’t going to solve our long-term challenges,” Kaur said. “So, finding ways to plan ahead and keeping some reserve there for next year, I think, is a very smart financial move.”

Ric Galvan (District 6) said the government should intervene when it can to support residents whose tax dollars fund the city. He said he is open to budget cuts but wary of cutting programs “to the bone” and placing additional burdens on residents who rely on city services.

“We can of course cut the fluff, but let’s not also pretend that the fluff will disappear,” he said.

Moving forward

The Aug. 13 ordinance does not end the debate over the tax rate or budget cuts. The proposed budget can be amended, and the tax rate reduced, before final approval on Sept. 17.

The first budget work session is scheduled for Aug. 17, with budget reductions and revenues listed as staff presentations. The town halls also begin Aug. 17 with Districts 2 and 7. Budget and tax rate hearings are scheduled for Sept. 2 and 10.

The proposed budget would eliminate the projected deficits in FY27 and FY28, while reducing projected deficits in later fiscal years. City Council will continue reviewing the proposal before the final vote Sept. 17.

Texas is in the midst of an economic transformation. Dallas–Fort Worth is emerging as a global financial center, Houston remains the world’s energy capital, and Austin is an international name in technology and venture capital.

And then there is San Antonio. Growing, charming, full of promise, yet increasingly at risk of being left behind.

No doubt our metro is expanding. Subdivisions are pushing farther out, construction cranes continue to rise, traffic increasingly thickens. But the other Texas Triangle cities are successfully converting their growth into prosperity, seeing higher wages, greater educational attainment and stronger investment. San Antonio is adding people, jobs and buildings, yet far too many San Antonians are not getting ahead.

This is the hard truth that we must face honestly, or else we cannot change the future we are creating.

Tourism, hospitality, retail, government, healthcare and construction power our economy, and they’re driven by hardworking people. But too much of our workforce sits in roles where even full-time workers struggle, while competitor cities create high-paying jobs in technology, finance, engineering and biotechnology.

Our challenge begins with education. In too many of our K–12 schools, students cannot read or do math at grade level. Too few finish high school or earn degrees—and too many who graduate from our colleges and universities choose to build their futures elsewhere. That’s on us and employers notice. After all, investment follows talent. Companies choose cities by the depth and quality of their talent pipelines, not raw population counts. Without a superior and sustainable talent pool, the most valuable job opportunities (and the companies that create them) will and do go elsewhere.

The absence of corporate power in San Antonio compounds the problem. We lack a concentration of corporate headquarters—which boosts local economies by attracting direct flights, superstar talent, strong suppliers and quality investment, increasing philanthropy and, above all, concentrating decision-making power. The best jobs and biggest investments follow company leadership.

Lacking corporate power, to recruit new companies we have for decades sold affordability as our biggest advantage. But when low cost becomes a city’s identity it becomes a trap: employers come for cheap labor rather than talent, and low wages leave working families unable to get ahead. Population growth masks that weakness. Yes, new residents stimulate our local economy, but lasting prosperity comes only from producing and trading our own San Antonio–made products and services beyond our region and bringing new wealth home.

San Antonio is not stagnant. It is growing, but far below its potential. In a booming Texas, underperformance is another form of falling behind.

But that is only half the story.

Few American cities combine our strategic location, cultural identity, lifestyle and room to grow. The problem is that we have yet to turn these assets into prosperity at scale.

We sit at the crossroads of Texas and Mexico. But, despite this geographic advantage, and as integrated supply chains grow in North America, we have yet to become the continent’s command center for binational research, manufacturing, trade, finance and logistics. Advanced manufacturing should anchor that ambition—Toyota and JCB proved we can win major manufacturing projects; now we must go after related financial, engineering, research, design and corporate operations that add greater value.

In cybersecurity, we have a foundation few regions can match, yet we still have a lot of work to do to rival the strength of the top cybersecurity hubs in the US. In medicine and biotechnology, our institutions give us rare strengths. The challenge, however, has been in turning research and healthcare into patents, therapies, companies and high-paying jobs.

One seldom-acknowledged aspect of our workforce shortcomings is our military brain drain. Each year thousands of highly talented service members leave active duty with expertise in many fields, but take it elsewhere for lack of a clear path into our local private sector. Retaining them should be a central economic development priority.

The infrastructure of prosperity is also intellectual: our many universities and colleges can put us on the map by attracting the best students, faculty and researchers. But talent stays only where opportunity meets quality of life—this is why focusing on excellence in public safety, recreation, arts and entertainment, public transportation and the like is of the utmost importance.

But talent and industry are not enough: the next economy will go where reliable and affordable energy and water can support it, and securing both for the long term can be one of our strongest advantages. The pieces are here but we must align them and come together to execute, with urgency. That requires a different playbook.

Our economic development leaders have identified the right high-growth industries to target. What is missing is focus and alignment behind sectors where we can lead. Alignment must not mean countless feel-good meetings and ambiguous annual reports, fruitless trade missions, misaligned marketing efforts and clichéd slogans. We must operate from one strategy and answer to a public scorecard of objective results: headquarters attracted, capital invested, jobs created, patents turned into products, graduates created and retained, workers moved up into family-supporting careers. Otherwise we are measuring activity and not real progress.

Economic decline rarely arrives as one dramatic event; it creeps in until lower expectations feel normal. A child drops out of school. A graduate does not return. A company chooses another city. An invention finds investors elsewhere. A city service is cut. A restaurant shuts down. A military command leaves. Each loss compounds into the difference between a city that advances and one that falls behind.

To that end, good governance is an economic asset. Investors demand fairness, stability, predictability and transparency in local government—not partisanship or ideology. They expect elected officials to work with them and not against them. If every major issue becomes a fight, or if our companies feel constantly under attack, stonewalled or ignored, our competitors will gladly take them from us while we argue. A city consumed with dividing limited prosperity may never create enough to share.

This is the vicious cycle—polarized leadership, weak schools, thin talent pipelines, scarce investment, low wages, systemic poverty pressing back on schools—and it will not break itself. The entire region must agree on what matters and act in harmony and with purpose.

San Antonio does not have to become DFW, Houston or Austin. It must become a stronger, more ambitious, more united, more prosperous version of itself. We have what it takes. What we no longer have is time to confuse growth with prosperity.

History will not judge our generation by how much our city grew, but by whether our leaders had the vision, skills, maturity, discipline and courage to turn growth into lasting prosperity for all.

1. Mayor Jones is calling for a vote on the city’s Project Marvel spending. In a memo last Friday, Jones proposed a November election on the arena funding for Project Marvel: “Since they pay twice, city voters deserve to vote twice,” as residents fund both the county’s $311 million, approved last November, and the city’s $489 million. Here’s the snag: the county’s venue tax legally required an election but the city’s share doesn’t. It’s built from Project Finance Zone hotel-tax revenue, Spurs lease payments, and debt against projected downtown property-tax growth, instruments that don’t need a vote, as city officials have maintained all along. As such, it’s unclear what exactly the ballot language would legally bind, and we are fast approaching the deadline. So Jones is asking colleagues to volunteer for a vote the financing was structured not to need, and it seems unlikely she will secure the required votes. Though we support certain proposals raised by Mayor Jones, including ending Ready to Work, throwing everything back to the voters is an unsustainable governing model (and this one feels personal.) We’re watching because we expect August 17 to pass with no vote—the default when none is required—and whether the episode costs her more of her increasingly dwindling political leverage.

2. Gov. Abbott is looking to break energy monopolies in Austin and San Antonio. He called on the Legislature to open municipal utilities to retail competition, claiming a 10-20% savings and objecting that 100,000-plus ratepayers outside city limits fund a budget they can’t vote on: “This is taxation through electricity prices without representation.” Purely on the mechanism, Gov. Abbott is correct. CPS sends the city 14% of its gross revenues in lieu of property taxes, working out to roughly a quarter of the general fund, and it never appears on a ballot. It is effectively the largest unasked question in city finance. Here’s the thing, though: this is a campaign announcement. Though it will likely find its way into the Governor’s legislative priorities, this won’t materialize until the 2027 session and any form of implementation would be years off. That said, San Antonio lacks influence in Austin compared to peer cities and it is likely that this proposal would make it to the floor in some form. We’re watching to see precisely what language is filed, whether the San Antonio and Austin delegations put up meaningful resistance, and what kind of preemptive measures CPS takes in the interim.

3. The county finally answered on the jail: one real action, two items scheduled. Last week we promised an update after Commissioners Court’s August 4 discussion on the deaths at Bexar County Jail, and our reporter Jarrett Whitener sat through all three hours of it. The action: health screenings will move earlier in the booking process, an intervention aimed at the 44% of jail deaths that happen within the first seven days of custody. Everything else got scheduled rather than decided. Abolishing double magistration, the duplicated city-county intake the Express-News editorialized against, is now on the county’s own agenda, but it needs City Council support and likely won’t move until later this year. Capital projects to add mental health beds got ideas floated, with costs and selection still to come. Both will bleed into budget season, where the backdrop is already stark: $3.7 million just to house overflow inmates in Kerr and Burnet counties over nine months. We’re watching to see whether one action and two agenda items become budget lines this fall.

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

The Reframe

After City Council delays vote on water rate increase, SAWS cuts capital plan by $594M (SA Report) → A "no" vote isn't free: the council's delay got us the same 30% rate increase, minus $600 million of improvements. In June, council punted the utility’s rate case on a 6-5 vote, with members citing leaks, lost water, and distrust of CEO Robert Puente. On Tuesday the SAWS board answered with a capital program trimmed to $2.6 billion, a reduction of almost $600 million from the original, and rate increases pushed to January 2027. Delay was seen as the prudent, cost-free option: oversight in action, council withholding approval until it gets accountability. Putting off the vote, though, had consequences which were warned of at the time. The rate ask is still roughly 30% but now it buys $600 million less. Ratepayers get the same increase with fewer dollars for improvement, plus steeper hikes in 2029 and 2030. The performance of accountability defunded the thing it was performed about.

San Antonio’s Ready to Work needs improving, but it’s working and should stay (Express-News) → This is the defense we’ve been asking for: one argued on the merits and not on values. And it’s still wrong. Credit to professor Amberg: he engages the numbers, which puts him ahead of most that are defending this program. But watch the data he uses: $22.50 is the average wage for the graduates the program places, and per the program's dashboard, that's 5,845 approved placements against 17,038 enrolled in training. The headline wage describes only a third who actually make it through the program. Note the sleight underneath, too: he dismisses the $15 goal as “always far too low,” yet $15 is the floor the dashboard certifies an approved placement at. He's grading the program on its average while waving off the promise it's actually measured against. His most honest line is the concession: some of the biggest employers treat Ready to Work as a welfare program. Employer integration wasn’t just a feature of the model, it was supposed to be a core strength of the model. A better-run version of a program employers won’t use is polishing the supply side of a demand-side failure. The Mayor is right.

San Antonio has an opportunity to get data center growth right (Express-News) → Councilman Whyte will catch bipartisan flack for this, but he’s right. The two easy positions on data centers are reflexive boosterism and reflexive boogeyman, and they’re both foolish, as last week’s Reframe and the Governor’s moratorium each demonstrate in their own way. Whyte takes the harder, more adult perspective: they’re coming so we need to set the standards. This is worth applauding because being measured and thoughtful about these issues is often a political detriment, not a positive. And he drew up a solid list of concerns: closed-loop cooling as the expectation rather than the exception, demand response and flexible load agreements, buffers and zoning handled before construction instead of after, and large loads paying “more than their fair share” of the infrastructure they require. That last phrase, volunteered by a sitting pro-business councilman, is worth noting. A city $158 million short cannot refuse commercial tax base to make an empty political statement, the opportunity has always been being the city that’s smart about data centers.

Belgian biotech Ynios Pharma picks San Antonio for U.S. HQ (Business Journal) → The best economic development news of the week arrived without a subsidy, a referendum, or a press war. Valedyn Inc., the U.S. arm of Belgium’s Ynios Pharma, will develop an intravenous therapeutic to stabilize patients in severe trauma or critical illness from San Antonio after a national search. Why here? The one asset no competing city can replicate: the country’s densest concentration of military medicine and trauma expertise. Ynios Pharma founder Jean François Plucker said San Antonio combines those strengths “in a way we did not encounter elsewhere.” BioMedSA met the company through the Belgian Trade Commission and got San Antonio added to a Texas tour; VelocityTX had a facility ready on day one. This is a great, repeatable method: know what advantages you have and make it easy to plug into. More of this, please.

The Pick

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

Hamilton, closing weekend at the Majestic

Final performances run through Sunday, August 9, at the Majestic Theatre, 224 E. Houston St. A musical about the Founders brawling over debt, taxes, and who gets to be in the room where decisions happen… Subject matter readers of this week's edition may find familiar.

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

There is one argument that consistently resurfaces in favor of public spending, and it is made all over America in similar words: what would it say about our values if we cut this?

It isn’t so much a real argument as it is a rhetorical genre, and as we stare down San Antonio’s budget crunch, a number of people have deployed it locally. On Friday, City Council Member Sukh Kaur wrote the latest example: an op-ed in the Express-News to shield Ready to Work, the San Antonio Education Partnership, and the San Antonio Book Festival from likely coming budget cuts, claiming that a budget “is a values statement written in dollars.” But the councilwoman is not alone. In modern politics, practically every defense of any public program in America becomes a moral indictment of those who would see its funding reduced.

The hallmark of such a defense is that it uses substantive evidence of success only as window dressing, with the core argument a lofty appeal to our conscience. The Book Festival and the Education Partnership must be funded because we "should keep our promises to the San Antonians who need these programs most." The Partnership helps students "see college and careers as within reach." Ready to Work must be preserved because ending it "cancels a return." Each argument is what the funding says about who we are and about which kind of city we intend to be.

The problem with this is that when you cloak policy in self-justifying morality, you cannot be seen to reasonably argue against it. Take for example the cited poll results from 2024 (done by an activist group) that found 76 percent of respondents supporting increased funding for youth programs. Shocker. This poll asked people whether they like good things. People will naturally always choose to do good things. Framed this way, morality becomes the whole basis of the argument.

The whole defense is written in “we.” What we believe, what we value, which kind of city we are, what we would be saying if we cut. The “we” hijacks the moral standing of a million and a half people and reduces everything to an absolute. An official who flattens the whole community by mandating what their values must be is not representing the community at all.

To be clear, this complaint is not really about Ready to Work. The Civic’s position on that program is documented, and readers can judge the record themselves. The complaint is the very nature of this defense and what it does. Councilwoman Kaur’s strongest substantive point is a study finding the program returns $125 for every dollar spent, with a huge total economic impact. But even this doesn’t pass basic scrutiny: if the city possessed an instrument—any instrument—that returned $125 on the dollar, the only rational budget would route the entire general fund through it, and the fact that nobody proposes this while multiple officials support winding the program down tells you what the figure is worth. But that figure is just an obligatory appeal to authority, the core of the argument is moral.

A program judged on its performance will likely be cut if it underperforms. A program that represents our values cannot be cut at all, no matter what it does, because every cut becomes a referendum on whether or not we are “good” people. Therefore, the survival strategy for public programs is simple: stop being a program, start being a symbol. Symbols do not have to perform.

The genre’s function, really, is to protect the officeholder from the hardest part of the job, which is to think critically about whether we get our money’s worth and act on the answer, whatever it costs.

And the same genre can also defend whatever its user already supports. For example, what would it say about our commitment to safety if we cut a police budget? Or, what would it say about our civic pride if we rejected the new arena? And, what would it say about our respect for taxpayers if we increased taxes? Everyone is an auditor of the other side’s budget and a steward of their own. For example: Councilwoman Kaur scrutinizes police overtime that ran to nearly double its budget with exactly the arithmetic she withholds from programs that she favors.

The truth is, every public assistance program ever funded has helped someone. That is the byproduct of public spending, true of every line item in the budget, which is exactly why “it helps someone” or “it is the right thing to do” can’t be the bar for success. The responsible public official must recognize both that these programs are real, and real is not the same as worth it. Defaulting to a moral defense of the spending is actually declining to govern by keeping serious analysis from ever happening. San Antonio has run this liturgy for decades and remains one of the poorest big cities in America, which is what a politics of unaskable questions eventually costs.

Councilwoman Kaur proposes a test for her colleagues: "If we say this matters, are we willing to pay for it?" Here is a better test: we paid for it, did it do what we asked? San Antonio has been willing to pay, forever. Willingness to pay is the cheapest of the civic virtues, requiring nothing but other people's money.

More important than willingness to pay is good civic judgment: evaluate what we paid for, retain what works and terminate what doesn’t, regardless of political convenience. A budget is indeed a values statement—let’s make ours say that we measure what we pay for.

1. Bexar County is facing demands to treat at least 92 jail deaths since 2020 as a public health emergency. The death toll at the Bexar County Adult Detention Center is tracked by the nonprofit Texas Jail Project and was reported this week by the Express-News. Worth noting, Sheriff Javier Salazar has characterized the jail as being misused as a de facto mental-health and detox facility, and the deaths are often tied to medical episodes or underlying health and substance issues. Also relevant, the nonprofit in question, Texas Jail Project, has a strategic plan committing the group to organizing toward "a fully dismantled criminal punishment system." So when its co-founder calls Bexar's jail one of the deadliest in Texas, that is offered by a group whose remedy for jail deaths is, in the end, fewer jails. Co-founder Krish Gundu says 35 people have died by suicide in the Bexar jail over the past decade, compared with 13 in Harris, 14 in Travis, 10 in Tarrant, and 7 in Dallas. On Tuesday, July 28, a coalition that included ACT 4 SA and All of Us or None demanded a public death dashboard, timely intake medical screening, and continuity of care. We're watching because Commissioners Court pushed its jail discussion from July 7 to August 4, and the county's response will be the biggest tell. Expect an update from us after the meeting.

2. The city is forcing the Bonham Exchange and Club 727 to close at 11:59 p.m. Saturday, August 1, rather than grant another extension on expensive fire sprinklers. A July 29 memo from Assistant City Manager Lori Houston confirmed that the temporary certificates of occupancy for the Bonham Exchange and Club 727 expire before midnight on Saturday, August 1, and that the city denied extension requests for both venues. This traces back to the February 2026 compliance agreement, whose terms we detailed in our June 9 column: operations limited to the first floor, crowds capped under 300, a third-party fire watch, sprinkler installation costing roughly $550,000, and the venue on the hook for city costs if a fire broke out during the work. For the Bonham, a months-long closure "to reopen at full occupancy" is its own risk. Here is another problem: few small businesses can pay $550,000 for sprinklers in the first place, particularly thin-margin businesses like bars and clubs. Now the city's answer is forced closure, the bluntest instrument available, when the crowd caps and fire watch were already managing the risk. We're watching because Saturday is proof that oftentimes we just refuse to get out of our own way—the city could have exempted them or worked with them further at any point. Letting this happen was a choice.

3. Mayor Jones spent Wednesday night selling her budget workarounds at a town hall, and the math is still far short of $158 million. Mayor Jones told dozens of people at a Wednesday town hall that the coming cuts are "not going to be pretty" and warned they may be "even more severe than what we were presented with last time." City staff warned in June that without a rate increase the city may slash hundreds of positions. Jones's open letter asking business and philanthropic leaders for three-year commitments matching the $6.5 million the city gives 15 nonprofits has drawn no responses yet, and a Book Festival petition is circulating. Meanwhile, canceling the Ready to Work program could free money to offset budget cuts. At least four council members are already opposed to canceling Ready to Work, with Spears and Whyte in favor. The proposed budget will be presented on August 13, with a budget and tax-rate vote September 17. We're watching to see whether the upcoming proposed budget actually features any of these ideas and whether the Mayor’s "I am not raising people's property taxes if we haven't cut all the fat out of the budget" survives September. Our position: the Mayor is right about Ready to Work, and cutting the budget is the difficult but necessary choice that we have been avoiding for too long.

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

The Reframe

Don’t sacrifice family farms in Texas for water-guzzling data centers (Express-News) → Data centers are our emotional villain, filling in whenever you need something to worry about. A letter in Thursday’s Express-News opposes the 765-kilovolt Howard Solstice line through a fourth-generation farm. Losing farms, the writer fears, “leaves land vulnerable to other uses, including water-guzzling data centers.” Notice what the data center is doing in that sentence: nothing. The threat to the farm is a transmission line and the eminent domain behind it. The data center, nowhere near the story and injected by the author, appears only as a hypothetical future landowner. True, data centers are a real share of the projected load growth behind the state’s new transmission buildout, we are building a lot of them, and their water and power demands are legitimate questions with real factors to consider. But those variables either make sense for the locale or they don’t. The farm’s case deserves real consideration: route alternatives, necessity, compensation. A boogeyman settles none of it and just plays into our fears, relevant or not.

Mayor Jones asks business community to fund nonprofits that rely on city dollars (Express-News) → Mayor asks business community to fund nonprofits that the city can no longer afford. Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones' July 24 letter asked business and philanthropic leaders to backfill the combined $6.5 million the city sends 15 nonprofit organizations, from $40,000 for the Diez y Seis de Septiembre Commission to nearly $2.48 million for the San Antonio Education Partnership's scholarship and outreach program and about $1.1 million for the Botanical Garden. Meanwhile, Councilman Marc Whyte wants the city to go "line-by-line" through the whole budget first (seems like a good idea.) But the math is unforgiving: Jones conceded that zeroing out libraries, animal care, and public health would still leave a $20 million gap. The important takeaway is that a charity drive doesn't fix a recurring shortfall and doesn’t change the structural issues that necessitated it in the first place… And perhaps we should be less generous with city funds for nonprofits in the future.

University Health’s property tax rate to stay flat even as budget is ‘pretty tight’ (Express-News) → One taxing entity on your bill is absorbing $120 million in new-hospital costs at a flat rate while nearly every other taxing entity considers raising them. While the city hunts for cuts, the county hospital system is spending $120 million this year to get two new hospitals running (University Health Palo Alto on the South Side and University Health Retama on the far Northeast Side) while keeping its tax rate flat, per the Express-News. That matters in a state where, as we noted last week, 10.8 percent of Texas children under age 6 were uninsured in 2024, the highest rate of any state. A district carrying expansion and charity care at a constant rate is a standing rebuttal to the idea that flat rates make deficits inevitable. More importantly, it helps San Antonio’s families keep more money in their pocket.

Councilwoman Misty Spears calls for District 9 public safety review (TPR) → Even after years of real progress, San Antonio still struggles with crime. After a string of high-profile North Side incidents, District 9 Councilwoman Misty Spears is convening an August 4 town hall from 6 to 8 p.m. at Christ Community Church. San Antonio recorded 105 homicides in 2025, down from 127 in 2024, part of a more than 13 percent overall crime decline, following a sharp pandemic-era surge (homicides peaked at 231 in 2022) that preceded SAPD's Violent Crime Reduction Plan. The gap: per our data dashboard, San Antonio's violent crime rate has fallen every year since 2022, to 594 incidents per 100,000 in 2024, the most recent full year of FBI data, but the national rate is 359. Property crime is the stickier problem: 4,624 per 100,000 against a U.S. average of 1,760, more than two and a half times the national rate and still above the city's pre-pandemic level. The federal numbers say two things at once: real improvement, and a long way down to average.

The Pick

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

McNay Free First Sunday

This Sunday, August 2, admission to the McNay Art Museum is free, no registration required, from noon to 5 p.m. at 6000 N. New Braunfels Ave. (special-exhibition fees still apply). Go for the sculpture garden, stay for the collection. When McNay opened in 1954 from the estate of Marion Koogler McNay, it was the first modern art museum in Texas.

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

The Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, are having the best year in their history. Membership has surged since Zohran Mamdani began his rapid ascent that captured the Mayor’s office in New York City, but that was only the beginning of the current wave of success. In June’s primaries, DSA-backed challengers unseated sitting Democratic members of Congress in New York and Colorado, including a fifteen-term incumbent in Denver. On July 5, the national organization announced it had passed 120,000 members on the Fourth of July. Whatever you think of the DSA, it is now the ascendant organized force on the American left.

San Antonio is actually part of that story. Three of the eleven votes on city council belong to members the local DSA chapter vetted, endorsed, and knocked doors for: Jalen McKee-Rodriguez in District 2, Teri Castillo in District 5, and Ric Galvan in District 6.

It is within this context that, last Thursday, Texas Public Radio’s The Source hosted a conversation on the DSA and its platform. The episode featured four guests: one of the DSA’s national co-chairs, both co-chairs of the San Antonio DSA chapter, and a Columbia University political theorist introduced as the hour’s neutral explainer, a role she clarified by saying she had come to “debunk some of the more absurd claims” about democratic socialism. And in the closing minutes, during the station’s pledge drive, host David Martin Davies concluded: once you actually listen to them, “they’re not that different than everybody else.”

After listening to the episode, we spent some time with the transcript and the thing the hour was ostensibly about: Workers Deserve More, the DSA’s new national platform.

The two documents seem to describe different organizations.

A program that proposes to rewrite the very fabric of American government deserves to be discussed constantly and seriously the same way we argue about any other issue. What follows is an attempt to describe what the DSA’s platform actually says.

Workers deserve more

“Workers deserve more” is more of a mood than a substantive claim, and a mood intentionally designed in such a way that no decent person can be seen to reasonably oppose it. When we asked District 6 Councilman Ric Galvan, one of our local DSA-endorsed council members, about the national program last week, his office answered: “The national DSA program is not something I was personally a part of creating,” before adding that in a city where working people face rising costs in housing, healthcare, and groceries, “workers deserve more.”

Sounds reasonable. And some of it, in fairness, is the ordinary foundation of progressive politics. Paid family leave. Subsidized child care. A higher minimum wage. Free community college. Sounds great, you can find versions of these in most of the Democratic platforms in America, and many of them poll very well with the working-class voters the DSA is trying to win over. If that were the entire platform, Davies’ verdict would be correct.

But that is not the platform.

The platform says, in its own preamble, that the DSA and its members are fighting “to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” Some may recognize the first phrase: “win the battle of democracy” is Karl Marx’s wording in the Communist Manifesto, nearly verbatim, for the proletariat’s seizure of political supremacy. The DSA did not include that language by accident, and they go on to say: “Some of these demands may be won under our current system, but we know complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up. We push these demands to their furthest extent today.”

What does the furthest extent look like, written down? Under the heading “A Real Democracy,” the program proposes to abolish the Electoral College and to “replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” Under “A Democratic Congress,” it proposes to abolish the Senate. Under “Economic Democracy,” the program calls for “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.” Under criminal justice, it describes demilitarizing police and disempowering police unions “as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system.” Its foreign policy section would “defund the Department of War,” close overseas bases, end sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, among others, and terminate “all military and economic aid to Israel” while affirming a “right to resist military occupation.” Its democracy section would extend “full voting rights to all permanent U.S. residents.” That is, to non-citizens. Its immigration section would “legalize migration” outright and end visa caps and quotas. The lifestyle details, including universal rent control, a 32-hour week at full pay, cancellation of all student debt, and so on, are almost tame by comparison.

Every phrase in the paragraph above is taken from the program. None of this is a caricature—the strongest case against the DSA’s platform IS the platform.

The organization’s defenders have a ready answer for criticism, and the national co-chair, Ashik Siddique, gave it on air when Davies asked why “abolish the Senate” was on the platform at all, as it gives ammunition to the DSA’s critics. It’s part of a “longer-term horizon,” Siddique said.

But a long term horizon is still the direction of travel. On the same broadcast, San Antonio DSA co-chair Amador Salazar described the chapter’s electoral record: “we had already elected two DSA members, Jalen McKee-Rodriguez and Teri Castillo,” and then, most recently, Ric Galvan, a campaign in which the chapter says it knocked more than 20,000 doors. He then explained why city races suit the project. Because municipal ballots carry no party label, they give “a little bit of space for individuals that want to implement some of the national DSA vision, but here locally.”

A San Antonio DSA endorsement is not something that happens, passively, to a candidate. The chapter publishes its process and every step of it is highly involved. The candidate must request the chapter’s questionnaire and complete it, then hold a mandatory Q&A session with the general membership, then personally write the endorsement resolution, with a sponsor and four co-sponsors, that goes before a general meeting, where it passes only with a two-thirds vote of members present at a 60-percent-quorum meeting.

None of our three councilmembers ran on this document—it was drafted this spring and published on July 14, after all of their elections. So, once the new DSA platform was published, we asked each DSA-endorsed councilmember their thoughts on the national platform. As of publication, Galvan’s office has provided the statement above; Councilwoman Castillo’s office has not responded; Councilman McKee-Rodriguez’s office has not responded.

If you were looking for a substantive engagement with these elements of the DSA’s platform on this episode of The Source, you would be disappointed. The program contains over a dozen policy prescriptions and only one (abolish the Senate) received critical examination over the length of the episode, and much of that questioning concerned its constitutional feasibility and the political ammunition it gives Republicans. The host corrected his own colleague on air to say the hour was “not about socialism,” a distinction the DSA platform itself declines to make, given that it describes its demands as steps toward “a socialist future.” At one point, discussing the general strike, the host asked the panel, “What are you guys waiting for?”

Every voice on the panel, including the scholar booked as an authority, was a supportive one. Policy positions that command nowhere near majority support in this country like the abolition of police and prisons, the elimination of the Senate, voting rights for non-citizens, and the nationalization of large companies all entered the studio as the adopted program of a socialist organization and left it as “not that different than everybody else.” They are not popular positions in either party and most elected Democrats will not touch the majority of them—go ahead, ask them.

Every tension the hour permitted itself was imported from national politics. Trump, the Red Scares, Stephen Miller, which party is closer to fascism. The questions that belong to this city weren’t asked, on a local program, with both local chapter chairs in studio and three local elected officials in the subtext. Nobody asked what “steps towards fully abolishing the police” implies for the police contract this council will vote on. Nobody asked what their “Green New Deal” will mean for a city-owned utility. Nobody asked what “finishing reconstruction” or “universal rent control” looks like in San Antonio’s neighborhoods. Nobody asked what “defunding the Department of War” looks like in Military City U.S.A. Nobody asked if the DSA considers USAA big enough to be nationalized, or Valero, or H-E-B. Nobody asked whether the members the chapter elected support the program the organization published.

In Chicago, the council's Democratic Socialist Caucus holds six of fifty seats. In New York the DSA cohort is four of fifty-one. In Los Angeles, four of fifteen. In San Antonio, three of eleven votes on the council. This makes San Antonio one of the largest DSA strongholds in America in terms of proportional city council power, as among major cities, only Minneapolis and Portland have handed the DSA a larger share. And our council will vote this term on a police contract, a city-owned utility, and a multibillion-dollar budget. Whether it’s politically convenient to answer them or not, these questions matter here.

The Source opened with the promise: “We're going to hear what the DSA actually is and what they want.” What the DSA wants is written down, and the national co-chair told listeners where to find it, on the air. The organization is publishing it, promoting it, and pushing it, in its own words, to the furthest extent. The missing half is local.

Maybe the three members elected here govern as ordinary progressives and call the platform noise. But they have been asked, and the answers so far are the slogan and silence. Until that changes, the platform is the only account on offer of what this project means for San Antonio.

1. Mayor Jones wants to end Ready to Work early and put the money toward the budget instead. In a Tuesday memo to council, the mayor proposed winding down the workforce program and redirecting the remaining funds (roughly $100 million according to her office) toward the general fund or next year’s bond, calling a property-tax-rate increase “a last resort.” Ready to Work was created by 77 percent of voters in 2020 and was funded by a 1/8-cent sales tax San Antonians are still paying, now going to transportation projects, which is why unwinding it may require another election and why the city attorney thinks it may be complicated to repurpose the funds. The proposal prompted a rare Wednesday column from us. Other line items are already feeling the same pressure: the mayor has floated cuts to Fiesta, the Botanical Garden, and the Book Festival. We’re watching to see how creative the council gets, whether there is enough support to cut our losses with Ready to Work, and which programs come under scrutiny next.

2. San Antonio ISD has a new superintendent, and the hire is ultimately about keeping the state out of the city’s core district. The board voted 5-2 Monday to bring in Adrian Bustillos at a starting salary of $315,000. He arrives from the Houston area’s Aldine ISD, where he has been chief transformation officer since 2019, and he starts next month. He inherits roughly 44,000 students (and about 2,000 fewer projected next year), a fifth consecutive year of budget cuts, and a $23.2 million deficit. The Express-News reports nine SAISD campuses are at risk of a fourth consecutive “unacceptable” rating, and a fifth would give the Texas Education Agency grounds to replace the elected board, the same mechanism that put Houston ISD under state management. San Antonio ISD is not the only ISD feeling pressure: Northside, the area’s largest district, is weighing its own campus consolidations as it also considers a near-billion-dollar bond. We’re watching because the stakes are quite high—if Bustillos fails we are likely looking at state takeover.

3. San Antonio just took on the biggest airport debt in its history. The city went to the bond market this week and sold roughly $869 million in airport bonds—a deal marketed at $944 million—the largest airport borrowing it has ever done. This is only the beginning of an expansion program officials expect will require more than $2 billion in borrowing in total. The money will go toward building the long-awaited Terminal C, an 18-gate terminal larger than either of the existing two, set to open in mid-2028. Two things worth knowing. First, this debt is repaid by the fees built into tickets, parking, and concessions, not by property taxes. Second, it is a bet on growth: the plan works if passengers climb from about 10 million before the pandemic to 14.5 million by 2040, and Moody’s trimmed the airport’s credit rating a notch, noting that the debt load is getting heavy. The bond paperwork even cites the planned downtown Spurs district as a source of future travelers. We’re watching because the terminal is a big bet on future growth, and the state of the airport has hurt us in the past.

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

The Reframe

Study: Texas ranks among worst states to raise children (SA Current) → The ranking is completely meaningless but one number matters. This “study” (which does not appear to exist anywhere on the internet as of this writing) comes from a nanny-recruitment company, so calibrate your expectations. The 23-metric index claims Texas has less than one pediatrician per 100,000 children, a figure implausible enough that someone should have caught it before publishing (Texas has around 7.5 million children—their figure would imply fewer than 100 pediatricians in the entire state. Not true, the real number is some 88 pediatricians per 100,000 children, nearly 100 times the cited figure.) But one number in the pile is real and actually matters: 11 percent of Texas children have no health insurance, the highest rate in the country. Uninsured kids don’t stop getting sick, they end up in emergency rooms, and in Bexar County a large share of that uncompensated care lands on University Health, which is the hospital district line on your property tax bill. If you’re looking for something relevant from this story, ignore the study, focus on this statistic.

San Antonio housing lacks affordability, not inventory (Express-News) → San Antonio IS affordable, and getting more so. A reader responds to the Express-News’s coverage of the new federal cap on institutional investors by noting San Antonio has nearly 16,000 homes listed for sale, so the problem isn’t supply, it’s that the supply is unaffordable. On the diagnosis we agree, supply is our great gift. And that supply, we would remind everyone, is already cheap, with San Antonio the cheapest major metro in Texas and near the bottom of the largest metros in America in terms of median home value. The letter’s prescription, to wait for owners to walk away then have the federal government buy the distressed homes and resell them at a discount, is unnecessary and foolish. We don’t need Washington to serve as a glorified house flipper. The market-based version of what the author wants is already underway: prices here are drifting down as listings sit and supply remains high, with prices down 3% over the last year. So the author is correct that we do not lack inventory, but to say that one of the cheapest housing markets in America lacks affordability is simply not true and we continue to get MORE affordable, not less.

Tesla robotaxi hub near Pearl clears zoning hurdle (Business Journal) → You can't lose housing that nobody is building. The Zoning Commission voted 8-2 on Tuesday to let Tesla lease a lot on West Josephine near the Pearl as a charging lot hub for up to 56 robotaxis. This was against the recommendation of city staff, who recommended denying the proposal because a parking lot conflicts with the area’s mixed-use ambitions. One dissenting commissioner called it "a bad, bad use for the space." Here is the space: zoned in 2024 for 225 apartments, a hotel, and commercial space that were never built because rates and construction costs killed the project, briefly listed for sale and then delisted. The zoning already allows a public parking lot with EV chargers, the fight is just over whose cars park there. In May we asked why Texas's biggest builder invests everywhere but here. Perhaps we’re getting in our own way? Council takes it in August and should say yes. A city hungry for investment can't afford to be a choosy beggar.

Could bus routes link New Braunfels to San Antonio, San Marcos and Seguin? (Express-News) → By the study’s own math, the bus lines don’t make sense. The Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization and New Braunfels commissioned a study on bus routes between San Antonio and New Braunfels, and the result recommends several routes between the two cities. But consult the ridership section… On an average Thursday, 13,303 trips are made between New Braunfels and San Antonio, and the study assumes the buses would capture 1 to 2 percent of them, roughly 130 to 270 riders on the flagship route, spread across thirteen hours of buses every half hour. That's a handful of passengers per bus, in a city whose own analysis finds 92.5 percent of households already have access to a car. Even the story's opening sales pitch, take the bus down for a day of tubing on the river, dies in the study. The San Antonio route runs weekdays only, 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., so the “tubing bus” wouldn’t run on weekends. New Braunfels has seen tremendous growth and the interstate can be genuinely miserable, but we still don’t need a bus line.

The Pick

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

National Day of the Cowboy at the Briscoe

The Briscoe Western Art Museum is hosting its annual National Day of the Cowboy, a free community day, museum admission included. Expect lasso demonstrations, cowboy poetry, chuckwagon treats, storytelling, and live Western music across the galleries and the McNutt Sculpture Garden. The observance started in 2005 and Texas made it an official day of honor in 2015.

Saturday, July 25, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Briscoe Western Art Museum, 210 W. Market St. on the River Walk. Registering is recommended before you go.

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

Yesterday afternoon, Mayor Jones released a memo to City Council proposing to redirect Ready to Work (RTW) funding to help close the city’s $158 million budget deficit by routing it into the general fund or the 2027 bond. This will undoubtedly ruffle quite a few feathers around the city. RTW is the workforce development program approved by the voters in order to reskill San Antonians into higher-paying jobs and generally promote employment around the city, and according to the memo, winding it down at the end of this year would free up roughly $100 million.

But why this program? In November 2020, 77% of voters approved redirecting a 1/8-cent sales tax, money that had long funded aquifer protection and greenway trails, into workforce development. The tax ran from the end of 2021 through the end of 2025 and collected $236 million. The city launched the program in May 2022 and contracted the actual work out to four outside organizations: Workforce Solutions Alamo ($102.4 million), the Alamo Colleges ($49.3 million), Project Quest ($26.4 million), and Restore Education ($5.1 million). They handle intake, training, “wraparound services,” and job placement. The campaign pitch was enormous: up to 40,000 residents served, 28,000 placed into better jobs. That placement goal has since been quietly marked down to 15,600.

Though, despite what people may say, this is absolutely the correct move, and Mayor Jones should be applauded for the suggestion. Many city programs are seen as untouchable because the motives are just, and RTW is no exception. Indeed, criticizing RTW has been likened to criticizing an attempt to tackle poverty itself. Defending the program at his final State of the City address, former Mayor Ron Nirenberg put it exactly that way: “let’s stop talking about poverty if we’re not willing to do something about it.”

The thing is, Ready to Work doesn’t work. A glance at the city-provided dashboard (good!) shows that of the roughly 27,000 people who have completed intake, some 5,700 had been placed in an “approved” job as of the day the memo went out (not good), with an approved job defined as one paying at least $15/hr with access to benefits. Of these placements, a large share have gone into truck driving and call center or customer service jobs, with a smaller percentage going into healthcare support roles and so forth. The City of San Antonio is itself the program’s third-largest employer, hiring its own graduates as truck drivers for Solid Waste and Public Works.

Having spent well over $100 million to date, the question becomes whether it’s worth more than $17,000 per placement to manufacture truck drivers and customer service representatives, when training pipelines for those jobs existed long before we raised nearly a quarter-billion dollars for RTW. About 73% of graduates land an approved job within twelve months of “graduating,” which sounds adequate until you look at the numbers: roughly 27,000 making it through intake, about 15,000 actually make it into a training program, and only about 62% of those finish at all. A nine-figure public program is not necessary to employ people at $15/hr jobs.

Indeed, for such a flagship program, Ready to Work has faced years of criticism. Two years and only hundreds of placements in, council members across the political spectrum were already furrowing their brows. Councilman Manny Pelaez said flatly that “Ready to Work is not a sacred cow” and should be questioned at every opportunity. As of last October, only 56% of graduates were landing approved jobs within six months, against a contractual target of 80%, a target that Executive Director Mike Ramsey has since conceded is out of reach… “Will we ever hit it? Probably not.”

But the reason this will be controversial is not that it amounts to “an abandonment of the poor” here in San Antonio. It doesn’t, though the city’s spokesman is already previewing that argument, warning that an early wind-down would fall hardest on low-income workers, single parents, and veterans. The real reason this will be controversial is that the organizations built around Ready to Work dollars have a financial incentive to keep it going.

Consider COPS/Metro. By its own account, the group and its Industrial Areas Foundation sister organizations authored the state’s Better Jobs Act in 2001, the law that allows Texas cities to spend sales tax dollars on job training in the first place. In 2020, COPS/Metro proposed the workforce-tax concept to city officials, helped recraft the ballot language, and ran the get-out-the-vote campaign—the Express-News called the proposition “COPS/Metro’s baby.” And Project Quest, the workforce nonprofit COPS/Metro founded in 1992, holds a $26.4 million Ready to Work contract. It is not alone: the contractors that run the program, a mix of nonprofits and public agencies, were awarded $185 million in contracts to do so. Even with the purest intent in the world, that is a financial incentive to keep the money spigot flowing.

So Mayor Jones is absolutely correct. To her credit, she also concedes that redirecting the funds requires another public vote. Good. The voters created this fund in 2020 and the voters can redirect it in 2026. Put it on the ballot. Rather than being blind to the realities of the program’s performance because of its good intentions, and rather than letting the remaining nine figures be frittered away through 2030, let the money go where the need actually is: a budget that is otherwise headed for the largest property tax increase the law allows. That is how you keep more money in the pockets of San Antonians.

And while we’re at it, ask: “what other programs should we scrutinize?”

On Friday afternoon, after six months and numerous bargaining sessions, the City of San Antonio and the San Antonio Police Officers Association announced a tentative agreement for a new three-year police contract: a cumulative 16.5 percent raise in base pay and price tag of $102.2 million over the life of the deal.

The union initially asked for $155 million, while the city opened with $63 million. But after months of negotiations, they agreed on a figure of $102 million, roughly the halfway point between the initial proposals. City Manager Erik Walsh said this deal strikes a balance between paying the police a fair wage and keeping the city's finances in check. He's also happy that they were able to reach an agreement quickly, so the city staff can work with a set number when they propose the new budget on August 13. Union President Johnny Perez seems to agree, calling the deal "a fair compromise for both sides."

San Antonio has been down this road before. Back in 2013, City Manager Sheryl Sculley warned the city council that if things didn't change, the cost of public safety could end up consuming the entire general fund by 2031. She later put it more bluntly: left unrevised, the contracts would bankrupt the city. The warning didn't go over well. A year later, in the middle of the contract fight, police union president Mike Helle accused her of trying to make officers look like “a bunch of greedy bastards trying to break the city of San Antonio.'“ The fire union went on to run a charter campaign against her office, which ultimately led to a cap on the city manager's pay and tenure. Sculley announced her retirement within the month. Despite her departure, the financial reality she highlighted remains, and it's the backdrop against which Friday's deal was negotiated.

The constraints on police and fire negotiations were established long before this negotiation. Texas law forbids police and firefighters from striking and Chapter 174 of the Local Government Code gave the unions collective bargaining as the trade. Bargaining built the status quo, starting with the 1988 contract that, by Sculley’s later accounting, awarded uniformed employees premium-free family health care, a legal fund covering divorces and criminal defense, pre-funded retiree health care, and unlimited tuition for unrelated degrees. Every contract since has been an attempt to buy that 1988 deal back one piece at a time.

Refereeing every round of negotiations is the evergreen clause born of the original deal. The evergreen clause states that, if a contract expires with no successor, the old terms simply continue on, originally for up to ten years. Because of this, the union’s worst case is the status quo on terms it already accepted. The city’s worst case is the wait.

And the city actually argued this in court. In 2014 it sued both unions, calling the evergreen clause an unconstitutional debt hamstringing future city councils. The courts steered the city and the police union into mediation, and the subsequent settlement brought the evergreen clause from ten years down to eight, alongside changes to health benefits that saved more than $100 million. As such, if the new deal fails by September 30, the old contract’s terms hold for up to eight more years.

The structural reality, though, is that public safety expenditures continue to go up faster than revenue and there is not much that can be done because the union has no reason to volunteer its leverage.

Public safety now takes up about sixty-four percent of an ever-expanding $1.69 billion general fund, drifting toward the 66 percent ceiling the city’s own financial policies set for public safety spending. The city projects a $264 million budget gap through 2031, and even recently proposed property tax increases are not enough to get out of the hole. Walsh said it plainly in June: “our expenses are growing faster than our revenue.” This, of course, was eerily reminiscent of an email that Sculley sent council in February of 2014, warning that public safety costs were crowding out other core city services. Different decade, same script.

Mayor Jones framed it this way: if the city closes every single library, cuts out public health spending, and gives nothing for animal care, the city would still be $21 million short. Public safety was already projected to add $80 million in costs over the next two years before a single new officer is hired. So what Friday actually settled, underneath the raise, is how much of the budget will shrink to pay for it. Settling early means the budget can be written around a known cost, and that is better than the alternative, but the problem that predates everyone in the room was built by councils that left the invoices to their successors and is enforced by a clause that guarantees the union cannot lose by walking away.

And there seems to be no legally permitted relief mechanism. Since 2021, state law lets the governor’s office freeze the property tax revenue of any large city that cuts its police budget by labeling them a defunding municipality. Since 2019, a second state law caps how much property tax revenue the city can raise without an election at 3.5 percent a year, a ceiling San Antonio is already proposing to hit. Spending minimums enforced by Austin, revenue capped by Austin, cost structure locked by the evergreen clause: the only adjustable line left in the general fund is cutting other programs.

Public safety is one of the core, nonnegotiable services of a city, and you do have to pay for it. But within the constraints named above, public safety spending continues to relentlessly expand, and it would be foolish not to take note of that.

The city priced the 2022 police contract at $92.7 million across five years—this one is $102.2 million across three. On an annual basis, the cost of a police contract nearly doubled in one cycle. The firefighters’ 2024 deal carried raises totaling 21.3 percent. The police budget alone has grown almost $180 million since 2019, roughly 40 percent, inside a general fund whose revenue was projected to grow by less than one percent this year. The August 13 budget proposal will price Friday’s deal into that budget.

So the union did its job, it secured higher pay for the men and women in uniform. Council will weigh the deal against eight more years of the old one, the choice other councils have faced and ratified. Each budget will balance by taking a little more from the rest of the city. Sculley did the arithmetic years ago and the city ran her off for showing it, but the math hasn’t changed.

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