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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reframe

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

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

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

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

The Pick

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

Stars & Stripes on Houston Street

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

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

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

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

Enjoy your weekend and see you Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

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

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

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

The Reframe

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

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

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

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

The Pick

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

The Sound of Freedom - America at 250

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

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

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

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

Enjoy your weekend and see you Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

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

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

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

The Reframe

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

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

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

The Pick

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

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

Runways to Rockets

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

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

Mayor’s Monthly Town Hall

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy your weekend and see you Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

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

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

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

The Reframe

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

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

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

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

The Pick

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

San Antonio Food Bank Urban Farm Tour

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

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

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

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

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

The Reframe

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

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

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

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

The Pick

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

The Orchestra San Antonio: Summer Tales

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic