1. Tesla Cybercabs launch in Texas, but not in San Antonio. Tesla registered 45 Cybercabs with the Texas DMV ahead of Thursday’s public launch in downtown Austin: the two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals that Elon Musk unveiled in 2024 and began building at Gigafactory Texas in April. If you’re wondering why not here… Tesla is trying to, and you may have seen the gold Cybercabs driving downtown. In June the company applied to rezone two vacant lots near Pearl for a charging depot. City staff recommended to deny because the block had been zoned for high density residential that was never built, but the Zoning Commission overrode staff 8-2 in July to send it to council. Despite this, the case never actually reached council—though it was scheduled for a vote in an August 20th council meeting, Development Services confirmed that it was withdrawn. According to a person with knowledge of the decision, District 1 signaled opposition to the rezoning, and as council defers to the district member on zoning, Councilwoman Kaur’s position was effectively the vote. Her office did not respond to a request for comment. We’re watching because the apartments the city zoned for haven’t materialized in years, the lot is empty, an important customer wants to use it—and a council office decided to stop it.

2. Storm recovery: four days to restore power, two deaths, and a homeowner repair program due this week. Friday night’s storm sent damaging winds from northeast Bexar County through San Antonio, downing poles and hundreds of power lines. Over 100,000 CPS Energy customers lost power at the peak. In response, CPS more than doubled its field crews with outside contractors and Pedernales Electric Cooperative, and the last customers were restored Tuesday night. Police are investigating two deaths associated with the storm, including a woman swept down San Pedro Creek. At Tuesday’s budget workshop, City Manager Erik Walsh said staff had been working “for the last day or so” on an emergency homeowner repair program, with a proposal expected by the end of the week. We’re watching because the bill lands on CPS as it was already eyeing a rate increase. Watch what the repair program costs and who qualifies, and whether CPS's accounting of the storm becomes the argument for more money.

3. We are now in budget month and the budget vote is Sept. 17. Our likely “austerity” budget is bigger. The proposed FY2027 budget is $4.4 billion, up 8.6%, with a general fund of $1.76 billion, up 4%. It carries the first tax rate increase in over three decades, a 3.9% increase that works out to about $35 a year for the average home, alongside $41 million in cuts next year and $90 million over two years. The cuts eliminate more than 100 civilian positions, consolidate departments and defund several senior nutrition centers, among other minutiae that is still subject to change. Council member Marina Alderete Gavito argued in the Express-News on Sunday that the gap is 1.6% of the budget this year and 2% next and can be closed without a rate increase, through higher fines and less spending on travel and food. Marc Whyte wanted the rate increase killed outright, and Walsh says doing that means finding roughly $30 million more this year, but it is highly unlikely that council reaches any meaningful consensus on that front. Meanwhile, Bexar County, held its rate flat and cut spending instead despite facing the worst property-tax year since 2008. We’re watching because we’ve heard nothing but the terrible financial circumstances we face, with a rate hike and a hundred positions gone, yet the budget still comes in 8.6% bigger.

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

The Reframe

‘Unacceptable’: San Antonio nonprofits rally against proposed $5.1M cut to city grants (Express-News) → The city betrayed the nonprofits twice. It never seriously tried to figure out which contracts work, so it couldn’t cut what doesn’t, and it never seriously tried to shrink itself, so their money is an easy target. More than 60 nonprofit leaders rallied on Wednesday over $5.1 million in cuts that council won’t vote on until next September. We’re somewhat critical of nonprofit spending, but nonprofit spending isn’t actually the problem as a rule. The problem is when we can’t tell whether we get what we pay for. A grant that helps a group make culture is one thing but a contract that pays for a specific, measurable job or service is just a transaction. The city never built the means to check whether we get our end of the deal out of those transactions: no consolidated total for what it pays nonprofits, and no outcomes audit of the contracts like the one Austin ran in July, so there’s no way to cut what doesn’t work (we don’t know!) Instead, the city cut by proximity to city-determined priorities: a spokesman said the targeted programs “do not have a direct impact on City Services.” Three-tenths of one percent of the general fund, spread across groups that nobody measured the value of, was the easiest target. And, as expected, the city refuses to shrink itself.

Pre-K 4 SA says it will increase toddler access, affordability if city funding reauthorized by voters (San Antonio Report) → Monday’s briefing was a sales pitch and the math doesn’t quite add up. In August, council put Pre-K 4 SA on the November ballot three years early and for 20 years, not the eight years that voters approved in 2012 and 2020. Monday’s case for two more decades of sales tax was toddler seats, nights-and-weekends care and a “tri-share” model with employers the San Antonio Report calls “still very conceptual” with the specifics to come later, in an upcoming voter guide. Councilwoman Gavito did the math: with a $62 million budget and just shy of 2,000 kids in four centers, that works out to about $31,000 a student which is more than St. Mary’s Hall. CEO Sarah Baray’s answer is that the budget also covers business support and training for other providers, district partnerships and wraparound services. Important to note, though, that doesn’t increase the number of enrolled kids. What does the rest of the money buy? Is it worth it? The current ask is to skip the next check-in until the late 2040s even though an eight-year approval window was working just fine and we don’t know for certain we’re getting enough out of the program.

‘Blank check’ for developers? Why city cuts can’t touch $170M in special projects. (San Antonio Report) → Good that someone at City Hall is looking for money but be realistic. The TIRZ-funded projects that council approves next Thursday is greenhouses at the Botanical Garden, an animal hospital at the zoo, a jail diversion center on the West Side and land for the arena… A.k.a public facilities paid for with captured city property tax. Most of these projects would not exist otherwise without a general fund allotment, which is why the zones are quietly popular with the members demanding cuts everywhere else. Under Texas Tax Code, the captured amount can pay for bonds and project costs inside the zone and nothing else, so the mayor’s idea of pulling it back to close the deficit is not an option. Councilman McKee-Rodriguez’s proposal, to keep the zone alive and point it at shelters and supportive housing, is just using the restricted fund for a different preferred agenda. The truly reachable money is less exciting: the general fund itself, which nobody seems to want to look through line by line. Developers are the easy villain but going after them won’t help us.

San Antonio narrows to-do list of 2022 bond projects as council mulls 2027 budget and bond (San Antonio Report) → A city that needs a standalone department to make its projects start and finish is telling you something about itself, and it’s not good. A year ago Erik Walsh split Public Works into two departments and moved nearly two hundred employees into a Capital Delivery Department whose only job is completing capital projects. Its staff, he told council, would “wake up in the morning and go to bed focused on this effort.” Delivering the projects that voters approved was already the job of Public Works and the city had almost a thousand people for it. A year later, 78% of the 2022 bond’s 183 projects “completed or started,” with 85 still unfinished as the city prepares for the next bond. But started and finished are two dramatically different stages and counting them together seems like garbage in, garbage out. Marc Whyte asked Wednesday whether the restructuring worked and the answer was that the metrics seem to say so, but the question the reorganization raised was never answered: what, specifically, was broken?

The Pick

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

El Mercado turns 50 at Market Square

El Mercado's tenants association is throwing a 50th anniversary celebration Saturday morning at Historic Market Square, and it opens three days of free Labor Day weekend programming from the city: local bands, food vendors and a kids zone. Saturday, September 5, 11 a.m.–noon for the anniversary and 10 a.m.–6 p.m. Saturday–Monday. for the rest. Historic Market Square, 514 W. Commerce St. 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.

Enjoy your weekend and see you Tuesday.

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How should San Antonio think about this dynamic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the trial budget showed

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

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

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

How the council reacted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic.