1. City Council is deciding how tightly to regulate data centers. At a Wednesday briefing, staff laid out two ways to update the city code in order to regulate data centers, and both would limit them to industrial and heavy commercial zones. Under the first plan, a project could build without a council vote if it stays 500 feet from sensitive areas like homes and schools, sets back 50 feet from its property line, adds landscaping, and stays off the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone. Under the second, every project would go to council, with public comment. Mayor Jones floated a hybrid: council approval on every project, plus a 45-day pre-filing notice and backup generators enclosed “as much as possible.” District 6 Councilman Ric Galvan, who wants council votes on every project and recycled water only, counts just under 30 data centers in the city, 18 or 19 of them in his district. The Zoning Commission takes it up Tuesday, and council votes October 29. We’re watching because the vote decides whether a project that meets the standards can count on a yes. Staff warned that case-by-case review means “less predictability and certainty,” the two things they said developers look for. District 9’s Misty Spears was blunter: with too many restrictions, “they’re not even going to look at us.”

2. City staff recommended a $442 million 2027 bond that can be issued without raising the tax rate, but some council members want substantially more. City staff sized the 2027 bond to avoid raising the debt-service tax rate, which has held at the same level since 2004. The bulk of it would go to streets, bridges, and sidewalks. Drainage would be paid for separately, with a stormwater fee increase to raise $175 million. On Wednesday, at least four members said they favor a $750 million bond, including Sukh Kaur, who wants drainage folded into the bond, and Teri Castillo, who wants more for affordable housing. Finance staff said that they couldn’t promise the tax rate would hold if the bond goes above $442 million. The bond matters for the arena, too: under the Spurs’ non-binding term sheet, the city’s $489 million share is subject to voters approving a bond program. A formal council vote is expected October 29, with a May 2027 election. We’re watching because council raised the property tax rate for the first time in more than 30 years just last month, on a 7-4 vote, as taxable values fell 2.7%. Staff’s number fits under the current debt-service rate but the bigger number would likely mean raising that rate too, on top of last month’s increase and another the city already plans for next year.

3. Waymo opened fully autonomous rides to everyone in San Antonio on October 14, including airport trips. Anyone in San Antonio can now download the Waymo app and hail an autonomous ride, in an area stretching much of the city core that includes downtown, the River Walk and the airport, where Waymo began trips in late March. But getting here took a while and there were some hiccups. Waymo opened to invited riders in February, then went dark after an empty Waymo vehicle was swept into Salado Creek during April flooding, and came back nearly five months later. None of it took a tax, a construction project or dedicated lanes. VIA, meanwhile, just adopted a $384 million operating budget, up more than 10% from last year’s projected spending, and its Green Line is scheduled to open in April 2028. We’re watching because San Antonio is locking in long term transit bets whose ridership is still a forecast, at the same moment a privately funded alternative is scaling up.

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The Reframe

Defense startup moves headquarters to downtown San Antonio (Business Journal) → San Antonio’s defense credibility lands unicorn. Defense Unicorns, a veteran founded company that builds secure software delivery tools for military systems, raised a $136 million Series B in January that valued it at more than $1 billion, and the Express-News reported in March that it had moved its headquarters from Colorado Springs to downtown San Antonio. Explaining the move, CEO Rob Slaughter called San Antonio “one of the biggest cyber capitals of the world.” The local footprint is still small, about 20 of some 200 mostly remote employees as of March, so it’s not a huge jobs story, but it’s the same lesson as Ynios Pharma in August: know the advantage you have, and play to your strengths.

Republican Marc LaHood rode into office on Abbott’s school voucher train. Now he’s struggling to defend it. (SA Report) → We aren’t concerned with the debate, but this article is more advocacy than news. When LaHood said he wanted to know how many students with disabilities had applied, the story originally claimed that fewer than 30 of the roughly 28,000 students in the program’s top priority tier had disabilities, though that tier is entirely made up of students with disabilities and their siblings. SA Report has since corrected this, but the new version says fewer than 30 received “the full $30,000 benefit for students with disabilities,” without noting, as its own source does, how few students could ever qualify for the maximum, or that the average award was about $16,000. Neither version answers his question: about 29,400 students (or their siblings) with disabilities qualified for the top tier, and students with disabilities make up nearly a quarter of recipients, per SA Report. Dunn’s line that it’s “a billion dollars that was taken away from our public education system” goes unexamined, too. The law gives the program its own account, and the ESA bill was deliberately paired with a funding bill that added roughly $8.5 billion for public schools, though districts do lose formula funding when students leave. “Lion’s den” and “struggling” are the reporter’s own characterizations in a news story, and readers deserved to know that debate co-host Raise Your Hand Texas was, by its own description, “a consistent opponent of vouchers” for many years. It’s reasonable to question vouchers as policy, but you should at least characterize both sides correctly, and fairly.

Support San Antonio’s future by backing Northside ISD’s bond, tax increase (Express News) → The premise that “the state has failed to adequately fund public education” does not match the record. The editorial rests on the premise that “the state has failed to adequately fund public education.” That’s hard to square with the numbers. State funding for Texas schools grew from $23.2 billion in 2016 to $33.5 billion in 2024, and per-student funding from all sources rose 43% during that time, 9% more than inflation. Then the Legislature added $8.5 billion more through House Bill 2 in the last session, with almost half of that going to teacher pay. The fair complaint is narrower: lawmakers steered the new money toward raises, so the basic allotment, the most flexible money, rose just $55 per student, its first increase since 2019. Ultimately, Northside’s bond and tax increase should be judged on their own merits, not on the idea that Austin failed to fund the schools.

‘All means all’: How this SAISD high school became one of the city’s highest rated (Express News) → Maybe we’re measuring things the wrong way. Brackenridge High School earned an A for 2025-26, up from a B the year before, despite the fact that 84% of its students are considered economically disadvantaged. The Express-News reports it’s the first traditional neighborhood high school in SAISD to earn an A, and credits a returning principal, consistent expectations, double-blocking for students behind grade level, and holding onto teachers (but not funding!) It is certainly an accomplishment, but 52% of its students still scored below grade level on the STAAR. The A leans more heavily on a ~96% graduation rate and the 91% of graduates the state counts as “college or career ready.” It does beg the question: if a school can earn the highest possible grade while 52% of its students perform below grade level, maybe we’re measuring things the wrong way.

The Pick

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

Archaeology Adventures at SAMA

A free day of hands-on art projects, real artifacts, and local archaeologists, as the San Antonio Museum of Art marks International Archaeology Day. Kids get a scavenger style gallery guide to track down hidden treasures, and community partners run live demonstrations. Admission is free, and registration isn’t required but is encouraged. Saturday, October 17, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., at 200 W. Jones Ave.

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

Since April, The Civic has filed more than 60 records requests with the City of San Antonio. Six of the 10 requests The Civic filed in its first month, six months ago, are still unfulfilled, including two the attorney general ordered be released. One request, for information about the city’s legal settlements, has been basically ignored by the city since April 28 despite several follow-ups. In total, less than a third of our requests have been answered before the legal deadline.

Most of our requests are not for arcane secrets. In fact, almost all of what we request is basic information that the city should have on hand and should be able to produce quickly: city payments to nonprofit organizations, budget information, how it counts the homes its housing bond built. It is the kind of information most people would assume the city already posts online somewhere. And yet, it doesn’t, and we are forced to obtain it procedurally and at a glacial pace.

Our experience has been so difficult that we felt it necessary to ask for the city’s records about its records requests: a single spreadsheet exported from the city’s request tracking system. A couple weeks later, the city quoted us $6,493.50. It priced the spreadsheet as 47,323 pages needing 288.6 hours of redaction. The same letter said that without the request summaries we had asked for, the data would cost nothing. Within half an hour, we told them to drop the summaries. Two months later, the city has yet to reply. Its portal still lists the request as “Waiting for Cost Estimate Approval.”

We just wanted to know whether others were waiting, too, and we’re still waiting to find out.

On the request for nonprofit grants alone, the Finance Department has extended its own deadline eleven times. The city’s automated tenth day notices arrive with a blank where the request should be described: “Description of records requested: [PUBLICRECORDDESIRED].” This doesn’t fill us with confidence that someone is actually even reading them, just relying on the software to send an extension every time the tracker goes red.

Worse still, both attorney general rulings received so far—and there will be plenty more as the city has sent around a quarter of our requests to the attorney general—found the city had not followed the law’s procedures for withholding records. In one, the city cited six legal exceptions, then never sent the attorney general its reasons for withholding or the records in question. And despite our follow-ups, the city has yet to produce the records ordered released by the attorney general. The attorney general’s office has even had to warn the city to respond on several of our requests.

Then there is the paperwork. The city misses deadlines it set for itself, and its standard notices promise follow-ups that often never come while skipping the production date state law requires. Its letters and estimates get basic dates incorrect. Its own portal mislabels where requests stand. Messages arrive with no text, or twice.

Part of this is the reality of prying records from the city using records requests, and some of the points above are just minor errors. But the result is a city that is not open with its information. Generally speaking, the city performs transparency yet lacks the true transparency required for independent checks on spending or performance.

The city’s adopted budget is more than 900 pages, yet it reports each department’s spending in several broad categories, such as “contractual services” and “commodities.” The city’s inventory of its programs is a list of buckets, with budgets rounded to the nearest $100,000, and it covers only the General Fund. The online checkbook lists what the city paid each payee by month and type of service, but nothing in it ties a payment to a contract or a program. The city’s open data portal, built on a policy that calls the city’s data “open by default,” lists a paltry 166 datasets. Given these conditions, records requests are sometimes the only tool available to get the right information.

When Councilman Marc Whyte proposed zero-based budgeting in 2024, making every department justify its spending from scratch, then-Mayor Ron Nirenberg answered in a written statement, calling zero-based budgeting, “an academic exercise that costs time and resources and produces little or no result,” saying it “would not bring added value in a stable, transparent process such as the city’s.” When the city did review five departments in depth this past year, its proposed budget credited the reviews with $12.8 million in savings over two years. There is clearly waste behind the curtain.

Much of what we have asked for is directly relevant to major decisions San Antonians are trying to make right now. Last month, the council raised the property tax rate for the first time in more than three decades. Our request for the line-item details behind that budget, filed in August, has drawn nothing but a delay letter. Voters will also be asked whether to extend Pre-K 4 SA’s sales tax for 20 years, a measure the council put on the ballot before the program briefed it on what it would do with the money.

Next year the city will ask voters for another bond worth at least $442 million, possibly much more. In May, it said its 2022 housing bond had supported “the creation and preservation of over 3,100 homes with an additional 1,100 homes under construction.” When we asked how it counts them, the city told the attorney general the request was large and claimed six exceptions, then said a week later that it had no responsive records at all. There is nothing sensitive about how the city counts the number of homes a bond paid for, it’s just a core part of governance. And with each of these decisions, large sums of public money are committed for years, meanwhile it is hard to tell how dollars are actually spent.

Most of our requests are questions the city could answer by publishing what it already has. While the delays and errors are not unimportant, the larger problem is that the city keeps asking residents for more money without showing them, in any usable form, how it spends what it has. And the same gap that forces outsiders like us to file these records requests also prevents our leadership from properly appraising the spending before they vote on it.

Making information available is not a huge ask. It is a continuation of the same principle we have been arguing for months: measure what we pay for and show the public the results. This is absolutely essential. San Antonio will not take control of its future until it can meaningfully examine how it governs itself and how it spends its money.

In June 2021, Colorado-based Coalfire acquired Denim Group, ending the 20-year run of one of San Antonio’s leading cybersecurity companies. I was fortunate to be part of that deal, alongside my partners, Sheridan Chambers and Dan Cornell, and a talented management and technical team. Right after the sale, Mike Lynd, CEO of Kairoi Residential and co-chair of greater:SATX, asked me a simple question:

“What is the next San Antonio-based cybersecurity company that will have a successful acquisition like Denim Group?”

His question caught me a bit flat-footed. I replied simply, “I don’t know.” What Mike was really asking about was the pipeline of security companies in San Antonio. Surely in “CyberCity USA” there was another Denim Group waiting in the wings for its own acquisition, or, as we say in the business, its “exit.” But to Mike’s dismay, and mine, there wasn’t an obvious next company.

For more than a decade, Denim Group was a national leader in software security and a trusted advisor on software risk to many Fortune 500 companies. Headquartered in San Antonio, it grew to around 100 people, with a satellite office in Austin and employees scattered across the country. Within the cybersecurity industry, Denim Group was well known and a regular fixture at national conferences like Black Hat and RSA. In many ways, the company was better known in the industry outside San Antonio than here in our own backyard.

Mike’s question has gnawed at me ever since, because our city has called itself “CyberCity USA” for more than a decade. We have foundational assets like the 16th Air Force, NSA Texas, and UTSA, along with other universities and a strong contractor community that supports the military missions here. That’s an embarrassment of riches.

Yet we are not producing a pipeline of successful commercial cybersecurity companies. We should be.

Why not?

There have been commercial cybersecurity successes in San Antonio before and after Denim Group, and they offer some clues. One goes back to the industry’s earliest days. In 1995, a group of Air Force security veterans and industry experts founded a network security firm in San Antonio called WheelGroup. In 1998, Cisco acquired WheelGroup and its intrusion detection technology for about $124 million, a deal that startled many at the time. The acquisition put San Antonio on the cybersecurity map, even if most people have since forgotten it.

The success of Lee Sutterfield, Rick Jordan, Toney Jennings and the rest of WheelGroup’s founders directly influenced my decision to join Sheridan Chambers and Dan Cornell in building Denim Group.

The WheelGroup and Denim Group exits had four common denominators. Both companies focused on commercial markets despite deep Air Force roots on Security Hill. Both raised capital: venture capital for WheelGroup and a strategic investment from Wipro for Denim Group. Both had proven commercial products — WheelGroup’s NetRanger and Denim Group’s ThreadFix — and owned the intellectual property inside them. And both were led by serial entrepreneurs who had seen success and failure at previous companies. Those traits set WheelGroup and Denim Group apart from many other companies that were pure services firms, served mostly local markets, or were government contractors with a narrow set of clients.

The other truth entrepreneurs know is that building a cybersecurity startup from the ground up is hard and risky. Many talented cybersecurity operators may not have the risk appetite to start a business. I know countless former Air Force colleagues who followed a successful career in uniform with a second one at government contractors such as Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics. For many of them, the natural next step is working for someone else, not breaking the mold to start a new venture. WheelGroup’s and Denim Group’s leaders had a bigger risk appetite and the ability to execute in fast-moving environments. They could also recover quickly when things didn’t go as planned. That resilience is another common denominator of successful startups.

I’ve said publicly that quitting your day job to start a company can be borderline reckless. But San Antonio needs more reckless founders, enough to build a pipeline of cybersecurity companies, so the next time someone asks me Mike’s question, I have an answer.

John Dickson is a former Air Force officer who was a principal at Denim Group for 17 years, through its 2021 sale to Coalfire.

San Antonio could be heading toward its smallest bond package in two decades at a time when the city has identified $5.8 billion in infrastructure needs.

Every five years, San Antonio puts a bond package before voters to fund infrastructure and capital improvement projects across the city. The 2022 bond reached a record $1.2 billion and funded 183 projects. For 2027, city staff has recommended $442 million.

The smallest bond voters approved in the past two decades came in 2007, when they approved $550 million. The 2027 proposal is more than $100 million smaller, even as construction and project costs have increased.

City staff presented the recommendation to City Council on Sept. 30, but several council members pushed for a package closer to $1 billion. A larger bond would require the city to account for additional debt-service costs and could result in a property tax-rate increase.

The bond process remains in its early stages. Council, community stakeholders, city staff and bond committees will continue reviewing projects and funding levels through early 2027. If council decides to put the bond on the May ballot, it must make that decision by Feb. 12.

Mike Shannon, director of the Capital Delivery Department, said staff identified more than 300 projects totaling $5.8 billion in needs. Drainage and flood control account for 43% of the total, while streets, bridges and sidewalks account for 37%. The remaining 20% includes facilities, parks and recreation, housing and other needs.

$1 billion or $442 million?

The size of the bond has emerged as one of the central debates.

Phyllis Viagran (D3) said she wants a package of at least $1 billion. Viagran pointed to the city’s growth and said a 4% to 5% increase in taxable values could allow the city to avoid a tax-rate increase while taking on a larger bond.

“We have an opportunity to take to the voters a bond that does not take us backwards, a bond that moves us forward and provides more project completion citywide,” Viagran said.

Under the city’s financial forecast, however, a $1 billion program would require City Council to vote in 2028 on a property tax-rate increase. The debt-service rate would rise from 21 cents per $100 of taxable value to an average of 23 cents, effective in 2029.

Avoiding that increase would require taxable values to grow between 3.75% and 5% annually, a level above the moderately conservative projections presented by city staff.

City Manager Erik Walsh emphasized that bond debt carries a long-term obligation. Unlike an annual budget decision, bond debt must be repaid over the life of the bonds, and the city is obligated to make those payments even if economic conditions worsen.

“We have an obligation to bondholders,” Walsh said. “So that’s an added level of complexity when we project out what we should do from a financial perspective in terms of the issuance of debt.”

Marc Whyte (D10) was among the council members cautioning against a larger package. He warned against asking residents to absorb another tax-rate increase shortly after budget and utility-rate discussions.

“If we go and we raise the amount of this bond by increasing taxes, we’re going to have something of a holy war on our hands,” Whyte said.

Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones suggested moving forward with the $442 million package in 2027 and considering another bond in 2029 if city growth supports it.

“I think what is the most fiscally responsible at this point would be going ahead with $442 million, understanding that we could all commit to looking at an FY 29 bond and understanding—with better clarity—what the size of that could be,” Jones said.

Equity and distribution

The total bond package is the umbrella over other debates. Council members from Districts 1 through 5 raised concerns about how bond funding has been distributed in previous cycles, particularly what they described as a concentration of investment in the city’s northern sector.

Those concerns have also contributed to the city’s first tax-rate increase in 30 years, as districts that have historically received less investment push for maintaining services and infrastructure their residents rely on.

Edward Mungia (D4) said his district still has underdeveloped parks, streets and other infrastructure, particularly in its poorest areas.

“The best time to plant an oak tree is 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now,” Mungia said. “The same is true for projects, right? The best time to have done all these streets and projects was 20 years ago when you could do it for a lot cheaper, but here we are.”

Sukh Kaur (D1) pointed to the number of “F-rated” streets in each council district, which showed Districts 1 through 5 having 10% or more of total street mileage rated an F, indicating city roadways in severe disrepair.

“In 2022, the entire streets portion of the bond was $471 million,” Kaur said. “District 1 only got $22 million of that. On the contrary, District 8 got $44 million and District 10 got $51 million of those streets projects.”

Walsh said the city could revisit its bond schedule before 2032 if circumstances change.

“There’s nothing that would prevent this council from, if we see a change in tide, doing something sooner than 2032,” Walsh said.

Project Marvel

Project Marvel, the proposed sports and entertainment district, has also factored into the bond discussion.

During preliminary bond discussions in May, city staff estimated that the district could receive as much as $250 million in bond funding. After the scope was narrowed, that figure fell to $35 million in the current $442 million proposal.

Walsh said the reduction was partly the result of removing an $85 million parking garage and a renovation of Durango Boulevard from the package.

Affordable housing

The 2022 bond allocated $150 million for affordable housing. Staff had anticipated another $150 million for similar projects in 2027, but the smaller proposed bond could reduce that amount by half.

Staff highlighted the previous housing investment as a success. The goal the city set in 2021 was 28,094 affordable housing units; the current total is 29,304.

Some council members nevertheless want to maintain or increase housing investment. Teri Castillo (D5), who credited the 2022 bond with helping fund more than 700 affordable units in her district, said reducing infrastructure investment could increase costs over time.

“If we fail again to invest in these infrastructure projects, whether it’s housing, streets, bridges, sidewalks, and so forth, it’s going to cost us more in the long run and we’re going to get less for more in terms of costs associated with these proposed projects,” Castillo said.

Drainage

Drainage is another major area of need. Staff identified more than $165 million in drainage projects in District 6 alone.

Ric Galvan (D6) identified drainage as one of his top priorities, advocating for citywide projects to address low-water crossings and flooding.

“We know the significant drainage needs across our city are fundamental,” Galvan said. “No matter what kind of area we’re looking at here, no matter who’s eventually impacted here, we should be making sure that no one’s at risk of drowning in our city; no one’s property is going to be destroyed by now more frequent catastrophic rainstorms that we know are the impact of our climate.”

Marina Alderete Gavito (D7) echoed those concerns, pointing to drainage needs in her district despite its lower number of low-water crossings.

Council members are also considering a potential stormwater-fee increase that could generate about $175 million for drainage projects.

Next steps

Bond discussions return to City Council on Oct. 14, when city staff is expected to provide additional information requested by council and outline project priorities.

The meeting is also expected to include a closer look at larger bond scenarios. As of the Sept. 30 meeting, several council members were advocating for further consideration of a package larger than the $442 million staff recommendation.

“There’s a fair amount of work that still needs to go on in terms of scale and scope and what those numbers and those projects mean, and that’s work that we will be doing over the next couple of weeks,” Walsh said.

Back in August, the Express-News carried a guest column by the chairs of the San Antonio Ready to Work Advisory Board. Arguing that ambitious investment paired with accountability is paying off with Ready to Work, they cited an economic impact study claiming nearly $12 billion in economic benefits from the program and a staggering 125-to-1 return.

It’s a pattern here and nationally: governments and program sponsors commission economic impact studies that produce large, flashy sums, then present them as objective validation of the spending. Few bother to stress-test the conclusions and the results are often repeated as established fact.

Take AlamoPROMISE. In October 2025, the Express-News reported that the program had “generated $1.1 billion” in economic activity and supported roughly 7,800 jobs. No one, as far as we can find, publicly asked the obvious question: how does a last-dollar scholarship program that had spent roughly $16 million through 2025 produce a billion-dollar impact and nearly 8,000 jobs?

We consulted the report and filed a records request to find out. The District commissioned the study from St. Mary’s University economist Belinda Román and supplied the underlying data. Four days after the agreement was executed, Román asked whether the District still wanted to include “construction improvements ACD (the District) has made during the same timeframe as AlamoPromise,” noting those dollars “will add to the overall economic impact.” Three minutes later, AlamoPROMISE’s chief program officer, Stephanie Vasquez, replied: “Yes.”

The final report counted bond-financed construction as one of its “two main sources of investments,” spending it says “is derived from the 2017 bond.” It seemingly counted any construction spending that took place during the AlamoPROMISE years, those “included in the 2019–2024 period.” It never says how much construction that added up to, and its executive summary calls the $1.1 billion simply “the overall impact of AlamoPROMISE.” Logically, $16 million in scholarships can account for only a small percent of that. The rest has to come from the construction and other spending counted alongside them.

But Bexar County voters approved the District’s $450 million bond in May 2017, based on its existing enrollment projections, and AlamoPROMISE’s planning didn’t begin until 2018. The construction was approved before there was an AlamoPROMISE to credit it to.

Hmmmm. Not so cut and dry.

The Ready to Work study is a similar product. It projects $7.5 billion in lifetime earnings gains for all graduates and enrollees, then adds $3.8 billion for the economic activity generated when those same earnings are spent, and tacks on roughly $500 million in assumed savings from social programs. Compare that to the program's $94 million cost (a the time of the study) and you get the celebrated 125-to-1 return. What it never does is compare participants with similar people who didn't go through the program, among other decisions, nearly all of which conveniently work to increase the total.

Then, again, in September. As San Antonio’s council cut 39 library positions as part of the budget debate, the Texas Library Association released a statewide study crediting public libraries with $3.8 billion in “economic activity and community value.” And the list goes on and on—UT San Antonio, Microsoft’s data centers, Port San Antonio, the economic impact of immigrants. If there’s a program, business, or cause, there is probably a study designed to produce a big number to make it look essential.

But by the logic of these impact studies, the most “impactful” thing we do is usually whatever we spend the most money on—which is a bad litmus test for what we should support.

Case in point: the San Antonio Police Department is the largest single department in the city budget, with the most recent budget awarding SAPD over $675 million a year. Run that through an IMPLAN model and it would show a tremendous “economic impact” every year. You could even throw in the holistic costs and savings of crime, perception of safety, and other such whimsy, but no one would take that number seriously.

It would be a mistake, though, to treat any impact study as a definitive verdict on whether or not a program deserves the money. Programs will always advocate for themselves, but any engaged citizen (or public official!) presented with one of these figures should know that healthy skepticism is warranted.

And none of this means that these programs are failures. AlamoPROMISE has, at minimum, funneled tens of millions of dollars in federal financial aid into the local community college system, supporting the whole institution. Ready to Work has helped thousands of people, even if we have argued that it wasn’t worth the cost.

San Antonio has real ambitions for its institutions, and a necessary step towards achieving them is understanding what programs actually cause versus what merely happened. So the next time a study announces that a modest investment has produced transformative economic impact, our first question must be: compared to what?

Over the weekend, Elon Musk announced that the Boring Company is “working on a simple, precursor Hyperloop tunnel between Austin and San Antonio.” Reception was optimistic: Sen. Ted Cruz, Joe Lonsdale, Michael Dell, and countless others cheered it on within hours.

A Hyperloop is a transportation idea Musk first unveiled in 2013: a capsule the size of a small bus sealed inside a long vacuum tunnel. With little to no air to slow it down, the capsule could travel between stations at extremely high speed. What exactly this project would look like, Musk didn't say. What he did say: it would travel over 200 mph, going eighty miles in under half an hour.

Meanwhile, the State of Texas is spending $3.2 billion to build a new freeway along twenty miles of I-35 Northeast. Just up the road, another $4.5 billion to rebuild eight miles of I-35 through Austin’s downtown. That’s nearly $8 billion for twenty-eight miles of highway.

When it’s all said and done, the drive between the two cities could still take a couple hours in traffic because the rest of the drive remains congested and limited by the physics of highways.

No one disagrees that more transportation infrastructure is needed. Kyle has grown roughly 1,200 percent since 2000, New Braunfels has tripled, and San Marcos has more than doubled. The combined Austin-San Antonio metro is packed full of over five million people, and it’ll pass eight million by 2050. Leaders in both cities have long said that the two economies should be better connected, but the problem of how to stitch them together remains largely unsolved. This will not get better with time, and we are still building the infrastructure of the past to keep pace with the congestion of the future.

The biggest problem is that every alternative to “build more road” has been fundamentally doomed from the beginning. The commonly proposed solution, an expanded rail connection between Austin and San Antonio or even a new high speed rail line, faces numerous financial and political obstacles.

Building a rail connection to Austin is not impossible to engineer, but it is impossible in nearly every other way. The state constitution dedicates the highway fund to roads and the overwhelming majority of all funding goes to highways, so funding is a challenge. This is a problem when a recent study showed that a new passenger rail line would cost at least $13.5 billion. The finished price tag would undoubtedly be higher. TxDOT’s cheaper option, using existing track, would be too slow to be compelling and only projected a couple thousand daily riders.

And if you can raise the many billions, building above ground still requires securing enough contiguous parcels to put track through the entire corridor. With these constraints, you can study rail projects in Texas all you want—the corridor has been studied two dozen times since 1997—but the money and the political coalition will likely never come.

So don’t wait for a rail solution that Texas will study endlessly but never fund at this scale. Help Boring build a tunnel.

Elon called this project a “precursor,” and there are no details yet as to what the tunnel would actually look like. What we do know is that a Boring project like this one would actually solve a number of problems inherent to connecting Austin and San Antonio by rail.

It doesn’t need the funding that Texas won’t and can’t spend. Boring raised $3 billion this year, its Nashville tunnel is privately funded, and when it bid on a San Antonio airport tunnel in 2022, it offered to pay for the first phase. At the cost the company claims in Nashville, roughly $20 to $30 million per mile, eighty miles would run about $2 billion. But the company’s actual price target is about $10 million a mile, which would put it significantly cheaper than even the cheapest equivalent rail project. And if the Boring pattern holds, much of this could be privately funded.

A dedicated tunnel changes what’s possible. Unlike with highways, there is no weather underground, no wrecks ahead, and no merging traffic to deal with. Unlike an above-ground rail project, there are far fewer political and property puzzles to solve. There is no incumbent rail company to reach an agreement with and the construction cost is far, far lower. Because of this, the Boring Company is probably our only realistic chance to connect the two cities—something leaders in both have said is necessary.

The pieces are almost in place to get started, too. Boring already carries passengers through several miles of tunnel under Las Vegas, is digging in Nashville, and is finishing a test tunnel with its newest machine in Bastrop, thirty miles from Austin. This project would not happen overnight, true, but rail has had four decades and we are no closer to a real solution.

Boring has announced tunnels before that never got built, in Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere, even the airport tunnel the Alamo RMA picked in 2022. There are reasons to think this one is different. This has the makings of a flagship program, less than thirty miles from the company's factory, over an achievable distance. Elon has even been talking about this exact idea for years. And if it isn't different, it costs San Antonio nothing. That is the difference between a private bet and a public one.

For decades, we’ve seen creative ideas waste millions and die because they ask Texas to be something it isn’t and never will be: a state that funds massive intercity rail projects. This one doesn’t.

The Boring Company is going to build something like this, somewhere. With $3 billion raised and no shortage of cities asking, it doesn’t need San Antonio’s money. Why not here? When Boring brings a real proposal, San Antonio’s answer should be yes, and how can we help?

San Antonio property owners will face the city’s first property tax increase in 33 years following a narrow City Council vote on the fiscal year 2026-27 budget.

The budget and tax rate passed 7-4. Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, Marina Alderete Gavito (D7), Misty Spears (D9) and Marc Whyte (D10) voted against the increase. The remaining seven council members voted in favor.

Effective Oct. 1, the city’s tax rate will increase from 54.159 cents per $100 of valuation to 56.288 cents. City staff estimates that will add about $35 to the average homestead’s tax bill.

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

Final changes to the budget included increases to the following fees:

• Raising booting fees from $60 to $120 and the fee for parking in residential parking zones without a permit from $32 to $52

• Increasing vacant lot and dangerous premise abatement administrative fees from $250 to $400

• Increasing San Antonio River barge ticket fees for adult non-residents from $15 to $20

• Increasing HAZMAT fees for retail gas stations

• A new $30 library card fee for non-city residents

The approved budget restored about $4.5 million in program funding. Amendments also increased capital improvement funding for each council district from $200,000 to $1 million, paid for through debt capacity.

Mayor Jones criticized the budget, saying a tax increase would be her last resort and that she did not believe other options were adequately considered.

Jones pointed to funding cuts affecting programs she has flagged throughout the budget process, including the botanical gardens, Fiesta, UT Public Health and other city subsidies.

“This is a business-as-usual budget, but this time, business as usual comes with a property tax increase on our neighbors during an affordability crisis,” Jones said.

Failed amendments

Whyte offered an amendment that would have eliminated about $947,000 from the SA Tomorrow planning department, reduced additional funding from the Northeast Corridor Revitalization Plan and increased fees to fund 10 San Antonio Fear Free Environment (SAFFE) officers.

According to the city website, SAFFE officers work with residents to identify, evaluate and resolve community crime problems on particular streets or in neighborhoods. Officers are stationed at eight substations across the city.

“This is really an attempt to not grab money for my own district but to say here is, I think, a balanced and fair way to get each of our districts another SAFFE officer which I know that our residents appreciate and that I think our districts all need,” Whyte said.

The amendment failed, with only Whyte and Spears voting in favor. The remaining council members and Mayor Jones opposed it.

Spears offered an amendment to add 10 patrol officers over the next two fiscal years by reducing funding for adult programming and SAWS Plumbers to People. It also failed, with Whyte and Spears as the only supporters.

Whyte then proposed postponing the budget meeting and decision by one week to give department staff time to assess the effects of a 1.6% across-the-board cut.

The proposal followed a Sept. 16 budget workshop in which Mayor Jones proposed a 1.6% across-the-board cut for the next fiscal year instead of a tax rate increase. Whyte had proposed a similar 2% cut. The amendment failed, with Whyte, Spears and Jones voting in favor of delaying the decision.

Alderete Gavito, who also opposed the tax increase, said the council had come close to avoiding it. “We were so close to being able to avoid that burden on our residents, but you know, I respect the will of my colleagues who may agree or disagree,” she said.

Spears’ final amendment would have removed carryover costs from Districts 9 and 10 to fund two SAFFE officers. She withdrew the proposal after council members raised questions about the position’s costs, the Police Department’s needs and other concerns.

The vote

Phyllis Viagran (D3) made the motion to approve the budget and tax rate increase, citing challenges in the federal and state economies that have put pressure on the city budget.

“We have to take the moment now, while we can, and while it is imperative and necessary for the city of San Antonio to build their revenue,” Viagran said. “Jobs will come. Industries will come, but in this time, we do need to maintain our services and maintain what we provide for the least of our community here.”

Ric Galvan (D6) similarly criticized the state government.

“Instead of supporting local entities and delivering quality services to our residents with our state tax dollars, our state would rather disinvest from our residents and force cities between a rock and a hard place at the local level,” Galvan said.

Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) said additional cuts beyond those already proposed would disproportionately affect Districts 1-5, which include some of the city’s most vulnerable populations.

“If we implement any further cuts, the numbers and participation levels presented show that the impacts will fall in districts 1 through 5, some of the most impoverished in our community. That is the difficult decision that my constituents asked me to make,” McKee-Rodriguez said.

Spears said her primary budget request was for additional patrol officers in her district, a request that was not included in the final budget.

“A final budget that does not reflect our priorities in District 9 is not something I can stand by,” Spears said.

Whyte, who advocated for cuts throughout the budget process, expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of reductions in spending and the resulting tax increase. He also raised concerns about whether future budgets will rely on additional tax increases to address projected deficits.

“The difference in approaches between some of us here today is the belief that in some of these programs where you give directly and you see immediate impact now, a lot of which I believe are band-aids, versus a focus on the longer term approach, which really could institute change,” Whyte said.

A looming deficit

The FY 2026-27 budget is balanced in accordance with state law, but the city faces additional budget challenges in the coming fiscal years.

The two-year plan already assumes a second property tax increase in FY 2027-28. City staff has projected a $48 million ending balance at the close of that year if the plan holds. By 2031, the projected deficit is $136 million, down from the original $264 million projection. The city will still need to reduce spending or generate additional revenue to close that gap.

Whether that balance comes through additional property taxes, economic development or natural revenue growth, San Antonio is only beginning to address its long-term budget challenges. Future City Council decisions will determine how the city responds to those pressures.

After months of discussion, Bexar County commissioners on Tuesday approved a $2.6 billion budget for fiscal year 2026-27 with no tax rate increase. The budget will reduce the county’s reserves by nearly $68 million but keep them above the required minimum.

The tax rate passed unanimously; the budget itself passed 3-2, with Precinct 3 Commissioner Grant Moody and Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert voting against it.

Moody cited the $68 million reduction in reserves as one of his primary concerns. He has pushed for greater fiscal restraint throughout the budget cycle and said the county will still need to cut $25 million to $30 million in future budgets to avoid deficits.

“I don’t think we have a revenue problem. I think we need additional spending restraint,” Moody said.

Calvert pointed to the lack of a cost-of-living increase for county employees and the possibility that the state Legislature could limit annual growth in county property tax revenue during the 2027 session. His concerns follow Gov. Greg Abbott’s “Empowering Texas Taxpayers” plan, announced in June, which calls for changes to the state’s property tax system.

Calvert also cited concerns about checks and balances, a lack of analysis of program cuts and other process issues.

“We are operating like we’re a Blockbuster Video that we will have a tactic of holding the line as things have been, but our strategy actually needs to change because the environment has changed from one of cooperation between state and local government to one of destroying state and local government,” Calvert said.

Precinct 1 Commissioner Rebecca Clay-Flores said the budget is legally balanced and noted that county employees have received cost-of-living adjustments totaling about 23% over the past few years.

Also Tuesday, County Manager David Smith announced he will retire when his contract expires at the end of the year.

With County Judge Peter Sakai leaving office after the Nov. 3 election, a new judge and a new county manager will take on the county’s budget challenges next year. Smith said those challenges could eventually include the first tax rate increase in more than 30 years.

He said he was comfortable recommending a flat tax rate this year, even in a tough environment, in part because he expects growth in the unincorporated parts of the county to create “unprecedented demands for infrastructure to support that growth,” including roads, maintenance of new subdivisions and flood control.

The change order

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bexar County received $389 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding, some of which paid for staff across various departments. The federal funding for those positions runs out Dec. 31, leaving them unfunded for the remaining nine months of the fiscal year unless commissioners move them into the general fund.

When staff first presented the proposed budget Aug. 18, it included funding through Dec. 31 for 91 post-ARPA positions. After that date, the positions would move to contingency unless commissioners shifted them into the general fund.

Moving the positions from contingency to the general fund would require the county to fund them for an additional nine months, through the end of the fiscal year, and each position carried over into the county budget creates a recurring cost.

Exceptions include Specialized Multidisciplinary Alternative Response Team (SMART) positions in the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, which are protected by a state law prohibiting reductions in law enforcement positions. The SMART program pairs mental health professionals with specially trained emergency responders to handle cases that may escalate because of mental health concerns.

Positions in the County Auditor’s Office were also excluded from the reduction plan because state law allows the office to increase its budget without Commissioners Court approval. Together, those exceptions account for 11 positions and about $1.07 million in funding.

The remaining 80 positions, totaling $5.9 million in contingency funding, were tied to six programs:

• BiblioTech Navigators: Help residents access digital resources and technology.

• Domestic Violence Impact Courts: Handle court cases involving domestic violence.

• Pre-Indictment Court: Reviews criminal cases and considers plea agreements before formal charges are filed.

• Preventative Health: Provides health screenings and services, including programs addressing domestic violence.

• STAR Program: Provides support and case management for people affected by domestic violence through the county’s domestic violence hotline.

• TX Fast Track 2: Trains participants for entry-level jobs in maintenance and advanced manufacturing.

At Monday’s budget workshop, Budget & Finance Director Tanya Gaitan said the county is funding about $2.2 million in post-ARPA positions.

Looking ahead

While the county approved a balanced budget this year, its long-term financial challenges remain. With a new judge and county manager taking over, Commissioners Court will face renewed pressure in 2027 to weigh cuts as federal funding expires and reserves decline. Those decisions could shape the county’s fiscal outlook and determine whether it can maintain current services without what would be its first tax rate increase in more than 30 years.

The FY 2026-27 budget takes effect Oct. 1.

Space may be the final frontier, but the foundations are being developed in San Antonio.

Through collaborations among Port San Antonio, Astroport Space Technologies, Inc. and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), San Antonio is positioning itself as a hub for space manufacturing and development.

In March, Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones announced the establishment of an Economic Security Advisory Group focused on growing opportunities in artificial intelligence, quantum technology, biotechnology and space manufacturing. While the group is focused on future opportunities, San Antonio has had a space-research and manufacturing presence for more than 30 years.

The space market is very real. The World Economic Forum and McKinsey project that the global space economy will nearly triple to $1.8 trillion by 2035, up from $630 billion in 2023, growing faster than global GDP and, according to them, approaching the scale of the semiconductor industry.

Texas is moving to claim its share. In 2023, the state created the Texas Space Commission and backed it with a $350 million Texas Space Fund for launch, manufacturing, and research. Whether San Antonio captures a meaningful piece of that growth is an open question.

But San Antonio’s push for the space economy is not exactly new. Since the late 1960s, SwRI has contracted with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on research and development projects. Now, a new phase of that work is planned for the SwRI campus. A 180-acre National Lunar Research Center, developed in partnership with Astroport, will serve as a research and simulation hub for lunar missions.

The facility will allow researchers to test machinery and processes on Earth before sending them to the moon in the 2030s. The goal is to support NASA’s plans for sustained exploration near the lunar south pole, part of NASA’s multi-phased effort.

Building towards the Moon

Sam Ximenes, founder and CEO of Astroport, said the company is a subsidiary of Exploration Architecture, which focuses on architecture development for celestial surfaces, including the moon and Mars.

Astroport’s current focus is developing a machine that can turn moon rock and dust, known as regolith, into construction bricks. Rather than transporting bricks from Earth, the company aims to send the machine to the moon and use local materials, reducing the payload that must leave Earth.

“The machine right now is actually a demonstration machine to show that we can make bricks on the moon,” Ximenes said. “Once we prove that, then we start going into the larger construction.”

To simulate lunar regolith, researchers use Earth materials with similar chemical and mechanical compositions and test bricks made from them.

Creating the bricks is only one part of the effort. Researchers and architects must also determine how to lay them efficiently, transport equipment and materials, and address the challenges of operating in a lunar environment.

The National Lunar Research Center will provide a site for that testing. Through partnerships among Astroport, SwRI, the WEX Foundation and other organizations, the simulation facility is planned for construction on the SwRI campus.

Matthew Freeman, space science director at SwRI, said the lunar yard, as the center is known, is expected to be constructed in the next few years to support NASA’s moon-base launches in the 2030s.

The 180-acre site will simulate the moon’s de Gerlache Ridge and the footprint of NASA’s Artemis Base Camp. Machinery designed for lunar missions can be tested there before moving to higher-fidelity facilities for final testing. Because lunar missions will have limited human presence, Freeman said, systems must be capable of operating remotely.

How Port San Antonio is getting involved

One of Port SA’s main advantages in attracting businesses is its ability to self-permit rather than go through the city permitting office.

Earlier this year, Port SA announced that Germany-based Blackwave GmbH plans to open a location at the Port, adding to the number of companies involved in space manufacturing and development.

Jim Perschbach, Port San Antonio’s president and CEO, said Port SA can accelerate development by using its entire development enterprise to get facilities operational. Its ability to self-permit projects, he added, gives companies a significant advantage.

Having these companies on the Port SA campus also creates an ecosystem that encourages collaboration and innovation.

“By bringing these companies here, you have not only the ability to intersect with them in a procurement type of environment, you can buy from each other, but you have that very simple, often overlooked value that you get from clustering. It’s what universities build on and knowledge economies build on,” Perschbach said.

The history of Space in San Antonio

SwRI has been involved in space-related contracts since the Apollo missions in the 1960s.

One notable project is the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), which launched eight microsatellites in 2016 to improve tropical storm and hurricane forecasting. The mission was initially expected to last about two years but is still operating. The remaining CYGNSS satellites are expected to come down in the next couple of years, Freeman said.

The project also produced an unexpected benefit: researchers discovered that the data could be used to track surface water, soil moisture and other conditions over land.

SwRI is also conducting heliophysics research to study the sun’s effects on machinery and equipment. Unlike Earth, the moon has a limited atmosphere, leaving equipment more exposed to solar radiation.

Researchers must also account for rocket vibrations, the vacuum of space and equipment’s ability to operate independently on the lunar surface.

That work extends beyond the moon. SwRI teams are studying other celestial bodies, including Europa and comets, to understand the solar system better and identify potential opportunities for exploration.

Scott Sutherland, space systems manager at SwRI, said the research facility supports larger organizations as a spacecraft vendor and through engineering and data analysis on collaborative projects.

Current research includes a system designed to refuel equipment in orbit and another designed to capture satellites nearing the end of their operational lives, extending their use before moving them to a disposal orbit.

Sutherland described SwRI as a combination of industry and academia, focused on solving complex engineering problems.

The benefits to San Antonio

These collaborations and innovations could advance space technology while attracting additional space manufacturers to the greater San Antonio area. The industry could also help address one of the city’s persistent challenges: attracting more diverse, higher-paying jobs.

Perschbach said San Antonio does not necessarily need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to persuade companies to relocate. Instead, he said, the city can establish itself as a manufacturing hub by building on its existing industrial base and its position in Central Texas.

One advantage is the proximity of Port San Antonio and SwRI to major transportation infrastructure. Port SA can use Kelly Field as an industrial airport, giving companies access to a runway where equipment can be tested without closing airspace in busier parts of the city. That proximity could also make it easier to move equipment from the planned lunar yard to the next stage of development.

The greater:SATX Regional Economic Partnership says San Antonio is one of the three largest aerospace talent hubs in Texas, with more than 46,000 professionals working in aerospace and defense across the city.

“As the world economy evolves, we move into whatever the next generation economy is going to be: knowledge-based, energy-based, everything else. We’re going to need to be able to start getting resources, whether that’s an energy resource, a physical resource, a communications resource or just a commerce resource, utilizing space,” Perschbach said.

Space manufacturing would also build on San Antonio’s existing manufacturing base, potentially giving the city an advantage over other major metropolitan areas.

Freeman said SwRI has capabilities comparable to those of larger research facilities but has lacked the same physical footprint and visibility.

The planned lunar yard could begin to change that. Its scale, combined with access to nearby runways for transporting large equipment, could make the facility more attractive to companies and industry leaders looking to develop and test space technologies.

Spacefaring for the future

The payoff, if San Antonio can capture some of it, would not stop at the moon. Lunar missions are the industry’s immediate priority, but the technologies developed for space tend to find uses on Earth.

Perschbach pointed to spinoffs of past NASA research, including water purification systems, phone cameras and portable computers, and to what may follow. Energy is another possibility; he raised the prospect of large solar arrays collecting power in orbit and beaming it back to Earth.

So far, though, San Antonio’s record in the space industry is mixed. The Texas Space Commission has handed out grant after grant from the first $150 million of its space fund: to Houston companies such as Intuitive Machines, Starlab and Axiom; to Cedar Park’s Firefly Aerospace and other Austin-corridor firms; to Blue Origin in Van Horn and SpaceX in Brownsville; even to regional planning councils in El Paso, Midland and Abilene. Not one award has gone to a San Antonio recipient. Asked about it in late 2025, the commission’s executive director, Norman Garza, acknowledged that “none of the grantees were from San Antonio, but there were plenty of applications from the area.”

Despite this, San Antonio has landed the state’s first Texas Space Summit, which the Greater San Antonio Chamber was set to host this September at the Henry B. González Convention Center. Earlier this summer, the chamber postponed it to 2027, with its CEO saying the program wasn’t yet where he wanted it.

Still, the most promising signs are local and recent. Blackwave chose Port San Antonio for its first U.S. factory and expects to build toward roughly 250 jobs making pressure vessels for rockets and satellites. At SwRI, the planned National Lunar Research Center would give engineers a place to test the technologies needed to build a lunar base before those systems ever leave Earth. Neither project puts San Antonio in competition with Houston’s Johnson Space Center or Austin-area rocket companies, but both suggest the city may finally be turning its decades of space research into something larger.

“Even though we’ve been in space since Apollo, we’re one of the best-kept secrets, and that’s really unfortunate,” Freeman said.

For San Antonio, the challenge now is not establishing a presence in the space industry—it has had one for decades. The challenge is turning that history, along with its research capabilities, manufacturing base and infrastructure, into a larger role in the industry’s future.

When they were young, I used to give my daughters individual bags of chips. Turns out, my oldest would seize some of her sisters’ stash. This coincided with chip-makers putting fewer chips in each bag, commonly known as shrinkflation.

When I cut the number of bags I handed out, she would actually demand more from the other girls.

If this sounds too unfair to be true, that’s because it is. I made it up. The analogous situation that San Antonians are facing as the City’s budget process comes to a head, however, is real.

CoSA is staring at a projected $158 million deficit over the next two years. Back at their June 18th meeting, city staff presented the mayor and city council with a range of options: raise taxes, raise fees, cut spending, or some combination of the three.

A few on the council sounded skeptical about raising the property tax rate; whether what the city is allowed to do annually per state law, or recapturing that which it has passed on in recent years.

On August 13th, City Manager Erik Walsh answered: all three. His proposed $4.4 billion budget takes the recapture route, raising the property tax rate for the first time since 1992, which works out to roughly $35 a year on the average homestead. It raises a raft of fees. And it cuts $89.6 million over two years, more than 100 civilian positions among them. Three council members voted against setting the higher rate; it survived 8-3, and comes up for a final vote on September 17th.

The San Antonio Express-News editorial board had chimed in over the summer, recommending a “modest tax hike (and) spending cuts.” It’s “common sense” and “rational” to look at “both sides of the budget scale.”

Interesting choice of words.

Since the pandemic lockdowns, San Antonio’s population has grown 9%. The increase in its property tax take has roughly tracked the 25-30% overall inflation rate. The City’s budget, including payroll growth exceeding that of the population, has grown over 40%. The proposed budget grows the general fund another 4.1%.

Do those figures, taken together, sound “rational”? Much of what came from the dais in June was also puzzling.

District 2 Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez started by posing a thoughtful question regarding policing. Do we believe someone isn’t going to “retaliate at someone for shooting their friend or relative because the city hired 60 more officers?”

By the same token though, do we believe the “programs and social services” at risk of losing funding would prevent a crime like that?

Moreover, the new parent he sees in the mirror might object to his claim that the “root causes of crime can only be addressed” in such a way. His mere presence in his child’s life arguably does a better job.

Earlier, District 1 Councilwoman Sukh Kaur expressed a desire to shield the “minor home repair” program. It can “keep people in their homes” and prevent “them from being unhoused.” A laudable goal.

Are ever-growing property tax bills not a similar threat?

Later, Walsh suggested that some expenses could be moved to capital. As Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones astutely pointed out, that’s basically putting them on the city’s credit card.

We are the most indebted big city in Texas, by a lot. That liability is borne by citizens of what is also one of the poorest cities in the Lone Star State, also one of the poorest in the U.S.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani proclaimed in June that “we balanced the budget without asking working New Yorkers to shoulder the burden.” Do his socialist counterparts on our council share that goal?

The correlation may not be apparent, but our municipal debt is financed by property taxes. If transplants to the region continue settling beyond city limits, joined by ex-San Antonians with the means to do the same, everyone else will be left with the bill.

Surrounding counties are growing 15%-4X faster than San Antonio proper.

This is a good spot for a reminder that the council is also considering raising that portion of the property tax rate for the sole purpose of borrowing more. Earlier this month, a majority signaled they are open to doing just that down the road, to prop up a 2027 bond program whose capacity has shrunk to $450 million, the smallest in years.

Does any of this sound like “common sense” yet?

In fairness, it could lend itself to District 3 Councilwoman Phyllis Viagran’s assertion that “a city budget … is not a … household (or a) business budget.” Councilman McKee-Rodriguez seemed to concur when he said “we will not get better services with lesser resources.” By August, he was “really, really exhausted” with the “high ground” his tax-averse colleagues were taking.

Are these tacit admissions that city government is an inherently inferior organization? Sure, it’s much bigger than even the biggest household, but that excuse fritters away against large private businesses.

Unlike them, CoSA will never go out of business. Why? Because, as members of council obviously know, they can keep it afloat by simply imposing taxes on San Antonians.

Perhaps this is why many politicians barely mention “the taxpayer.” It relieves electeds of the guilt of taking more from them if they don’t explicitly acknowledge them. Rather, these involuntary benefactors exist as some abstract other.

Maybe that’s what makes it easy to force them to fund 21X more of VIA’s operations than riders do. How about “modestly” raising the baseline fare, shrink the sales tax devoted to public transportation, redirect it to the general fund, and actually cut the property tax rate?

It would be more respectable than circling “all the vendors … that line-up SW Military” like vultures, threatening them with increased permit fees, as Councilwoman Viagran implied. The proposed budget takes that approach citywide, hiking fees on everything from Alamodome parking to trash carts to overdue library books.

District 5 Councilwoman Teri Castillo put a bow on this discussion when she added that “austerity is not a realistic budget plan.” But austerity isn’t just cutting spending; by definition, it includes raising taxes.

It’s disappointing how many of them struggle to grasp reality.

It’s bad enough that they fattened up the city budget when Uncle Sam was showering dollars on municipalities. Regardless of the federal government’s penchant for regularly overspending, the lockdown flourishes were not going to last indefinitely.

But why did so few, if any, foresee the inevitable plateauing of property values? This year, the City’s taxable base is actually shrinking, down about 2.7%.

They were content, even opportunistic, to spend the spike in tax revenue. The homes I’ve owned in the Alamo City experienced anywhere from a 28% - 70% rise in values over this time. But those were effectively inflationary, unrealized ‘gains’, to use that term loosely.

Once Washington D.C. started to correct policy, poof!

After all was said and done, it seemed those bags of chips in my story were less illusory than any “common sense” and “rational”ity emanating from city leadership and establishment.

Christopher E. Baecker ran for San Antonio City Council District 6 in 2025. He is Vice President of the Bexar County Taxpayers Association, and a board member of InfuseSA. He works in financial services and teaches college economics.

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.

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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?”