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.
Seems city manager needs to be held accountable. Maybe removing the term limit was not best idea.