The Civic Weekly Brief
Toyota invests $3.6 billion, a new acting police chief, the Mayor's report on voter turnout
What We’re Watching This Week
Toyota is investing $3.6 billion in its Southside campus. Truly the story of the moment: $3.6 billion total investment, a second assembly line, a 2.5 million-square-foot expansion, and an estimated 2,000 jobs by 2030. The project will push Toyota's total investment in San Antonio to $8.3 billion, when it was already among the largest companies in San Antonio by total investment. To land it, the city, county, and state assembled a total incentive package worth at least $303 million, which works out to more than $150,000 per job. That said, the total investment is huge, and the vehicle line being reshored is the Tacoma—the same truck Toyota moved from San Antonio to Mexico in 2021. A company reversing its own relocation is about as clear an economic development win as it gets. We're watching because as big a win as this is, no single project is enough and sustained momentum is necessary to solve San Antonio's problems. Will we land more?
The police department changes hands this weekend, and the replacement search now has an incumbent. William McManus's last day is today and Assistant Chief Jesse Salame, a 26-year SAPD veteran, takes over Saturday as acting chief while the city searches for a permanent one, with interviews expected in August and a selection in September. City Manager Erik Walsh says he has full confidence in Salame. McManus went further, telling the San Antonio Report that Salame has "every quality that the next chief should possess." We're watching because the acting chief will run the department through budget adoption and up to the September 30 expiration of the police union contract while auditioning for the permanent job, carrying the outgoing chief's public blessing and the city manager's endorsement.
The Mayor's Commission on Voting has delivered its report on expanding voter turnout. Of its nine recommendations, the load-bearing ones build permanent infrastructure: a new Office of Civic Participation, a permanent 13-member successor to the commission itself, a nonprofit coordination Roundtable, and a Community Civic Engagement Fund housed at the San Antonio Area Foundation, plus a mandate attaching "civic participation touchpoints" to city contracts, permits, and subsidized development. Almost none of it is priced, the only hard number in 56 pages is $10,000 for the Roundtable. The natural grantees for a new fund are the voter-engagement nonprofits whose leaders stood with the mayor when she announced the commission in February. We're watching because the two vehicles that would carry this are moving now: the arena CBA negotiation is open—the report's most time-sensitive ask would write an annual payment into it—and the budget is being worked on now. Whether council takes the recommendations seriously is the question, as this could easily turn into another unnecessary funding vehicle for local nonprofits.
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The Reframe
San Antonio schools need culturally relevant physics instruction (Express News) → Physics is universal, and it’s the whole case against this essay. The argument: San Antonio students would do better in physics if instruction were culturally relevant. Here’s the thing, though: physics IS universal. Newton’s laws are the same all across San Antonio, as everywhere else, which is precisely what makes the subject worth our time. The best argued examples like teaching energy through Texas heat and the electric bill and letting students explain a concept in their own words before formalizing it aren’t even cultural frameworks. That’s just good teaching, and good teachers already do it in every subject. The questions that decide whether a San Antonio student is good at physics look like: how many campuses offer physics at all? How many classrooms are led by a capable teacher? How many students are proficient at algebra? Those are staffing and math-pipeline problems, not cultural problems.
Organizer from the conservative Americans for Prosperity nominated to serve on appraisal board (SA Report) → Ask what’s actually news here. Is his affiliation really news? Strip the framing and you have: a Marine veteran with an MBA and mid-level field job applied for a temporary seat on a board doing administrative, non policy-setting work. A committee, including the board's left-leaning official, interviewed fifteen applicants and chose him as the one with the clearest grasp of what the appraisal district actually does. She praised the pick and said the board benefits from ideological diversity. That's just a good process, not a scary story. When was the last time that a nominee's employment at a progressive advocacy nonprofit led a local story? Just because there's a "Koch-backed" modifier should not inspire panic.
San Antonio already knows how to build public trust around major civic projects. We did it on the river (Express-News) → Oh joy, another committee. The argument: the arena district should get a standing citizen oversight committee like the one that shepherded the river improvements. The diagnosis here is correct, the arena district project should be visible to the public on a regular schedule. But why is our reflex always to convene some kind of standing government body? San Antonio already has an oversight committee for billion-dollar public commitments: it’s called City Council and it’s backed by a professional city staff, a finance department, an internal auditor, and a payroll of consultants hired for exactly this project. If those institutions will not hold the project accountable, a volunteer stakeholder committee will only absorb responsibility and diffuse it. This summer has already produced a listening tour, a commission recommending a permanent commission (see the Mayor's announcement), and now we want to add a proposed committee? At some point, we need to trust the government we have rather than making more.
San Antonio retail occupancy at record high as tenants fill vacant storefronts (Express-News) → Two stories in one. The first is genuinely good: 95.3 percent of the metro’s tracked retail, around 50 million square feet, is occupied, the fifteenth straight year above 90%. Saks OFF 5TH closed at The Rim in January and the space was promptly taken by Cavender’s, two closed Gold’s Gyms are becoming a Crunch Fitness and an EOS Fitness, and a Taiwanese entertainment operator picked Park North for its largest American location. All happening naturally due to market forces. And Blackstone paid $440 million for an H-E-B-anchored center on the North Side, which is a strong endorsement from out-of-town capital. The second story is the ratio itself: occupancy is a fraction, and the denominator is still growing relatively slowly. This year’s 727,000 square feet of new construction would be the post-pandemic high but it still trails 2019. Inflation, interest rates, and tariff-priced materials have made new builds expensive, so demand waits for closures instead, and owners, the brokerage cheerfully notes, get to “push the rents.”
The Pick
Our weekly recommendation for what’s going on in San Antonio
CineFestival at the Carver
The nation’s oldest Latino film festival turns 47 this weekend, and it never left San Antonio. Founded in 1976 as the Chicano Film Festival, CineFestival runs through Sunday at the Carver Community Cultural Center with its largest hometown showcase yet: 22 San Antonio-made shorts in the Vistas de San Antonio program, and more local Mesquite Award nominees than any prior year. It closes Sunday at 6 p.m. with American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, this year’s Sundance audience award winner on the director behind Zoot Suit and La Bamba.
More than half the screenings are free with a reserved ticket, all-access passes are $40. Through Sunday, July 12, Carver Community Cultural Center, 226 N. Hackberry.
Thanks for another week. Follow us on your platform of choice: X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Story tips and reader notes go to our reporter Jarrett Whitener at jarrett@thecivic.com, and my inbox is always open.
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Enjoy your weekend and see you Tuesday.
- Philip Reichert
Editor, The Civic