The Mayor Is Right About Ready to Work

Redirecting the program's remaining millions isn't an abandonment of the poor.

"One career at a time" is accurate: 5,756 so far against a $236 million tax. Credit: SA Ready to Work via Instagram

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?”