The San Antonio City Charter Review Commission voted on Thursday to select its final charter amendment recommendations to present to the San Antonio City Council next month.
The commission was charged with considering charter amendments on a number of different issues: council pay and term lengths, city manager tenure and salary caps, ethics processes, the number of council districts and redistricting, and updating outdated charter language.
Once the Charter Review Commission presents its recommendations to the city council, the council will have the opportunity to decide which of the items to send to voters, who will make the ultimate decisions about how the city charter is changed in the fall.
The commission was unanimous in all of its recommendations.
City council salary and term lengths
The commission recommended increasing the baseline council and mayoral salaries — $80,000 for council members and $95,000 for the mayor. The recommendation also said those salaries should be indexed to annual percent wage increases for the civilian city staff.
The salary for a city council member is currently set at $45,722, and the mayor’s salary is set at $61,725. The salaries were established in 2015, and the council salary was pegged to the median area income at the time.
The commission recommended implementing concurrent four-year terms for city council members and the mayor, for a maximum of eight years in office.
Currently, council members and the mayor are concurrently elected every two years, for a maximum of eight years in office.
City manager salary and tenure caps
The commission recommended removing both the tenure and salary caps placed on the city manager position, allowing the city council to determine how much to pay and how long to retain the city manager.
The caps were instituted in 2018 after the San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association pushed to get a city charter amendment during bitter negotiations over a collective bargaining agreement that involved former City Manager Sheryl Sculley. The current tenure cap is eight years, and the city manager salary is limited to no greater than 10 times the lowest paid full-time civilian city employee.
Council districts and redistricting
The commission decided not to recommend adding any new city council districts. However, it did recommend adding language to the city charter that would give voters the opportunity, through a city charter amendment, to amend and increase the number of council districts.
The current charter language states redistricting can only occur after the decennial U.S. Census.
The commission also recommended making some changes to how the redistricting commission — which develops new council district maps — functions. The recommended language would prohibit family members and employees of city council members from being on the redistricting commission. It would also require the city council to have a supermajority to pass any redistricting plan the redistricting commission had not approved.
The council could reject the redistricting commission’s plan and ask for revisions, but it would ultimately be up to the commission to bring something new forward for council to again vote on.
This is very similar to how the most recently implemented redistricting commission functioned, but because the rules were established through a city ordinance, and not the charter, the city council could have changed the rules.
Ethics officer and other ethics revisions
The commission recommended that no new independent ethics officer with a legal background be established and said that the current ethics auditor position fulfills its duties.
The commission did recommend several changes to the ethics processes at the city, including establishing a high level definition of “conflicts of interest” and ensuring the semi-autonomous San Antonio Ethics Review Board was adequately funded. It also recommended eliminating term limits for members of the Ethics Review Board and increasing the Ethics Review Board’s discretion to accept or refuse complaint cases when those cases have already been resolved through other means.
Special meetings
The commission recommended no substantive changes to the city charter regarding how special meetings that come from a three-signature memo function. They recommended a slight change to the language of the charter, striking outdated language that said the city clerk, rather than the city manager or city attorney, had the role of calling the special meetings.
Currently, any three members of the city council may sign a three-signature memo calling for a special meeting on a certain subject.
Most recently, the three-signature memo has been used by five council members this week to call a special meeting to assess whether City Attorney Andy Segovia remains fit to remain in his position. Council members tried to use the three-signature memo early this year to hold a special meeting to vote on a resolution supporting a ceasefire in Gaza, which failed to materialize after one of the members — District 8 Councilmember Manny Pelaez — withdrew his support.
Language modernization
The commission recommended amending 117 sections of the city charter that the commission said contained outdated and superseded provisions.
