San Antonio District 6 Councilmember Melissa Cabello Havrda announced her candidacy for mayor on Wednesday morning on the steps of City Hall.
The three-term council member and disability attorney opened her speech with an anecdote about what first pushed her to work on behalf of her community during her childhood on the West Side.
“I remember being a little girl and like, kicking at the grass, and I looked up at him, and I asked my grandfather, ‘Why don't you have sidewalks in your neighborhood?’” she said. “And he looked down at me, and he said, ‘Porque, no, les importa mija — they don't care about us.’ And even as a little girl, I was infuriated.”
Cabello Havrda joined an increasingly crowded mayoral race, even after District 9 Councilmember John Courage dropped out earlier this week. She is now competing with two of her council colleagues — Adriana Rocha Garcia from District 4 and Manny Peláez from District 8 — along with former city and state officials and local entrepreneurs.
She said she believed her campaign and governing principles would make her stand out from the crowd.
“I'm running on a belief system, and that is under three premises,” Cabello Havrda said. “One, City Hall should work for you, you should feel safe in your neighborhood, and we should create opportunities right here at home.”
She said one of the ways she would make City Hall work with the everyday San Antonio resident would be to make sure they’re included in decision-making processes, something she said she has a track record of doing as District 6 representative.
“I have never brought something forward to city council that has not been approved, and mostly they're unanimous votes, because I do that leg work myself,” she said. “I call communities, I meet with them — if they live in my district or not.”
She said she thinks the city’s major workforce training initiative, Ready to Work, needs to expand to include teenagers in high school, despite pushback from some colleagues when she recently brought up the idea.
“The goal [of Ready to Work] was, once … life has beaten you down a little bit, you come back and you have the second chance,” Cabello Havrda said. “But I say, let's not give life the opportunity to beat these kids down. Let's get them in a pipeline to success from day one.”
She said collaboration with her fellow council members has been a key part of her tenure in the San Antonio City Council, regardless of their political leanings, and that she sees her own politics as being somewhere in the middle.
“I do see myself as more moderate, and I know that's not, you know, sensational — people like the far right and the far left, but I am fairly moderate, and I think the majority of our city is moderate,” she said.
But she said there were some issues where she has either a more conservative or progressive view. One of those progressive issues is her effort to get the city to spend $100,000 to support travel for out-of-state abortions. She wrote a memo to the mayor with four of her colleagues in support of this measure last month.
She made a veiled criticism of her fellow councilmember and mayoral candidate Peláez for his position that he supports pro-choice policies at the state and federal levels but doesn’t believe the city is the right place to handle abortion policy.
“If you believe in something, then go for it,” Cabello Havrda said. “Do it. Do what the community is asking you to do, and you figure out how to do it … I will never say to my community, ‘that's not my job.’”
Poor infrastructure has long plagued different parts of San Antonio, and Cabello Havrda said expanding parks and improving streets and sidewalks in her district have been some of her biggest achievements.
She also pushed for a policy that ended up giving money back to CPS Energy that the utility generated and that previously went into the city’s coffers so that future rate hikes would be mitigated.
Several of her colleagues recently questioned the usefulness of that policy after CPS officials could not say how much a $26 million return in revenue to CPS would lessen a future rate hike. The municipally owned energy utility has requested two rate hikes in the last three years and is expected to request another in the coming few years.
Cabello Havrda is now one of several mayoral candidates, including her colleague Rocha Garcia, to vie to be San Antonio’s first Latina mayor.
She said she believes she has what it takes to serve as mayor of the seventh largest city in the country.
“I now represent the fastest growing district in the fastest growing city in this country, and that has taught me a lot,” Cabello Havrda said. “You know that fast growth, there's good and bad that comes from that. So it's my experience. It really, I think, makes me uniquely suited for [the mayor’s office], but also just my natural tendency towards collaboration and building consensus.”
