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The San Antonio City Council’s Community Health Committee voted to move forward a new round of $100,000 to the Reproductive Justice Fund to support “downstream” services, including support for abortion travel, on Friday.
The committee voted 4-0 to move the item to a full council review.
The vote came after none of the selected recipients for the city’s $500,000 Reproductive Justice Fund last year planned to use the funds for abortion travel.
Beyond abortion travel, other “downstream” services include STI testing, at-home pregnancy tests, transportation to prenatal care, and emergency contraception. Nearly $300,000 of the first round of funding went toward these downstream services.
The same committee failed to approve the funding in January on a 2-1-1 vote, where District 4 Councilmember and mayoral candidate Adriana Rocha Garcia abstained over what she said were errors in the public posting of the agenda item. District 7 Councilmember Marina Alderete Gavito voted no in the first vote, and District 1 Councilmember Sukh Kaur was not present.
In a statement, District 5 Councilmember Teri Castillo, the committee’s chair, said she had the authority to re-agendize items and chose to do so.
Alderete Gavito was absent on Friday for the second vote.
District 6 Councilmember and mayoral candidate Melissa Cabello Havrda, who wrote a memo in November calling for an additional round of funding that four of her council colleagues joined, spoke to the committee before the vote.
“In some instances, leaving the state for an abortion is the only option to save your life,” she said. “Our proposed $100,000 fund can help nonprofits provide this access to safety.”
The full council will need to vote on whether to approve the additional funding before it can be disbursed. A bare majority of the city council, including the mayor, have voiced their support for additional funding for abortion travel in the past.
Under the current version of the policy, the organizations that applied for the first round of Reproductive Justice Fund dollars will be allowed to apply for this second round in order to speed up the bureaucratic process required to move city dollars.
Metro Health's Claude Jacobs said possible future litigation and open records requests for communication between the city and service providers were potential barriers to the fund’s effectiveness and willingness of service providers to apply for funding.
Anti-abortion groups previously sued the city over the $500,000 Reproductive Justice Fund, though those lawsuits were dismissed and money from that fund was not used to pay for abortion travel.
And there are currently two bills in both houses of the Texas legislature — House Bill 1806 and Senate Bill 730 — that would prohibit municipalities from spending any tax dollars for abortion travel logistics. Neither bill has been passed through a committee yet, one of the earliest stages for a bill to become law in the Texas legislature.
Jacobs said Metro Health would need to reallocate funds from its current budget in order to accommodate the $100,000 addition if it is approved. He also added that the department is watching federal budget cuts closely; tens of millions of federal grant dollars go into Metro Health’s annual budget.
District 3 Councilmember Phyllis Viagran said if Metro Health faced cuts, the city council would find ways to support it, even potentially pulling from a pot of money current city policy has dedicated to return to CPS Energy for rate hike mitigation.
“I'm committed as a councilperson to find that money, whether it's in [CPS Energy] off-system sales, whether it's in my own on budget — y'all know I'm always going to go off-system sales — I think you have enough council people that are going to look at their budget to make sure that that Metro Health is okay,” she said.
