Sign up for TPR Today, Texas Public Radio's newsletter that brings our top stories to your inbox each morning.
Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones held her first public town hall on Monday night in District 4 on the city’s Southwest Side. Jones took questions from the audience and gave updates on some of the issues she’s promised to tackle in her first 100 days.
She promised to hold monthly town halls in San Antonio’s 10 city council districts on a rotating basis.
One of the questions she faced was about the city’s role in immigration enforcement and whether it could protect undocumented immigrants.
“This administration is being very aggressive in these actions," she said, "and there’s just not a lot we can do at the local level—that’s just the reality of it.”
State law requires local law enforcement to cooperate with federal law enforcement when asked.
Another issue she addressed was her efforts to convince the U.S. Department of Defense to consolidate the Army North and Army South commands in San Antonio instead of somewhere else.
"If we can make a Tundra, you know what else we can make? ... We can do space manufacturing, electric vertical takeoff vehicles, UAS's, the drones, essentially," she explained. "So I think there's a lot of opportunity that's aligned with where this administration is going.”
Jones said she made that pitch to federal officials in Washington D.C. in her first weeks as mayor.
She also addressed the improvements she wanted to make to the city’s taxpayer funded workforce development program, Ready to Work: “And so I said, ‘Well, what if we made the goal, 90% of the folks in an approved job within 90 days. How do we get there?’"
That is far more ambitious than Ready to Work’s current goal of placing 80% of program graduates in an approved job within six months — a goal it has consistently failed to achieve.
Jones said the program would need to become more aggressive and more selective with the kinds of jobs it trains for in order to meet the new goal.
The mayor said her August town hall would be held in District 3 on the Southeast Side, with details to come.
