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The San Antonio City Council held a meeting on Wednesday to publicly discuss changes to a key policymaking process Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones informed her colleagues about in July.
Three council members signed a three-signature memo last month, a rarely used process which requires that a public meeting be held to discuss an issue, after repeatedly arguing the changes went beyond Jones’ legal authority and that they empowered unelected city officials.
The top concerns were new requirements for city council members to get an initial from both the city manager and city attorney before filing any new Council Consideration Request (CCR), the primary policymaking tool for council members.
The current CCR ordinance requires that council members notify City Manager Erik Walsh of new policies, but not that he sign off on them. Jones has said getting his initials on the CCR is the way to prove that required step has been taken.
The ordinance also calls for legal reviews of policies by the city attorney after they’ve been filed rather than before, but does not explicitly say earlier reviews can’t take place.
A majority of the council appeared to at least agree that any changes need to be voted on, even if some agreed with or were ambivalent to the specific proposals.
Jones has said her changes to the CCR process were up to her discretion and that they were intended to make the process more efficient.
She drew a sharp distinction between herself and her predecessor, and she said her intention was not to abuse the system.
“I’m not Ron Nirenberg, I’m not slow-rolling these things,” she said.
Changes to the ordinance that regulates the CCR last year largely came out of frustrations with how former mayor Nirenberg managed the policymaking process.
City Attorney Andy Segovia said the lack of external legal risk, the non-contradictory nature of her changes to the existing CCR ordinance, and the fact that the mayor is empowered with the authority to create, assign, and disband council committees were why he believed Jones’ changes were legal.
District 5 Councilmember Teri Castillo, District 7 Councilmember Marina Alderete Gavito, and District 10 Councilmember Marc Whyte signed the three-signature memo and spoke on Wednesday about why they believed any changes to the CCR process should be considered by the full council, not just the mayor.
“We don't have executive orders in San Antonio. We do not have executive orders,” Whyte said. “The mayor is one out of 11 people. She has no additional powers than anybody else sitting around this table.”
Castillo said the city council discussed some of the same proposals last year when they amended the CCR ordinance that Jones made in July.
“One of those conversations that we had, in 2024 rather, was the recommendation for city council to check in with the city attorney, and that recommendation was rejected by the council,” she said.
Castillo said if they want to have that conversation again, they can, but that it needs to be done by the entire city council, and not just the mayor.
She said it didn’t matter if Jones would be better than Nirenberg on moving policies through the process.
“I can't think about the change in leadership,” Castillo said. “I need to think about the governance structure as a whole and long-term.”
Jones pushed back on criticisms from her colleagues that the changes could give the city attorney, city manager, or her own chief of staff the authority to block policy proposals and said they had no veto power.
Jones said even if Segovia’s legal opinion is that a proposed policy violates state or federal law, that wouldn’t block it from being considered by the full council.
Segovia and Walsh agreed that the changes didn’t give them any new power to stop policies from moving forward.
“I'm indifferent,” Walsh said of the notification process. “You all decide how you want to do it.”
Whyte said a vote on the mayor’s proposed changes needs to happen sooner rather than later.
“The people’s business is being held up,” he said. He added that colleagues hadn’t filed prepared policies as a result of uncertainty about the process.
Councilmembers also expressed frustration and the desire for a vote about the mayor’s decision to call for all uncompleted CCRs filed before the new council was elected to be wiped away, even for council members who are still on the city council.
“The move to have folks resubmit CCRs that did not get across the finish line is really in line with every other legislative body — state, federal, et cetera,” Jones said. “And I think what it also does is give due respect to the folks that have been newly elected to ensure that there remains sufficient support for that.”
Alderete Gavito pointed to a CCR of hers filed in 2024 about protecting cluster mailboxes from theft that had already moved through key policymaking steps, like being assigned to a committee, as one where all that work may need to be done over again if she has to refile it.
“I'll tell you this, taxpayer dollars have been spent already on these CCRs, right?” Whyte said. “Council staff, city staff, they've gone through Governance Committee, they've gone through other committees, and to all of a sudden say, we're going to stop and do it all over again, right? Makes absolutely no sense.”
District 1 Councilmember Sukh Kaur said the city council was meaningfully different from other legislative bodies like the Texas Legislature.
“We don't have a set time frame in which we are legislating,” she said. “We're full time, so we are constantly evolving and constantly making policy.”
Councilmembers suggested CCRs from former members who are no longer in city council might be dismissed after each election cycle, or CCRs that were filed but never got a committee assignment could be considered expired.
But they said that decision needed to be up to the full council.
“What we're going to do, I think, I hope, is get together with this mayor and try to work together to do something that we can all live with,” Whyte said.
Walsh may put the item on a future A Session for a council vote, or council members could initiate another three-signature memo to force a vote.
