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The San Antonio City Council approved a new policy relating to non-disclosure agreements, an issue Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones pushed during her campaign.
The new policy discourages council members from signing NDAs and requests that they inform the city manager, city attorney, and their colleagues if they ever do sign an NDA related to city business. It does not require council members to follow these guidelines.
NDAs became a point of contention over the Project Marvel Sports & Entertainment District after several outlets reported that NDAs came up in emails between top city staff and third-party developers.
“I think lots of us that had just come off the campaign trail heard a lot about why such a major investment of multi-billion dollars had only come to light,” Jones said. “Actually, your first public meeting on it was last November, and as the San Antonio Express-News and many outlets reported, unfortunately, that was shrouded by NDAs.”
Council members and former mayor Ron Nirenberg have repeatedly said none of them signed any NDA related to Project Marvel, and District 7 Councilmember Marina Alderete Gavito reiterated that claim before the vote on Thursday.
“I do want to clarify to the public that council members were not asked to sign an NDA regarding Project Marvel,” she said. “I'm stating that into public [record] so that we can clear up any misconceptions out there.”
The NDAs mentioned in published emails between city staff and developers were requests by the city for developers to sign NDAs, not the other way around.
But Jones said the issue of NDAs coming up at all raised questions among the public about the transparency of the process that led to such a massive development proposal.
The new proposed Spurs arena is estimated to cost up to $1.5 billion alone, and the rest of the district is anticipated to cost several billion more.
The NDA update passed unanimously.
