Roughly a year into her first term, Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones is calling for some drastic measures to address a ballooning budget deficit: Reconsidering funding for a new $1.3 billion Spurs arena, sunsetting a workforce development program that’s popular with some of her closest political allies, and axing funding for popular events like Fiesta and the San Antonio Book Festival.
Under San Antonio’s weak-mayor form of government, however, Jones has little power to do any of these things alone.
And after months of irritating colleagues with her go-it-alone approach, she could soon be the one left holding the bag on the biggest tax increases in decades.
“My administration inherited a mess,” Jones vented to reporters after Thursday’s council meeting. “This $158 million budget deficit did not happen overnight. This was years and years of poor decision-making.”
Six weeks out from its budget vote, the City Council returned from July recess with tensions as high as ever.
Members have been grumbling privately all week about the slew of memos the mayor released about her spending plans without consulting them.
On Thursday, a low-stakes vote over a community advisory board ended with one member accusing the mayor of lying about the status of the arena deal and the mayor requesting mediation from the city attorney.
Then on Friday, a trio of council members raised the stakes with a press conference in which they characterized Jones’ budget efforts as “disingenuous” and an unwelcome distraction in the middle of the council’s busiest season.
Despite not having the support to put a Spurs funding vote on the ballot, they pointed out, Jones has proceeded with a listening tour to rally residents in favor of the idea, the first of which kicked off last night.
“We are literally coming back from break in a really tough moment — one that I have not had to experience as a council person before — [and] I don’t get to go lobby my colleagues and ask for the things that we really want,” Councilwoman Sukh Kaur (D1) said at a press conference outside City Hall on Friday.
“We have to make really tough decisions, and instead we’re here fighting the democratic process,” Kaur said, referring to last November’s vote on the Bexar County portion of the arena funding, which city leaders made their own agreement with the team contingent upon.
Flanked by leaders from the Greater Chamber of Commerce, the San Antonio Board of Realtors and CENTRO, Kaur, Phyllis Viagran (D3), Ivalis Meza Gonzalez (D8) demanded that Jones abandon efforts to defund the Spurs arena and Ready to Work job training program — money they said can’t easily be used to fill gaps in the general fund.
“Our residents deserve transparency, accuracy, and honest discussion about the upcoming budget,” Viagran said at the gathering. “The city’s proposed $489 million contribution toward the downtown Spurs arena has no impact on the current fiscal year 2027 budget deficit — a deficit that has grown 17% since last year, and [since] this mayor has taken office.”
In an interview after the event, Viagran clarified that the mayor isn’t responsible for city expenses growing faster than its revenue has.
But as one of the council’s longest-serving members, she said it wasn’t fair for Jones to pin the blame on past administrations doing their best to stimulate San Antonio’s economy and workforce.
“I don’t think it’s [Jones’] fault — this is the economy,” Viagran said. “We didn’t raise property taxes for 30 years when we were on an economic upswing, then the pandemic hit, and [now] globally we’re feeling the crunch.”
‘Years and years of poor decision-making’
After several years of slowed economic growth, this year San Antonio is actually projected to take in less property tax revenue than the year before — even as it remains among the fastest-growing communities in the country.
The city’s arena contribution can’t be used to plug the hole because it comes from property tax dollars on surrounding development that doesn’t yet exist.
But the overall investment in the sports and entertainment district includes infrastructure needs that could consume as much as half of the city’s bond capacity next year — leaving little money for streets, drainage, parks and other projects unless the city raises its debt service tax rate in addition to the other increases already planned.
Last year, Jones says she saw this coming. She fought to delay the city’s agreement to help fund the Spurs arena until they had more information about their financial state, but was overruled by five council members who called the city manager and asked him to go around her to call a vote.
Now, Jones is harkening back to that moment as she calls for a citywide vote to reaffirm the arena investment.
“Last August, we had the term sheet for the Spurs arena for all of 96 hours. I asked for a strategic pause and was out-voted,” Jones said in a statement this week. “That day, I let my colleagues know I would ask them to let city taxpayers vote on the city’s $489 million contribution.”
But she still lacks the support of her colleagues, who say they weren’t looped into her plans, and are now being attacked by Jones for resisting
Speaking to reporters this week, Jones’ frustration was palpable. Across the city, she said, families are stretching each dollar farther every day and making adjustments to what they thought they could afford.
“Of course today’s finances are informing how they’re thinking about major investments,” Jones said. “That’s just what normal-ass people do.”
A weaker-than-ever mayor
San Antonio’s mayor has long held less power than in other large cities, with most day-to-day business and spending decisions overseen by the city manager.
Before Jones took office, City Council members further weakened the position by expanding their own power to put items on the agenda and advance their policy proposals without the mayor’s help.
Now, despite recently electing one of the most progressive mayors and councils in San Antonio history, it’s become common for members to vote down the mayor’s big-picture visions to set the city on a different course.
“We are an 11-person body. Each of our votes counts as one, no more than the other,” Kaur said Friday.
At that press conference, member after member stressed that economic development is the way out of the city’s budget woes — not the place to cut costs to balance the budget — even if they don’t have any data to point to on how the sales tax or other revenue will increase with the new Spurs arena.
The same goes for the Ready to Work program, they said, which started under then-Mayor Ron Nirenberg and has been slower than expected in reaching its goals.
“We should not confuse economic development with the responsibility of balancing the city’s annual budget,” Viagran said Friday. “… In order to build our revenue, we need a workforce in our community that spends and invests. In order to do that, we need new businesses, we need new headquarters, and most especially, we need to keep the headquarters that we have.”
COPS/Metro defends Ready to Work
In an unexpected move, many of the people standing with the council members on Friday were members of the COPS/Metro Alliance, a faith-based group that was among Jones’ closest allies in questioning the city’s arena investment last year.
COPS/Metro hasn’t taken a position on Jones’ call for a second vote on the arena funding, but the group came to advocate for the Ready to Work program she’d like to sunset, which they consider one of the city’s most significant investments in human capital.
Even in the face of a deficit, Father Jimmy Drennan, one of the groups’ leaders, said it was a bad idea to start moving money around in ways that could violate the will of voters.
“[We cannot] create a precedent where we begin playing a shell game, where we take the money that was for Ready to Work and move it to something like Pre-K 4 SA, and then take the money that was going to Pre-K 4 SA to balance the city budget,” said Father Jimmy Drennan, one of the groups’ leaders.
At a crucial budget moment, the group’s plea seemed to ask the council to find a way to get along.
“… We have the capacity within our city government — the city manager working with our City Council and our mayor, they can close this gap,” Drennan said.
Texas Public Radio reporter Joey Palacios contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared in the San Antonio Report.