A pair of old foes faced off in the lone debate of the Bexar County Judge race on Thursday night.
“My motivation for getting in this race was to stop Ron Nirenberg from becoming Bexar County Judge,” Republican Patrick Von Dohlen told roughly 100 attendees at the Texas Public Radio’s Irma & Emilio Nicolas Media Center.
The two men were on opposite sides of many issues during Nirenberg’s eight years as the mayor of San Antonio, including legal fights over whether to allow Chick-fil-A in the San Antonio International Airport, funding for the city’s first Advanced Rapid Transit bus lines and a controversial reproductive health fund.
In a blue county, Nirenberg is now heavily favored to become the next county judge.
He defeated incumbent Peter Sakai by a nearly 25-point margin in the Democratic primary, and has laid out a vision for taking county government beyond its traditional roles of running the court system, the jail and emergency response services.
“Most people think that Bexar County, all they do is provide your tax bill and a jury summons. But I want you to expect more,” Nirenberg told the audience Thursday.
“County government should support the working families that it’s meant to represent. That’s why I want to make healthcare more accessible, I want to keep our communities safe, and I want to make it easier, not harder, for our neighbors, working families, to get ahead.”
Von Dohlen, a longtime conservative activist, was the only candidate to seek the Republican nomination after his efforts to recruit others turned up short.
“I saw the writing on the walls of what was going to happen [in the Democratic primary],” Von Dohlen said Thursday. “We’ve had over eight years of disturbing [leadership] by the former mayor of San Antonio.”
Bexar County’s budget grew by roughly $1 billion during the pandemic years, from about $1.8 billion in the 2020 fiscal year to nearly $3 billion by fiscal year 2023.
Federal relief dollars were flowing, property values were on the rise and the county opened an entire public health department during that span.
Now four years later, the federal pandemic relief is expiring, property tax revenue is down and the county’s $2.6 billion budget for fiscal year 2027 pulled more than $68 million from reserves to avoid a tax increase.
Nirenberg said the decision to cut public health spending was “one step in the right direction,” but that bringing the county’s current spending in check would require significant consolidation of services with other government and public agencies.
“There is no reason that this community needs two public health departments: one in the city of San Antonio, one in Bexar County, and we’ve got to close that gap,” he said.
Nirenberg wouldn’t say whether current leaders’ decisions had left the county barreling toward an inevitable tax increase in future years.
“What I will do as county judge is work across government, including other jurisdictions in our community, other cities, to reduce duplication of services, eliminate redundancies. We’ve got to make sure that we do that first and foremost,” Nirenberg said.
Von Dohlen, a financial advisor, said he didn’t necessarily agree with the public health cuts, but that he could sympathize with county leaders kicking the can on big spending cuts because they lack big-picture planning.
“It’s crucial that we get in there and we audit every dollar, we measure it, and we deploy it officially for core services first and foremost,” he said. “And public health is certainly one of those core services.”
