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Two members of the San Antonio City Council who often find themselves on opposite sides of issues want as much transparency as possible on the Spurs area deal.
District 5 Councilwoman Terri Castillo, and District 10 Councilman Marc Whyte want the city to create a publicly accessible dashboard on updates for the proposed sports and entertainment district, known as Project Marvel.
The two have submitted a council consideration request, or CCR, asking for the city to make it happen.
Think of a CCR like a bill in the legislature. The process includes the CCR going to the council’s governance committee as the first step to becoming reality.
The dashboard has a goal to “strengthen public trust, financial transparency, and project accountability, ensuring that all commitments made to the people of San Antonio are delivered as promised,” according to the formal filing.
“With nearly up to a billion dollars of public investment, we believe it's important that we create this dashboard to ensure that the Spurs and the city are delivering on the promise made to San Antonio and Bexar County taxpayers in terms of timeline, transparency, and what metrics and goals we are meeting in terms of the construction and the movement of the project,” Castillo said in an interview with TPR.
Investment in the Spurs arena has received differing public opinion, mounting a large but mostly disorganized opposition campaign known as “No Project Marvel” during the election cycle against a massively funded $7 million political action committee run by the Spurs.
Last month, Bexar County voters approved one of the first steps in the process by green-lighting the use of $311 million in venue tax money as the county’s portion.
“The framework of the deal has been agreed to. The public has had a chance to weigh in and has voted to move the project forward,” said Whyte. “And so now it's a matter of getting … the details of the contracts in place, so that everybody signs on the dotted line, and we can move forward with the land acquisition necessary and move towards breaking ground and building this thing.”
Whyte and Castillo are asking for the governance committee to move this forward at an upcoming meeting with the hope of it being started administratively rather than a full council process which could take months.
“I’ve always said that it doesn't matter to me if I disagree with one of my colleagues on one day. It's our job to turn around the next day and find areas in which we can agree. That's good government. That's what I think the people of San Antonio want,” Whyte said.
The two council members, while politically diverse and on different sides of votes, said they wanted to work together for transparency.
“We both value transparency and ensuring that if there are large public investments, that the public are well aware of how those dollars are being materialized. And of course, the accountability component—we want to ensure that this project stays on track, given the large amount of public investment,” Castillo said.
The dashboard already has the support of three additional council members who have signed onto the CCR — Sukh Kaur from District 1, Marian Alderete Gavito from District 7, Misty Spears from District 9.
