111. The Last Word - Leave the City Bond Elections Alone

Bob Rivard [00:00:04]:
Welcome to The Last Word, my weekly commentary on life and work in San Antonio and Texas. The best government is local government, The people closest to the challenges and opportunities in any given city or community are the leaders who live and work there. Take San Antonio, for example, with its city manager form of government. Locally elected officials and professional municipal executives manage the city's finances, its budget, capital projects essential to critical infrastructure like roads, sidewalks, flood control, water and sewage systems, etcetera. And in fast growing sunbelt cities, even the most ambitious bond programs fall short of addressing all of the community needs. San Antonio's Local Leaders call on voters every five years to approve new bond cycles. The last such bond was $1,200,000,000 covering 183 capital projects. It was approved by voters in 2021 for the twenty twenty two-twenty twenty seven cycle.

Bob Rivard [00:01:05]:
A new mayor and city council will be tasked along with city staff to identify projects in the coming year for the 2027 bond. The Republican controlled state government, including the Texas legislature and all state agencies, have been taking aim at home rule authority in the state's major cities for many years now. The Republican party has a locked grip on the state budget, and the majority needed to pass laws that diminish the power of city managers, mayors, and city councils in predominantly Democratic cities and counties. So San Antonio once again finds itself in the crosshairs. The state local separation of powers enshrined in the Texas Constitution has guided San Antonio and other home rule cities for more than a hundred years. That separation has served citizens well. Governor Greg Abbott, however, has urged state lawmakers to further constrain city authorities by changing the rules governing bond elections, which now require a simple majority of voters to approve. Abbott and the state legislators carrying the proposed legislation wanna change that to a requirement that two thirds of voters approve the bonds.

Bob Rivard [00:02:17]:
School boards would face the same hurdle. No such hurdle, of course, is being proposed to elect statewide officeholders. As the San Antonio report noted in its article this week, if approved, House Bill twenty seven thirty six would take effect in September. Notably, that would be ahead of a November bond election the city has been considering to fund streets, sidewalks, and utilities related to Project Marble at Hemisphere. A similar proposal, House Bill fifty four ninety, would take effect early next year. Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai and the county commissioners are considering asking county voters to increase the venue tax in the November election to help pay for their share of Project Marble. Unfortunately, the Texas legislature continues to be dominated by rural and suburban conservatives who wield outsized influence over the state's major metros, which are home to two thirds of the 30,000,000 people in Texas, but also to most of the Democratic voters. That makes San Antonio and the other major metros a target, a political target.

Bob Rivard [00:03:25]:
At the same time the bill is under consideration, a political action committee controlled by Abbott is seeking to control the mayor's race in San Antonio by providing former Texas secretary of state Rolando Pablos with outsized campaign funding. Individual voters and donors are limited to giving a maximum of $1,000 to mayoral candidates. PACs, like the one established by Abbott, can spend unlimited sums. PACs can also funnel dark money to candidates, concealing the source of that money long enough to keep voters in the dark during the campaign. It often takes months to trace the political contributions, including those coming from arch conservatives outside the state. State leaders can claim their only interest in passing this legislation is to reduce city debt burdens, but such oversight is the job of independent credit rating agencies to determine each city's debt capacity. San Antonio is doing fine with those agencies and does not need rural and suburban legislators with no connection to the city telling us how to manage our bond elections. Pablo can demonstrate his independence from Abbott by acknowledging that the Republican initiative is a bad one disguised as fiscal restraint when in fact it's rooted in crass political considerations.

Bob Rivard [00:04:45]:
There is no good governance at play here. Any new state law that limits the city's bonding capacity will only make the city's most challenging issues multigenerational poverty, inadequate public school funding, the housing crisis, and underfunded public transit system even more intractable. Engaged citizens and their locally elected leaders know their city best, both its attributes and its deficits. Taking away local control provides state leaders with another political victory in their campaign to keep Texas a one party state at all costs. But the cost, of course, will be borne by you and me. If you care about San Antonio's fiscal health and its continued capital improvements in this fast growing metro area, you would tell your elected representative to oppose any legislation that further ties the hands of local leaders. If Governor Abbott and legislators truly wanna make a difference locally, they should take the long overdue step of directing the Texas Education Agency to consolidate public school districts wherever possible. In Bexar County alone, that would free up tens of millions of dollars now spent on administration and overhead and allow that money to improve teacher pay.

Bob Rivard [00:06:01]:
That's my last word for this week. We'll see you next week. Please share this episode with friends and colleagues, and do sign up for Monday Musings, our weekly newsletter, at bigcitysmalltown.com. Big City, Small Town is brought to you by Western Urban, building the city our children want to call home, and Geekdom, where startups are born and smart ideas become businesses. Our producer is Corey Eames, video by Erica Rempel, and sound engineering by Alfie de la Garza of Sound Crane Audio. We will see you next week.