Monday Musings #8: A $5 Billion Bet on San Antonio’s Future—Who’s Paying?

🚨NEWS ALERT: Longtime Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff shook up the mayor’s race last Thursday with an enthusiastic endorsement of tech executive Beto Altamirano for mayor. That has to add serious energy to the campaign just days after the city clerk’s drawing of ballet positions that landed Altamirano in position 23 among the 27 candidates. Given the small computer screens voters see in the voting booths, that’s probably going to require Beto’s supporters to page through a few screens to find their guy.

Wolff first held office as the city councilman from District 8 and then went on to serve as mayor from 1991 to 1995. He was succeeded by another District 8 resident, Dr. William “Bill” Thornton (1995-97), and current Mayor Ron Nirenberg (2017- present), also from District 8. Wolff’s endorsement, then, is a pointed rejection of current District 8 City Councilman Many Peláez, whose name will appear – you guessed it – #8 on the mayoral ballot.

Districts 8, 9, and 10 traditionally account for more votes in local elections than Districts 1-7, but this election, that turnout could be negated by the plethora of Northside candidates. Peláez will have to contend with District 9 Councilman John Courage, former District 10 Councilman Clayton Perry, and former Republican Secretary of State Rolando Pablos, whose principal support likely will come from the city’s Northside. 

And to answer newsletter readers who have asked: Yes, I, too, intend to publish an endorsement in the race, although that will not come until the candidates have responded to a questionnaire we will send out later this month that aims to get past campaign talking points. We also will schedule a series of interviews on the weekly bigcitysmalltown podcast. Mid-April seems like a good time for an endorsement, well in advance of early voting April 22-29 for the May 3 election.

For new readers of this newsletter, let me underscore my unhappiness with how easy San Antonio makes it for every pretender with $100 to get on the ballot and claim to be running for mayor. The waters are more than muddied with 27 candidates, with the majority of them unable to raise funds or mount serious campaigns, much less express a vision for the city. It’s a disservice to the candidates who are serious about running for office and the future of San Antonio. As matters stand, they’ll have to hope informed voters work their way through the list to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Stand by this week for more news.

UTSA’s Center for Public Policy Research will release the results of its February community survey, which includes polling on the mayor’s race. Dr. Bryan Gervais, the center’s founding director, appeared in Episode 80 of bigcitysmalltown. We expect to have him back again in the coming months. 

Not yet registered to vote? Here is a link to register or check on the status of your registration. Unfortunately, state legislators do not give Texans the right to register online, unlike other states that do a better job of promoting citizen engagement. Come on, Texas state leaders: get with the program and come into the 21st century!

Do not succumb to ‘news avoidance”

This is no time to dial out of civic engagement, even if the re-election of President Trump and his control of the Congress has left you depressed and worried about the future of democracy. Tuning out is not a strategy.

For those of us who remain engaged, all eyes have been on Washington as President Trump signs new stacks of executive orders while his consiglieri Elon Musk wields his chainsaw against the federal budget and agency workforce.

We will feel in San Antonio.

Local business and civic leaders are packing their bags for the annual San Antonio to DC lobbying campaign, March 3-6, and they will have plenty of agenda items as they fan out in the nation’s capital and work to keep San Antonio in the good graces of administration and congressional staffers they meet with. This is year 46 of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce’s working excursion. This year, attendees can fly on the new nonstop American Airlines flight from San Antonio to Washington Reagan, which launched Sunday, March 2. 

Let’s hope they persuade Trump administration officials not to undermine the city’s economy or some of the vitally important research work being conducted here. Many of the decisions emanating from the White House will quickly reverberate in San Antonio, whether it’s tariffs imposed on Mexican exports, our number one trading partner, or the promise to slash budgets at the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and other agencies that send significant research grants to leading San Antonio institutions.

Leadership throughout the city is rightly worried. I am hearing a lot of concern off-the-record; most are hesitant to say much publicly and be seen as critical of Trump or Musk. UT Health-San Antonio, the Southwest Research Institute, and the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, three leading centers of excellence in the city, could lose critical funding. Ditto with nonprofits dependent in part on federal funds.

The Marvel-ous Wish List will cost $5 billion. Or more.

All politics are local, right? That brings us to the growing volume of debate and conversation over the confluence of Project Marvel and the May 3 city election. It’s making for an unusually robust campaign season. Voters will want to hear what each candidate for office has to say on the subject. Meanwhile, sitting incumbents at both City Council and the Bexar County Commissioners are expressing serious differences over how to proceed.

Most elected officials appear to support the proposal to bring the San Antonio Spurs back to Hemisfair with the lure of a new arena projected to cost $1.3-5 billion, and more for a surrounding entertainment district. With lots of strings attached. Every elected official has a wish list intended to benefit their constituencies. You can see why principals like to negotiate behind closed doors, out of the public and media’s eye. Democracy is messy. You can read the San Antonio Report’s latest coverage here, and the San Antonio Express-News coverage here.

The newspaper’s editorial board called for the Spurs ownership, led by the Holt family, to pay 50% of the arena’s cost. After all, the ownership group includes two billionaires, Dell Computer founder Michael Dell and AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia, both of Austin, and multiple individuals or entities with estimated net worths in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Even without a new arena, the franchise is valued at $4 billion.

The proposed arena is the centerpiece of an ambitious, multi-billion dollar investment in Hemisfair and its surroundings that City Manager Erik Walsh’s staff is exploring. That vision would be transformative for downtown, for locals as well as the millions of people who visit the city each year.

The proposed improvements would include expansion of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center with a cost estimate of $700-900 million; a $1 billion remake of the Alamodome, which cost $186 million in 1990 dollars to build;  $100-150 million to turn the former John H. Wood Jr. Federal Courthouse, which began life as the United States Pavilion and a cinema at HemisFair ‘68, into an events center; $750 million for a new convention center hotel that would house a UTSA School of Hospitality; $60 million to purchase the former Institute of Texan Cultures from UTSA that would be razed to make room for the new arena; and a cost yet to be determined to construct a pedestrian land bridge across Interstate 37 to connect the Alamodome with Hemisfair.

The land bridge at Hardberger Park cost $23 million in private and public dollars, but it's an elevated green space not intended to move thousands of people in an urban setting. The cost of the Hemisfair land bridge would be a multiple of that number.

Even spread out over, say, the next decade, the city has never remotely attempted to pull off a project of this scale and scope. I am all in, just don’t ask me to explain exactly how we will pay for it all. But I predict a final price tag in the $5 billion range.

Do your part: Vote!