Monday Musings Extra: A Vote for Beto, A Vote for Change

Welcome to a Monday Musings Extra!, a special edition of our weekly newsletter to remind readers that today is the first day of Early Voting (April 22-29) in the May 3 City Election. 

Starting today, voters will go to the polls to elect a new mayor to lead San Antonio, as well as city council members and a number of school board races. My strong recommendation is that you cast your vote for mayoral candidate Beto Altamirano, listed 23rd among 27 candidates on an unnecessarily crowded ballot. Beto is worth your patience in the voting booth. Please scroll through the long list of mostly unknown candidates and the handful of other credible candidates to check Beto’s box.

I see seven serious candidates with credible campaigns competing for your vote. Please ignore the 20 other names on the ballot. The ability to pay a token $100 fee is no measure of a would-be candidate's qualifications.

Let me make the case today for Beto, and explain why I find other leading candidates, while qualified in various ways, less suited to meeting the opportunities and challenges in San Antonio, one of the country’s fastest-growing major U.S. cities, and one at a true inflection point.

The campaign

Beto has mounted the most effective citywide campaign of the eight leading candidates, which includes four current members of San Antonio City Council, and Beto and two others branded as “outsiders” by at least one sitting council member running for mayor. I do not consider former council member Clayton Perry a credible candidate. Others do, but as noted below, I do not believe he is fit for a leadership position of any kind.

Beto is no outsider. He’s a bilingual Rio Grande Valley native who deliberately chose life and work in San Antonio after earning an impressive education at the University of Texas-Austin and Harvard. He has since made his mark here as the creator of the city’s 311 app, an entrepreneur who has both started and acquired businesses, and built a record of service in local and regional government entities.

With his fellow founders at Iryss Technologies, a cybersecurity company, Beto is a small business owner in a small business city. Many small business owners feel overlooked and unduly stressed by municipal bureaucracy as well as street, drainage, and utility improvement projects that in some cases have run years longer than promised, not to mention well over budget. With Beto, they will have a much-needed ally at City Hall unafraid to hold staff accountable.

His vision for the city has been spelled out during a months-long “listening tour,” and at countless community and neighborhood gatherings. He is articulate, on point, and deeply briefed on the issues. He occupies a place left of center on the political spectrum, but well within the moderate range, a pragmatist more than a partisan.

You can delve deeper into Beto’s position on the issues by visiting his website, and by watching my recent conversation with Beto on bigcitysmalltown. 

Is city council experience the only path to the mayor’s office?

City council service is a commendable path to serving one’s home district in the city, and until the recent charter change on term limits approved by voters, a great way to undertake a two-year crash course in municipal government and process. It is not necessarily an incubator for vision and leadership.

Certainly, many mayors have made that transition successfully in the modern era, including Lila Cockrell, Henry Cisneros, Nelson Wolff, Julían Castro, and Ron Nirenberg. Less successful were Dr. William Thornton, Howard Peak, Ed Garza, and Ivy Taylor.

District 9 City Councilman John Courage has been the most outspoken of the current council members running for mayor to rail against Beto in multiple candidate forums for somehow cutting the line without first getting elected to council and waiting his turn to run for mayor. What nonsense!

Mayor Phil Hardberger was the most effective and widely admired mayor over the last 20 years, yet his background was in practicing law and serving as a judge on the state’s Fourth Court of Appeals. He proved to be a wiseman, someone with the intelligence and leadership style to get things done in four short years. Without term limits, he would have remained unbeatable at the polls.

Let me deal with Courage’s candidacy before proceeding. John was a superb councilman and district representative, pragmatic enough to win re-election the maximum three times in his conservative district. He was the first of the candidates to launch his mayoral campaign. Yet in December, the 72-year-old announced his withdrawal from the race, writing, “While I remain passionate about public service, I must also acknowledge the realities of my age and health.”

One month later, Courage endorsed District 4 Councilwoman Adriana Rocha Garcia for mayor, only to wait one more month and jump back into the race. Courage, now 73, was one of two candidates who did not respond to our invitation to appear on the bigcitysmalltown podcast, so I have not had the opportunity to ask him why if his age and health were a serious issue in December, suddenly they are not an issue now.

Rocha Garcia, the candidate of choice for the San Antonio Express-News editorial board, would certainly make a better mayor than Courage. His return to the race probably saps votes from her column. Adriana, an educator and single mother, has been a strong, totally engaged council member over the last six years, focused on the basics for her district residents, collaborative with her colleagues, yet global in her approach to the job.

I do not think she would be as compelling as Beto in serving as the chief ambassador and economic development advocate for San Antonio in recruiting companies and job creators to our city, an area where we are showing significant progress yet still lag far behind Austin, Dallas, and Houston. Beto’s preparedness, communications skills, and private sector chops give him the edge. Still, San Antonio would be well served were voters to elect the city’s first female Hispanic mayor.

Watch my conversation with Rocha Garcia on bigcitysmalltown.

Fellow mayoral candidate and District 6 Councilwoman Melissa Cabello Havrda has labeled another candidate, District 8 Councilman Manny Pelaez, “la chancla,” or “flip-flop,” but she also could apply the term to Courage. He would be 78 at the end of his first term, and 82 if he completed two terms. We do not need an aging senior at the helm of San Antonio.

Hardberger was 70 when elected, but he was of sound mind and body, and as I can attest from our lunch at Liberty Bar last month, he remains sharp and engaged at age 90. Hardberger was elected before we experienced the consequential impact of deteriorating intellectual capacity in former President Biden, and now, in the incoherent ramblings and falsehoods of President Trump.

If ever there was a time in American politics, nationally and locally, for older generations to cede the stage, it is now.

Cabello Havrda also has been a strong representative for her council district. She stumbled seriously, in my opinion, when she led the ill-fated charge to fire City Attorney Andy Segovia. Without taking sides on the issue of his performance, her efforts with other council members to terminate the head of what amounts to San Antonio’s public law firm was an attempt to end-run San Antonio’s city manager form of government.

Watch my conversation with Cabello Havrda on bigcitysmalltown. 

The next mayor and city council will have to take the measure of City Manager Erik Walsh now that San Antonio can pay a competitive salary and recruit nationally, as it did when Hardberger convinced Sheryl Sculley to leave Phoenix in 2005 for what became her transformative 13-year term in the job. The new mayor and council can give Walsh a vote of confidence, or they can make a change. They cannot directly manage the city’s 9,000 civilian and 4,500 uniformed employees from the dais. 

Cabello Havrda has joined others in hanging “la chancla” albatross around Pelaez’s neck, but his high profile work as an attorney for Toyota at its inception here, his service as past board chair of Brooks City Base, and his work with Verano, the Las Vegas investors who donated the 700 acres that have become the thriving campus of Texas A&M University-San Antonio, represent a range of experiences that other sitting council members cannot match.

District 8 has produced more mayors than any other district in contemporary times, so it will be interesting to see whether that gives him an edge with voters. Watch my conversation with Pelaez on bigcitysmalltown.

Former District 10 Councilman Clayton Perry has high name recognition, good and bad. He, too, did not respond to our bigcitysmalltown invitation, no surprise given my views on his unsuitability for public office. His 2022 drunken hit-and-run episode, captured on various police and business videos, is a humiliating, hard-to-watch documentary of a destructive binge drinker in full denial.

The negative impact of outside money on local elections

The undue influence of unlimited outside cash on the race should be a critical issue for concerned voters. Former Republic Secretary of State Rolando Pablos, and former Under Secretary of the Air Force and congressional candidate Gina Ortiz Jones are both benefiting from outside political entities, partisan advocacy organizations, and political action committees to put their thumbs on the scale against the locally-funded candidates.

Citizens and local businesses can donate a maximum of $1,000 to candidates, but outside groups that donate through PACs face no limits. Gov. Greg Abbott appears prepared to spend hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, to elect Pablos, a highly competent and competitive businessman and former high-level state political appointee.

Pablos, a fully bilingual attorney with extensive experience working in trade and in Mexico, is a genuinely likable pro-business Republican who touts his relationship with Abbott while assuring voters of his independence. I do not believe Pablos can ride into the mayor's office backed by Abbott’s bottomless political war chest – much of it coming from out-of-state political extremists – without owing his fealty to the state rather than the city.

If Pablos were self-funded by individual and business contributions, I would feel differently. He is otherwise a superbly prepared candidate in terms of experience, intellect, focus on economic development, job creation, and education as the city’s most effective anti-poverty initiatives.

Pablos has an origin story equal to Beto’s, but make no mistake. He is Abbott’s man in the race, and this governor and the Texas legislature have engaged in non-stop attacks on the independent governance of big Texas cities for the last decade.

The latest example? A bill in the Texas House would change municipal bond elections from simple majority votes required for passage to a supermajority two-thirds vote. It's a blatant attempt to meddle in big city finances and limit the use of public debt to finance critical infrastructure investments. The governor and conservative rural and suburban Republican legislators have decided they are better equipped than the nation’s top independent credit agencies in assessing municipal fiscal health.

In our bigcitysmalltown conversation, I gave Pablos the opportunity to distance himself from the bill. He did not take that opportunity. 

Gina Ortiz Jones, another San Antonio native who rose from an immigrant family to success, is a U.S Air Force veteran with an intelligence background who is pivoting from a national to local political force.

Ortiz Jones was the 2018 Democratic nominee for Texas's 23rd congressional district, which runs from San Antonio to El Paso and includes most of the Texas-Mexico border. She narrowly lost to incumbent Republican Will Hurd, and ran again for the seat in 2020, but was defeated by U.S. Navy veteran Tony Gonzales. After her second loss, she joined the Biden administration for a 20-month stint in the Pentagon as Under Secretary of the Air Force from July 2021 to March 2023.

Ortiz Jones is an impressive, data-driven candidate. If she is an unfamiliar presence in local politics, she is home-grown and displays a broad understanding of the issues, the city’s history, and its challenges.

Watch my conversation with Ortiz Jones on bigcitysmalltown.

Ortiz Jones is one of only four of the seven leading candidates to submit a candidate statement in response to the questionnaire we distributed to all candidates. The three others were Altamirano, Rocha Garcia, and Pablos. In her candidate statement, Ortiz Jones cites endorsements from at least 11 national advocacy groups. While all of those groups engage in work that is important to their constituencies, ceding them influence on local elections is not in the best interest of San Antonio.

Like the Pablos campaign, Ortiz Jones is well-funded by outside interests. The weight of that money can only serve to reduce the voice of local voters and donors.

A Vote for Beto, a Vote for the City’s Future

Beto, 35, is the same approximate age as former mayors Henry Cisneros, Julían Castro, and Ron Nirenberg when elected. A husband and new father, Beto has the energy, focus, and support of his business partners at the company he co-founded, to devote his full attention to the job.

His bicultural roots on the border, fluency in Spanish and many personal and professional contacts in Mexico position him well as San Antonio navigates the increasingly complex politics of its advanced manufacturing sector upended by Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs and our important cross-border trade relationships with Mexico and Canada.

His focus then and now has been on San Antonio. He can bring a fresh, bottom-line approach to the city’s major public works projects as the next council debates the 2027 bond, and bring more critical oversight of the city manager regarding underperforming directors.

He also has the strength and smarts to negotiate a successful Project Marvel, the city’s biggest proposed public-private partnership in history. Nothing unites San Antonio like the Spurs, and nothing embodies the city’s excellence or international profile more than the Spurs. A new arena promises to return the team to its original home at Hemisfair and ignite further downtown redevelopment that will make the center of the city a place as welcoming to its residents as to its visitors.

Above all, Altamirano, perhaps more than any other individual since Henry Cisneros, holds the promise of elevating San Antonio on the national and global stage, not by exaggerating our size or rank, but by focusing on our many centers of proven excellence and the opportunity here as well as our cultural uniqueness.

Much is at stake for San Antonio. While I respect the many people I know who have chosen another of the leading candidates, I’ll be voting with great confidence and anticipation for Beto. I urge all undecided voters to join me.