Several readers of my inaugural Monday Musings newsletter circulated last week asked me who I was voting for in the May 3 San Antonio mayor’s race. That’s a premature question since the one-month filing period for candidates only opened on Jan. 15 and runs to Feb. 14.
I will tell you what I am looking for in the course of the campaign. For starters, I want ethical candidates, not people explaining away their drunk driving episodes or other flaws they fail to own. We’ve all made mistakes. Learning from them matters.
Voters deserve a mayor who acts like he or she is leading one of the fastest-growing major U.S. cities and puts forward an agenda worthy of such growth and opportunity. We want candidates who present concrete plans to build a more prosperous, better educated, more equitable, and sustainable city. That’s a lot, but let’s reach high.
Every elected official has to devote considerable attention and resources to addressing the city’s high rate of poverty, its low education attainment, and the city’s history of economic segregation. But I also want a mayor who recognizes and promotes a San Antonio brimming with excellence in many of its institutions and in the private sector.
San Antonio has multiple transformative initiatives on the drawing board or already underway. Seeing those projects to successful completion is critical for how San Antonio will be evaluated by talented individuals raised here, as well as the tens of thousands of people looking to make Texas their new home. If we want to compete with the state’s other major metros, we need to embrace a shared drive for excellence in all we do.
San Antonio is a city too often labeled simply as a poor, Hispanic dominant city, a step-sibling to nearby Austin, a one-dimensional description most recently repeated in a Texas Monthly article that read like it was reported and written in 1990. We have a different story to tell, and the coming campaign for mayor is an ideal opportunity to identify candidates who can tell it with conviction.
I was in a conversation with a number of community leaders last week about the looming merger of UTSA and UT Health-San Antonio. The combined institutions will be led by UTSA President Taylor Eighmy, whose vision for the city’s leading public university has seen it leap forward in multiple areas: as a Tier One research university; in its programs focused on data science, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence; in the dramatic expansion of the Downtown Campus; and in the hiring of Coach Jeff Traylor and the building of a nationally recognized Division I football program, which, in turn, has created school spirit that simply didn’t exist a decade ago.
Many citizens do not yet appreciate the potential of a new UT-San Antonio that includes a Tier One research university, a medical school, a dental school, a nursing school, and a Downtown Campus that Eighmy promises will grow to 10,000 students in the coming years. That’s a big story, one deserving to be told well and widely.
You don’t have to be a UTSA graduate or a Roadrunner fan, or even now have children whose first choice for college is UTSA, to understand that the city’s future and the vibrancy of downtown depend significantly on the continued growth and evolution of UTSA, or UT-SAn Antonio, whatever we decide to call the post-merger institution. As one person in the conversation noted, the acronym UCLA immediately conveys excellence without any further explanation. What people call the new institution matters less than how much they recognize and respect it.
As I looked around the room last week, I saw excellence represented in almost every seat in the room. The San Antonio Spurs are world-class. The Pearl is world-class. River North, a concept two decades ago, is thriving. Frost Bank, in its new tower built by Weston Urban, is the standard of excellence. Weston Urban, whose vision for multiple acres of blighted, vacant downtown properties, is nothing less than excellent as it leads the transformation of downtown into a center city as alive with locals as visitors. Project Marvel, the city’s code phrase for bringing the Spurs back to a reimagined Hemisfair, with major new investments in the Alamodome and the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, and a dramatic land bridge connecting downtown to the near-Eastside, is more excellence.
H-E-B and USAA, two major employers here and outside the city, exude excellence. Both companies are recognized nationally as best-in-class. Both are based here. Add Toyota to the list and our growing advanced manufacturing base in the city and region.
While UTSA leads the way as a public institution of higher learning, private Trinity University continues to enjoy a national reputation for excellence, attracting the best and brightest students from afar, many of whom elect to stay in San Antonio after graduation.
The South Texas Medical Center, home to UT-Health San Antonio, is home to the greatest concentration of brain power and good jobs in the city. Nearby, Texas Biomed is making groundbreaking advancements in combating infectious diseases, and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) broke ground on a $34 million facility where they will develop hypersonic engines that travel five times the speed of sound—essential to modern defense and aerospace advancements. Farther south, the former Kelly Air Force Base, Port San Antonio, and its nearly 20,000 good jobs is one of the most successful economic transformation stories in the city’s contemporary history.
More excellence, fast-growing.
Look at the revitalization of almost every urban neighborhood ringing the downtown over the last 20 years. I live in Southtown, arguably the city’s most pedestrian and bike-friendly neighborhood in urban San Antonio. Yet I can remember an editorial board meeting at the San Antonio Express-News in the 1990s, where I served as executive editor, when a group of business owners, planners and architects, and others presented the Southtown concept. It didn’t yet exist.
My point here is I am describing what Mayor Julán Castro called “a city on the rise,” words first conceived by Graham Weston, one of his SA2020 tri chairs and arguably the most committed developer and philanthropist in the downtown space.
Growth and prosperity, coupled with improved education opportunities for all, is key to building the San Antonio we all want to call home. I don’t advise putting our problems and challenges in the shadows, but those persistent issues do not define the city and we need to stop letting ourselves and others dismiss San Antonio as an also-ran. We can and do compete. We need mayoral candidates fit and ready to compete, able to tell San Antonio’s complete story, including our many standards of excellence.
Look around, they are everywhere and growing.
