Monday Musings #14: The Mayor’s Race Comes Down to the Wire
Early voting in the Saturday, May 3 city election commences in eight days. The majority of voters vote early, so if you are one of them (and I am), you will have April 22-29, eight days, to help elect a new mayor and your city council representative.
With everything that has happened and continues to unfold daily at the Trump White House, it seems like the city election has hardly received the voter attention it deserves. Polls show a bunched up crowd of candidates. There have been almost daily mayoral events in recent weeks, but the burden of 27 candidates on the ballot has made it a real challenge for even the most dedicated voter to discern the difference among the leading eight candidates.
It won’t get any easier when voters enter the polls and realize they must scroll through multiple screens to see every name in the mix. Next week I’ll be sharing my choice for mayor and explaining why, and why others in the race are not my first choice. It won’t surprise you to read here that I believe we have multiple worthy candidates amid a larger field of unqualified candidates. Fortunately, there is little chance a long shot stands a chance of even making a runoff.
The San Antonio Report held the one event that I thought put a spotlight on the candidates. You can read their coverage here. An event I attended at Texas Public Radio only drew six of the eight candidates campaigning who delivered two-minute sound bites. A more recent event at the Sheraton Gunter Hotel also failed to attract all eight top candidates.
Here at bigcitysmalltown, we are dedicating all of April to individual candidate interviews that run 45 minutes each. Our aim is to give voters a more in-depth sense of the leading candidates than they might get at the various community forums where candidates are reduced to hurried soundbites.
Some time ago, we invited eight candidates on to the podcast. Six responded positively. District 9 City Councilman John Courage, who previously dropped out of the race, citing his age and health, only to jump back in, did not respond.
Neither has former District 10 City Councilman Clayton Perry. Given the certainty of my confronting Perry on his drunken hit-and-run episode captured on camera as he lay inebriated in his own backyard, I am not surprised. He should not be running for public office again, in my view.
Beto Altamirano was the subject of our first mayoral podcast released Friday. In order to post all of the mayoral episodes before early voting, we will post our interview with Distrcit 4 Councilwoman Adriana Rocha Garcia tomorrow (Tuesday) and our interview with District 6 Councilwoman Melissa Cabello Havrda on Friday.
We will follow with individual podcast episodes featuring District 8 City Councilman Manny Pelaez, former Democratic Congressional candidate Gina Ortiz Jones, and former Republican Secretary of State Rolando Pablos.
In the likely event of a runoff, we will invite the two finalist candidates to appear again on bigcitysmalltown.
While I deplore the city’s low bar for gaining admission to the election ballot ($100), we did send all 27 candidates a questionnaire with 10 topics, thus giving even the candidates who are not campaigning and whose motives for getting on the ballot are far from clear the opportunity to share their positions on the issues.
Seven of the candidates have responded, but only three of the leading candidates. There is still time for other candidates to send in their responses in advance of early voting. We will close the postings on April 21. Here are the seven we have posted on the bigcitysmalltown website:
- Beto Altamirano
- Adriana Rocha Garcia
- Rolando Pablos
- Gina Ortiz Jones
- Christopher Reyes
- Jade McCullough
- Armando Dominguez
We hope our efforts here at bigcitysmalltown and Monday Musings help bring the race into focus for you, and we hope that San Antonians will surprise the candidates and the media and turn out in strong numbers. Local elections tend to attract less than 15% of registered voters, despite their importance to the future trajectory of the city. This is your opportunity to exercise your right and privilege to participate in democracy at the local level. Don’t waste your chance.
Bob Rivard
Host, bigcitysmalltown
Robert “Bob” Rivard is a veteran American journalist whose 46-year career has taken him across Texas, Latin America, and beyond. He co-founded the Rivard Report (later named the San Antonio Report) with his wife, Monika Maeckle, in 2012, building it into the city’s leading nonprofit news organization before retiring in 2022.
Bob has worked for five Texas newspapers, beginning his career on the border at the Brownsville Herald, then moving to the Corpus Christi Caller, the Dallas Times-Herald, and later serving as a foreign correspondent and chief of correspondents for Newsweek. He returned to Texas as senior editor of the San Antonio Light before becoming executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News (1997–2011).
His journalism has earned widespread recognition, including being named Editor & Publisher’s “Editor of the Year” in 2000 and receiving the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia University for his reporting on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border.
He is the author of Trail of Feathers, a nonfiction book chronicling the disappearance and murder of journalist Philip True in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. The book, published by Public Affairs in 2005, was widely reviewed, excerpted in Esquire, and selected by People magazine as one of five recommended nonfiction works that year.
Bob now hosts bigcitysmalltown, a podcast featuring the people shaping San Antonio’s future. He and Monika live in Southtown, where she runs the Texas Butterfly Ranch blog and previously founded the annual San Antonio Monarch Butterfly and Pol… Read More
