Monday Musings #15: The Race for San Antonio Mayor
Let the voting begin Tuesday. Here at bigcitysmalltown this April, we’ve focused our weekly podcast and newsletter on the race for mayor in San Antonio. We believe voters will make a consequential decision–one that will shape the city’s trajectory over the next four years.
The ballot is a big mess, cluttered with 27 names, mostly people you have never heard of who paid the nominal $100 fee to get their name on the ballot. I’ve seen a few of them at community forums, but most have been no-shows throughout the campaign.
We invited all 27 candidates to respond to our issues questionnaire with a promise to post their statements on the bigcitysmalltown website. We live in an age of sound bites and consultant-driven mailers; only four of the leading candidates, and three of the others, responded.
These leading candidates sent in candidate statements:
Three of the other 19 candidates also sent in statements:
We invited the eight leading candidates to come on to the podcast for one-on-one, in-depth interviews. Here they are in the order they appeared in our studio:
- Beto Altamirano
- Adriana Rocha Garcia
- Melissa Cabello Havrda
- Rolando Pablos
- Gina Ortiz Jones
- Manny Pelaez
District 9 City Councilman John Courage and former District 10 Councilman Clayton Perry did not respond to our invitation.
We have posted the six podcast episodes with candidates in the space of two weeks, keeping our pledge to present them ahead of the early voting period, which begins Tuesday and runs through the following Tuesday.
We hope our in-depth conversations with the candidates who agreed to be interviewed helps undecided voters learn more about the individuals who want to be San Antonio's next mayor, and we hope our efforts encourage more registered voters to show up at the polls. Local elections attract far fewer voters than state and national elections. We believe local elections are every bit as important and merit your participation.
With that in mind, we will be sending out a second newsletter on Tuesday in which I will offer my personal endorsement in the mayor’s race, and my views on the strengths and limitations that various candidates bring to the race. It’s not my intention to tell you how you should vote, but I do want you to know what I believe the best informed choice is and why. I welcome your feedback.
Please share our work with friends and colleagues, and enjoy any of the episodes you have not yet heard or seen, and stand by for our newsletter tomorrow.
See you at the polls!
A special thanks to bigcitysmalltown producer Cory Ames/Ensemble Texas, videographer Erica Rempel, and sound engineer Alfie de la Garza/Sound Crane Audio for doubling down on our work this month to bring extra episodes to our audience in the interest of greater civic engagement. This campaign coverage would not have happened without them.
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
