SAN ANTONIO – San Antonio voters could be asked next fall to decide on longer terms for council members, whether to add new council districts and how to determine pay for council members and the city manager.
But the specifics of those possible ballot propositions, and others, must first be sorted out by a newly reconstituted Charter Review Commission over the next seven months.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg announced his plans for the 15-member commission in a memo to council members Tuesday. In his fourth and final term, Nirenberg tasked the commission with what one expert called a “laundry list” of issues:
- Whether to add to the 10 current city council districts
- Whether council member pay should more closely reflect the cost of living in San Antonio
- Whether council and mayoral term limits should change from four, two-year terms to two, four-year terms
- Whether an independent citizen committee should handle the decennial redistricting process
- Whether to undo the 2018 limits on the city manager position (eight years in the job and salary capped at 10 times the lowest-paid city employee)
- Whether the city should appoint an independent ethics auditor
- Whether the Ethics Review Board should be autonomous and have the power to compel testimony
- A catchall on whether the city charter’s language needs to be updated to reflect “current processes, acknowledgments, and roles”
Nirenberg has asked the commission to deliver its recommendations on those subjects to the city council by Jun. 14, 2024 — a little more than two months before the city council would need to vote to put any of the recommendations on the Nov. 5, 2024, ballot.
San Antonio voters would have the final say on adopting any of the proposed charter amendments.
Heywood Sanders, a professor emeritus of public administration at UTSA, called the list of possible changes to consider “a laundry list.”
“There are so many there’s not one focus, which is an intriguing thing,” Sanders said.
The charter can only be amended every two years, at most, and Nirenberg has so far been unable to oversee many changes. He convened a commission in 2018, but the fire union beat them to the punch and led a petition drive to get three proposed amendments onto the November 2018 ballot.
Ultimately, an amendment instituting a salary cap and term limit for the city manager position passed, as did an amendment allowing the union to bypass contract negotiations and go straight to arbitration.
The third proposed amendment failed, which would have made it easier to put referendum votes on the ballot.
One of the issues the 2018 Charter Review Commission had considered ended up making its way onto the May 2021 ballot.
During the pandemic, city voters agreed to change the charter to allow bond dollars to be used for more than just “public works,” which paved the way for the city’s first-ever $150M housing bond a year later.
You can read the mayor’s full memo and list of issues for the 2023 Charter Review Commission below:
MORE COUNCIL DISTRICTS
The City of San Antonio has maintained 10 council districts since 1977, when voters replaced the previous system of nine “at-large” council members in favor of 10 district-specific representatives and an at-large mayor.
The city’s population has exploded in the decades since. The 1980 U.S. Census counted 970,000 people in San Antonio, but by 2020, there were more than 1.4 million.
After the most recent redistricting effort finished in June 2022, each district was left with approximately 143,400 people.
Professor Francine Romero, the UTSA Public Administration Department chairwoman and a member of the 2014-2015 Charter Review Commission, believes the commission will likely consider increasing the number of districts to 13 or 14.
Romero, who is also a CPS Energy Trustee and chair of the Conservation Advisory Board, sees that number as the “sweet spot” between just adding one or two districts and “going crazy with 19 or 20.”
“Council districts can only do so much, and there’s so many people in every council district now,” Romero said. “So we need to move toward smaller, maybe more representative districts as well. Not just that they’re more responsive, but more representative for different pockets of our city.”
More districts would mean redrawing the council district maps, which seems unlikely to happen in time for the May 2025 city election.
The previous redistricting process took eight months, and there would be only six between the November 2024 and May 2025 elections.
The commission has also been tasked with deciding whether an independent committee should be charged with the redistricting process every decade rather than the city council.
In the most recent process, the council chose to let an advisory committee do the detailed work of drawing the maps; however, it was still the council members’ responsibility to approve the final version.
COUNCIL PAY AND TERM LENGTHS
A holdover from the 2018 Charter Review Commission is a question of whether to change the city council and mayor’s term limits from four, two-year terms to two, four-year terms.
The lengths would likely come with staggered elections, per the commission’s list of issues.
Sanders calls various council term limits a “perennial” issue, though he said a switch from two to four-year terms would be a “pretty dramatic” change for the city.
“We like keeping our elected officials, for better or worse, on a short leash,” he said.
The commission has also been tasked with considering whether to change how council members are paid so they are “compensated on indexed terms that more accurately reflect the city’s cost of living and lower barriers to participation in City government.”
Since 2015, council members have received an annual salary of $45,722, while the mayor gets $61,725. At the time, the council salary was equal to the median household income in the city — a number the U.S. Census currently puts at $55,084.
Former District 7 Councilwoman Ana Sandoval cited the pay as one of the reasons she decided to finish her council term early this year and take another job.
Romero was part of the 2014-2015 Charter Review Commission that recommended giving council members a full-time salary instead of the $20 per meeting stipend they used to get.
Though she could not remember why having a cost-of-living adjustment built into the charter change became “controversial,” she thinks it is important to do it now as the “salary seems really lacking.”
“So I don’t know if they’re going to consider increasing the base pay, but I think at least considering some kind of index that raises it with [the] cost of living would be so important because we don’t have to go back and do this every few years to raise their salary again,” Romero said.
CITY MANAGER PAY & TENURE
One of the least surprising inclusions to the commission’s duties is the potential reversal of the 2018 restrictions on the city manager position, which opponents say could force out a good city manager prematurely and make hiring top talent for the position harder.
With the fire union leading the charge, 59% of San Antonio voters in November 2018 agreed to cap the salary of the top city administrator to 10 times that of the lowest-paid city employee. The charter amendment also limited a city manager from serving more than eight years.
The vote was widely seen as a referendum on the city manager at the time, Sheryl Sculley. With a base salary of $475,000, Sculley was a polarizing figure, best known for her clashes with the police and fire unions.
The charter amendment didn’t apply to Sculley, who retired after 13 years in the position a few months later. But it does apply to her successor, Erik Walsh, who is already more than halfway through the eight-year term limit after taking the reins of the city in March 2019.
Walsh’s base salary for FY 2024 is $374,400. In comparison, the heads of the city-owned utilities, CPS Energy and SAWS, earn salaries of $655,000 and $593,838, respectively.
Romero sees merit in undoing the 2018 charter amendments.
“I know people are concerned about paying public officials too much, but that’s almost like saying, ‘we’re a poor city, and we don’t deserve a better-paid city manager,’” she said.
Sanders thinks trying to reverse a decision that voters made so recently could prove controversial, though he was not surprised to see it among the commission’s charges.
“The mayor made no qualms over the years about saying he’d like to see those change, particularly since he seems pleased with Erik Walsh’s performance as city manager,” Sanders said.
For his part, Nirenberg said he will hold his opinions until the time comes to vote, though “certainly I have feelings about each of these issues as a voter and as a mayor, but it is truly an independent process for the commission to be engaged in.”
COMMISSION MEMBERS
The 15 members of the commission include numerous members of the business community and people with ties to the City of San Antonio or similar institutions, like VIA Metropolitan Transit.
Though Sanders called the list of commissioners “an awfully inside baseball kind of group,” Nirenberg said it was a “broad cross-selection of folks who bring a perspective.”
“They also bring constituencies,” the mayor said. “So they will have access to, you know, plenty of public input. And I’ve charged them also with making sure that there is a process for general public input.”
- Co-Chair Bonnie Prosser Elder - General Counsel & Senior V.P. at VIA Metropolitan Transit; Former Chairwoman of 2018 Charter Review Commission
- Co-Chair David Zammiello - Former CEO, Project Quest
- Elva Pai Adams - Businesswoman; Former Wells Fargo Executive
- Josh Baugh - Director of Communications, VIA Metropolitan Transit; Former San Antonio Express-News Reporter
- Luisa Casso - Chief of Staff, Trinity University
- Frank Garza - Municipal Lawyer; Former San Antonio City Attorney
- Mike Frisbie - Senior V.P., Raba Kistner; Former San Antonio City Engineer
- Pat Frost - President, Frost Bank
- Martha Martinez-Flores - Creative Director, MMCreative
- Naomi Miller - Executive Director, American Council of Engineering Companies; Former District Director for Former TX House Speaker Joe Straus (R-San Antonio)
- Bobby Perez - General Counsel, Spurs Sports & Entertainment; Former District 1 City Council Member
- Shelley Potter - Former President, San Antonio Alliance (union for SAISD teachers)
- Dwayne Robinson - Managing Director, Robinson Consulting Group & Chairman, San Antonio MLK Commission
- Rogelio Sáenz, PhD - Professor of Sociology and Demography, UTSA
- María Salazar - Attorney & Chair, Mayor’s LGBTQ Advisory Committee