SAN ANTONIO – A city council committee wants the carriage to come without the horse on San Antonio streets.
The five-member Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted unanimously Monday for city staff to devise options on how to phase out horse-drawn carriages within one to three years. Staff’s presentation to the full council will happen at a non-voting discussion session by the end of October.
The decision came after an online city survey got nearly 50,500 responses, with 52% supporting a ban. The other 48% were split between keeping the carriages operating as they are, expanding them outside of downtown, or moving them to city parks.
Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), who co-sponsored the original ban proposal in November 2022, asked that the phase-out plan include options to support acquiring electric, “horseless” carriages.
Such carriages cost about $20,000, San Antonio Police Assistant Director Rick Riley told the committee.
“I’d love for it to be as expeditious as possible, McKee-Rodriguez told reporters after the meeting. “We want to be fair to the business owners, of course, and we want to be reasonable in the type of support that we can provide. You know, what a transition period would look like, I’m really interested in seeing what those one year and two-year options look like.”
Ban supporters have cited animal welfare and traffic concerns as the driving reasons for a ban. At the same time, the carriage companies have said they’re being unfairly maligned and say they treat their animals well.
The carriage companies also say they’ve offered alternatives, such as reducing their hours or the number of carriages on the street at one time.
Stephanie Garcia, who owns Yellow Rose and H.R.H. Carriage Companies, said the plan to phase out the horse-drawn carriages within three years would “bankrupt us.”
“We’ve invested a lot of money into these companies. So one to three years is just not realistic,” she said.
Garcia also doesn’t trust the results of the city survey, which she said had been spread outside of San Antonio.
A New York-based “cat behavior expert” with 2.2 million followers had urged his followers to vote in the survey if they had been to San Antonio. Conversely, the Cavalry Group, which lobbies for animal-related businesses, also posted the survey to its Facebook page and encouraged its followers to take it, noting the survey “does not require the participant to be a constituent of San Antonio.”
KSAT also previously confirmed Garcia’s claim that the survey could be taken multiple times by opening it into “incognito mode.”
City Spokeswoman Alana Reed said that while 11,000 of the responses had come from duplicate IP addresses, it didn’t mean it was the same people were responding each time.
The city’s network IP address showed up 72 times, she said, as an example, but that shows the respondents were connected to the city’s WiFi network.
“So what we found was there was no evidence of single respondents submitting multiple responses to influence the survey outcome,” Reed told KSAT. “And we can’t guarantee that respondents didn’t take the survey from multiple devices, or using different browsers, or in the incognito mode. But we do find that the data does provide a broad enough picture of how stakeholders feel about the proposal.”
Assistant City Manager Alex Lopez laid out possible transition options for the carriage operators, including learning to operate electric carriages, becoming a new tour guide operation, training for a new career through the city’s Ready to Work program, or getting a loan to start their own business through LiftFund.
Lopez said the options the city had considered so far were focused on the carriage drivers, though, not the owners.
Other members of the 11-member city council have said they support a ban on horse-drawn carriages, too, and Garcia said she’s “definitely not optimistic” about what will happen once it gets to the full council.
McKee-Rodriguez’s co-sponsor for the ban, Councilwoman Phyllis Viagran (D3), had seemed to reverse course in June, saying she was open to compromise. However, she was back on board for a full ban as of Friday when she and McKee-Rodriguez submitted a memo asking for a three-year transition plan.
“As stated on Monday, this is a process,” the councilwoman told KSAT in a statement texted by a spokeswoman. “This will be a compromise with the carriage operators that will help transition into electric carriages. As the coauthors of this CCR I think it’s important that I believe the outcome of today’s committee. Because of the continued construction and the results of the survey we do not see the horse draw carriages moving forward in the downtown area.”