Voters line up last week to cast their ballots at a polling location on the San Antonio College campus. Credit: Sanford Nowlin
Cityscapes is a column of opinion and analysis.

“Welfare of City Depends on Election” read the headline, followed by “Adoption of New Charter Necessary to Progress, Says Mayor … Business Men Agree that Amendments Should be Passed and Tell Why.”

Sounds a lot like the literature Renew San Antonio distributed over recent weeks urging support for Proposition C in last week’s election. But no, it was a headline from the San Antonio Light in February 1914, when residents voted on city government’s new commission plan.

The rhetoric was also much the same — and the backers too — when San Antonio voters considered a new charter in 1951. The proponents of the city manager plan, led by banker and eventual Mayor Walter McAllister, argued that the new plan would “insure LOWER taxes and improved municipal services,” providing the “most democratic, efficient and economical form of local government.”

So, on Nov. 5 we found ourselves once again facing a set of propositions to change the city charter, and once again, they were backed by the city’s insiders. And clearly the most visible — and conflictual — was Proposition C, written to undo the tenure and pay limits on the city manager that the public voted to enact in 2018. The city’s business establishment had long made evident their unhappiness with the 2018 changes put on the ballot by the firefighters’ union during its battle over a new labor contract with then-City Manager Sheryl Sculley.

In 2024, just like in 1951, our business leadership wants low property taxes, perpetual outlying growth with the public infrastructure to support it, regular boosts for tourism and a city government staffed with folks who won’t oppose those objectives. The 1991 charter change that gave us restrictive term limits for the mayor and council ushered in a remarkable revolving door of elected officials, any number of whom seemed to have little interest in public policy, or much beyond their own importance and ambition. It put the city manager in an unusually strong position relative to the council and ended up working just fine for folks like Graham Weston, Kit Goldsbury and an array of local developers.

The 2018 change did succeed in moving Sculley to Austin and replacing her with veteran city staffer Erik Walsh. But its real impact won’t come until Walsh hits his tenure limit in 2027. That looming deadline and Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s status as a lame duck made a charter change effort particularly functional this year. That’s why the issue of city manager pay and tenure limits was packaged with a set of non-conflictual, easily sold charter propositions.

In the end, it worked. The full set of six charter propositions won majority support from the voters. But that support was neither consistent nor substantial.

Proposition A, a thoroughly noncontroversial proposal involving the city’s Ethics Review Board got a “yes” vote from 72% of voters who weighed in. The similarly noncontroversial Prop B on updating charter language garnered 68% support, while Prop D, allowing for greater local political participation by city employees, was favored by 63%. Even Prop E’s boost for mayor and council salaries got a 64% majority.

The story was very different for Props C and F.

Despite the volume of mail from Renew San Antonio — I got three separate flyers — and the business coalition’s tales about the wonders of a “well-managed city,” Prop C passed with just 54.4% approval, far from an overwhelming endorsement. And then there’s Prop F at the very bottom of the ballot, which increased mayor and council terms to four years with a limit of two terms, keeping the same eight-year limit we now have. There was no big campaign I could discern in favor of F, nor did there seem to be any organized opposition. Yet only 53.3% of voters endorsed the proposal, the lowest support of the six.

A large share of San Antonio voters clearly didn’t consider the propositions as six noncontroversial, “good government” measures. They registered discontent with Props. C and F in substantial numbers. While forming broader conclusions will have to happen after a detailed analysis of the precinct numbers, it’s obvious that the public considered these changes individually. The relatively slim majorities for C and F also suggest a considerable minority isn’t necessarily happy with the way things are being handled now, neither by the city manager nor the council.

There’s a lesson here, both for the business establishment and our elected officials. Selling an expansive, expensive scheme for a new Spurs arena and downtown entertainment district is far from assured. And, by next May, candidates for the mayor’s office will need to make a compelling case for what they believe the city needs — and a plan for delivering better.

Heywood Sanders is a professor emeritus of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

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This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2024.