The vast number of bond-funded street projects in recent years have often taken too long and been too disruptive to residents and businesses. Credit: Sanford Nowlin

Editor’s Note: Cityscrapes is a column of opinion and analysis.

Ron Nirenberg is in his fourth, and last, term as mayor of San Antonio. The next two years provide the last chance to define and cement his legacy and shape his political future. And the mayor has apparently decided that our city government needs fixing — lots of fixing.

Indeed, Nirenberg recently issued call to reconstitute the city’s Charter Review Commission, looking to a potential November 2024 vote on changes to the current charter, adopted in 1951.

The mayor’s charge to the commission is a lengthy one — a laundry list of changes covering no less than nine specific issues. They include creation of an independent ethics auditor and revisions to the ethics review board, indexing compensation for members of city council and changing council terms to four years with a limit of two terms.

Also on the agenda are altering the limits on city manager tenure and compensation, adding additional council members and creating an independent redistricting committee. He also wants to modernize the charter “to more accurately reflect current processes, acknowledgments, and roles.”

For some, the proposed changes promise nothing less than a significant improvement in city government: attracting more candidates to compete for key city roles, stabilizing the city manager’s office, emphasizing ethics standards and boosting the abysmal turnout in city elections.

Even so, the mayor has offered no specific goals or overarching purpose for the numerous issues which will define the charter review commission’s work. Perhaps he will elaborate his own vision in the months to come. But he has been clear in recent years that he wants to see changes in the way things work — particularly in undoing charter changes that came from outside city hall and were approved by voters.

We have term limits because a majority of local voters endorsed them in 1991 — a reaction to the extended tenure of then-mayor Henry Cisneros and a number of his council colleagues. That outcome reflected a wave of dissatisfaction with a number of city policies and initiatives, including rising public debt and the purchase of a number of downtown buildings without a public vote. While those limits have been loosened in subsequent charter change votes, previous mayors and councils have been unwilling to propose eliminating them all together.

Nirenberg’s proposed changes to the tenure and pay of the city manager would undo a proposition put on the ballot by the firefighters union in 2018 —one supported by 59% of local voters. The city’s business leadership has made no secret of its desire to change or eliminate the limits on the manager. They clearly enjoyed the stability and policy focus of Sheryl Sculley’s lengthy tenure as city manager, even as dozens of members came and went from city council.

The charter review group has a substantial workload ahead if it’s to report back to council ahead of a June 2024 deadline. Perhaps Nirenberg will provide a more full, more compelling and ultimately salable justification for each of the issues he’s set out.

It’s also imperative that the review body encourages comments from a broad array of individuals and groups. The business of city government is too important to be left to narrow interests and insiders.

I had hoped that any charter review would consider how things actually work at city hall these days, and what often doesn’t. In that regard, an independent ethics auditor sounds just fine.

But a much more compelling case can be made for two other independent entities, separate from the manager and city staff. All too often, council enacts policies that are poorly explained, poorly understood and poorly evaluated in terms of implementation and results.

Examples abound. The deal to purchase the old Frost Bank building ended up costing more than promised. The vast number of bond-funded street projects in recent years have often taken far too long and been too disruptive to residents and businesses. The city’s disposal of the Grand Hyatt hotel happened too quickly with too little information and likely at the bottom of the market. And we still await what former mayor Julián Castro’s “Decade of Downtown” promised.

We could use an independent policy and program review entity comparable to the U.S. Government Accountability Office at the federal government level — an entity with a watchdog role.

Further, council would benefit from an independent budget analysis organization comparable to the state’s Legislative Budget Board or the Congressional Budget Office.

Above all, council — and the public — need far more information about the city’s public business as well as an independent analysis of the performance of its agencies.

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

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This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 12, 2023.