As local leaders continue to push Project Marvel, plenty of questions remain about how the Frost Bank Center will be used in the future and how new development might be attracted to the area around it. Credit: Courtesy Photo / Frost Bank Center

Cityscrapes is a column of opinion and analysis.

Project Marvel keeps barreling ahead in a manner appropriate to its moniker.

“Community planning workshops” about the proposed downtown sports-and-entertainment district are scheduled to begin June 24, ostensibly giving residents their first chance to “engage” with the grand plan.

But the real marvel here is how little of the grand scheme city officials have bothered to make clear, and how little say the public ultimately will have in the project whose price tag could reach $4 billion.

Marvel was birthed and developed behind closed doors at City Hall, obviously intended to be pushed through at the May city election with Mayor Ron Nirenberg and a supportive city council still in office. But County Judge Peter Sakai was apparently unwilling to commit to the scheme with so much uncertainty still surrounding its cost and specifics.

Sakai’s unwillingness to immediately jump on board pushed back the original schedule, and a public vote is now more likely for November. Even so, the delay hasn’t really produced any more substantial answers to the most fundamental questions about the project, namely its feasibility, its financing, its timing and indeed, its purpose and strategy.

City staff have presented residents with a single, grand, long-term plan with no opportunity to consider options, alternatives or other possibilities. It’s been packaged as a take-it-or-leave-it deal, with only a limited public say on some elements of the overall scheme, notably the vote on the county venue tax and a likely vote on some $250 million in infrastructure improvements needed to make the first phase work.

With that in mind, here’s a brief rundown of the things we still don’t know:

  • The realistic cost of the proposed Spurs arena that would be a centerpiece in Protect Marvel, which staff has so far estimated at $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion;
  • What the Spurs are prepared to pay and how;
  • How much the county venue tax will cover;
  • How much the city’s components of the deal — the project financing zone (PFZ) and tax increment reinvestment zone (TIRZ) — will contribute;
  • How much will come from private sources;
  • The specifics of the arena itself;
  • What events beyond Spurs games the city is planning for, which it categorizes in presentations as “large-scale national and international events;”
  • What “an activated district full of amenities within a quarter-mile walk” would actually contain and look like;
  • Who the planned “private developers” associated with the project would be or what or whether they would contribute to paying for the public development;
  • Anything about the market feasibility or actual performance delivery of the new convention center proposed under Project Marvel;
  • Why we need a new 1,000-room hotel that also would be part of the project;
  • What kind of new private development the city is seeking and planning for;
  • What’s involved with the “re-imagined Alamodome” proposed under Marvel or how much it might cost;
  • The cost of the proposed Land Bridge linking the Alamodome and the Spurs arena;
  • How the Frost Bank Center, the Spurs’ current home, will be used in the future;
  • How any new development might be attracted to the vicinity of the Frost Bank Center;
  • What the plans are for the neighborhoods around the Frost Bank Center.

When city staff revealed initial details about Project Marvel last November, the timeline included finalizing funding mechanisms, exploring delivery options and identifying project and hotel partners by the end of 2025. We’re now being asked to vote in November on a project where we have yet to see a finalized funding plan or project and hotel partners — and where residents have been presented with no other alternatives.

All of these questions need firm, definitive answers before there can be any meaningful community planning or engagement process.

But, above all, we need to have real choices. Why not a new arena at the county fairgrounds site? Why not improvements to the existing Frost Bank Center? Why not other sites they might require less costly infrastructure and development of a land bridge?

Then there are the choices surrounding the proposed 1,000-room hotel. Why not a smaller one? Why not a different site? What about the “UTSA School of Hospitality” that was pictured in staff’s November presentation on Marvel? Or choices about the “re-imagining” of the Alamodome and the cost of further public investment.

Above all, San Antonio residents need to have some meaningful choices about what the Spurs are prepared to commit. Not only in terms of their financial outlay for the arena, but their long-term commitment to this city and supporting the community. With up to $4 billion in public funds at stake, the entire community — not just the Spurs organization, its ownership and die-hard fans — should benefit from this project.

Newly sworn-in Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones and the reconfigured City Council should at least call a timeout on Project Marvel. We need answers to all the above questions and more, and we need a meaningful process of participation, involvement and choice. We don’t need a rush to a vote in November.

That lack of choice has been an all-too-common fixture of past projects pushed by the City of Sn Antonio. Too often, residents have suffered through an inadequate planning process so leaders could rush to a vote, and that’s given us public projects that cost more than estimated, take longer to realize and ultimately fail to deliver on the grand promises.

San Antonio can and should do 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 Jun 26 – Jul 9, 2025.