San Antonio City Manager Erik Walsh gets 23% pay raise

Despite San Antonio being among the nation’s poorest big cities, its city manager is now the second-highest paid in the state.

City Council voted 9-1 Thursday to give a 23% raise to City Manager Erik Walsh, bringing his take-home pay to $461,000 annually. District 6 CouncilwomanMelissa Cabello Havrda, a mayoral candidate, was the only member to vote against the increase. District 9 Councilman John Courage wasn’t present.

Council was able to give Walsh the raise because 54% of San Antonio voters last month approved a change to the city charter erasing a previous restraint on the position’s annual earnings.

Before the reversal, Walsh’s pay had been tied to the city’s entry-level wage, which is $18 an hour. Under a city charter amendment passed by voters in 2018, annual salaries for city managers weren’t to exceed 10 times the city’s entry-level wage. Further, city managers couldn’t serve for more than eight years.

Walsh can now stay as long as the city is willing to keep him around — and as a graduate of both Central Catholic and Trinity University, he could be embedded in City Hall for quite some time.

It remains a mystery precisely where the money for Walsh’s raise will come from, however.

When District 2 Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez posed the question, he was met by a long, awkward pause.

“Obviously, we’ll have to work within the city manager’s office budget,” Walsh finally responded. “We’ll look at that as we do the mid-year [budget], and we’ll see where we’re at.”

San Antonio faces a $27 million budget deficit over the next three years. That expected shortfall led council to make more than $30 million in budget cuts this fiscal cycle.

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This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2024.