On the record is brought to you by Steve and Adele Dufilho San Antonio is a fast growing, fast moving city with something new happening every day.

That's why each week we go on the record with Randy Beamer and the newsmakers who are driving this change.

Then we gather at the reporters roundtable to talk about the latest news stories with the journalist behind those stories.

Join us now as we go on the record with Randy Beamer.

Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us for on the Record again this week.

I'm Randy Beamer, and this is a special edition of On the Record at the end of the year.

We are going to be going through the top five stories as chosen by a couple of our special guests, the top journalist in San Antonio, who also come in and talk about the stories we have.

Andrea Rush, who is local government reporter for the San Antonio Report and editor in chief Sanford Nel, one of the San Antonio Current five.

Number five the spate of dog attacks.

Just this month, you wrote a story about what the city is doing, raising some minimum fines about dog attacks, trying to make a difference in this problem.

Yeah.

So we're going on year two of dogs as a theme for story of the Year in San Antonio.

We've had now, I think our seventh, dangerous attacker or seventh, mauling of this year in San Antonio.

But this started back in, February of 2023, when we had an 81 year old veteran who was mauled to death by some dogs in San Antonio.

That really started.

Yeah, started this whole discussion.

And so then this past month, we finally reached some conclusions at City Hall.

They're going to increase fines for if dogs are off of a leash.

And they instituted a $1,000 minimum fine for if your dog bites somebody.

And you were talking about how this is such a long problem that we have had not just since February of 2023, but decades.

Yeah.

I mean, this is this is a situation where, you know, animal care services went before the city, council during the budgeting process and said, look, you know, we know that there's just this problem going on.

We we're we're not even able to respond to all of the calls we get about dangerous dogs.

I mean, and it was it was alarming the, the lack of response that they admitted that they, they had they so they were understaffed, something.

Like one third of critical calls get a response.

The rest maybe get a letter some day.

Yeah.

Right.

And so, you know, the budget, they got a 33% budget increase, which was the biggest of any city department.

And these kind of things raise the question, why in San Antonio do we continue to have problems like this that just snowball and we don't take serious steps about solving them until it's really kind of reached this cataclysmic level.

It's like, you know, when Brackenridge Park, we don't maintain Brackenridge Park for decades, and then suddenly everybody's surprised when, you know, we're having to chop down trees and repair these crumbling, you know, walls that are in danger of spilling over and, you know, hurting somebody.

Although we did last year after the first, dog attack, the fatal dog attack, go to the legislature, and it looked like they were going to have a solution.

Yeah, but in, as a nod to that, maybe this is a San Antonio specific problem.

They came up with some legislation, and all of the other Texas cities said they maybe you guys do your own thing, San Antonio, get your own dog problem.

They ended up narrowing that legislation down to where it would only, if applicable, to San Antonio.

And then Governor Abbott vetoed it and also said, I don't think that criminalization of dog owners is like the way to solve your problem.

Come back with some other answers.

Do you think this one, the fines will go to the legislature or something?

We'll go to the legislature and maybe knock down those fines or not, because Abbott's not real happy with any kind of local control over anything, really.

But a big piece of this.

The most recent rules that the city came up with was an allowance that if you have a neighbor with an issue with a dog, you can report their dog and get it on the dangerous dog list, which means that it has to have certain issues to go out with.

A muzzle has to have a certain regulations.

And they said you can do that anonymously because they didn't want people to feel intimidated by reporting their neighbor.

And you would still eventually find out if you go to court who accused you and your dog.

But the next step, they're saying is, take that to the legislature and see if it can be a permanently anonymous process.

Animal lawyers are skeptical that this is the solution to this.

Other cities are skeptical that.

This is maybe Ken Paxton or Greg Abbott saying due process.

That's not you're not giving a dog owner a due process.

What do you think?

Yeah, this is a problem that has been snowballing for, for, for years, decades even.

I have had friends come to San Antonio, stay in Airbnbs and up and coming neighborhoods and say, you know, I really love Dignity Hill, but damn, you got a lot of stray dogs running around San Antonio, a lot of people, people from other cities noticed this.

And I think we for some reason have become, you know, you know, immune to it until it started, you know, it's still you still you saw, Ramone that had attacked and killed on the street in front of his brother.

And a lot of what they say isn't stray dogs so much as people who own those dogs, just letting them loose.

And that's what they hope this will crackdown on.

Right.

Well, I think that's part of the answer.

But I also think education, I also think, spay neuter programs.

I think I think if we're going to undo this amount of neglect, it's going to take a action on a lot of fronts for.

And now the number four story in San Antonio for 2024, the charter review and the charter amendments passing in November.

And that is going to have, a little bit of an impact on how much the mayor makes, how much city council makes, and also on the city manager, because that was somewhat controversial, years ago.

Tell us about the charter amendments and and the review.

Yeah.

I mean, there were six of them that came up, and they proved to be surprisingly non-controversial for the most part.

Right?

I mean, voters passed all of them, the, the although, it's worth pointing out that the, the pay raises and the term limit extension, both of those passed by just north of 50%.

So those barely passed.

The rest of them, pretty overwhelmingly passed, in the big one, I think, was the, you know, the, pay raise that we saw for mayor, city council, city manager.

Of course, there was, you know, the fire union, initially convinced voters to pass a, you know, a punitive measure that was designed hitting back against the city manager, Cheryl Scully, who was a city manager, as a personal thing.

Oh, yeah.

They were in a fight over a union, over a labor contract.

And that was sort of their way, it hitting back at her.

Ultimately, that led to her leaving city government.

And it put, not only, pay limits on what the the city manager can earn, but also term limits.

So Eric Walsh, who was the current city manager, looked like he would have to leave in 2027.

Now that voters have approved, that change, he doesn't have to.

Leave and he could also make more money.

And so this all ended with, you know, a conversation about, will we really need to restore, you know, put the power back in the hands of the city council, just like a company's board would have the power to hire and fire their CEO.

That's that's the right way to do this.

And then came back with a plan to give him a raise that would make him the second highest paid city manager in all of Texas.

That would be a a $87,000 raise that they're going to consider at the next meeting.

That would put him at $461,000, still less than Cheryl Scully was making, but more than everybody.

It's up to the city manager in Austin.

But it seems like all they're all happy with him.

And he, as I understand, I'm trying to remember when he was in junior high, he was planning to be city manager.

He was like training himself.

That's what he's always wanted to be.

Well, and so I think six people or at least a half dozen city assistant city managers applied for that job when he was chosen.

I'm sure some of them were thinking, he's going to hit this term limit in 2027.

There's a job for me to be had.

Not the case anymore.

But also the, what they were going to pay the mayor when the charter review came out.

First they were going to pay or they recommended paying the mayor and city council members more than they wound up on the charter review or the charter amendment.

Right?

Yeah.

That's correct.

Very dramatic.

It was, they suggested $125,000, I think, for the mayor.

And that the people who came for the charter review meetings were not happy with that.

But the pay equity thing has been such, a sticky subject, even when it was just city council.

City council got that recommendation from the Charter Review Commission and said, we need to pare this back down.

But even amongst the ten of them, it was one of the most dramatic discussions of the year.

What is fair pay in a city where there's so much need?

And there were certainly some some name calling on the day as every.

Yes, the three lawyers said, this is enough money.

And everyone else.

Yes.

No, it's not.

Including some of.

The happier to work out.

Yeah.

Part time jobs while they're on city council.

Yeah.

And it goes back to, Phil Harshbarger when he first wanted to get people getting more than what was a $20 a meeting or whatever, that they weren't getting anything.

And people were saying, that's why we have people who have gone to prison and things like that on the city council.

Yeah.

Well, I think, I think you can look back at it.

Another factor there in terms of the bad old days of some of that behavior on city council, it went in, 1991, they passed these, these, term limits that basically limited people to, to two year terms on council.

And so you really had, you had, let's just say, some fairly unserious people running for that office.

And, and consequently, you know, we saw that up to, to, to for two year term.

And now it's, changed to two, four.

Year term.

That's correct.

So they say they won't have to campaign nonstop to.

Get a big raise, and they don't have to run for reelection as often.

Three.

And that does bring us to number three of the top stories of 2024 horse drawn carriages.

After being an issue again for decades, city Council just voted ten to nothing to phase them out.

But over a period of five years, anyone surprised by that.

Was the first Texas city to do it.

Lots of cities across the country have been talking about this.

Some of them.

There is now a really active horse drawn carriage lobby that fights these things.

They actually tried to pass legislation in the last two sessions to protect horse drawn carriages in Texas.

They're passing that all over the country.

They thought they were protected by that larger preemption bill that's sort of tied up in the courts.

But this all started, what, two years ago now, if CCR was filed a council request for consideration to phase these things out, as Councilman Jalen Mickey Rodriguez and Councilwoman, Phyllis Vega on who she ended up being kind of a skeptic of this plan by the end after meeting with the the industry.

She wanted the five year, phase out instead of three years.

She ended up saying she wasn't going to vote for it unless they extended it to a five year transition plan.

You had some council members at the last minute saying, I don't know that we've proven that there's a a transition plan for these folks.

And this was some of the most dramatic council meetings of the year.

They packed these meetings with, farriers and large animal veterinarians and her horse drawn carriage drivers to talk about their jobs and these horses.

And it was hours and hours and hours of discussion on this over the course of two years that ended in this ban that, still five years down the road, doesn't start cutting back hours and stuff for three years, but.

It also doesn't really give, you know, they had talked about phasing out or moving to, electric, carriages and things like that that wasn't brought up in this or I mean, they talk about that, but not put it in the, in the language, in the, in the.

Report about all kinds of things.

They thought about moving them to parks.

They said, let's get them off city streets.

They didn't wind up going that route.

They thought about, the electric carriages, a transition to electric carriages.

One of my favorite quotes from all of the city council meetings was the research they had done on horse drawn carriage drivers, and they were like, well, they're kind of, entrepreneurial and and they like horses.

So I don't know if the electric carriages are going to work.

But do you think, again, talking about the, campaigns coming up and a number of council members running for mayor, I don't believe many realize he abstained from this vote.

I think.

That it wouldn't be fast enough.

We wanted them off the streets ASAP.

So, but do you think that's going to affect what they do next on this?

Or if they do.

More, I would not be surprised if we saw them, moving towards approving some sort of electric carriages or some, some other sort of alternative transportation downtown that appeals to tourists.

I mean, I do I do think you could make the case, that a number of the people on the, on council were less concerned about these things moving slow and being a, a potential traffic obstruction and more about the animal welfare part of it.

I guess the question becomes, do you get enough support, for that?

But again, with the legislature or session coming up in January, do you think the legislature will kill this idea of where you can, city can ban?

If I had to guess, yes.

They opened that carriage.

Horse folks have openly courted, Dustin Burrows, the guy who wrote the the larger preemption bill.

They're asking Ken Paxton for help on this.

They're making an open appeal to people that agro tourism needs protection.

And we've certainly seen, the Republican elected officials at the state level eager to punish big blue municipalities like San Antonio.

And that's just been a theme that's been running for years now.

And this will be the next kind of I don't want to say culture war, but it is.

I've heard Texas.

Turned into one in which it so surprised me from the beginning of this argument.

And then it turned out, you know, the there was a lot of animal welfare concerns, and the accidents involving horses.

And they said, actually, there isn't any of that happening in San Antonio.

We have one of the most highly regulated horse drawn carriage operations in the country.

There's there's very few incidents here.

And then it sort of changed the argument to horse, Exploitation, that it wasn't necessarily cruelty, but exploitation.

Yeah.

And I always think of one of the first conversations that I'd had about this was with them, the veterinarian for the city who said, we have so many mistreated animals in this city, I can tell you that the horses are one of the most regulated ones.

To the number two story that had a development just this month as well is the missions baseball stadium and the complex around it.

The last, I guess, obstacle, SARS, these parking lot.

C-i-s-d said, okay, you can have it, but there's a deal on this, so it's still early, but you think the missions baseball stadium and that whole complex is a go, That's an interesting one.

No, I mean, I think it it is, it seems likely that, you know, if the board at C-I-S-D approved it, that there it's going to be a serious attempt to negotiate that particular deal.

We'll see if you know how much is too much in terms of what they're asking, but they already have sort of come back a little bit off of there are initial, demand because they had.

A lot and they have leverage.

They were the last piece of the puzzle.

Yeah.

Let's go backwards here.

You ask if this is likely to happen of the two big stadium plans that we're talking about, this one, the developer, Weston Urban, already owns most of the property.

City and county have been relatively on board.

This last piece of land, this last parcel of a dusty parking lot owned by a San Antonio ISD, may or may not have been critical to it.

That kind of came up at the school board because.

The stadium.

Stadium won't go.

There isn't going to go there.

It's the stadium funding relies on a lot of other development in that area to pay back the bonds.

Needs the money from that development to pay off bond.

So tax increment reinvestment.

Yeah.

So it is a careful balance of how this all comes together.

But they own most of the land.

So it seems like that one's a better bet than the other stadium project looming this year.

The, the C-I-S-D superintendent we had in we were talking with him and he, I don't know if was on camera or off, said, you know, we have a lot of leverage.

And they use that because they they got a whole lot aside from a lot more money than the land is worth currently.

Right.

They had really it wasn't.

They asked for 20 times the value of the land currently.

That is what one developer said.

And they were criticized for being, exploitive of this process.

The, the they took a lot of criticism for their asks.

And in the end, they got some of them.

They didn't get some of them.

Interestingly, the tough thing on their list that they wanted was affordable housing promises.

Well, and, and and that is interesting because, I mean, we have seen despite the, you know, city leaders continued, statements about we understand San Antonio has an affordable housing crisis, and we're doing something about it.

Here is an example where you have a a low cost.

It's not technically classified as an affordable housing.

So factory apartments.

Have.

Torn down.

But they are affordable housing units downtown.

And there aren't very many affordable housing units downtown at all.

And they're basically going to raise this property, move those people out.

And I think.

But there's no real timeline on that yet.

Right?

There is a timeline, but it's a few years and but before before the entire complex goes, it's going to basically be, as I understand it, knocked down into two different phases, but they're already sort of were, you know, people that started moving out and one of the issues we saw was it the city said.

And Weston Urban said, we're going to give you 2500 bucks to cover your move out, and we're going to set up this help this nonprofit to sort of coordinate things.

Meanwhile, some people have already moved out and they're saying, where's my money?

And alas, the city and Weston Urban are saying, well, you know, it was all contingent upon us, getting this deal moving forward.

And and here is here's the essay question mark over it.

So we can't really pay you until that gets resolved.

But they did get the seat on the, San Antonio Housing Trust Board.

Yeah.

So strange, right, that a school district wants to be involved that involved that level of involvement in affordable housing.

But they have had to close schools this year.

They see their student, their, school aged population shrinking in this in the the urban core.

And it's led to school closures that were widely unpopular that they took a ton of criticism for.

And so it's a really interesting argument happening at that school board meeting this week about why affordable housing is become their interest.

But but if you if you have that exodus, I mean that's a school age children you know.

Yes.

It's not just downtown, it's in their whole district as there are a lot district.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think, I think it's, I think it's easy to see why there's some concern there from the, from the trustees about losing affordable housing in their district and having kids moving out.

I do I do think it was interesting, though, that, you know, we kind of, saw city council in people at the city level put the cart before the horse in that they basically had this this council vote in October wasn't right.

What they said there was a deadline for the Major League Baseball.

Had this deadline that.

But, you know, the past the the team was going to explode and everything was going to be terrible if we didn't hit this deadline and have a deal.

And, you know, so the city Council voted to approve this thing.

And then we realized, oh, they haven't done a deal with that c-i-s-d. And it turns out that's trickier than some people thought, and that's relocating people out of, the soap factory.

That's a little trickier than we thought to.

Yeah, it just seemed like there was this eagerness to get this deal done by what I think a lot of critics would argue is an artificial deadline.

Well, and to your point, did you ever in your in your newsroom's reporting, see evidence of the MLB threatening to relocate them?

No, I don't know that we ever saw a letter or.

No.

In fact, you know, my my, staff writer Michael Kalas was going around talking to people on council, talking to city staff, talking to the team, talking to Weston Urban, saying, where did this deadline come from?

Where's the document from MLB that says that there is this October deadline on on getting a deal done.

Miraculously, nobody could come up with that document or even clearly articulate how that came to be.

One.

And that brings us to our top story of 2024, another stadium project that has also been shrouded in a lot more mystery than what we have heard so far about the missions baseball stadium.

That is the awesomely named Project Marble.

Yeah, this is the Mega Sports Complex idea.

People with the city, the Spurs, you know, chamber commerce types have been talking about in a hush hush fashion for months.

And we finally got an unveiling of what that would be, a new Spurs arena downtown.

It would be renovations to the aging Alamodome.

Alamodome, 150,000ft² added to the Henry B Gonzalez Convention Center.

UTSA School of Hospitality would be constructed downtown, and we would turn the John Wood Courthouse into a 5000 seat concert venue, which rates the questions how many downtown concert venues do we really need in San Antonio and.

Land Bridge, though this is another thing.

It's kind of that's what they are.

It seems like the Project Marvel, they're thinking outside the box, the land bridge across 281.

Project Marvel combined.

You mentioned the land bridge that was because of a federal grant that is available to, help cities that were divided by highways that the the Biden administration offered.

And so that somehow got thrown into, okay, we could use that money.

So maybe that could be a land bridge that connects to Project Marvel.

Then there was also something from the legislature that they offered some state money to renovate facilities like convention centers and concert venues, and so that it's some state money coming together, pieced together over here to make this one big patchwork of things, but it makes it so that there's a lot more places where things could fall apart from the outside looking in.

We don't even have a price tag for it because it's money from here, money from there.

And yeah, I mean, I think the the thing that's driving this to some degree is this the Spurs have an aging facility.

At some point we're going to have to think about, you know, what, what kind of facility are they going to be playing in?

How is that going to be funded?

But I think what you're also seeing is a concern, in San Antonio, that a lot of big cities have and that is, downtown's have not really recovered since the pandemic.

Right.

Everybody got sent home to work.

Some of people have come back and we've been seeing, you know, a lot of vacancies downtown.

And then a lot of cities have gone with these, you know, sports districts, right, with the notion that if you put a whole bunch of stuff together, you have this critical mass and it generates all this, you know, economic development and all this, this, this new, you know, stuff going on around it that revitalizes an area.

Although I think a lot of, people who study those things would say the jury's still out.

Whether that stuff really works, there are a lot of, economic consultants that go around telling you, oh, it's going to have this sort of generational generator effect, and it's going to result in all these jobs being created.

And if you talk to other economists on the academic side, they'll say, this is all a bunch of smoke.

And what do you.

Think about the local reaction to this and what that's going to be?

It's different than the baseball stadium because that's a tax increment reinvestment zone.

Everybody knows or believes it'll be fees and taxes.

That doesn't hit me as a property tax owner, but the Spurs we don't know about.

The early conversation does involve some public funding, which you've got groups that specifically opposed public funding for private development, that.

Even if it is separate fees and not property tax.

Yes, but have said that they will fight this thing to the death if if that if it involves public funding.

But that's coming from the county.

And I think to take it one step further, of all the pieces that would need to align for this, the county County judge Peter Sacchi has said, okay, a key ingredient of this is that we find a use for the Frost Bank center on the east side that was supposed to spur the development there.

We've got this tentative bus line that could go east west and connect to that, but without a plan in place for how to redevelop and find a good use for that Frost Bank center, they're not willing to contribute.

County money hasn't been a plan to do that yet.

They're going to put together some demands.

But even that bus line that was kind of a critical piece of it.

Who knows what happens with that in this administration?

The Biden administration put those bus lines in its budget.

But who knows what happens with the Spurs as well?

We have when getting better and better, and that could help push Spurs fans and a good part of the public.

Yeah, I think that I think there will be a certain part of the population who's going to be enthusiastic about this because of the Spurs involvement, but I would also like to bring us back to the The Charter review story, looked at the non-controversial parts of that amendment votes.

Right.

Let's have a city ethics policy update.

You know, that passed pretty swimmingly.

But when you look at the more controversial stuff, getting the pay raise.

About the money, yeah.

People barely edge that up over 50%.

I mean, the two most controversial charter amendments passed by just over 50%.

And there was really not a whole lot of opposition.

I mean, the fire union kind of came out and they kind of had some people standing at the polls holding signs and that sort of thing.

But it was not the the forceful opposition.

And you.

You expect with a huge project like you.

Would expect, but you are going to see that, I think, on Project Marble, and I think the margins are already razor thin for controversial stuff that gets put in front of voters.

Let's see.

And so you're going to be busy and making money and contributing to the tax base.

Well, I'm I'm happy to have some job security that's all.

Yes.

And speaking of which, you can check out Sanford Nowlin, the editor in chief of the San Antonio Current.

I'd say current.com, and Andrea Drost, local government reporter for the San Antonio report.org.

Thank you very much.

And thank you for joining us for the special edition of On the Record.

You can see this show again.

You can watch any previous shows.

You can see them at a number of previous shows.

I recommend that you can download podcasts.

Just go to klrn.org I'm Randy Beemer.

Happy holidays and we'll see you next.

On the record is brought to you by Steve and Adele Dufilho