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.

Joining us now as we go on the Record with Randy Beamer.

Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us For on the record this week, we are talking about a number of issues from the CPS rate increase that just took effect this week, in fact, today, as well as a number of education topics, things going on around San Antonio.

But we're going to start with that Department of Justice report that was released a couple of weeks ago now on the response to the shooting in Uvalde.

And joining us to talk about that is State Senator Roland Gutierrez.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you.

You've been on this since the beginning.

The Valdez in your district.

What did you think of that report and what ultimately will it mean, do you think?

Well, Randi, there wasn't a whole lot of new in the report.

There was a couple of things that did surprise me.

Things that I had missed is, you know, I sued the state because I wanted to have some more transparency.

There was a whole lot of misinformation that was being dealt out by the Department of Public Safety.

In some cases, out and out lies that we were able to decipher in over the course of this last 20 months, the DOJ has been doing their investigation.

The best thing is that now the world gets to see all of this failure and black and white with the DOJ seal on the front of that document.

Everything that we have been talking about that the media has talked about has proven to be true.

Law enforcement failure at every level.

Lack of communications.

Lack of training.

Lack of information.

Lack of any kind of command structure.

But it wasn't just the local cop, it was DPS, it was the sheriff.

He was even the federal team's.

Everybody that was out there could have done something about this sooner and they failed.

And I think that that's the important message when we're talking about this particular weapon, as you know, as when I sued them.

I've seen I signed a nondisclosure agreement.

I've gotten all of the information.

I've seen all of this footage horrifying footage, Randi, of of children dismembered.

You know, the only word that I can describe, one little girl with no face is just dysmorphia.

There's nothing left there.

I never use that word in my life before I knew what it was, but I never had to use it, you know, semblance of a face.

It's just that kind of horror over and over again multiplied a thousand times.

This is described as a just a scathing report they outlined, in effect, five huge areas where there were failures from failure to identify and I guess the biggest one from law enforcement's failure to identify that it was an active shooter situation and a lack of courageous action, a lack of securing the crime scene, the lack of establishing standard operating procedures, and a lack of then communicating with the families on all these things you've talked about.

But after 575 pages of the critical report, the reaction to that, what did you what have you thought of the reaction across the country and here in Texas to that?

You know, certainly I think that the national impulse was exactly what we had seen in the media.

People were very, very upset about what happened in Nevada.

Indeed, we led to the first federal gun law in the last 30 years.

And so I think that you validate was absolutely the impetus to that.

That said, there was a lot of people that were pushing back against me saying, well, why are you picking on DPS?

How come, you know, they weren't the ones in charge there?

Well, no one was in charge, but they should have been in charge.

And they take charge just about every rural crime scene in Texas.

They showed up and they failed to act.

Putting it on one cop that, you know, identified this as a barricaded subject was wrong.

They had every bit of equipment, personnel and people to be able to do what needed to be done there.

And unfortunately, that didn't happen.

And it took 77 minutes for that federal team to go in.

What about changes coming out of this now?

You pushed for changes initially at the state level as a state senator.

There have been, as you said, the gun law in response partially to this.

But what else have you been pushing for?

That hasn't happened that you thought might actually have happened, the 18 year old age to 21 for gun sales?

In all of the video footage that I had seen that I signed and that nine disclosure agreement, Randi, there was I also saw the footage from this young man purchasing that gun.

And he goes in on day one, buys his first air 15.

The next day he buys over 100 rounds of ammunition.

And on the third day, he picks up his Internet, bought AR 15 at the same gun shop, the one that he used in the mass shooting.

It would seem to me that in the few minutes that it took each one of these purchases, that someone could have said, this looks strange, this is a significant deal.

Let me call the sheriff.

This kid doesn't look right.

But none of that happened because we don't have laws in this state to protect us.

We don't have an extreme protective order law.

We couldn't have stepped in in any way.

We tried to get change to your point in the legislature, but Republicans simply weren't listening.

Even when most Republican voters want universal background checks, age limits and extreme work protective orders.

None of that happened because of, I guess, some fealty to the NRA or some strange article of faith.

I do not know.

But we still have not no change.

Now, some of the leadership of the NRA has gone on trial recently for misuse of funds and other things like that.

And some have argued that the influence of the NRA has diminished compared to what it was.

Do you see that in trying to deal or even bring up gun laws?

I think that one thing that should happen, Randi, because I think that now I'm a lot better now, but this affected me quite a bit.

It affected me for a number of reasons.

I know those families very well.

Now.

Many of them are, my dear friends, and I consider them extended family.

I see their pictures of their beautiful babies when they were alive.

And because I saw all of that horror in that room, I saw them dead.

And I think that one thing that we can change is every politician in Washington, in Austin, throughout these United States, should be made to look at those crime scene photos.

Maybe then we would create change.

The fact is, we have cowardly Washington politicians on both sides that refuse to look at the damage, and they just pontificate from from up here without looking at what actually happened to those babies, to those children.

Maybe that needs to happen for us to create real change.

What about the fact that it's been you know, we're coming up on a couple of months now since the anniversary, and it seems like after every shooting, there's a lot of talk about what might happen.

But then the publicity fades, the momentum fades.

Do you sense that here?

Well, here we are, 20 months out.

And as you said, the two year anniversary is coming up in May.

It would seem to me that this story would have died a long time ago, like every other mass shooting.

But Uvalde has been very different because of that failure that occurred, because of the cowardice that occurred from those police over and over the same refrain.

There's an air.

There's an air in there.

He's got an air 15.

He's got an assault rifle culminating in the last cop that says, I don't want to.

I only get clapped out today.

I don't want to die.

And so I think for me that you validate will continue in people's minds because of the horror of it all, because this could have been anybody's child, but more importantly, because these things don't happen in a vacuum.

Cops are fearful, Accidents happen, failures happen.

We have to understand that as policymakers are making decisions on this gun, the cops are afraid of this guy, this gun that there's a difference.

You think if it wasn't an AR 15, do you think this would have happened?

Or do you think if they had known where he's armed, say they had heard with a pistol, with a revolver or with something else?

Randi, I have a lot of guns.

I don't own a AR 15 and I don't need when I fired them.

It's incredibly powerful gun to fires, about three times the speed of my nine millimeter.

When you go in there with that air and you sweep it across the room as fast as you can pull that trigger, it's just constant, rapid fire with my pistol.

I'm going to have to point and I'm going to have to shoot and point and shoot.

It's vastly different when you're just going in there with this militarized weapon of war and sweeping a room, which is exactly what happened in those two classrooms.

What are you still pushing for today in terms of a specific changes to not just gun laws, but what's going on in Duval, the prosecution of different people, how people have been treated, say, at the state level.

We've had no accountability.

Pete Arradondo was fired.

That's it.

And the Texas Ranger still on the payroll, sitting at home on his couch where we paid him over $100,000.

Maldonado, the Texas DPS trooper that supposedly was fired, he was actually allowed to retire.

There have been zero accountability.

We're waiting now, finally, for the district attorney to finish a investigation.

She's impaneled a grand jury, and maybe there'll be some kind of criminal penalties.

Certainly nothing from politicians, cowardly politicians that refuse to do anything on this issue, both in Washington or in Austin.

Listen, if you're not going to do an assault weapons ban, do an age limit, do universal background checks, do universal do extreme risk protective orders, which most voters want, most Republican voters want.

There's so much we can do.

How about with DPS and what their response has been and changing policies there?

Steve McCraw said if it turned out that his agency was at fault or had failed, that he would resign.

He's never resigned.

He's still with the Department of Public Safety.

And I think after we saw the DOJ report, we now know how much do the the Department of Public Safety failed.

What do you look ahead for, say, in the coming months as the two year anniversary comes up?

The media always talks about anniversaries.

There will be a lot more publicity then what do you look forward to at that point in terms of possible changes?

What would you use that publicity for to push for the most?

It's my hope that at least in Washington, we can have some continuation of the Safer Communities Act.

And if that means limiting magazine ads, if that means raising an age limit and federal extremist protective orders nationwide, we have to at least look at that.

If states like Texas, if politicians that control Texas Republicans don't want to do this, then the federal government needs to step in from the perspective of these families.

It doesn't get any better.

The only thing that they have to look forward to is some sense of pain.

They sent their kids to school nine, ten years old, and in a few hours they were gone forever.

And they're never going to come back to those families.

The bravest people I know, I couldn't get out of bed two years later and do this If I'd lost my children, I just couldn't.

Well, thank you very much.

State Senator Roland Gutierrez, appreciate you coming in and responding to this.

Again, a Department of Justice report out there, if you want to see it.

It's at their website, 575 pages.

Thanks for coming in.

Thank you, Renee.

As of right now, this week, if you get your energy from CPS energy, the rates have gone up by four and a quarter percent.

Here to talk about that is Dee Dee Belmares who is with Public Citizen, an advocacy group based in Washington.

But you're based out of San Antonio, work on issues here in Texas.

And you have talked a lot over the years about CPS, energy and rate increases and transparency and things like that.

First of all, what's your reaction to this latest rate increase that we knew was coming?

Sure.

We knew it was coming.

And fortunately, it wasn't as high as they were expecting it to be.

The concerning thing is, is once again, this is the second increase in two years that city council has passed.

But now this, you know, CPS is I don't say their line, but their argument is that they hadn't had a rate increase until two years ago.

Eight years before that, they hadn't had a rate increase.

So they increased it then by single digits, again, about 4%.

Another four and a quarter percent this time.

And that it's needed to replace the infrastructure and to just update for the expansion of San Antonio.

More people.

Right.

Right.

Definitely.

They're needing to update infrastructure, invest in their people.

But it also does come at an expense to ratepayers, especially people that are really struggling to pay their bills right now.

And you wanted more not just transparency, but you want a an adviser, an independent adviser.

Where are you on getting that done?

Right.

Public Citizen, along with other community and statewide organizations, had advocated for city council to appoint an independent consumer advocate in this rate increase proposal.

This person has would have a heavy utility rate making experience that the person in Austin that advocated and their last rate increase had nearly 30 years experience at the Public Utilities Commission.

And what they do is they review all of the utilities data.

They do their own type of modeling.

They ask a lot of questions and then they make recommendations on behalf of ratepayers to their to their city council or to their to their board, whoever is the decision makers in that utility.

And that hasn't happened yet.

No, it hasn't happen.

Councilman Mickey Rodrigues put forward a CCR council consideration request in order to have that person appointed, But because the rate increase was the actual amount was revealed in October, the vote went to council in December.

It was a very short amount of time in order to get this person appointed.

And there had been a rate advisory commission, a temporary, I guess it was for two years.

Right.

Appointed a couple of years ago.

And for people who don't know what happened to that.

Sure.

The rate advisory committee was formed by CPS Energy, and this committee was tasked to give input on rates and generation, which is how CPS energy powers this the city.

So we started studied and gave input on a lot of things and including that last increase of 3.85%.

But in that timeframe, we didn't look at how rates were designed.

And in order to update them, because CPS energy's rate structure does need some updating.

And we talk about rate structure, we're talking about commercial businesses versus homeowners versus high.

It's all of them.

It's all of them.

It would include residential customers, small businesses and large customers, large commercial customers or large industrial customers who have pushed before for a different portfolio of energy generators here in San Antonio.

And we're moving toward that.

What are you been pushing for and and how are we doing in that?

First and foremost, we we community members have been working with CPS Energy to close its last remaining coal plant, this base coal plant and this is the good part of the rate advisory committee is that we were able to work through that and we came up with a date certain for the coal plant.

One unit will shut in 2027 and the second unit will convert to gas in 2028.

So that's a good thing that came out of that rate advisory committee process and that but there will still be gas and you're pushing for that to change as well.

We would like we need because of the climate crisis and because of global warming, we need to phase out our fossil fuel usage for power supply.

And and so once again, we're calling on CPS energy to look at, you know, every resource out there, 2 to 1, provide reliability, and also for the benefit of the climate crisis.

And speaking of that, solar, just last month or last month, they added another 150 megawatts solar farm that will be online next year.

Right.

And that's great.

That's that was that was welcome news that they're incorporating more renewable clean energy resources into their portfolio.

And how do we rate you think, in terms of rate fairness across the state CPS energy we had Rudy Garcia in here talking about we have the lowest rates in the state, basically.

Is that.

Sure.

I think like for example, compared to Austin Energy and we and we have to look at other municipal it compare apples to apples to other municipal utilities were a few dollars less than Austin Energy but you also have to consider that the wages are so much higher in Austin than they are here in San Antonio.

So I don't know if that's necessary.

The right comparison when we say, you know, we're the lowest, we also are the third poorest large city in the United States.

So we have to take that into consideration.

And also, we can't compare ourselves to the private lot of different right that companies that that's a different that's a different ballgame.

So we just need to compare ourselves to other municipal utilities here in Texas.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

DeeDee Belmares Public Citizen.

Appreciate you coming in.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

On Reporters Roundtable this week, we are talking education.

A couple of stories about school districts here, as well as one involving UTSA.

Tell us all about it.

As a man who's been covering all this for the San Antonio Report, education reporter Isaac Windes, Thank you very much for coming in.

We'll start with the more positive news, first of all, about UTSA and this new college they're setting up really talks about what people are into in terms of jobs and the economy these days.

Tell us about that for sure.

So UTSA is just kind of starting the process of creating a new college that's focused on AI and data science and some other kind of related topics of study.

And they're going to be kind of pulling in programs that are currently spread across four colleges and aligning them into one.

And really, they want to tap into the innovation that's happened in this last year, especially, you know, ever since kind of like revolutionized how AI is is, you know, impacting industries and how individuals are working with it.

It has created, I think in their press release, they talked about 3.5 million jobs in the coming years that will be related to these fields that need people that are able to work with these new systems.

And so I talked to some of the officials and they were saying that they want to be able to kind of tap into the rapid evolution of these technologies as they happen and be able to research them, apply them, and find how they plug in to different fields like health care, cybersecurity, etc., cybersecurity.

You mentioned that we're already big in that here in San Antonio, in the private sector, but also at UTSA.

And they have several thousand students right now in that cybersecurity kind of field.

Is this going to be headquartered in centralized downtown?

Downtown?

Yes, I believe so.

They're standing up a committee right now that will look at the structure of the college and where will be located, all of those things.

And it'll be a way to recruit new students for UTSA as well.

Yeah, Yeah, for sure.

I think that's one of the things they're banking on and then again, just kind of like building on the momentum they talked about, I think 19% growth in those programs just in the last few years.

So yeah.

All right.

And a couple of other things.

You've been going to a lot of meetings with school boards and those, as we have seen along a number of years.

I've talked about cutting back schools, cutting back teachers in South San.

Tell us about what's going on in South San now, because they've been in the news for years for different things with the school board, but now we're talking more cuts for sure.

Definitely.

So at a recent school board meeting, they voted to declare a financial exigency and that's the first step towards a reduction in force.

And really, there's a lot of factors that go into this.

A big one is the Esser funding, which is COVID relief funds that come from the federal government are expiring.

They're running out.

So that's a fiscal cliff for all school districts.

But South San plugged those funds in to kind of help with deficits that already existed.

Those deficits really opened up when a few years ago, 2019, they voted to reopen schools that have been closed for low enrollment.

Enrollment continued to decline even after that.

And so that was a very expensive decision.

And so they've re closed those schools.

They just recently voted to close West Campus.

But as they're doing that, they are now having too many teachers, you know, to to support, you know, that that amount.

So there are they're hoping that some of the teachers just through attrition that happens naturally every year or it's going to handle or they're still going to have to do layoffs.

Their hope is and they predict about 40 people just through natural attrition, people leaving, retiring, things like that to take care of the problem.

That's what the superintendent said.

But currently they said about 18 teachers and two administrators is how how many extra they have when they're combining They're combining the high schools.

So when they close West Campus, they're moving everyone over to South High School.

They will need to, through either attrition or layoffs, get rid of 18 teachers and two minister.

And finally, a different kind of story.

Been covering it.

Another school district, Edgewood, where a young trustee has been sanctioned.

Tell us about that.

Yeah.

So the youngest trustee there, Mike Valdez, was, you know, in the headlines when he was elected because he had just graduated from Edgewood.

He ran unopposed.

But, you know, obviously, it was kind of an exciting story.

All the board members at the most recent meeting were talking about how much hope they had for him.

But there's been kind of growing disagreements ever since he's been on the board.

He very regularly objects, pulls things from the consent agenda and in debates, a lot many members of the community have said that, you know, that is what they want.

They wanted someone in there to do that, that, you know, he is advocating on behalf of them and he's outspoken.

And that's what the district needs.

That's what he says as well, is that, you know, he's getting in trouble for, you know, pushing back against the administration's agenda.

But what an investigation found was that on several occasions he acted inappropriately.

So one of the ones that was cited and it was like, I think 10 minutes that they were reading all of the different things that went into this, these sanctions.

But one of them was a district member had asked him to speak up.

And so he yelled into the microphone and and that kind of made the district employee uncomfortable.

There were other things you know, related to him parking in a space he wasn't supposed to and not moving his car when a district police officer told him not to.

And, you know, kind of telling the board president she didn't know what she was doing.

So essentially he's being asked to go to professionalism, training and then he is basically given another chance.

But if he continues this behavior, what the board voted on was to strip him from committees and then potentially bar him from campus buildings.

They can't bar him from the boardroom when it's doing official business.

And I think unless, you know, it goes a lot further, they can't really remove him from the position.

But yeah.

All right.

Well, thanks very much.

Interesting kinds of stories, all kinds of stories you get to cover.

And you can read about it in the San Antonio Report.

Isaac Windes, education reporter.

Thanks for coming in the show and thank you for joining us for this edition of On the Record.

You can see this show again.

You can download the podcast or watch any of them at KLRN.org I’m Randy Beamer and we'll see you next time on the record is brought to you by Steve and Adele.

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