On the record is brought to you by Steve and Adele Duflo.

San Antonio is a fast growing, fast moving city with something new happening every day.

We have a lot.

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 this edition of On the Record.

I'm Randy Beamer.

And coming up this next week, we will swear in two new city council members, two women, one of them, Dr. Sook Core joins us.

Thank you very much for coming in.

You have one of the most fascinating backgrounds and resumes I have ever heard.

But this latest thing is kind of a veering left into politics.

First of all, tell us a little bit about your background, where you're from and how you got to San Antonio.

Yeah, I would love to.

So I'm a first generation American, first generation college student.

I was born in India and Punjab, so my first two languages were Punjabi and Hindi and then moved over to Maryland, which is where my grand uncle lived.

And my family started off in the flea market business.

So I grew up in a small business household.

We were in the furniture business and so we started from flea markets and my dad and my family are the epitome of the American dream in that hard work and resilience pays off and you can have access to all the opportunity if you get have the right set in front of you.

And so while my parents were working hard in the business, I was getting a good education.

So focused on working really hard in school was privileged enough to go to Rice.

And I thought initially that I wanted to be a political scientist and go to human rights law.

I realized that law wasn't my forte.

So I shifted over to public education.

So now I've been in public education for 15 years.

That's my full time career.

But as all educators, you have side hustle.

So I got my finance background because I have a business degree as well, and I have my own education consulting organization.

So I work with school districts across the state, really helping them think about innovative school models, because what we know is that what students are learning today in school sometimes doesn't directly correlate to the jobs that they're going to have to fulfill in the future.

But back in there, you were a Teach for America middle school teacher.

Yes.

I thought you wanted to be a teacher for a time.

I knew that I wanted to be a teacher because I always wanted to work with kids and help them learn.

I in my application, I wrote, If I could change the life of one kid, then I would be successful.

And and then you realize, Wow, I can really impact a classroom.

And then you think maybe I could do that for an entire school.

And so then you kind of go up the school leadership ladder there, but then when you work at the system level, what you realize is that there are so many inequities and systemic barriers that prevent certain schools from being incredibly successful.

So you want wanted to affect policies while you were a teacher.

You couldn't do that.

Yeah.

And if you had asked me back then, I would have said, Oh, it policy doesn't matter.

It's the people on the ground and, you know, the people up over there writing policy at the state level or at the city level, they're not affecting what we're doing in the classroom.

And then you start to realize actually the trickle down effect is real.

And unless we address this, a systemic issues like the economic segregation in our city or access to health care or access to infrastructure that strong in all neighborhoods that will never get to true, equitable opportunity for all.

So from there, how did you get to San Antonio?

So I actually worked for an organization called City Education Partners.

I was getting my doctorate at Vanderbilt at the time in K-12 education leadership.

And so we were working to address making sure that every student within Loop 14, which has some of our most underserved communities, have access to a high quality school.

And then also there was a different organization you're working with for a while.

What what changed when you decided, you know, I want to be a city council member?

I was walking a school in D.C., which is where I spent a good chunk of my time, and I saw what was happening in the school.

And it was incredibly hardworking teachers, a school leadership team that knew exactly what they were doing and making all the you know, they had the leadership tops doing the right moves for kids.

And I still saw that there were so many challenges that that school was facing because they were 97% plus free and reduced lunch kids in that school.

So when you have that level of concerted trauma in a building in underserved populations, it's very difficult to help that.

And so I remember thinking that at that point that we needed to do something differently.

And having participated in leadership San Antonio and Latino Leadership Institute, I was learning about what was happening at the city, and I felt like I could be a great voice having a community engagement background through schools, but also a business background to help bring to bridge that and move our community forward.

Was there a tipping point?

Mario Bravo had some issues last fall on, I believe you were the first candidate to to declare after that.

Was that something you said?

Well, okay.

That may make it easier or so.

I had actually been thinking about running for a while, so I thought of the last term in 2021, this would be an open seat.

So I was I had been thinking about it since then.

And then when everything happened in the fall, I thought, well, this would be a good opportunity.

And I wanted to be a leader for the city.

How did you come up with close to 60% of the vote?

And now this wasn't just in the runoff against an incumbent.

This was against some other other people as well.

What what is it about the way you're connected to this community?

Yeah.

So if you had asked any of those people that I had received endorsements from who were leaders in the community, they'll tell you one thing to other wins races.

And I always joked, well, I think it's Nike's, but that's the only reason I worked.

I had been block walking since January, so because I announced in October, I had all of basically October, November, December to raise money.

So my funding focus was in the fall.

And then starting in January, I said, all we're going to do is a ground game because grass roots wins, wins races.

And I think that was true for us.

I walked every single day and talked to so many residents and it was so humbling because every day I went out there, I got to hear the concerns of our community.

And as a city council member, you are the closest elected to the community and you get to really change lives every single day.

And the quality like the closest touch point, right?

Everyone's always going to use trash.

They're going to use their streets, they're going to use their sidewalks.

Those are things that affect the daily life of residents.

And so it's been really humbling to be able to talk about that.

So what are your priorities now that you've heard all that?

Yeah, so three priorities.

The first one is infrastructure.

If you've ever driven down St Mary's or Broadway to get here, you know how bad the construction has been and it's really negatively impacted small businesses, It's negatively impacted quality of life of residents.

So the first priority that I have is making sure we get a handle on our infrastructure.

I'm going to hire a director solely dedicated to that.

So one qualified for to look at projects to do a heat map visualization so residents know what's going to happen when it's going to happen.

The second thing that I've heard loudly and clearly, and you'll hear this from all of I think the new council candidates is that public safety is an issue.

We have a huge chronically homeless population that's growing in District one and across the city.

And there are things like basic infrastructure, like street lights that make areas and public spaces feel unsafe for folks to frequent.

And so I want to make sure we're addressing as much as we can those two issues and public safety.

And then third is our small businesses.

District one is so unique.

We are the hub of a lot of the economic development for the city.

We've got downtown.

We've got a lot of major business corridors and areas.

Northstar, Pearl And so I want to make sure that we are doing everything that we can to remove negative barriers that prevent businesses from being successful, but also figuring out ways to help support that mission drive.

How about we've heard a lot about, I guess, equity funding for San Antonio and that's public housing and things like that, affordable housing.

Where do you stand on those and will those be at the top like it has been for the councilman in the past?

Well, absolutely.

We have a big project coming down the way in District one with the advance rapid Transit system.

And we also know that we have a shortage of affordable housing stock.

And so for affordable housing, it's two strategies, right?

The first is keeping people in homes.

If you talk to residents, they so many residents feel like they're being pushed out.

And so we need to figure out property tax relief.

And I'm excited to start working on that as hopefully as soon as next week.

If you look at the agenda sneak preview.

And then second is making sure we do have enough stock in that mix.

That means that we're thinking about building around infrastructure that already exists rather than going out further to to build new infrastructure.

We have to make sure we're strategically doing that while at the same time being compatible with neighborhoods, because that's really important for our residents that have lived and built the city.

They don't want to have something that seems out of place.

So compatible development is important.

Well, good luck with all of that.

Thank you very much.

We appreciate it.

Dr. Sook Core the San Antonio's new City Council.

As of this coming week, Councilwoman elect, council and councilwoman elect for District one.

Appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

As we are now in the hottest week of the summer so far, the city council has been briefed on how city departments are going to implement the city's climate action Plan and reduce pollution as well, with help from a new federal grant.

Here to talk about that and how it'll affect the whole area is Dianne RATH with the Ella Alamo Area Council of Governments.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thanks for having us.

And now this is $1,000,000 from a federal grant that is going to help not just the city, but a big area of the county and surrounding counties.

Tell us about that.

Yeah, it's very exciting.

And we really appreciate the city of San Antonio, including a cog in this opportunity.

Under the Inflation Reduction Act, 67 metropolitan areas in the country received $1,000,000 for planning climate reduction strategies.

So San Antonio included us in the plan for it.

So we're very pleased because, you know, air doesn't respect boundaries.

Air goes across heat and heat, greenhouse gases.

So the plan will allow us to really improve and develop strategies for implementing the Climate Action Plan developed by San Antonio.

And then we'll be able to work with our surrounding 12 counties so they can develop plans to really reduce their greenhouse gases and address their climate challenges.

Also, we're talking about things like planting more trees, figuring out other ways to get more shade, as well as what you call cooler cool pavements, cool pavements, planting more trees.

Perhaps you need some structural changes, particularly in the rural areas where they can make improvement to their electric generation plants.

You know, CPS has done so much in Bear County, but many of our outer areas with small communities don't have the funding to make major improvements and installations.

So this could give them that opportunity.

And this is also about pollution and how, you know, our ozone is going up and how we can try to affect that.

What what will happen there?

It really is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And in Bear County, our primary source is automobiles and transportation.

So we're really going to be focusing on what strategies we can take to decrease the emissions from transportation in Bear County.

And then as we look at the other ways, we're really looking at how we can improve the climate, which can lower energy costs and also create jobs.

We're really a growing area.

We have a strong economy.

So we need to be sure that the two can grow together.

And when you talk about climate change, some people go, I don't want to hear about that.

But whatever the cause, even if climate doesn't change, doing some of these things will help all of us in terms of cutting energy costs and just making life easier because there's this heat island effect.

We have 20,000 new people a year and it's just getting worse.

It is getting worse.

And this region is growing.

The fastest growing region in the country.

And as we have more people coming here, the state's power generation has not increased, which is why we have warnings about our power consumption these days.

So anything we can do to really decrease greenhouse gas emissions, improve our climate, save energy, will help all of this region in the long run.

And this heat island effect, some people maybe haven't heard as much about it, but that's a real thing, especially in Bear County, where we sometimes see storms coming in.

They go around it because of the heat and that also affects everybody here.

And there are some ways that you can deal with that, though, in terms of making a different kind of roofing, different kind of asphalt roofing, having white roofs, changing your asphalt, planting more trees are for developers, not cutting down existing tree canopies.

Very important.

It's interesting when you fly into San Antonio during the hot summer months, you will see that shimmering as you land, and that's the heat radiating.

Yes.

And there's other things that this could affect as well.

Like San Antonio has been looking at the flood plans and things like that.

Because when we talk about climate change, we also talk about, you know, the storms like we had or Hurricane Harvey and the big you know, we had a lot of that.

So they're going to maybe in the outlying areas as well, deal with flood control plans as we as we have the climate changing, we have the droughts where we're just coming out of severe and significant droughts and we're barely out of that.

So when we have El Nino come and we have the floods and the ground just can't absorb.

So really looking at techniques and strategies to help retain more of the water, to preserve the water, which really helps heat the damper, our soil is the lower your temperatures are.

And the plant is so very important because in this grant that San Antonio is receiving and they are the administrator of it, it has two parts.

The first is a preliminary plan that's due in about a year, year and a half, and that gives a rough inventory of all sources of emission in these 13 counties.

Then a year later, we will have a comprehensive plan, and that is a very detailed inventory of the emissions.

What's very important for every entity in this region is if you're not included in the preliminary plan, you're not eligible for fund under the implementation.

And I understand there's a lot more funding in terms of billions of dollars across the country and, you know, millions of that could potentially come to this area, really important for those small communities.

What are some of the things that they couldn't even imagine doing?

When you look at over four and a half billion dollars being available starting in just over a year, they can really look at what they need to do but haven't been able do.

As I mentioned earlier, their electric generation plant.

Do they need to make significant changes to some of their structure?

They need do they need to invest in massive changes to their government owned buildings, to the roofing, to their HVAC systems?

You know, if you have an HVAC system that was put in in the seventies, the technology today is so much cleaner and is so much more efficient, both decreasing your emissions and costing less to run that.

There's a lot of opportunities that we'll be able to explore and have community input.

So there's really support for it as we move forward with implementation.

That's all good news.

But when people hear anything about climate and San Antonio and ozone or whatever, they wonder about, okay, we've been in whatever kind of non-attachment we're about to have or what does it mean in terms of emissions testing for our cars and things like that?

Yes.

And it's such an important part for the public to understand.

Last year we went into moderate designation for ozone.

We missed hitting that target by just a couple of points.

But under moderate, the regulatory controls are significantly increased and we will be having emissions and inspection testing of all vehicles when you go to get your car inspected annually.

They're going to add an emissions testing.

We're the largest city in the country that hasn't had it, and all the other cities us had it voluntarily.

Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso, they've all had it for years.

But we've escaped because we've worked so hard as a region.

But it's coming down, so it's going to be about $11 additional for every time you go get your car inspected.

That won't happen until 2026.

It looks like at this point, I think what TCU has proposed is November of 26.

They have a rule out for comment right now and we have a public hearing, in fact, at ACOG in July, July 13th to discuss the public proposal and they'll be taking comment.

They anticipate going final with that rule November and then they anticipate November of 26 when we'd start paying extra dollars.

But again, this is like every other place where you go like in Houston and you see on the gas, when you fill up, there's a recapture.

Yes, that heavy, bulky thing fumes.

Yes.

And that's likely to come here as well.

At the same time, it's interesting that the gas manufacturers have improved the gasoline so much that we probably won't be mandated to have that because the gas is so much better in the past ten years.

So we're lucky with that.

The other way that we're going to start feeling that very quickly is the type of paint that we are allowed to use in Beer County, any because a vehicle sees any volatile organic compounds, anything that smells, produces viruses.

So they've been I have to really thank TCU.

They've been very active in meeting with the mayor and the judge to make sure they understand what's coming.

And the primary emission we have, obviously, is paint and building surfaces because we don't have the manufacturing, we don't have the industry that produces voces.

So they'll probably change the type of paint that we're allowed to use or surface coating.

They even talked about hairspray, which I took very, very seriously.

Oh, yes, that's very important to me.

But anything that smells.

So they'll probably be limiting the type of paint and surface coatings that can be used in Burt County, and that will probably come about in about a year or so.

Interesting.

Well, this is fascinating.

Thank you very much for coming in and outlining this for us and come back when some of these changes are going.

Diane Roth with with ACOG.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

On Reporters roundtable this week, a change is in the works for billboards, a big digital billboards in one of the busiest parts of town that the city had once sought to protect.

Calling it the Hill Country Gateway Corridor.

Here to tell us about the latest on that is Andrea Dresch, who is the San Antonio Report writer who knows everything there is to know about this story.

And this is one that's kind of gone under the radar.

Yeah, if you haven't heard about this, that's not surprising because the council barely talked about it when it happened.

They were very focused on the billboard aspect of this.

They were updating the city sign code and made a deal to take down four billboards for static billboards for every new digital billboard.

This is the overall sign ordinance that got the most attention.

Yeah, but this one part of it didn't.

Yes.

Lower down in that sign code overhaul was changing the rules on the Hill Country Corridor, which runs from UTSA Boulevard to Burney Stage Road.

This was supposed to be a protected area as a zoning code, but part of that was a limit on on digital signs like in front of your business, you couldn't have a digital sign as of 2015.

So the corridor was created in 2013.

In 2015, they did some more modifications to cut down on digital clutter and cut out these digital signs, and they brought that back kind of quietly as part of this sign code overhaul.

Yeah.

Tell us about how that happened, because there were people that were against it.

I mean, this this thing came up before the zoning commission.

There was a sign code committee that was supposed to look at this specifically.

Yeah.

So the Public Works department put together a committee of folks who were supposed to overhaul the sign code, and they also included four community members who attended these meetings who are supposed to be the community input on it.

And they didn't get a vote on this and they fought it every piece of the way.

They largely agreed on the sign code overhaul.

But this whole country gateway corridor on premise signs they did not like.

And this was, mind you, something that then Councilman Ron Nuremburg had put into place.

And it called for a study on this.

After the study, they came back and saw the clutter.

And so this is what they decided to do.

The council approved it.

And so they say they didn't get a vote.

This went to zoning.

Zoning sided with the residents who said, we don't want these signs to come back here.

This is not what we wanted in the first place.

But council slapped it in with the rest of the sign code up.

These aren't the big massive digital billboards that we see on the road.

These are on premise signs.

And I understand also that anyone who now has one of these on premise signs that a digital billboard will have to it'll have to be smaller than their current sign.

Mm hmm.

And they accidentally slipped.

They accidentally kept permitting them for a while after 2015.

So that was part of the discussion.

The sign makers are like, Hey, this corridor isn't really what you sought to protect in the first place in 2023.

The spirit of that is kind of gone.

It's car dealerships, it's fully developed.

So we should be able to have these signs.

And it was actually a sign maker who submitted this amendment to the sign code, which sided with him over the community and the signs they can make some money on the sign that is, I believe, start at $50,000 just for the sign.

Mm hmm.

And now the rest of the sign code is you talked about it, touched on it there.

If you get rid of how many signs you can keep one, they're going to allow some new digital billboards.

And those cannot go in the hill Country corridor.

There's a few corridors where they are not allowed to.

You can't have new ones There.

But there's going to be, I think, 20 new digital billboards and they have to take down for static billboards in exchange for that.

So the for each one.

Yes.

Part of a long running effort to declutter signage around the city that they've been doing for this was kind of similar to what they did years ago, trying to cut back on 64 on the big billboards that were one after another at the time, and they got rid of some of them to keep up one or two of the bigger ones.

And now you've also been looking at city council that we were talking about with Dr. Soccer.

The next couple of years is going to be interesting.

Yeah, you are already seeing a big change, I think, at these council meetings.

Everyone who is you are either brand new or you're running for mayor or maybe you're both.

And this whole country corridor would have happened.

Old council, new council is spending all day debating whether they want to do business with Wells Fargo.

And I think is almost all of them are social progressives.

Maybe not Mark White, our new Republican from our new district ten Councilman.

But I think you're going to see a lot more of that overlaying into their day to day business, thinking about sort of the polity, the social politics of their economics and their business decisions, things like tax incentives for the Baptist Health, South Baptist health hospitals that they did, that the county is doing right now, that the council approved last week.

So that's going to mean longer council meetings.

I think that's just seems like it.

And what's your prediction is there?

You know, we've had this progressive kind of tilt for a while.

You mentioned that.

Is that going to continue?

Well, these council races certainly didn't continue that trend in a stand of all in district seven.

Environmentalists, very progressive.

It's going to be replaced by Marina Eldoret.

Take a veto, who is from the tech world, but a businesswoman and I think the the sort of primary round of this was all these neighborhood association town halls that sort of drug those races to the right.

There's so much discussion about Proposition A and in that race, not a single candidate came out in favor of Proposition eight.

So they it sort of yielded a different crop of recruits this year.

And I asked Dr.

Corps about, you know, public housing and affordable housing.

Is that going to be maybe a little bit down further in the list of priorities for the whole council?

Well, I think that's probably a legacy goal that Nurnberg would like to finish up in his final term, focusing on affordable housing, probably.

And that's another big question.

And you and your crystal ball, what do you think he'll be focusing on in this next two years?

Is there really any way to tell yet or as he talked about what he's looking at in terms of legacy projects?

I think probably the affordable housing is what he has focused on so much here.

And and we're doing an event with him with you coming up soon where we'll talk a little bit more about those things.

There was at one point talk about doing some charter amendments to raise council pay and and make some sort of internal adjustments that you maybe wouldn't want to do while you are on the ballot that you can do after you've been elected for your final term.

But it's unclear whether those things are going to come together.

They'd have to put together a charter committee to make some of those decisions.

But if you remember, Councilwoman Sandoval left the council saying that she didn't make enough money.

She has a daughter now.

She needed to make more money and she accepted a job at University Health doing something that pays better.

It's kind of like when Phil Harburg or I think it was when he left, when they got council pay, you know, real council pay for the first time because he wasn't pushing it.

He wasn't running for office to get easier to do on your way out the door.

All right.

Well, it's going to be interesting.

Well, keep at it.

It's going to be a long summer.

Thank you very much, Andrea Drost, San Antonio Report.

And we'll look for the difference in the lights out there on the Hill Country Gateway Quarter, UTSA two Burning Stage Road.

Thanks for explaining all that and thank you for joining us for this edition of On the Record.

You can see the show again or download the podcast at Cal or in Dawg.

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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