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

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

That's why each week we go on the record with the news makers who are driving this change.

Then we gather at the Reporters Roundtable to talk about the latest news stories with the journalists behind those stories.

Join us now as we go on the.

Hi, everybody.

Thanks for joining us for this edition of On the Record.

I'm Randy Beamer, and a lot of people are thinking about their property taxes right now because it's a deadline coming up Monday to protest your appraisal.

But there's a new program in the works that could help seniors lower their property taxes here.

A pilot program And joining us to talk about that proposal is Melissa Cabello, Harvard of District six.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you so much for having me.

Tell us about where we are in this.

It's a council consideration request to get it on the agenda to look at a pilot program.

So it's very early on, but what would this program do?

I'm really excited about it.

San Antonio really needs our property tax burden to be lifted from our seniors and so saves it's what does it stand for?

San Antonio volunteer exemption for the.

San Antonio volunteer exemption for seniors.

I think it could be an innovative way for us to find some tax property relief for our seniors.

What excites me the most about it is that it's something that a lot of our seniors are already doing there.

We have so many wonderful, energetic, vibrant seniors that are out volunteering in our senior centers.

They answer phones, they're helping in the kitchens, and they love to be there.

They love to be out and active.

And they may as well get some credit for some of the work that they're doing.

And so if you if you have around 40 hours or so of volunteer service, you can get a $300 tax reduction on your property bill.

For some seniors, that makes a huge difference, especially our seniors that are on a fixed income.

This is just a volunteer program.

Yes, sir.

Some people I've seen reacting to the idea of saying, Why are you making old people work to pay their taxes and not young people?

They shouldn't have to pay anything at their age.

Well, and I agree.

I wish that we did that.

Our seniors wouldn't have to pay anything at all.

However, it's not it's a volunteer program.

It's seniors that are already out there doing a lot of this volunteer work.

And like I mentioned before, they really do enjoy it.

They love being around other people and they're they're vibrant and active.

And so they're just getting credit for the work that they're already doing.

And this is an option.

People don't have to do it.

We're not making anybody work.

But if you're already out there and volunteering in your community, it's a good idea, I think, to get to to get credit for you to on your property tax bill.

And this the way the timing of this works right now.

It would go before the council.

You want to get it done before the budget comes out in October.

So the people could figure this out and the city could figure it out.

Absolutely.

So the council consideration request has been filed.

The next step is to go to our governance committee and our governance committee will take it, which I'm on as well.

And so we'll take a look at that.

And then from there it'll go to account for council.

At that time, the public can speak and let us know.

What do you think?

Are there tweaks?

Do you like this?

Do you not like this?

I firmly believe in representative government.

My vote is based on the needs of my constituents.

And what they're telling me and what they're telling me right now is they need property tax relief.

And as a pilot program, what do you see?

How do you see it working?

Just part of town, the first several thousand people who apply to do this or what?

I think we'll start in our senior centers and look at the individuals that are volunteering there.

There's a finite number so I think when we start with those individuals that we have access to and we have an ongoing relationship because they're connected with our city senior centers, that that will be kind of the start of it.

And then also what I really appreciate is a lot of us have relationships, of course, with our seniors that in our district, and I want to hear that feedback from them as we're going forward is is it working?

Is it not working?

We really have to take the opportunity as a pilot pilot program to tweak it and make it better.

But it will be a pilot program here, but it's done in other places and state law allows it.

Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

So that's the the reason we're able to do it is because of the the state tax code.

We're allowed to to use this program.

And it's kind of been out there that we've never really used it.

It's taking this opportunity.

It's a it's a resource that we have out that we can bring to our seniors.

And so we're bringing that we're making an effort anyway to bring that to the community.

And it does happen in other areas of our state.

And so I think that will be part of the pilot as well as seeing how how do those programs work?

What can we take from from those prior programs that's working and not working the.

Losses basically that they can accept public service in lieu of some of the property tax bill?

That's right.

Yeah.

So your your volunteer hours, if you work 5 hours a week at a senior center or another volunteer effort that qualifies, you'll get those tax credits on your tax bill up to about $300, which could be.

And you see this passing because there were several at least five.

Right.

That that signed on to this.

Yeah.

There should be five of us that signed on to for to have the conversation, you know, when you sign when I sign a CCR, it's because I think it's a worthwhile conversation.

It doesn't necessarily mean.

A done deal.

It'll pass.

No.

And there could be some it could even end up being a little bit different than the original CCR intended because it'll go through a committee, governance committee, and then it'll go to the full council where the full council will then deliberate and consider and hear from, of course, our constituents all right.

Well, thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

And look forward to the next stage in that process.

Melissa Cabello, Harvard of District six.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

You may have seen over the weekend that Governor Greg Abbott has called for an investigation into the North Side District.

The governor retweeted allegations that the Northside district employees were pressured, at least some of them were pressured to vote for a bond issue Saturday, which passed by the way, this was apparently by a school district or a school principal here.

And joining us to talk about this is Wanda Longoria, president of the Northside American Federation of Teachers.

Thank you for coming in.

Thank you, Randi.

What is your reaction, first of all, to this call for an investigation?

Well, you know, the call for the investigation by the governor is within his job duties.

So we can't I'm not going to say that that's wrong or right.

He's doing his job.

But the the pressure itself there are this there was apparently a memo by a school principal saying that we encourage you to vote for the bond issue.

Reaction to that.

You knew that.

You knew about that.

You had heard about that.

Yes, absolutely.

On.

In April on April the 20th, we sent documentation to district officials letting them know what we knew.

Members and nonmembers had sent us some documentation.

And we continued to send new documentation to the district leadership as we got it.

And now the district says that they immediately took corrective action to clarify this, that there was no intention to coerce.

And so they dealt with it right away.

Yes.

They tell us that we're not privy to how they dealt with it.

We're not privy to when they dealt with it.

We just know that we gave them the information that we felt was problematic and asked them to please deal with it as soon as possible.

Now, the Federation itself now you supported the bond issue.

Yes, we did.

We endorsed the bond as Northside left.

We sent our membership information that we were endorsing the bond because we truly believe it's the best thing for students and the community.

And we also got our aflcio with affiliate, which is the Bear County LC, to endorse it.

So, yes, we sent information to our members, our union members to endorse, telling them we were endorsing the bond and asking them to be sure to vote.

And so you didn't leak this, as you said, but the fact that I mean, this information didn't come out through through you, but the fact that the governor retweeted a school choice proponent apparently against the bond issue or could be against a bond issue and more for public funding of private schools.

What do you think of that?

Well, we know for a fact that Cory DeAngelis is a public voucher person.

He is a Betsy DeVos supporter.

He believes in charters and privatization of public schools.

OK.

So the fact that Governor Abbott tweeted on his tweet, we felt showed political rhetoric trying to stir up a base.

And it was at the same time the governor was talking about school vouchers.

Yes, it was.

So I think the important thing to remember here, the community needs to make that connection.

What was the purpose of that tweet?

And why does why do you think that the school district needs that bond issue?

Obviously, it passed 57%.

So it, you know, arguably would not have changed had anyone not been had this so-called pressure.

That's arguably.

But why was that bond issue needed?

Well, as I stated, you know, schools are belong to the community, correct.

In Texas, if a school district wants to improve infrastructure, build new buildings, work on the older facilities, that is the way they do it through bonds.

They are forced to do that because our Texas legislature does not pay for that.

OK.

They give Ada Ada, which is average daily attendance moneys to districts and that's just to operate the districts.

And you think this was maybe I don't know.

We could presume a a mistake, however you call it a dumb mistake there.

They have been given ethics, you know, presentations, district officials not to do any kind of pushing for a bond, coercing anything like this.

So, Randi, I would say this is an open investigation now.

Right.

So we don't want to speculate as to anything.

All I can tell you is that the union properly informed the district to some of the problematic things we were seeing from members and frankly, nonmembers who were calling our office with documentation and we did the right thing, which was to send it to district officials, letting them know the severity of it.

And then we continued to send new documents to them and communicate with them.

And so that's what I would say about that.

As far as internal north side emails and things like that, we weren't privy to any of that.

So I don't know.

We don't know what the district did or we have.

I want to mention that we put in a request to talk to them and hope to do that in the next few days.

Good.

Well, thank you very much, Wanda Longoria.

President of the North Side, American Federation of Teachers.

Thank you for your time, Randi.

This Monday is the deadline to protest your property tax appraisals.

So many have had a big jump in the value of their property.

That means they'll have a big jump in their taxes if they don't protest it.

Here to tell us how to protest and maybe how you can save is Michael Mosquito, the chief appraiser of the Bear County Appraisal District.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you for having me.

I appreciate it.

How complicated is it if I want to protest my property appraisal to do it?

It's really not complicated.

At all.

I mean, we have an opportunity for taxpayers to use our online portal or, you know, if they choose to file just a written protest, they get to schedule themselves as to what time they want to be contacted by my staff.

We're going to do most of those virtually either through a zoom contact or a telephone contact or an email contact, whatever the preference is for the informal.

So you do have to talk with somebody.

You can't just submit.

I understand pictures and comparable values and things like that.

There is an online portal that is completely touchless, so you don't have to talk to anybody.

You submit whatever evidence you want.

You want to make sure and get all of our evidence before you do that.

So that you have the best possible outcome.

I don't really recommend that if you have pictures and you want to make a point about something, if you have a closing statement and you just bought it and you bought it for less than we have on it, sure.

That's a great way to go.

You refinanced last year when rates were low and you have a current appraisal.

That's great information.

I would recommend that.

But if you have to make us if you have to make a story, if you have to make a case, I really suggest you have a conversation with my staff because they are laser focused on trying to help homeowners.

I understand pictures can help because you can show that your house maybe has problems compared to other houses in the neighborhood.

Absolutely.

And especially inside of 410 and the urban core, we have a lot of neighborhoods that are, quite frankly, gentrifying because there's so much new money coming into those neighborhoods and there's a lot of remodeling and house flipping and investment.

We have a lot of there's a lot of capital markets working in San Antonio right now.

People would wonder, OK, well, why doesn't the appraiser know that?

How specific can you be and why are you over appraising my house?

Sure.

My opinion.

Sure.

And so, you know, we have 70 appraisers for roughly some 600,000 parcels residential over 700,000 total.

And Bear County, we're not going to visit every home every year.

If you had if you had a building permit or if you have a relatively new home, we probably have seen it in the last two or three years.

But the truth of the matter is we do mass appraisal.

And so we look at the neighborhood to see how values are appreciating according to market.

But you also are really encouraging homeowners to protest if they think it's too high because it's a different system in a way for homeowners versus business.

I think there is everybody starts out at 100% of market value, but the equity system for appealing is very beneficial to commercial property owners.

And I've told my staff I can't give away enough residential value to make up for the losses that we'll see in commercial.

So I encourage property owners, homeowners and particularly to take advantage of the system.

And you said it's the policy that how you appraise commercial businesses compared to homes is different.

It's not really the appraisal that's different.

It's the appeal mechanisms.

And while that mechanism avails itself to homeowners, you know, like I was telling you earlier, if you if you live in a given neighborhood, most of us have similar homes.

So there's not much room in the equity statute.

But if you're the best category, if you're the best property, the best commercial property in any given category, you automatically get to move to the middle.

That doesn't seem fair.

What happens is that taxpayer policy from the state, is that how that works?

It is tax policy from the state.

And when that when that particular amendment was filed back in 1997, it went without a public hearing and was in the last eight, 10 minutes of the the session that year.

But still it's appraised higher.

But then when they protest, it can automatically go to the median.

It really works very much so that way.

What else do you tell people about what they can do?

Again, this is by Monday.

Right.

Where do they go Monday.

You just really want to get if you're going to mail in that protest, it just needs to be postmarked by midnight Monday, the 16th.

But you got to be caught because you have to fill out a form, right?

That's correct.

And actually, when we mailed them their notice, there's a protest form on the back of that notice.

Always has been.

You can make a copy of that and submit it and you can go to protest at BCD dot org and do it online.

Just through email.

You can protest using our e-file.

Every property owner got a notice this year that was taxable and so there is a PIN number associated with that set up and create your own account on our system.

And you can just file your protest that way.

And also check the box that.

Says absolutely.

Asking for your evidence.

That's right.

And that limits us to that evidence.

While the property owner can continue to collect as much evidence that helps their case and I say this in jest, but I'm not really joking.

If you've made great renovations to your house, please don't tell me.

I don't want to know.

OK, well, thank you very much, Michael.

Mesquita again.

Monday is the deadline to protest chief appraiser of the Bear County Appraisal District.

Thanks.

Thank you.

The controversial proposal to build a tunnel from San Antonio's airport to downtown has been in the news quite a bit recently.

And before we talk with Michael Carlos of The Current, who wrote this cover story about it, I want to show you some video that I shot recently of Elon Musk's tunnel project in Las Vegas.

Outside the central hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

This steel and glass structure is the main entrance to what's called the Vegas Loop.

Elon Musk's first real working tunnel system.

And right now it's only operating under the sprawling Vegas Convention Center with exactly three stops right This underground stop is right in the middle of it.

About 30 feet down at the bottom of the escalators is what amounts to a taxi stand with just five spaces on each side.

A greeter directs you to a waiting driver and of course, and all electric Tesla.

You tell them whether you want to go to the south hall or the west hall, and then off you go.

Into one of the tunnels.

And that tunnel is smaller than you'd expect it just 12 feet in diameter.

Because of that, the system is really a pair of parallel one way tunnels or tubes like one way underground highways.

And Musk plans to use all self-driving or autonomous Teslas in the tunnels including some that could carry 12 people or more.

Well, it's still just that plans right now.

It's just telling me to stop in space number four at the two ends of the Vegas Convention Center Loop.

Instead of stopping underground to get out, you're driven up and then out onto a parking lot to what looks like another taxi stand here.

The driver pulls in, lets you out, and then picks up more passengers to haul back down underground and into the tunnel that heads the other way.

Musk has said above ground stops are cheaper to build, and his specially designed machines, this one called Prufrock, are able to just nose down into the ground, then tunnel across however far, and then back up again.

And the relatively small 12 foot width also makes these tunnels easier, cheaper and faster to build.

And others the Las Vegas Convention Center is just massive, now sprawling across a 200 acre campus with four separate convention halls.

The newest, the West Hall at 1.4 million square feet, is also across a major road from the rest.

So using musk tunnels to get from one part to another is very convenient and it cuts what could be a half hour or more walk down to just a few minutes.

And at least right now at the convention center here, it is free I like it.

That's because the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority paid the roughly $50 million to build the tunnel system using hotel tax money.

It also pays Musk's company about four and a half million a year to operate.

But there has been concern that the loop may not be as efficient as promised.

Musk's company has promised it can move at least 4400 people an hour at the convention center, and a test proved that it can.

But just barely bigger conventions could mean longer waits and Tesla traffic jams.

Critics have called it a much less efficient subway, but the Las Vegas Loop project is already expanding in February, Prufrock broke through with a new Resorts World Hotel complex at the north end of the Vegas Strip for a loop that'll connect it to the convention center tunnels And last fall, county commissioners here okayed preliminary plans for Musk to build 29 miles of tunnels, a network that would connect many of the hotels on the Strip and downtown.

And they hope eventually the new Allegiant Football Stadium and the airport And joining us now to talk about the latest plans or proposal anyway for a project of a tunnel here in San Antonio are tunnels.

The author of The Hole to Nowhere.

Staff writer of the San Antonio current Michael.

Carlos, thank you very much for coming in.

It's great to be here.

First of all, your article talks about the many, many roadblocks that would be in place before this could be really considered, even though there's a feasibility study.

One of the biggest questions about it here.

Well, as far as feasibility, my goal was to basically look at every angle about whether this tunnel was was possible.

And I don't know how long the Alamo Army is going to take, but my feasibility took about 48 hours.

And I can say there's a lot of problems with this becoming a reality.

The environmental concerns obviously they're going through a very sensitive area where the water feeds into the city's water supply, the Edwards Aquifer.

And the most interesting thing that I learned is that he's going to have to get permission from a lot of people to drill.

It's under the.

Laws different here.

The property owners have to give you permission to drill anything under their land.

So how tough would it be even if he tried to go along mainly to I-81?

Well, you know, you'd have to ask the people in Alamo Heights and almost park that.

As the one professor said, it's going to be tough to tell those people you can't build in-ground pools anymore.

And it's all a different kind of hydrology or geology than is under Las Vegas.

So to build 12 foot tunnels you know, the machine could build them quickly, but he would run into all kinds of problems aside from lawsuits.

Well, exactly.

I mean, Las Vegas is one thing.

It's sand.

It's but easier to build under where the San Antonio's really built on rock.

With underground caves and rivers and a lot of endangered species in those caves.

So it's it's definitely going to be a tough project for him to pull off.

And the springs on either side of it, you have the blue hole and the San Antonio where ever you have San Pedro Springs when you first heard about this idea, what was your gut reaction?

Well, when I first heard about it, I was I was interested.

I think initially I thought like some other people thought maybe this would be a good thing for the city, maybe some public transport, maybe something to draw visitors in but the cost versus reward on this and as I said, the the several other issues with where he wants to drill this hole, it just doesn't seem feasible.

The Alamo Army, the Regional Mobility Authority, it seems like they're as interested in the $25 million that they would be promised to get from this but you looked into that as well, the economics of it.

What did you find there?

Right.

So the Alamo Army really wants this project because the revenue generated from it they could spend on on other projects such as toll roads, which is why they were initially founded two decades ago.

However, that estimate just seemed wild.

And after I did some math on it, basically every single person flying in and out of San Antonio International Airport would have to take this tunnel at a at a price of $10, which is about what Uber costs from the airport downtown.

And while the Vegas project seems to be going ahead, all the skepticism there with the expansion.

There are a lot of other cities that have looked at it and apparently also said, no thanks.

There's been a lot of them.

L.A. Chicago, Baltimore, Washington.

And at the end of the day, it's the same issues that I pointed out in this article.

A lot of it is NIMBYism and a lot of it's the environmental impact Yeah, it's a lot tougher to drill holes around urban areas than L.A. might like to believe.

But with a lot of villains and ticks, he's he's really good at getting the headlines, but it's not always that great of pulling it off.

What about the other proposals that they were supposedly considering like Villa and the above ground?

There was a similar monorail kind of thing.

Right.

So there were five bids for this project.

One was by the Bear Transport.

Afraid, a consortium b t of something.

And it was it's a conglomerate of local companies at transport companies.

What was interesting is that the Army said that that bid, although a little more expensive.

20 million more expensive it was going to use a lot of local contractors, local workers and kind of maybe give a boost to the local economy.

It also qualified for federal funding under the Biden administration's build back better plan.

And they instead went with the boring company's plan, which does not qualify for federal funding and also is all in house.

But it would bring them more money.

Hypothetical hypothetic.

I think it's all hypothetical right now, but we'll keep an eye on it.

And thank you for updating us on this.

Michael Carlos, staff writer for the San Antonio Current.

Thanks for coming in.

Thank you.

For having.

Me.

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

As always, you can catch on the record Thursday nights at seven, Saturdays at 530 and Sundays at 1 p.m. You can also catch at any time at klrn.org.

Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

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