On the record is brought to you by Steve and AdeleDufilho 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 this Week.

I'm Randy Beamer, and we are starting with the mayor's race, city council, mayor's race over the weekend in San Antonio left us two runoff candidates for the mayor's race.

And it's going to be a little different race this time.

Here to tell us all about it is the chair of the Policy and Geography department at UTSA, John Taylor.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you Randy.

Now this is going to be different because nobody on the council made it through.

We had a number of candidates, but maybe they cancel each other out.

We had 27 candidates.

Final two Gina Ortiz Jones and Rolando Pablos.

Why is this a different race this time?

It's a different race for a variety of reasons.

But it probably boils down to this is that for the first time in almost two decades, we have finalists that are running for mayor who have no city council experience, who have no urban government experience, which means we're electing essentially a newbie as mayor.

And what do we know about them?

Obviously, they have Partizan backgrounds.

Is one running for Gina Ortiz Jo Didn't make it close race the first time.

And then Rolando Pablos, installed by Governor Abbott as a state official as a Republican.

How big a deal is that going to play?

Well, they've got executive experience, which I think helps.

Absolutely helps.

At the same time, though, they don't have the experience of working with essentially a legislative body, a city council.

I would also make the argument, and this is not disrespecting either one of them.

They don't have the municipal experience necessary to understand such things as walking around with with public works, people, looking at potholes, sitting in traffic, figuring out transportation issues, going into economically declining areas of town and figure out how are we going to lift those areas up.

They have their ideas, obviously they have on the campaign website.

But that practical side of understanding and getting a feel for how municipal government works, that's going to be a learning curve.

And in particular, they need to remember San Antonio is not a strong mayor system like Houston.

It's a council manager system, which means much of the power of the day to day responsibilities is vested not in the mayor and city council, but in the city manager, who's paid a lot more.

Yes, and they took a little bit away.

The council took a little bit away from the mayor in the last few months of his term.

Oh, absolutely.

And is that going to hamstring them?

Well, their background also, we have a little more Washington experience and Ortiz Jones Austin experience and Rolando Pablo's not at that time in San Antonio.

Right.

And so again the question is how do you how do you learn to be mayor when you have none of that experience at the local level, the local government level?

I mean, yes, there's been there's been chamber of Commerce and stuff like that.

Yes, you've run for office and you've done the, the essentially the groundwork for running for office, kissing babies, handing out push cards.

But you don't have that city council or city government experience.

I think that is necessary.

I'm not I'm not concerned.

They won't learn, but they may learn on the job, which, by the way, that was the criticism of Nuremberg, who had a city council seat when he became mayor.

Is that that learning curve was stiff enough.

He almost lost reelection the next time.

But these are the candidates that we have.

And these both had outside money, at least outside San Antonio a lot.

Is that why they won?

I think that played a part, there's no question.

What's interesting is if Pablo's actually had more of an air war, or at least an air game than than Ortiz Jones did.

For the most part, you didn't see a lot of her ads, a lot of social media stuff, and digital stuff.

The other candidates were the fascinating ones, because you saw plays and Altamirano, who put ads out everywhere and yet couldn't get the traction to make the runoff.

Do you think there there was some canceling out of votes?

Yeah.

You know, splitting the votes of council candidates.

I think that played a part.

Absolutely.

Let's say if only 1 or 2 had run rather than 4 or 5.

That definitely I think would have played a role.

Additionally, it's just the overwhelming number of people that were on the ballot when you got 27 people and with all due respect to San Antonio, and it's not just San Antonians, low information voters in terms of just the knowledge that's out there, the information that's out there.

And then trying to pick and choose a candidate is not easy to do.

And, you know, this is not to be mean to San Antonio voters.

It's just in general, it was overwhelming by the number of candidates that a lot of information they had a process that they could go through that.

Oh yeah.

Do you think this will change by next term?

Because we have four years for them to decide.

It just didn't work out so well.

At least raise the application for you from $100 so you can prevent all the vanity candidates for running.

And yes, no offense, the vanity candidate ran nonetheless.

Raise the fee.

Put some sort of petition requirement in place so that you get more viable candidates.

And that hadn't been changed since 1974.

No.

And likely to change.

What about these two candidates?

Gina Ortiz Jones, with a a strong lead.

Maybe surprised some people that 27% and Rolando Pablos I think, what, 16% in 70?

Yes.

What, what do you see happening in the next four weeks as well as in that election?

I'm I'm sighing for a reason because I'm fearful it's going to be a scorched earth campaign on both sides, in particular, just because, again, neither one of them got above 27%.

You're talking about a vast majority of voters either went with somebody else or just didn't vote at all.

And so now we have a case where the two candidates who may have attempted to introduce themselves a first round are going to have to introduce themselves again.

The, the the problem I see for both of them, I'll do Ortiz Jones first is that much of her support.

Yeah it came from in various areas of the city.

It was not concentrated in the north side north of 1604.

That's Pablo's strength.

Her voters tend to be Gen Z, tend to be persons of color.

You're going to have to get them to turn out in numbers that are sufficient enough to be able to win the North Side voters turnout, usually in bigger, no bigger numbers, and they tend to be more conservative.

If you look at the numbers for Pablo especially, it literally parallels 1604 from district nine over to district seven.

If those people turn out the same numbers or near the same numbers as they did in May, for the primary, Pablo could end up winning this.

Which is why there's got to be a significant get out the vote effort for Ortiz.

And you said each of them have problems.

What do you think of Pablo?

Pablo, first of all, he's the biggest problem, I would argue, is that one he's not known well known to the Abbott connection.

And Abbott is not well-liked in San Antonio.

And in general that connection.

You can even make the connection to Donald Trump in this regard.

So, you know, he doesn't have he doesn't have a lot of charisma.

And there's no offense to him.

It's just simply he's more of it would be a good technocrat as a mayor.

But at the same time, that conservative leaning may or may not help him.

Ultimately, it'll help him on North Side, but I don't know if it'll help in in particular, the West side, the south side of the city.

We already had a debate.

What do you think of that?

And are we going to have just, you know, nonstop, that kind of thing?

It's not expected I would please, dear God, not a series of debates.

That's maybe one more, maybe the information voters in San, you need that.

But at the same time, how much are they going to tune out?

We're now into post fiesta.

We're now heading toward toward basically college and high school graduations.

We're heading toward Memorial Day before the primary.

The runoff takes place.

So what kind of information are voters going to get?

The answers are probably going to get it through social media, through videos, and through through basically mailings as much as anything else.

And how much heat and light are we going to get?

It's going to be, culture war to some degree because of the Republican.

Democrat.

And that's my fear, is that we'll see.

We are, in essence, going to be in, in a, in a Partizan election that in a nonpartisan election, officially, but a Partizan election, which means you're going to start getting more outside money, you're going to you're going to see various third party groups inject their opinions.

You're going to see attacks, a saw one the other day that on ironically on Ortiz Jones Facebook page that said, you know she's nothing but a Soros liberal if we're going to start getting that stuff, it's going to be on both sides and it's going to devolve into a culture war.

Are we going to see an Abbott and even a Trump, endorsement in this race?

And would that help or hurt?

I think if Trump endorsed, it would hurt Pablo's.

Abbott wouldn't help necessarily, which is why I think Abbott has stayed out of this.

Abbott's been behind the scenes, to pack the Texas Economic Fund, the political action committee, about 220 grand or so came from basically Abbott's political action committee or his money.

You're going to see more come from that.

On the other hand, Ortiz Jones got her money from vote.

That's what's in the left of center organization as well as from for various LGBTQ organizations.

That goes back to this whole idea of culture war.

Again.

Are we going to see that?

The answer is we likely will.

The attacks are going to be they're going to be vicious and personal on both sides.

Well, you'll be busy, man.

That'll be fun.

Yeah.

Thank you very much for, chair of a policy geography department.

Fun.

John Taylor, thank you very much from UTSA.

Appreciate you coming on.

A pleasure.

What's being called Project Marvel in downtown San Antonio?

A plan for a big expansion.

Renovation?

Possible Spurs arena.

Well, that is in the news again this week because the San Antonio water system just approved a feasibility study for moving a big downtown chilling plant water plant because of Project Marble and a possible new convention center hotel downtown people for Project Marble, people against Project Marble ramping up for a possible vote in the fall.

And Annalisa Peace, who is with a different environmental group.

We're not really talking about today, but you are with a group called Citizens Against Project Marvel.

Why?

Well, we think that, frankly, the plan has not had any public participation.

Nobody knows what's going on.

It's been talked about like for $4 billion, to win total.

Yeah.

And and, when I saw the presentation, they were like, well, of course we need to have two conventions, a convention center that can have two conventions at once.

And it's like, why?

Why do we need that?

We just think that San Antonio has a lot of other needs and this is going to suck up, like, a whole lot of money.

The whole project, the whole project.

A lot of people right now, folks sitting on the possibility of a Spurs arena downtown, maybe a billion for that.

Don't know how much public money would be for that mostly hotel motel tax, we would assume, and some private money from the Spurs and others.

Are you against that part of it as much or the whole thing?

Because a lot of it would include the convention center, hotel, a new hotel, expansion of the, HemisFair, that whole area, and the convention center, as you said, plus the Alamo Dome area, possible land bridge across, two 8137 there.

What about those might you support?

You know, I really don't know because we haven't seen the whole plan, but the whole I mean, what they're talking about with all that, I think a lot of reasons that people are opposed to it are, because of the traffic that that would attract to downtown.

So if you had simultaneous events at all these different venues they're talking about, I think you'd have 37 backed up to Hildebrand.

Then there also, this is going to be a huge disruption for downtown.

And Castro was very successful with the decade of downtown, of getting people to move downtown.

And a lot of us live close to downtown.

It's like, well, so is downtown for the people who live here or is it for just tourism?

What about, the possibility of just doing, convention center or revamp or maybe the Alamodome because we saw the NCAA playoffs, NCAA wants to have more upgrades each time they come.

They want to have more upgrades.

And the argument is that whatever those upgrades are, they more than pay for themselves that the Alamodome paid for itself?

A number of times over because of the investment, because of the tourists coming, because of the tax coming in.

Yeah.

And, you know, the Alamodome is a city venue.

And so it makes sense to, put the repairs into it that they need.

But do we actually need a giant convention center?

Austin is considering a $6 billion convention center.

And Dallas is also considering expanding their convention center.

So, if we don't, I mean, infrastructure wise, who has the best airports that would support having two conventions at once?

There's just so many.

And I've heard say, well, you are competing with an Austin in Dallas, but we're a different kind of tourist city.

We have a Riverwalk.

We have a whole different feel.

And we have grown up with that since HemisFair.

Would that hurt if we don't keep expanding, is the argument?

I don't think so.

I mean, you know, my background is urban administration.

And when you look at the master plans that the city had commissioned, all the way going back to the 1930s, they say San Antonio needs to diversify their economy beyond the military and tourism.

And this is just more reliance on tourism.

Look, we have cyber command, which Governor Abbott, you know, has decreed is going to be in San Antonio.

We that would be really good paying jobs for San Antonio college graduates.

And they already have a program with UTSA.

Why aren't we talking about supporting that infrastructure more than, frankly, what would result in a lot of, low wage service jobs?

What would you see as an alternative for that area, say, the Institute of Texan Cultures building, which is being raised right now?

Do you have a different option for that, a different idea?

Well, yeah.

Because, you have a lot more people living downtown.

And when you talk to younger people, they want to live in apartments downtown.

So having park space and open space and community gathering spaces would be a really good alternative.

To what about the land bridge?

People might think, well, that's going to get some support because it's something new and different.

Eco friendly.

Well, yeah.

And, you know, I understand that the city had gotten, some funding from the federal government to do a study on the land bridge, but in this administration, would funds be forthcoming to actually build it?

There's also we talked about the, Saws vote this week to do a feasibility study.

There had been talk of moving that chilling plant out of downtown or someplace else, for some time.

Would you be supportive of that if it's for something else, a different kind of growth in that area or would it be needed if there is not the growth that you would not want?

Well, I mean, I kind of take the attitude, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

If you're talking about moving the the current chilling station on the east side of downtown or.

To the east side of town.

Yeah.

You would.

You're gonna be tearing up streets.

This is going to be going on at the same time, perhaps that they're talking about, closing down 37 for new exits for Project Marble.

And I think it would just be, frankly, a traffic nightmare that would make nobody who lives here want to go downtown.

Supporters of Project Marvel, including the mayor who was here last week, have said that there's really not a specific plan yet, but that one there is one in the next couple of months that it's going to be easier to convince voters to support the overall plan, and that that is when the money will be spent, when the.

We'll hear more about that.

Are you waiting for that?

I mean, because, because part of why you are against it is you don't know the plan yet.

Well, yeah.

And this is rolling out like, just in dribs and drabs.

Nobody really knows what's going on with the project.

I was really surprised yesterday, at the source board meeting, when source staff said that city staff had told them that the convention center expansion would move forward, regardless of whether the Spurs decided to move downtown.

I think most people are interested in the Spurs component.

I don't know how much the average San Antonio really cares whether we have a convention center that can host two conventions at once.

Some of the opposition had been, what's going to happen to the area around the Frost Bank center?

We were promised that was going to get economic development, as well as other areas on the West Side.

Judge Peter Chi, County judge, has said that that's going to be a big part of his thinking as to whether he's going to support it.

And so there does seem to be the push for that.

If that happens, would you be more likely to support it, or do you think that's not going to happen?

I you know, I don't know, I don't have a crystal ball.

I think I would still not want to support it because I think, it would be enormously disruptive to people who live downtown and who live close to downtown.

And they're talking about 15 years worth of construction.

And we've already seen kind of traffic nightmares downtown.

So, no, I, I really think that we would do better to spend our money to concentrate on things like, sustainability measure hours that would be needed to address changing weather patterns.

There's all sorts of things, like I said, may be supporting the infrastructure more for the cyber command.

You know, they they are just pushing this one agenda without really considering what it's going to take away from.

Well, thank you very much.

A lot to talk about with Project Marvel, and I'm sure we'll be talking a lot more about it in the next few months.

And Lisa, Citizens Against Project Marble, thanks for coming in.

Thank you.

On Reporters roundtable this week where you're talking about education and the legislature up in Austin, which just passed a school voucher bill but has not yet passed public education bill here to tell us all about it is Camille Phillips, who is the education reporter for Texas Public Radio in San Antonio.

Thank you very much for coming in.

You're welcome.

Glad to be here.

You wrote an article about the accountability, or lack thereof, of the private voucher bill that passed.

Tell us about it.

Because the accountability isn't maybe what it seems.

Right.

So the voucher bill that's now signed into law, has language in the bill that requires, people who, take advantage of the voucher like to send their kids to private school, to take the private schools that accept vouchers, have to, administer a nationally normed test every year to those students who are using the vouchers.

But the language of the bill says either any nationally normed test or the state standardized test, and that or does a lot of work, because that means that those students, private school to private school, are taking different tests, and so they can't even be compared amongst themselves amongst the voucher users, let alone compared to public school students in Texas.

And this is important because right now, I mean, that's tax money going in there right now, public or private schools compared to each other.

Same thing.

Normative tests are different.

Well, right now, in order to be accredited in Texas, they do have to take again any nationally normed tests.

But that's just like an accreditation thing.

So basically, private schools won't have to change their practices in order to accept vouchers.

But, you know, normally when you have public dollars, there's public accountability.

The state, you know, right now rate schools based on how they're doing largely on those state standardized tests.

But voucher recipients will be taking any number of tests, 4 or 5 different tests.

And you you can't compare apples to apples when they're taking different tests.

Researchers always compare students how they're doing over time.

In the same test, there's a whole field of study called psychometrics that's about making sure standardized tests have accurate results over time.

Now.

The supporters of the voucher bill, including this language, say, well, apples to apples isn't something you could do anyway because the schools are so different, right?

Well, I talked to Mandy Drogon, who is a big voucher proponent.

She is with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a big right wing think tank, a very influential in the state.

They kind of sponsor Governor Abbott to do a whole tour of private Christian schools across the state, promoting vouchers.

The last two sessions, her whole thing is like talking about pillars of education, she said.

Transparency.

She said quality of education.

But with the voucher bill, like I said before, there's no way to know.

There's no way to have the transparency you need as a parent to know if your student is doing better.

Once you transfer them to a private school than they were previously in a public school.

Because you're not comparing apples to apples, you're not comparing the same time.

Do you think this language kind of skated under the radar or was a way for them to be able or supporters to be able to say, well, there is public accounting or public accountability, but in practical terms you say there's not.

Well, that's the thing.

Like many Drogon, you know, says, she rejects the premise that you can't compare students taking different tests.

She's like, that's a false claim.

Even though it's researchers have always used the same tests in your research or you talked to who looks at academic accountability is going to be very careful to use the same test.

When the bill was debated in the House Education Committee, the chair of the committee, Brad Buckley, said the same thing.

He said that, there's a nationally norm reference test requirement on there.

So.

Right.

It paints the appearance of accountability.

The lawmakers and the voucher proponents are able to say, look, they're taking a test.

They're going to be held accountable.

But in practice, like the numbers won't mean much.

I spoke to Josh Kaplan.

He's a Michigan state professor of education policy.

He's a become an outspoken, speaker against vouchers because he did a lot of research on vouchers in the early days and found that there weren't.

But when results came out, not his research or other people's research, that there was no significant improvement in academic outcomes and large scale voucher programs, he said.

This is not something we should be putting our money towards.

And so he's kind of used his expertise to speak about it.

And he says that in other states that had, previously before the pandemic, they did require state tests and the results were pretty abysmal.

And so he thinks it's on purpose.

Finally, we've heard a lot about the voucher bill.

That was a big focus.

The governor said last, you know, the special sessions, he wasn't going to pass public school funding increases until the voucher bill was passed.

The voucher bill was passed.

Where are we on public school improvements?

And that bill.

Right.

So there are two main bills that are kind of connected to public education funding right now.

The Senate version is only for teacher pay.

It would increase teacher pay.

And it has about 4 billion attached to that.

In the Senate budget, the state the House bill is also increases the basic allotment.

We're about, $395.

The basic allotment is the building block of.

Public basic law school per student, which has an increase for a number of years.

Right.

Which is what the school districts say they really need, as well as teacher pay.

It's a mechanism that spreads funding across everybody, is a mechanism that gives districts the flexibility to use the money as they need.

Because inflation has increased by metrics like 18% over the last five years, and the basic allotment has not increased since 2019.

And so they're basically having to pay more for the light bill.

They're having to pay teachers more to be able to keep up with competition.

And they're not even gotten any substantial new money.

Thank you very much, Camille Phillips.

You can read all about education, and she is the education reporter.

You can hear about it as well.

I read as well, Texas Public Radio in San Antonio.

Thanks very much.

Thank you.

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

You can see this show again.

You can watch any previous shows.

You can also download it as a podcast.

Just go to klrn.org.

I'm Randy Beamer and we'll see you next time.

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