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 have a lot to talk about right now coming up on mid November.

We're going to look at what's new or maybe new behind the Alamo, a few blocks, also maybe a side hustle you could get into, especially before Christmas.

But first of all, kind of behind the scenes look fascinating.

Look at what's happened in San Antonio in this area for the past 40, 50 years, but also things you can learn about leadership.

And joining us to talk about that, former mayor, a former county judge, former state representative, former pretty much everything, Nelson Wolf.

Thank you very much for coming in, Randy.

We're talking about you wrote another book and I don't know how many are right now.

Well, over a dozen.

Eight or nine year, 95 Power Principles Strategies for Effective Leadership in local government, which sounds like a basic business book.

But I think it's it's not as much a history of San Antonio through your eyes.

How did you come up with this concept for a book?

Well, I thought about it and I thought about I started maybe five years ago jotting down things and I thought, you know, a lot of people don't pay attention to local government.

They read about the president or the governor or state or federal government, but they don't focus on local government, and that's the driving engines of this country.

Without effective local government, we would not be anywhere.

So I wanted to write something about that.

I wanted to do it in a way that was practical, that showed how that power was used, either wrong or right, and give the public, as well as the other people that serve in local government, whether it be a special agency or city or county, an idea about how you get things done.

Scott Over 50 years since I was in the legislature, so I picked up a lot of different information.

People might read the title and say, okay, this is like a textbook for people.

It's a generic, and it does in terms of each of the 95 principles headline, basically a chapter.

But then you get into specifics, say, in San Antonio, and some of them, I think are surprising.

Like the second one is become a sorcerers apprentice there.

And the sorcerer in your case was Henry Cisneros.

That's right.

Tell us about that.

And you get kind of personal in there where, you know, he really changed the dynamics of city government.

He showed what a mayor could do that had never been done before.

City managers ran everything.

So he broke that mo.

I happened to be there and chaired the target 90 effort for him, served on the council when he was mayor and watched him and all the dynamics in his leadership, how he put together votes, how he said an agenda, how he made sure the city manager understood he knew how to count to ten and if he didn't function right.

Ideas And you literally took notes on that kind of thing because at that time you already knew you wanted to run for mayor.

Yes.

Yes.

I kept a lot of notes, well, notes going all the way back to the legislature and I'm always writing something.

You can go to my computer and I probably still had about a thousand pages in there.

And I just write down what happened that day or what how it may be useful.

And then I try to weave it into a book.

And I thought this would be good for those that want to serve in local government, for the public to understand how it works.

I didn't envision some other attributes that might be good for it.

I know I lecture at UTSA and St Mary's and they're saying, Hey, they'd like to use this with their students to understand leadership.

Well, that's something I never really thought about, so hopefully it'll be helpful.

And as we go through the book here, I want to get back to that chapter, too, before we move on to other chapters.

You also, in this become a sorcerer's apprentice, talked about some good advice that Henry Cisneros gave you when you were thinking of running for mayor and then eventually decided not to.

Well, at that time, let me just say this.

It's changed a lot since the days I served in the legislature.

You had a private life of our guys never poked into your private life.

Well, that changed.

And I was going through a divorce and Henry had had some issues in the past, and I was conflicted about whether to go on with the race or get out and marry the person I love.

So I sat down with him and he gave me the best advice of my life.

Get out of it.

Don't run now.

Marry the woman you love.

This is your life.

After his issues, he said, Get out of it, get out.

And people might think, Well, he's the wrong guy to go to.

Or I mean, it's always good to go to somebody that's lived through a little crisis.

And then some of them after this work with colleagues, with Honey and Spice, you get specific in this kind of thing and you think a lot of politicians these days don't because it's so polarized.

Well, when you have your leader within the city government or the county government or others, you have to hold your people together.

You can't let one get denigrated by the public.

Then it spills off on the whole body.

So he's the leader.

It's your job to help them, to support them, to defend them.

When somebody may attack them.

You may not like everything they do, but you got to hold your unit together and you don't hold your unit together.

When someone gets denigrated and a couple of other senior people might I don't know if it's controversial, but pick an early fight and win.

That's right.

Because if there isn't a fight that's that big, you picked it.

You made a big deal out of it.

What was that?

And well, it's just like playing a football game or a baseball game.

The first one to score has a big advantage.

And I picked a fight right along with some members of the Workforce Commission that had a conflict and asked them all to resign.

I didn't have the power to do it, but they thought I did, and most of them all resigned.

And then I passed something that later on it reduced it and replaced the whole board.

Is that another you don't have bluff in here, but is that one of your principles?

Maybe.

But you got to do it.

You got to do it on your home court because I pulled them into my office in a conference room next to my office and asked them to resign.

And they felt that I had the power to do that, but I didn't.

And many of them did resign.

And then I ended up restructuring the board, making it smaller and ended it with a whole new board.

This brings up now some of the people you wrote about in here.

I don't going to say it's not flattering, but it's a rather open.

Did you go to them and say, hey, listen, I'm going to write about this?

You may or may not like it.

No, Henry, you didn't.

Or any of those people.

And none of them have pushed out or none of them ever had that.

None of them know what I've written yet.

What kind of response do you expect?

People response.

It would be good.

And I suspect a lot of it will not be good.

Well, some of the other chapters might be surprising in here when you talk about tax rates as as a Democrat and crime and you come across as much more moderate like this is for Republicans and Democrats, this book who might want to get into local government, explains some of that.

What it tell us about the tax rate, the specific stories in here.

Well, that's a conservative issue and one that I've always believed in.

So we never wrote.

In fact, we reduced our tax rate.

We lived off a new construction.

And people have more confidence in you than trying to raise taxes when you don't when everybody else is in trouble at the same time.

That's a bad thing to do.

That's actually what happened back when back on the city council.

So you want to live within your means and you want to use your money effectively.

And because interest rates were so low, I held an operation to tight and invested in long term projects that have a long term payback.

So you want to be responsible fiscally.

This you could also read as for somebody with a lot of ambition but not knowing how to use it, did you have that much ambition when you were younger that you knew you wanted to move up a ladder of leadership?

Well, first of all, starting with the legislature, I was interested, got interested.

When I was in law school, I became Masters student president of the court representative school, and we were starting a business.

And then so I was 29 years old when I ran and ended up winning and taking office when I was 30.

Overpower friends, enemies, hustlers and opponents overpower friends.

Yes, they could be.

Your worst enemy.

Is for broken friendships.

Really?

How they get mad at you for various reasons.

Some of them may be the right reasons, the wrong reasons, and they turn on you and they turn on you and they go against you.

This and we're about out of time.

I'm sorry, but this isn't the as I read it, the tell all book that we expected you to write or expect you to write sometime after you're now retired there, the it's basically the tell more than you than I expected book.

When are you going to write the tell all book?

Well, you know, I wrote the book about 30 some odd years ago.

So I will have one county judge, one that will come out probably in a couple of years working on it now.

So is that the one where you don't overpower your friends but a friend?

And severely or not, some friends stick with you?

I don't want them dead, but most of them and most of them will after the book or not.

We'll see.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

Fascinating book again about the history of San Antonio as much 95 power principles.

Nelson Wolfe, thank you very much for joining us.

A San Antonio institution will be moving, at least eventually.

The Institute of Texan Cultures is looking right now at a plan that would put it on some land kind of behind the Alamo complex, behind the mayor.

And joining us to talk about that is Veronica Salazar, who is senior vice president for business affairs of UTSA.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you for having me.

Tell us about this new agreement that you have entered into about looking at a parcel of land to move everything and everything but what you can from the Institute of Texan Cultures to be on display in a much better place for it, maybe behind the Alamo.

Yeah.

So it's all started with a long community process that we had with a lot of participation from community stakeholders that gave us three ideas to look for the future of the Institute of Texan Cultures.

They asked us to look at relocating outside of hemisphere, building a new building on hemisphere, or then renovating the Texas pavilion where currently is.

Where would be the new institute would be that actually would create more access that we would have tap into other cultural institutions in San Antonio.

Looking at several sites, we looked at downtown, our own properties, our Southwest campus, and we were looking with the city.

We asked them for their help and they brought to the table the potential of the Crockett Parking Lot site next to the Alamo.

And let's back up before we get there.

Why is the institute for those people who don't know what the attendance has been like, why is it looking for a new place?

Yeah.

So the current location, the building is a significant deferred maintenance, so it needs a lot of help to even grant accreditation.

And accreditation for us through the museum.

Association is critical for the success of the institute or the museum wears as Smithsonian affiliate.

But we cannot bring any of their rotating exhibits because we don't have accreditation.

So that is one of the things that kind of prompted for reaching for what do we do, what is our best investment, Should we renovate or look for any new look?

And renovation was going to cost a lot of money.

This was the Texas Pavilion at Hemisphere in 1968.

So that was prohibitive.

Plus, that means you can use the land for something.

Tell us about what it would mean to the institute to be in that area, kind of behind the Alamo and North of the parking garage for Riverside for.

Well, the investment that the state, the city and the county have been making to the Alamo district over $400 million in the last appropriation that they received.

And they're anticipating two and a half million visitors.

So being close to the Alamo is the essentially just having a few of those people walking over or even the student trips that come over in their big busses, they're taking the time to go to the Alamo and to the ITC at the same time.

It's just a maximum, you know how we envision that the site then would then be better to tell the story of Texan cultures.

How big would it or could it be?

And what about parking?

Because a lot of people park there to go to the Riverside Center, Alamodome, the rest of downtown.

Is that going to take away parking at all?

Oh, actually, it's not at this site.

We did a preliminary site study, and so we're looking for about 80,000 square square feet for a museum, for a new museum.

So that's enough for a building, right on Crockett Street and then in the back to build a parking garage.

And we are actually partnered with the city on this memorandum of understanding to do the due diligence on the site, because the Alamo also needs parking.

And so there's a really good synergy here with the city and the Alamo District to put to create parking.

It can't be too tall because there's something called a view shed where you're standing in front of the Alamo.

You take a picture and there can't be another building up above it.

But how big could a building be at that distance from the outside?

So, you know, we still have the very preliminary stages, and that is exactly what we're going to do with the due diligence piece to see what is it?

Is it going to be enough?

How big can it be in terms of the parking structure or the building itself?

The building itself, we have no issues with that.

When the height it's important to know for five, four, five stories and it's something that is very, very modest.

And again, it will be next to the Crockett Hotel.

So a historic building that is going to take a lot of work with the Texas Historical Commission as well.

How much will that increase your visitation?

Because it has gone down over the years and that corner of hemisphere, even though they're working on hemisphere park, how much is it down and how much do you think it'll increase?

So we actually had about a thousand visitors a year.

Like it's really been very thousand, just only that.

So it's very small pandemic.

We're talking about it.

We think it's been, you know, before we had a really low participation.

So we feel that adjacency to the Alamo could actually bring us to 100,000 visitors.

And again, it's just over.

It's going to be 2 million people right next to it.

You know, we have a better chance of capturing that.

This is also about updating the kinds of exhibits, how you exhibit.

It's some people have complained.

It's just stuff, an old kind of museum where you have a mannequin with stuff on it and things on the wall.

How different will it be when you move to the new place?

So one of the community engagement task forces was the Museum of the Future sort of mission and what that plan would be.

And we have a new director of the ITC in her vision aligns with that and is really bringing in, you know, she said it in such a beautiful way, bringing the content to outside of the walls of the museum.

So creating either podcast and other mediums that would be digital so that it could actually transcend the walls and and reach more people about our culture.

Tell us about this partnership.

Why have a partnership with a hotel group and another and what does that mean?

Where is the money going to come from?

Why get a private group involved?

So the partnership with the hotel groups actually owned the property.

So they own the property where we are looking at so that we're asking them for permission to enter their site to do the due diligence they want to buy it or couldn't.

We were thinking about our lease structure for that because they also need parking.

And then with the city was also they interested of having parking and potential offices for the Alamo district.

And where does the money come from for us?

So we have always planned to develop the land in hemisphere.

So where the current pavilion sits on and there is 13 acres there.

And so our intent then would be to develop that land and generate revenue to support the new building and developing the land or about out of time.

But this is a whole different issue.

Could it include taking down the building, building something new?

Because that building, whatever it is, if it stays there, has to be totally redone or we looking at land for sports stadium, anything like that.

Right now we want to focus on getting the new home for the Institute of Texan Cultures.

That is the best location for them and that's what we're doing, this due diligence period.

Then we're going to see what is the community need in that site, the development community as well.

What is this praying for and go out for our request of information to see what that development will like.

So that's something next timeline for all this.

Yeah, well, the due diligence periods about six months, so we should be making a decision around that time.

All right.

Well, thank you very much, Veronica Salazar, who is the senior vice president for business affairs at UTSA.

Thank you very much for all the information.

Thank you.

On Reporters Roundtable this week, an interesting idea for you if you're looking for a side hustle, maybe especially around the holidays and maybe oddly, it comes from a business writer or a San Antonio Express-News writer Michael Taylor, who has the Smart Money column every Sunday in the paper.

Also an author also has a podcast.

And tell us about how you got the idea to do this side hustle that a lot of us maybe have not thought about.

But you said it's not as bad as I thought or not tough.

I've gotten into Uber and Lyft cars and you start chatting.

The natural thing to do with instead of like a taxi driver, you get in with an Uber Lyft person, you start chatting and they talk about their job and how is the job going.

So I had the idea as well.

Kind of like an able to try.

You would interview, maybe find some stories through them.

You're in enclosed space for 5 minutes.

Yeah.

And people tend to be friendly and want to talk about their stuff.

And so I decided, well, what is it like to be an Uber driver?

Yeah, let's try out the gig economy.

And what is it like?

Well, first of all, it's super easy to sign up.

It's you don't talk to anybody, you don't have a job interview.

There's no applications.

Lyft I actually did live.

That's right.

To be clear, I did Lyft and Super Easy, maybe two weeks of background check in and trip your data and then you can turn on the app and start looking for rides.

I washed my car.

I filled it up with a tank of gas.

I made sure it was pretty clean and then turn on the app and the app was super easy to use.

And so what does the app like for a driver?

Yeah, so you, you turn it on, it gives you a map of the city where you are.

It sometimes tells you how many minutes you might expect to wait it it has data.

So you say it's it's a hot time right now.

One minute to wait or it's 5 minutes to wait.

But in any case, you know, it says you're a match, you know, basically a little a little noise and a little map.

And here's the directions.

3 minutes away, there's a person that the ride's going to be $7.

And does it say where you're going?

And can you say, no, I don't want to go there.

It's the wrong way.

I'm on the way to someplace.

I want to make some money.

It's it's complicated.

It basically matches you.

But you do have an option to accept or decline if something suddenly happen.

So you basically press a button to accept and then you're on your way.

I will tell you I'm a little bit new, so I haven't been able to figure out where it's going until I get there.

Once you pick up the person, you then you slide your thumb and then it says, okay, here's where you're going, here's the directions.

And how much do you make doing this?

Because this is one of those surprises for you.

Yeah.

Far less than you would expect.

I mean, I'm a data guy, I'm a spreadsheet guy.

So they provide all the data, but then you put in your spreadsheet, you do a little math, and while you're waiting, you have to do a spreadsheet on this because that seems very complicated.

I do because I'm a super nerd and I wanted to write about it.

I wanted to, you know, so they say the the rideshare companies say this is 30 bucks an hour while you're driving.

That is only true if you're talking about none of the times in between driving.

So often you have a ride, you drop them off, then you're waiting five or 10 minutes.

So it's about $20 an hour.

If you put it in the waiting time and then the pay goes down from there.

If you want to get into the sad part about it, which is you have to probably wash your car, you definitely to fill up on gas.

Well, that's not a I can't do that.

They're washing their car and I'm paying someone to do.

So.

The depreciation, I guess, on the car and I think that's a lowers it so you may be way below 50 and probably more like 12 to $10 an hour.

If you consider that you add a thousand miles to your car, you've now a depreciated your asset, you're going to replace that or do maintenance.

And you tried one of these.

What you said was a grind.

What was that.

Yeah.

So that's just I have a whole afternoon of nothing going on and probably four and a half hours, that's just me attempting to not just do one or two rides for the fun of it, but I'm going to dedicate 5 hours to this now.

You know, this is a very light grind in the sense that 5 hours is not a huge shift.

I'm an an air conditioned car, ergonomically, super comfortable and, you know, an enclosed space that I control all the all of the factors.

So it's very pleasant, actually.

How much time were you waiting between rides?

Sometimes you're waiting no time.

Sometimes you're in the queue and you're the next one and other times you're going 10 minutes of this.

This is kind of lame and I'm running my motor and I'm like, I think I'll just go home and I'll turn off the app.

So that's that's certainly happened.

But you don't have to have your car running.

You can sit in a parking lot.

I could.

And I'm often like, Oh, I might if I get an open thing, I'll go to the store.

So, you know, you're waiting to pick up and then you're about to get to the store and then you get the ride and then.

Driver Did you ever feel uncomfortable, if not in danger, like you didn't know about this person or the area or whatever?

Some of that, maybe my personality, I felt totally comfortable.

I mean, there were plenty of parts of town that I never been to that are certainly not nice parts of town.

But I have I don't have stranger danger, and I kind of find it enjoyable to see parts of town that I have never seen do you have to use the route that the app says because the guy sitting in the backseat is going, Hey, I'm expected there and x minutes and it should go this way.

You can do your own route.

But somebody, somebody who an early rider said you want to have your phone facing the passenger.

So I had it in front of me and basically the cup holder because they want to see that you're following an app.

So as long as you do that and you deviate, I think you're fine.

But that was a little that was like one of the tips of the of the trade.

The guy said, make sure your phone is showing so they can follow the map.

So they're like, this guy isn't, you know.

And speaking of tips, how did that work?

And did you know right away, hey, this guy stiffed me or they gave me the most or extra?

If you pay right away, you find out right away.

The person who just got out gave me a dollar or $2.

Somebody gave me a $5 bill.

I was very pleased.

You know, an actual guy.

One time we got to I got a bunch of questions, a reader saying, do this.

Does the company keep your tips?

No, they do not.

They they pass them through in full, the whole thing.

Good.

Yep.

And I got a cash tip, you know, I only did it for two weeks.

And the last thing people might think, especially for the holidays, if they're doing a How fast do you get paid that a couple of days after the week.

And so if I did a monday to Sunday, it's probably Tuesday or Wednesday.

The money hits the bank or you invest.

Are you going to do this?

Is Express-News not pay enough, you know, to put you on the spot?

We'll leave that one unsaid.

But I've left the app on my phone.

I found it much more fun than I expected, much worse pay than I expected, but but actually kind of fun.

So I recommend it in certain circumstances.

Yes.

Or how would you get any stories out of it?

Yeah, no stories that are actionable outside of this one here.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thanks very much, Michael Taylor, Smart Money and the San Antonio Express-News every Sunday.

Appreciate you coming.

And thanks, everyone, and thank you for watching this edition of On the Record.

You can catch this show anytime at KLRN.org or download the podcast there as well.

That's it for this one, and we'll see you again next time On the Record is brought to you by Steve and Adele Dufilho