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.

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

I'm Randy Beamer.

And this week we're talking San Antonio music.

San Antonio Parks and history, as well as San Antonio and solar power.

And the latest on plans and the possibility of a tunnel in San Antonio.

But first, we're talking about the musicians getting back to work.

The musicians of the San Antonio Symphony went on strike just about a year ago this week.

In fact, a year ago, and then just this week, there's a new chapter in what's happening with the new San Antonio Philharmonic.

And joining us to talk about that is Brian Petkovic, the president of the new S a Phil as the new nickname is for that.

Congratulations.

You've had your first concert officially as the new orchestra of San Antonio and what happened just this week.

So this well, first of all, thank you for having me.

And this week, we were able to purchase the assets of the former San Antonio Symphony and keep them in San Antonio for everyone to enjoy for years to come.

And these assets include some of the instruments as well as the music library, which they couldn't put a value on officially, at least publicly.

How important is that library of music that goes back more than 80 years?

Yeah.

So the library has probably about five or 4000 titles in it.

I mean, it's a really a you know, when you say music library, it sounds like it might be a small thing, but it's a, it's a large room, lots of lots of music.

And really what that means is that all of that that we've collected over the years, we can keep performing some of this material you can't purchase any longer.

So it's really important that we have it here in town.

And now to catch people up, if they didn't know again, a year ago after the San Antonio Symphony, the board made an offer.

It was cutting back a number of jobs to part time musicians said, no, we can't live on this.

It's wrong.

You went on strike.

Finally, in June of this year, the board declared bankruptcy.

When did you know you were going to start something new again?

Clean slate, new people.

On June 16th, I mean, really, we we didn't even consider not not doing this.

I mean, it never crossed our minds.

We just started working right away.

My first reaction to the bankruptcy was, I'm going to be very busy and I have been ever since.

And now what do you tell people?

I mean, I've covered the symphony and its problems for decades, you know, of the problems you've been here that it was just losing money.

It's hard to raise funds for this.

And they were doing the best they could.

What's going to be different now?

Well, first of all, I hope I'm not casting arrows at the past at all.

We're trying to basically just turn the page with a clean slate and basically start fresh without any of the baggage of the past and growing the organization from from really a clean slate And that means that we're really reaching out to a lot of people that have supported us in the past and providing them, you know, an avenue to support the art form and then finding ways to be out in the public, out in the community to do some really great concerts.

The support that we've gotten from around the country for from musicians and other orchestras has been phenomenal, both emotional support and financial support and people offering to come and help.

So we're capitalizing on that right now to really give San Antonio something great.

Now, it was going to be cut back from some 70 musicians to 40 full time, but 42.

Different.

That was proposed by the old symphony board.

How many musicians are you going to have now?

Well, right now, I mean, in order to have a symphony orchestra, you need to have a certain number of people on the stage or else you can't work Right now there are about two thirds of that 72 people that are in town still.

And so we wanted to commit to to hiring all those people and then bringing in other people to fill in to make it, you know, really wonderful concerts.

So part of the challenge for us is growing fast enough that we can retain as many of that ensemble as we can and then bring people home that have gotten work in other orchestras around the country.

How about how many how much are you going to be able to pay those musicians and how many concerts are you going to have.

So this year?

We have basically ten classics concerts and three Pops concerts, and we were doing a number of kids concerts out in the schools and we're basically paying per service for for whoever is here to do the work that that is, you know, not where we want to be, but that's where we're starting from.

And speaking of where you wanted to be, now you're at the Tobin, which was, you know, a great place for the symphony to play, and now you're at the First Baptist Church for a while.

What's the future of your venues?

Well, we've asked to be a resident company at the Tobin Center, and we're still waiting for a reply from them.

We have a number of challenges that we need to overcome in order to make that happen, and we just need to have an open dialog with what is possible.

And now going back to what happened in June, a former board member, Lionel Sosa, wrote an article in the Express-News that the board did the city a favor by declaring bankruptcy.

He basically said that a city symphony, supported as it was, is a thing of the past.

He remembers, you know, fundraising challenges 30 years ago.

And we we you know, we had a bankruptcy during that time, millions of dollars in debt.

I think the old symphony board officially is $10 million in debt to the pension fund of new musicians.

What's going to make it different?

What do you say to Lionel Sosa?

Well, first of all, thank you for all your work you did 30 years ago on our board.

But also right.

Like I said before, where we're trying to start something new and build up from the from the ground.

And I actually believe that there's a lot of enthusiasm for the art form.

I mean, maybe I don't hear the negativity because people tell me, but really the feedback I've gotten has been really wonderful.

And maybe this is a time where we can, you know, turn the page and start working together.

What about fundraising?

How are you doing in that?

And who are you looking toward?

I mean, a lot of people, the musicians had complained about the fundraising that they thought it was out there.

It just wasn't being accessed.

Sure.

So right now, we've basically been focusing on individual donors.

And, you know, we really are working hard to work with the city and county to deserve that support and get some of those grants going and and figuring out how that can happen as well as foundations and other other entities.

But that's all the foundations.

There's a grant process that we just need to start with those foundations and then just start start working with people to show that we have something incredible to offer on stage.

And you mentioned the ten classic concerts, three pops concerts, but some 30 at least school concerts.

So when I got into this and frankly, the reason that sold me in in like investing the amount of time that I'm investing is to get kids back into an auditorium to hear this music.

I mean, after the pandemic, everyone was so separated and alone, it was important to get that community back together.

So right now, we've I believe we have 36 concerts planned for the entire year.

We did our first six last week, and the response was incredible.

Incredible for me, incredible for the kids because they were just so happy to be together in a room and listening to music and being engaged as a community.

Are you together as musicians as much as you were before?

No.

I mean, we're going to have a much, much smaller season than we had in the past.

I mean, so if that if there's ten, let me just we're probably like 15, 15 weeks of work so it's it's much smaller than it was with the Symphony Society.

Now, I looked at your website and you have plans.

You talk about packages, individual packages, donors and things like that.

But there are still some concerts to be determined.

I believe there's maybe some repertoire.

OK, there's a three concert package and there are two concerts for the classics, I think, or The Pops.

When will you have all of it put together?

I think it's ready to go now.

I mean, the flexibility of buying those tickets is is something that we wanted to build into the whole marketing strategy.

So as far as the repertoire goes and the conductors and guest artists, I think that's I think that's set.

And maybe I need to maybe I will check after I get home.

OK, well, I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Brian Petkovic, president of the new S.A.. Phil, that's the official nickname.

You're going to have like a little logo.

We have a mascot.

I should have brought a shirt for you.

Oh, that's all right.

Thank you very much and good luck.

Thanks.

Brian Petrovich, the San Antonio Philharmonic it is one of San Antonio's crown jewels.

But in some ways, over the past decades, Brackenridge Park has been loved to death and really needs some work.

That's the consensus now.

Well, you've heard about Brackenridge Park for the past year or so, a controversy over trees and the work coming up for the 2017 bond project.

Well, over the next few weeks and months, you're going to be hearing a lot about the history, a fascinating history of the park because of a brand new book that's coming out after a couple of years of research, at least by San Antonio historian Lewis Fisher.

The book is called Brackenridge San Antonio's Acclaimed Urban Park, and we're talking to him today.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you for having me.

It so happens that I was starting on a project of a TV program we're going to have here on Keller and eventually heard that you were writing the book and both of us got caught up in this because it is so incredibly fascinating, the history.

Yours was going to be a shorter project, and then it just ballooned.

We found out all kinds of things.

That's right.

Tell me about what you found that surprised you.

Well, I had started out to write just a book about Brackenridge Park.

What a great place it is.

We have a sunken garden, we have a tea garden, we've got a pump house and lots of rivers and picnic areas.

But as I began chronologically, as I, you know, I tend to do, I got through the Native Americans and learned some things there and then got into the the human history of the park, into the Spanish colonial history, which turned up some things.

And then I got into the Confederate tannery.

Everyone knew that there had been a tannery on the river during the Civil War and that the Confederates had something to do with it.

But nobody really had any details on what happened there, who did it, whatever I got a hold of a guy in the National Archives in Washington who gave me a access to a file of papers of Major Thornton Washington, who was the commander of the tannery.

He was the great grandnephew of George Washington.

Grandnephew of George Washington.

He'd been on the staff of Robert Dailey.

He's the one who set up the tannery.

And as I got into that, I don't know the details of how it operated and what was involved.

The trade with Angola and the cotton smuggled across to Mexico and over to England for equipment and the reverse.

All of a sudden, I realized that if I included that in that much detail in the book, I was going to have to go into other details to do other things in an equal depth.

And I found out everything had an equal.

There was a horse racing track in Brackenridge Park at one time.

There was room for bike racing.

There were all kinds of things that we don't know about today.

That because of the the Cultural Landscape Report that was out a couple of years ago, that kind of first opened our eyes to all of these things that were in the park.

And then you went so much deeper.

Yeah.

What has happened with Brackenridge Park is that it has been the victim of loving care, helping hands at home, basically plop and drop.

Things were put places without thinking out what the entire picture was.

The San Antonio Conservation Society is the self-appointed watchdog of parks but it realized that Brackenridge Park needed some help and some special attention.

So they sponsor the organization of the Brackenridge Park Conservancy, which is a private group it's associated with the city.

It recommends changes to the city and has given oversight of some areas by the city and the conservancy focused on the park.

As part of that process, they realized the the ecology of the park was in serious trouble.

The banks were compounded, water was was impure.

And so a cultural landscape study was that was conceived of and financed by the Conservancy, by the San Antonio River Authority and by the city of San Antonio.

This was produced by a group of top flight national firms in Boston and Oswald.

And then after that came out, that's when you started working on the book.

Yes.

That that sort of identified the overall problems and also revealed what which people had begun to suspect that Brackenridge Park deserved some respect.

It had never been thought of as nationally as anything in particular.

It was not designed as other major cities have, parks designed by major urban planners who have grand boulevards and everything is carefully thought out brokerages wasn't it just sort of happened?

It's a.

No Frederick Law, Olmstead, no.

No.

Nobody likes that.

Everybody had a piece of it.

And it's been described as kind of a crazy quilt.

The amazing thing that people found from the outside was that the park worked.

And not only did it work, it reflected the the history, the evolution of the city of San Antonio as much as any other urban park anywhere else in the country.

That's what I find so fascinating.

And artifacts that go back thousands of years of indigenous people.

Then you have all this history of the Confederacy it was going to be fortifications there.

It was going to be a whole industrial complex because they thought that the Union Army that line up in Brownsville was going to come up and attacks San Antonio.

Right.

And then the Confederacy kind of, you know, fizzled.

Now, Brackenridge Park is important because it was given in 1899 by George Brackenridge and that's wonderful and we have a great park.

But what is significant about the park is that there are all these remains that are out there that we can see that are part of the park.

It's not just that, well this happened and we don't have anything left from it doesn't matter anymore.

It does.

The pieces are still there, some of them slightly above the surface, some of them are still below.

And some of those pieces were put together by Lou Whitman and more importantly, I guess by Ray Lambert, the parks commissioner who had been a saloon keeper and stonecutter.

And so he thought, oh, that'd be a great place for the zoo by the quarry.

And that would be a great place for a lily pine that became the Japanese.

Teagarden recruited a Japanese family prison labor, helped build all this as well as a golf course.

And that's the plop and drop kind of thing where he just said.

Well, it was he also had an overall plan re Lambert was the right person at the right time.

He was kind of a type A personality, and he had his head ideas coming from every direction and he would implement them, too.

And so he he built some some very unusual features in the park, such as the the Japanese Teagarden, which doesn't really look like a Japanese Teagarden, but that's what it's called.

That's what he called it.

So that's what it is.

And and so he developed some of the most unusual features of the park at a time when the city could could work with him, although he he cut corners everywhere, he could and relied a lot on donations, a lot.

And kind of arm twisting and people, the buffalo or the bison and elk.

And George Brackenridge himself, the philanthropist, was kind of an enigma.

I guess he destroyed some of his papers before he died.

Well, he's his record is written.

Record is very sparse.

You have to read about it from other sources for them.

For the most part, I.

Gave interviews and now what has happened in the past decades, we talk about the maintenance of the park at, you know, through the twenties into the thirties, that's when they ran out of money.

The WPA helped with the city really hasn't spent much on maintenance compared to other cities.

Yeah, this this goes back to the Depression.

Surprisingly, enough, Ray Lambert died in 1927 and the Depression came along in the thirties.

Now it's a bit deceptive to see all the things that the WPA put in a lot of cages at the zoo, a lot of improvements, roads, streets, buildings and it's, it's deceptive to think that the park was really cruising right along.

Well it wasn't because while these things were going up, maintenance have been severely cut.

The staff was slashed at the beginning of the Depression and so the city workers were not able to really maintain the park and it declined seriously in maintenance in the 1940s and fifties.

And many of the problems that we have right now date to that time for instance you mentioned trees.

A lot of the trees that need to be removed should never have been there in the first place.

Careful maintenance would have kept them when they were twigs.

And we now have the the dividends of neglect.

And also this is bringing attention to the Brackenridge Park Conservancy as they are trying to get more Park Tobar fast to the point that was held over the weekend.

They're having more programing here and really need more support.

There's a lot of private money now, millions of dollars going in to help these projects.

That's right.

It's very similar to what happened with the San Antonio Riverwalk, with the mission reach and the museum reach.

Public funding could take that just so far.

You have a utilitarian niche and you have the flood control tended to, but you don't have all of the extra elements that really raise this to a first class park.

And so the San Antonio River Foundation was organized to raise funds and to oversee the development, which we now are so fortunate to have in both the museum and the mission reaches.

And this is very similar to that.

And after writing this for a lot longer than you thought it was going to be, you should have gotten your doctorate, I think, for this.

What's the next project for you or do you have?

One of my next project has been dealing with the amazing, I guess, the pleasing outpouring of interest in the book.

And I have just been keeping my schedule here, not worrying too much about what I'm going to do next.

I'll take a big, big breather.

Yes.

Well, thanks very much.

This is fascinating.

And again, I also have to thank you for the interviews that you've given me and the impetus you're to blame for me doing this long, long program if I ever get it together on Brackenridge Park.

But the book now is coming out officially next month.

You can find it.

It's getting out into the pipelines now, the bookstores and.

Well, thanks very much, Lewis Fisher, just joy to read this book.

I was up late last night overnight reading it.

And we appreciate your work here in San Antonio.

Thanks.

Well, thank you very.

Just last week, CPS energy here announced that they are adding 188 more megawatts of solar power to their portfolio.

That's good news for those people who are concerned about their closing of one of the spruce power plants on the southeast side.

Joining us to talk about this and more is staff writer for the San Antonio Currant, Michael Carlos.

Thanks very much for coming in.

Now, this just happened and also San Antonio is ranked the fifth in the country now in terms of cities producing solar power.

Tell us where we are now.

Right.

So it was it was great timing that CPS announced the additional purchasing of the solar power from a solar farm in West Texas around the same time that a report came out saying San Antonio produces 355 megawatts of solar power annually, ranking as the number five top producer of solar energy in the in the nation.

However, the energy purchased by CPS doesn't count into that report because that report only focused on solar energy produced within the city limits.

So the next ranking, it won't leap just because of that, but it's a good sign.

And now you also mentioned that there was some news about the Calaveras power plant recently.

Right.

So on Wednesday morning, a report came out which named the Covers Power Plant, which is owned and operated by CPS as one of the one of the top five polluting facilities in the nation in terms of its release of toxic chemicals into the waterways of Texas.

And you know that that report comes out as are still ongoing controversy about CPS is Spruce Power Plant, which is one of the few remaining coal power plants in the nation, which environmental activists and locals have called upon to be closed down for some time now.

Now, part of the reason CPS bought that additional wattage of solar power is part of their plan to shut down the spruce power plant.

But even so, the timeline for that still isn't until 20, 28.

So the people that live around the spruce power plant, many of them low income folks, will still have to deal with the negative health effects.

And now another story you've been covering is the latest on Elon Musk's boring tunnel, his boring companies tunnel plans possible in San Antonio from the airport to downtown or to the Pearl.

What's the latest on that?

So the latest on that is according to the Army, Elon Musk and his boring company have pledged another $15 million in funding for the first phase, which would transport passengers and through the tunnels and Tesla's through or from San Antonio International Airport to the Pearl.

But what was really, you know, kind of bizarre is that the Boeing company said that this this route, when it's completed, will transport 112,000 people a day.

Excuse me.

That's kind of what it is.

That's a well, if you've been to the one like in Las Vegas that's working their loop, there seems no way they can move that many people because it's one tunnel, one car lane in one way, one car lane the other.

And just getting people in and out of those cars like taxis is going to take some time.

What's what's your sense of where we are really in the possibility of that tunnel happening?

You know, from my perspective, it seems like at least one phase might be built but I you know, I'm not against progress or innovation.

Just the numbers don't work out.

The numbers have yet to work out.

So part of it might get built, but it'll never be profitable.

And somebody is going to get stuck holding the bag.

And it's going to be facing a number of lawsuits already.

Just because of where it is or where that route would put it underneath some private land as well as possibly park land.

Right.

And I mean, we're still in the early phases, but it seems like the army is not letting go of this of this dream they have.

Well, thanks very much for coming in.

You write in about everything now from the Spurs to business to all of it, everything that's fit to print.

So to use a unique phrase.

Michael Carlos, San Antonio Curran, thanks for coming in.

Thanks.

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

You can see this show again, a preview of shows as well as check out the podcast.

Just go to KLRN dot org and we'll see you next time.

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