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.

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 in the past couple of weeks, we have seen a number of shootings involving police officers.

In fact, just a couple of nights ago, we had one.

And here's what Police Chief McManus had to say about that.

So earlier this afternoon, another one of our officers was shot.

But individual who is a repeat violent offender and should have been in jail.

Joining us to talk about that now is Danny Diaz, who is the president of the San Antonio Police Officers Association.

Thank you for coming in, because this has been a tough time for the department, obviously, for your officers.

Your initial reaction has been in the news.

But tell me about what goes through your mind and what's going through officers right now after this.

Well, first of all, thank you for having me.

You know, morale was already at an all time low with things that have transpired across the country and here over the last six, seven years.

With this, we've seen a lot of brother officers that have been injured on duty.

And it's taken a toll.

You know, I've seen some of the younger officers out there, their facial expressions and them coming in and talking to me about issues that they have.

It's it's it's a fight to stay mentally prepared.

And you attribute this to a number of different reasons.

But what are the main ones that you you see is causing these kinds of shootings and incidents?

Well, a lot of it is.

And I'll tell you, frustration for the law enforcement side.

We've been dealing with the DA's policies all since the inception of his tenure, District Attorney General Gonzales, from giving individuals a citation for amounts of cocaine, small amounts of cocaine.

It's started climbing to up to a gram in certain cases.

So officers are frustrated because we're arresting these individuals that are committing robberies, drug usage.

And sometimes they beat us back out on the street because the DA's office or the individuals at the magistrate's office will release them, saying that, no, it doesn't meet the requirement.

It needs to be more drugs or whatever the reason.

What is the requirement in terms of keeping somebody in jail after an initial arrest?

Well, depending on the DA's policies, that's what those attorneys are following.

By state law, any amount of narcotics is an arrestable offense.

All we're asking for is for them to do their job or for him to do his job and follow the law the way that it states.

Because of what we've been doing over the last several years of retreating, de-escalating.

There's been no consequences for these individuals that have committed crimes against individuals.

And you say that he just hasn't prosecuted what he should.

Now, the D.A.

for one of the responses to that is all we can do is ask for the public to cooperate, that it's tough to prosecute some of the crimes because they don't have witnesses or witnesses aren't cooperating.

Yeah, he's deflecting.

So there's things in there that he doesn't come out and say.

We have body cams now.

We got videos in the cars that they use constantly for evidence.

Our detectives are very frustrated because they do bring good cases with those witnesses and any evidence that they need.

And they just seem to fall by the wayside.

I'll give you an example.

If you have one individual that has four crimes, if four of them are aggravated and one is like a theft, they'll drop the four aggravated crimes and get them on a theft.

That way, it's less time he stays in jail and he gets out sooner than later.

And in terms of these last half dozen cases here, what were some of these suspects?

They had been in jail before and were out telling me about these cases.

So each and every one of them had a extensive history of burglaries, aggravated robberies.

They're all different for the different individuals.

One of them that that the shooting and I forget which which date it was.

But he had committed two robberies the day before and one that morning of the the officer involved shooting.

So these are crimes against individuals.

So what we're asking is that one, that they actually go out and do his job.

Two, that the community come together again.

And let's start asking those questions because what's transpired, it's a detriment to this community.

How many more citizens have to lose their lives before the D.A.

starts doing this job?

Fortunately, now we have hospitals 17 that passed and started September 1st that the governor put through that holds these district attorneys accountable.

If they refuse to prosecute on certain cases.

And you see it as refusing to prosecute instead of just not having the evidence to prosecute.

Well, I see it as him following the policies that he put in place to allow individuals to stay out of jail.

And what are you asking of the D.A.

for him to do his job?

For him to resign, as I understand as well or not?

Well, if he can't do his job, then yes, absolutely.

And he's to resign.

And it's showed.

Look, he's been there for four years, a little over four and a half now.

And this has been a common occurrence.

We stated this when he ran after in this past election.

We stated this and showing statistics that he wasn't prosecuting these individuals.

Of course, I got a cease and desist letter to put out those to stop putting out those statistics because they were wrong.

But we acquired them from the district clerk's office.

Now, he says also there has been an overall decline in violent crime in Bear County and that they have had the highest homicide conviction rates recently.

That that's from my standpoint, since that's your statement.

We have 108 murders this year in San Antonio alone.

It's higher than what it's ever been.

Our crime rate has gone up and has skyrocketed.

So I don't know where he's getting his numbers, but the the habitual criminal is constantly going out and committing those crimes.

And now, in terms of the number of murders, I don't know if it was it seems to me it was higher back in the nineties in terms of overall homicides.

But what do you attribute that to?

These numbers, the increase in murders, again, so again, a lot of it was what we've been doing over the last six years through George Floyd during that time.

Look, cities across the country, including here, are getting tired of individuals just being allowed to do what it is that they want to do as far as committing crimes.

Now that that the community has asked for, city council has asked for product proactivity.

Now we're having to go out and get these criminals.

Well, there's been no consequences before.

So they're retaliating.

Hence, it's put us into this predicament that we're in now.

And now some of the officers were shot while serving warrants on these individuals.

Well, it wasn't a yes, they had warrants, but it wasn't that they were going in and knocking down a door.

They were calling them out.

One of them was actually they were following him in the vehicle.

So all these types of situations are all different.

And as far as the warrants were concerned, they weren't making entry like we used to do in the past.

It happened prior to getting to that that point.

They were being called out.

Of course, if the house was surrounded, we used the means necessary that we have to to make sure they come out before we go in.

We haven't been running any of those warrants lately on any of these individuals with these incidents.

And how are the officers that were injured in these incidents?

There's quite a few that are going to they're going to be dealing with some issues for quite a while.

The one yesterday he's going to be okay is going to be in the hospital for another couple of days, making sure that there's no infections from or from the shotgun blast.

Now, you said before the officer before these particular incidents, the officer morale was at an all time low or was very low.

Why was that Partly the same?

It's pretty much the same the same issues, right.

Our policies that that were put in place by the D.A.

are hampering officers from doing their job.

So it's difficult when you arrest somebody, take them to jail, and then they're they're out.

And we sent out a spreadsheet in our press release a week and a half ago.

There's one individual that that had 25 or 28 prior cases, and he's still out.

But some of this also isn't, I guess, just with the D.A.

But this has to be some judges because some of these have been cases that were dismissed in the past.

So they did get before a judge.

And a lot of this is is finger pointing.

Right.

The deal blames the judges.

Judges blames the D.A.. D.A.

blames the bondsman at some point.

And and I think when we originally spoke on my first interview with you, I learned one thing is that no one talks to each other.

How do we get things done?

Same thing with them.

If they don't start talking to each other and start to fix this, the justice system in Berry County is going to fall by the wayside now, as opposed to when we talked before.

You and the police chief are on the same page on this.

Absolutely.

And you hear the chief saying it all the time.

These people would.

This would not have happened if these individuals would be in jail for the prior cases.

D.A.

Gonzalez can point fingers to everybody else.

Ultimately, he has to take responsibility.

And if he can't, then he needs to resign and let somebody else that's going to do the job.

All right.

We appreciate you coming in.

And thank you very much.

And we'll also want to make sure that we get the the response from the D.A., Joe Gonzales, if that's possible.

We hope to have that soon as well.

Thanks very much, Danny Diaz, president of the San Antonio Police Officers Association.

Appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

There's a new COVID vaccine that'll be available within a few weeks.

Doctors are recommending that for certain groups of people and here in San Antonio, we wanted to find out what the latest is and the numbers of people who have it, who's at risk.

Joining us to talk about that is Dr. Jason Bowling, who is the chief hospital epidemiology just for University Health.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Now, people have maybe heard about the new vaccine coming out.

We'll get to that in just a minute.

But first of all, where are the numbers right now here in Bear County in terms of COVID and how serious the cases are?

Sure.

I think that's a great question.

We're in a different time with COVID than we were in the pandemic started and the public health emergency has ended.

And one of the challenges is that we have less visibility, meaning that it's a little bit trickier to know where we're at because we don't have all of the testing and things that we had earlier on.

That being said, we know that cases are up and we know that for a number of reasons.

One, we still have some reporting of cases.

We follow hospitalizations that are related to COVID 19, and those have bumped up some, but fortunately, they remain relatively low.

So we're not seeing in the same hospital numbers that we saw in the winter or last summer.

Now, when you talk about visibility, that means maybe somebody who has it, but they haven't been tested for it because they don't think about it being that serious.

So they don't need to be tested for whatever and they're just going through it like maybe the flu.

The symptoms similar to the flu symptoms are very similar to the flu.

And you're right, absolutely right, that there are a lot of people now that aren't getting the testing.

We're certainly not doing the asymptomatic testing that was being done at a pretty high volume during the public health emergencies.

They gave us a lot of information about really day to day where we're at with number of cases.

And so now we're relying on people that are symptomatic enough to get tested to have cases reported.

And so that's what decreases our ability to know day to day as much.

But we still have a fairly good amount of information.

And fortunately, through our virology lab, we have some good information about testing as well.

Is it expected at this time of year because we're heading into flu season that a virus would spread like this, more people are indoors or not because of the heat.

So each of the summers of the pandemic, the last three years and now this year, the fourth year we've seen increase in activity in the summer.

This is a little bit later in the summer and it was a school started.

So that really kind of led to some momentum from further cases being spread.

Probably during the summertime.

There's a lot of travel and during this summer especially, we're reaching pre pandemic levels of travel.

So people are going all over the globe, going to areas where there may be COVID activity, bringing it back to our local community.

And then certainly as hot as it's been this summer, a lot of people have been gathered indoors, probably closer together and that, you know, maybe some outdoor activities, but not spending as much time outdoors.

And maybe in summers where it's not quite as hot, there are a couple of variants that are out there.

And you said at least one of them is a direct descendant of the Omicron from a couple of years ago.

And what does that mean?

We are ready for it in terms of the vaccine.

So we are ready for that.

In terms of the vaccine, which is good news, we're getting information even today.

You know, studies being reported out, we're still dealing with descendants of this Omicron, which is good.

We're not seeing a completely new variant this Omicron, really, if just to remind everybody, when it came out, it was really transmissible and it led to one of the highest levels of hospitalizations that we've seen.

Fortunately now, since we're still seeing the same descendants of Omicron, most people have either been infected or had the vaccine.

And so we're seeing less severe cases, but it's still very transmissible.

So we're seeing a lot of cases still mainly in the outpatient setting, meaning that people admitted to the hospital.

Who do you recommend should get that vaccine?

And I understand they can get it with another vaccine at the same time, as well as the flu vaccine.

We want everybody to get the vaccine that it's eligible for that six months and older.

But we particularly want our people that are vulnerable for severe infections.

So people that are older, people that have underlying medical conditions, particularly, you know, heart, heart problems, lung problems, especially, this is a respiratory virus.

But really anybody with chronic medical disease, people that are taking medicines that compromise our immune systems, we want everybody to get that vaccine to have additional levels of protection.

And because this has been so politicized over the years, there are people out there who are being told, don't take it.

It's not.

It's all for the pharmaceutical industry.

I've heard some of this even locally, what you would call maybe the non the mainstream media.

What do you tell people out there who are hearing that message that doctors, some doctors are saying don't get?

I mean, that's what I heard literally on the way in today.

Right.

Right.

So I think the best the vaccines are the one of the most public health effective tools that we have.

They prevent hospitalizations.

Really, if you're looking at it just from a profit standpoint, people would want long hospitalizations where you can get lots of procedures.

And nobody wants that, right.

Everybody wants people to be healthy.

A healthy community is actually good for everybody, financially advantageous for all of us, for people to be able to be, you know, effective, healthy, be able to go to work, go to school, that's better for everybody.

So historically, people have been open to vaccines, polio vaccine eradicated.

That flu vaccine we used to get every year or so.

Problem is it tougher these days to convince people to get it?

After the history of COVID, it's been challenging.

There's been some challenges, in fact, with us learning about the COVID vaccine as it was rolled out.

That was really a technological breakthrough as fast as it was rolled out for this new pandemic, which was great.

But then it got confusing with how many doses should I get, when should I get it?

And really, they're trying to move that strategy to something that's more simple for people to kind of get into the rhythm of.

Move it to one vaccine probably annually similar to the flu vaccine probably around the same time of year.

That way, it's a little bit easier for people to put it into their, you know, regular rhythm, the regular schedule.

And how about mask these days?

What are you telling people about masks?

So we know that that masks are effective even one way masking, which means that if you wear a mask because you're at high risk for severe COVID and other people around, you aren't wearing a mask as long as you're wearing a high quality well-fitted mask that still reduces your risk of getting severe COVID infection ending up in the hospital.

It's still a tool that should be used, and we need everybody to be tolerant of somebody else that's wearing a mask.

We don't need to wonder why it could be that they had COVID and they're still in that time period where they're trying not to transmit to others.

Could be they have an underlying medical condition they didn't want to talk about regardless.

Or it may just be their, you know, their concern for themselves.

Right.

Getting COVID at all.

People don't want long COVID.

And so I think it's important that we're all accepting if someone's wearing a mask, that's a perfectly valid choice, particularly when COVID levels are high.

And I would actually recommend a mask for somebody that's at high risk for complications.

So people that are older or if they're immune systems compromised, if they're going to go to a crowded public setting, wearing a mask is an additional way that they can protect themselves in addition to getting the vaccine.

And what about the flu this year?

What's the outlook for that?

Or do we know yet?

So we don't know yet, but we expect that we'll see.

Flu cases in there could be quite high.

Flu seasons are definitely difficult to predict.

We are seeing flu already.

We saw 14 cases this past week in our virology lab and that's just one hospital.

And it's flu is out there and it's gone up over the last couple of weeks, which coincides with schools restarting, people, getting back together.

So we know that we will see flu activity, how much we'll see it and when we'll see it.

It's unclear, but we'll likely see a fair amount of flu kind of throughout this race toward virus season.

And it's hard to tell.

But, you know, I've heard people say also from the conspiracy side of it, get ready for lockdowns.

There's an election coming.

And this also is hard for medical people to deal with because that's well, what do you tell people about that?

Right.

And if the CDC has actually, you know, released an official statement saying there's no lockdowns coming, which is trying to combat this this notion out there, there's not going to be lockdowns.

You know, we're at a different place than we were back when we first in 2021, when you had this huge pandemic with something that people we didn't have a vaccine for.

We're trying to sort out what was going on.

We're in a different place now, but we don't need to go from not having a lockdown to not doing anything to protect ourselves either.

What we need people to do is do their own risk assessment, determine what they need to do as far as masking.

We need people to get the vaccine and we need people to stay home when they're ill protected and to get the vaccine, they need to go to a doctor now, because unlike in the past, when University Health and others were helping to give publicly free vaccine, it's different now.

Where do you go to make sure that you can get a vaccine, Doctor?

It it is it is different now that we don't have these huge vaccine centers, but people can still go to a lot of community based pharmacies to get vaccines.

There's still making efforts to have vaccines available.

Insurance covers, vaccines, hospital, the White House administration is working to provide vaccines for those people that don't have insurance so that we can make sure that we have that we need enough people to get vaccinated, to help protect people that are going to respond as well to the vaccine.

All right.

Well, thank you very much for the update.

And hopefully we'll have you come back in the new year saying, hey, there was nothing.

It wasn't a big deal.

But take the doctor's advice.

I appreciate it.

Dr. Jason Bowling, chief epidemiologist of University Health, thanks for coming in.

Thank you.

On Reporters roundtable this week, we are talking solar energy and whether it is hot or not, this is an actual print edition of reporting that you can get these days.

Still, San Antonio Business Journal the reporter is Zoe Got Megan, who is a tech and energy reporter for the Business Journal.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thanks for having me on.

First of all, tell us about this story, how you got into it and whether solar energy is hot or not because I guess we had all assumed there was or you'd been told it was.

Yeah.

So it was about March.

I had done an interview with two area solar companies, Big Sun, Solar and Freedom's Solar Power.

I talked to CEOs Robert Mickens of Sun Solar and CEO Brett Bigot of Freedom Solar Power, and they both were very confident in their projections.

They had told me, I believe it was big.

Central CEO Robert Mickens had told me that his company was on track to double its revenue and freedom.

Solar Power CEO Brett Biggar told me his company was on track in the next two years to reach the billion dollar threshold.

So I thought that was pretty significant.

And, you know, it was only a few months later that I received a tip about Freedom solar Power conducting nearly 9% of layoffs of nearly 9% of its workforce.

So that kind of sparked my interest.

So I decided to go back to to Robert Mickens and ask him if he'd been seeing the same at his company.

And he had confirmed to me that he too had seen nearly 9% of the workforce laid off as well.

So that was really what piqued the interest in what the heck is going on here and what is going on.

It's basically you found out, I understand, that, you know, not immune to the overall economy.

And as it was for a while when there were so many rebates, there was a, you know, big deal made out of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 that essentially made it so the investment tax credit went up to 30%.

It had previously been 26%.

So commercial commercial businesses and residents were set to, you know, receive a significant savings on their solar installations.

So it was just a it was just kind of a big shock because I really expected that to sort of be like the boon of the solar market.

And it didn't exactly turn out that way.

Well, now, at the same time this summer, we've heard how wind and solar really helped save the Texas grid, that when it needed that extra capacity, they didn't have the capacity in this heat.

Is that right?

Yeah, definitely.

So one of the conversations I had with Andrew Webber, he's a Jose Centennial professor of energy resources, and he was telling me that, you know, because we had seen with our court, they had issued six straight days of conservation appeals.

That's a pretty big deal.

And he was telling me, you know, without solar and wind, we would have definitely seen blackouts.

I mean, there were near outages, but but we would not be where we are today if it weren't for solar and wind, according to him.

Now, do you think that will encourage more people to do solar and wind, despite the fact that, you know, it's still a business, you know, whether you're going to be able to make as much money or not, do you think that's going to encourage more investment in solar?

Yeah, definitely.

I think for sure, people are definitely looking at micro-grids now, you know, self-sustaining grids.

So they're not it's not part of the overall grid.

I think that winter storm Uri was a big factor that played in.

People were kind of panicked about it and like people wanting to be energy efficient.

There's also other factors that come into play like ESG, environmental, social governance and environmental social governments.

Governance is if you want to invest in something environmentally friendly and that how is that going now in terms of it encouraging or not as much encouragement?

A lot of companies right now, because they're also getting contracts with multinational companies such as their Safran Helicopter Engines USA was one of them.

The Tesco technology is is another.

They're all looking at their ESG and trying to basically make that look better.

I think a lot of multinational companies are concerned about investor and how ESG will affect that.

And affecting it also is, I say, CPS energy, even though they have moved away from more direct rebates to people.

Tell us about that.

They had a rebate.

It was up to $80,000 for commercial businesses and up to 2500 for residential customers.

And just in December of 2022, they announced the ramp down of that.

So that's definitely been a significant factor because obviously residents and commercial businesses are always looking at their ROI, like when is this going to pay off?

And you know, for a while there, you know, especially with the IRA, it was looking like it could go down from like decade or more in recouping your costs to approximately seven years.

So that would make a big difference for a lot of people.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so this is kind of a mixed bag in terms of what you're reporting on what what's in your crystal ball about the future of solar.

Yeah, well, I think there is definitely a lot of promise.

You know, one of the interesting interviews I had done with Build San Antonio Green, a green home certifier in San Antonio, they were telling me that Green homes certifications are up 92%.

So that's that's a big number.

It looks like things are starting to pick back up.

For example, you know, both Jason Pitman, who's the president of Fix on Solar and Robert were telling me that some of the projects that they had put on hold because the companies requested them to just starting to come back online.

So everything's starting to sort of people are seeing sort of a renewed confidence in the solar market.

But I think what this story really highlights is that it's not it's not infallible, you know what I mean?

It's it's still a business.

Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, one of the big points that I really wanted to get across with picks on solar is that he was telling me Robert was telling me that solar still kind of looked at as discretions, free spending.

And so when, you know, people are kind of closing their pocketbooks, when inflation rates are up, that's the first thing that they're going to look at to to potentially knock off their list.

So we're just starting to see signs of recovery.

All right.

Well, very interesting story.

Again, Zoe got away with a story in an actual print edition as well as online San Antonio Business Journal.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Appreciate it.

Great job and thank you for joining us for this edition of On the Record.

You can see the show again, our previous shows, as well as download the podcast at klrn.org I'm Randy Beamer, and we'll see you next time on the record is brought to you by Steve and Adele Dufilho