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With Randy Beamer.

Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us for On the Record.

I'm Randy Beamer.

This week, some of the big news in San Antonio was made at City Council about how to respond to federal budget cuts or freezes or talk of that and how city councils should be responding.

An interesting dialog between City Councilman Mark white, district ten, who joins us in many places, among others.

District eight.

To talk about how we should or should not respond to, threats of or or funding cuts, this kind of thing, budget freezes.

First of all, take us back to that day Wednesday of last week as you see it.

Yeah, we had a B session to, discuss our federal legislative agenda.

And, during the course of the discussion, things came up about responding to the federal government and a lot of the policy initiatives that have, come out of Washington, D.C., that my colleagues are certainly not fans of.

And, there was an interesting back and forth, because my position is, listen, we need to be acting in the best interest of San Antonians, and we got to get along with our county government.

We got to get along with our state government, and we got to get along with the federal government as well.

A lot of folks don't know that $326 million is in our budget.

Those are federal funds that come down to San Antonio.

Right now there is.

That's right.

That could change, of course.

And that was exactly my point that let's not antagonize the federal government.

Let's not, you know, pee on their leg at every turn, if you will.

I understand we don't agree with everything that's going on up there, but let's try to work with them where we can because we need that money.

We need that $300 million to do some of the things we want to do for our citizens here in San.

So you didn't want them to speak out against what they, monopolize compared to domestic abuse, that it would be wrong to to just let it happen and, and say, well, we're going to keep quiet about our actual thoughts of what's going on up there.

Listen, I think respectful disagreement is, is fine.

And to talk about the fact that a particular council person may disagree with 1 or 2 of the policies going on up there, that's okay.

But when you use inflammatory rhetoric like calling the federal government, domestic abusers, calling them racist, talking about potentially suing them, those kind of things.

Right.

That's going to get noticed up there.

And then is.

It going to make a difference how we react in terms of what they do to San Antonio?

If you really think somebody up there is listening saying, well, he said this, so let's let's take it out on San Antonio.

Yeah, I absolutely do.

And in fact, there's been a, Department of Transportation order that's recently come down, from DC, where it talks about one of the things they're going to be looking at when they give out their grants, related to transportation is going to be how local jurisdictions, have been interacting with, with the federal government.

Are they following the laws?

Cooperate.

Following the law is different than than calling out someone as and I think that's my sense is what they wanted to do is to be able to express what they thought to to resist the policy sees.

I just think that without.

Worrying about a loyalty kind of thing.

Is it a loyalty?

Yeah.

No.

Nobody's saying you have to pledge fealty to to, Donald Trump and what's going on up there.

But we need to be more strategic with how we deal, with our, again, our state government and our federal government.

And, you know, for the last two years that I've been on council, I haven't heard a bad word said about the Biden administration.

But all of a sudden now, because maybe a different political party is in power in the white House, all of a sudden we're going to start speaking out, at every turn.

That's not smart, in my opinion.

Yes.

Voice your opinion where you disagree.

Do it respectfully, but let's find areas where we can work with them.

And let's not put in jeopardy that $300 million that we need from the federal government.

Let's go through some of that $326 million.

What's the most important?

What's the biggest chunk of that that we get right now from the federal government?

We get a lot related to housing.

We get a lot related to to transport.

And in fact, just the week before this, city council passed a bike network plan, right, which is going to cost our city hundreds of millions of dollars, but more than that.

Over.

Over 25 years.

But it'll cost more than that if we don't get the federal money to assist us with that program.

So that's a great example of where, the federal government's going to have discretion over whether to send us some of that money to help with that plan, and we don't want to put it in jeopardy.

Have you ever thought about, though, what we say about a specific person in Washington or how we react that it should, whether or not they should be able to say, okay, I don't like them, then they're, you know, doesn't it seem retaliatory if you're if you're subservient to that or you're worried about that more than.

Yeah, I don't disagree.

With freedom of speech.

I don't disagree with you at all.

But we are where we are.

And and, President Trump, has made it known.

And it's been no secret that, he will take retaliatory action.

So whether you like him or not, whether that's right or wrong, I'm not here to say we are a nonpartisan body down at City Hall.

Right?

There are no hours or days next to our name.

We need to work with everybody for the betterment of San Antonians.

And that was my only point last week.

Migrant resource center being closed.

Down.

How where are they in the process of that?

And what is that going to mean to the city?

Yeah.

Well, as you know, I've been arguing that we should close it down for the past year.

I have had my concerns about public safety.

And then also the fact that I don't want us spending our local dollars on it.

We have now gotten to the point, thankfully, where we are no longer accepting new folks to the Migrant Resource Center.

And when the last few folks leave, we're going to be shutting it down permanently.

And this is important, Randy, because, listen, it costs $20,000 a day to operate the migrant Resource Center.

Over the past couple of years, the federal government has been reimbursing the city for those costs.

Not all of it's been reimbursed to this point, but moving forward, there is certainly no guarantee that any money would be coming here.

We can't spend our general fund money operating the Migrant Resource Center.

Our money needs to be spent on our citizens, on our streets, on our sidewalks, on our police officers.

And so I'm happy that we're going to be closing it down.

A lot of concerns among the general public about what these funds, the freezes and the cuts will mean, whether or not it cuts the city's money from the federal government.

I talked yesterday at an event to, man from the university here, a university who is terribly concerned that when they cut the research grants, the so-called overhead out of that, they wanted to cut 60% of a research grant, which is called overhead.

But that's how it's been done for decades.

What do you tell people about about that?

And should they not voice their concerns or worry about how they put it so they don't offend someone?

No.

I think we're all concerned about about the freezes and potential cuts, and there's absolutely no problem with respectfully voicing concerns about that.

I think what's going on in the federal government right now is they're trying to get a handle on all of the spending that's taking place.

And let me tell you, I see it here with our own city government.

There is so much wasteful, redundant spending programs we spend money on where we have absolutely no metrics to determine if the programs are actually working.

I see that on a small scale here with our city.

So imagine what it's like up in Washington, D.C..

So I think they're getting a handle on that.

And as we move forward, the, you know, not all of this funding is going to be cut or frozen, but they're going through, trying to make it more efficient up there, sort of like the things that I've proposed down here with zero based budgeting and other things.

Government needs to be more efficient.

What do you what do you think of that so far?

Those cuts and freezes that have been, put on hold by courts, at least for now.

Should they go through with that?

Should Elon Musk and Donald Trump have that power?

Yeah.

So so I really question what some of the courts have been doing here.

Right.

And I believe that, you know, the the executive branch of the federal government, you know, does have a right to control some of the spending.

Obviously, the power of the purse lies with Congress.

And so those are issues that that the courts are going to have to have to figure out.

But again, I think in terms of what will be cut, what will be unfrozen, things like that.

We're going to see that play out over the course of the coming months.

Not everything's going to be going to be cut.

And, you know, we'll see.

We'll see what comes down.

Based budgeting is something you've been pushing for for a while here since you were elected.

This process, the upcoming budget for San Antonio, starting in April, it's going to be a little different than last year.

How?

Yeah.

So you'll recall that at the end of last year by a five to nothing vote, we got this new hybrid zero based budgeting model through our governance committee.

Our city manager has now committed to bringing in an outside consultant to help redo how we do budgeting here in our city, right?

Every department every year shouldn't get a little bit more money and government grows and we never check to see what if what we're doing is working.

What we're going to hopefully be doing now is department by department looking at each expense, for the upcoming year and asking ourselves, how is that expense going to go towards fulfilling that department's objectives for the coming year?

So it's going to be budgeting for results rather than budgeting just to spend money.

We're going to start that process in April of this year, and I'm hopeful that we're going to start spending money in a way, that more directly and positively impacts our citizens day to day quality of life, because that's what it's all about.

I hear about it every week in our neighborhood meetings, and city council needs to have its focus there.

All right.

Well, thank you very much for coming in and appreciate it.

Mark White, Councilman, district ten.

Thanks.

Thanks for having me.

With growing demands for energy across the state.

CPS energy just passed a budget with some big increases for generation and transmission.

Here to talk about that is president and CEO of CPS energy, Rudi Garcia.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Randi, thank you for having me again.

Tell us about this budget.

How big is it that people might be amazed?

We're talking into the billions and how much bigger is it this year?

So we've actually increased our capital budget.

You know, now, I wouldn't say drastically.

You know, we're trying to to bring as much investment into the year where we expecting, you know, high revenue numbers primarily from our wholesale, revenue, that power we sell on to the market when, you know, when prices are higher.

So our, our budget this year is $2.5 billion.

It is the largest budget.

And you know, our history, you know, but but I've been talking about the need to invest $1 billion a year for the next decade.

So it's in line with the projections that we've put out over the last couple of conversations we've had with council and, and our board on, on the rate increases that we've seen over the last couple of couple of terms.

But it's all necessary.

It's generation, it's technology, it's transmission.

It's investment.

Investment in our people.

So it's all the same things that we've been talking about for the last few years.

You talk about power generation and that increase.

Where is that money going to go, or are we going to see new, specific, ways to generate power or plants?

Well, so we have a generation plan that's been approved by our board.

And, and it includes all the generation that's available to us.

We've, we've seen and we've made investments in battery storage technology.

We've made investments in solar.

We've made a moderate investments a little bit more, in wind.

And we went out and bought, you know, 1710 megawatts of natural gas capacity that that was existing in the market in Corpus in Laredo.

So we have to keep the foot on the gas in terms of the resource, resource needs that we have, because our community is growing tremendously and the.

Move away from coal and with what Ercot tells you, you have to do with one of the old plants.

What are you doing?

Here in Bexar County now?

Well, that is part of our approved plan.

There are older units in the Browning units, and some units that are, simple cycle, natural gas plants that are just at the end of their useful life.

Ercot, you know, has asked us to keep the largest of the three units open, probably for another couple of years.

But our plan was always to have these older plants retired by 2030.

So we're still on.

And that's part of our approved generation plan.

So we're still on that pathway, to to getting those older units closed.

They're inefficient.

They're expensive to run.

We need to move on to the next set of resources.

And we are converting the spruce to unit, to natural gas, which was part of our approved plan as well.

And I've heard nationally, people are talking about, clean nuclear or smaller nuclear.

That's not an issue or that's not something you're looking at.

Absolutely.

We're interested in small modular nuclear.

We've actually signed a memorandum of understanding with Joint Base San Antonio.

They're interested in working with us to develop some small modular nuclear, which means what?

Well, which means it's a small unit that doesn't require a lot of water, that you could basically create a microgrid around.

So, you know, you could drop a small modular nuclear unit on Joint Base San Antonio, for instance, or other places, across our system and serve an area, be able to serve an area.

You know, if the power goes down, then they would have their own grid, you know, that's being served by that.

And then we can sell that power on the market when they don't need it.

You know, as part of our overall portfolio, we also have, the South Texas project south of Houston, the South.

Texas project.

That has a ton of land around it that we could string a bunch of those small modular reactors around.

If you're going to continue to create baseload power, that means power that you can run 24 over seven, and, and make, you know, inroads into your carbon goals, then nuclear is going to have to be part of the solution.

But decades ago, when the South Texas plant was coming online, that was hugely controversial.

And nuclear has been out of the conversation for so long.

How do you tell people, yeah, it's okay.

It's not the problem that we were concerned about back then.

Well, the small modular reactors are much different than the big reactors, number one.

The technology's just different and much safer.

But we do have some education to do in our community to make sure folks recognize, you know, what the technology does and what it means, what it is, what it isn't.

You know, and but we believe that it is the future in our industry.

We have data centers here coming online.

Bexar County people like that realize what a data center is and why it needs and uses so much energy.

How is that affecting us?

We have data centers lined up, you know, here in San Antonio, and they're here for all kinds of reasons.

You know, that we're reliable.

You know, we have very affordable power.

And we, you know, we've got military, you know, assets here.

You know, federal assets here that, that, that, that need the data services.

And you and I use data every day.

So there's a market for data services here.

They are very large load.

So, you know, it's not just, you know, connecting a gas station on, you know, on the corner.

So we have to plan appropriately.

We'll have to plan for the generation they're going to need.

We're going to have to plant.

We're going to have to built, you know, a lot of transmission to get service to them.

And we're going to have to do that in a way that doesn't take away from our ability to serve residential and commercial customers that naturally are going to are going to are going to grow.

Do we have much crypto yet in this area?

No, not a lot of crypto.

And I don't think we have a lot of crypto.

On the planning horizon, but it's out there.

Coin mining.

Yeah.

I mean most of it is literally just data data services.

That, that people are looking for.

All right.

Well, thank you very much, Rudy Garza, president and CEO of CPS energy.

Thanks.

All right, Randy, thank you.

On reporters roundtable this week, the Northeast Independent School District board voted to close three schools.

Very controversial decision here to talk about that and more.

Is education reporter for the San Antonio Express-News Melissa manno.

Thank you very much.

For.

Coming in.

Tell us about this, decision, because we've had this happen in different districts over recent years.

A lot of people surprise is happening in the Northeast District, and this year.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the board voted unanimously this week to close, Driscoll Middle School, Wilshire Elementary School, and Clear Spring Elementary School.

And this idea initially been proposed in December.

Community members have criticized the district for sort of the short runway here.

We've seen some districts kind of give it a bit more time to to gauge community, opinions.

But it's the sixth school district in Bexar County to have to take this painful step.

So it's kind of a familiar thing for families here to have to deal with.

And at northeast, the picture is similar.

I mean, they've lost 12,000 students over the past decade.

And so this plan is expected to save the district $5 million annually over, the next several years to offset a $39 million deficit.

And the loss of students might, people might think it's all because of charter schools, but it's not.

There's so many different reasons.

What are some of those?

Yeah, I mean, charter schools are a really big part of this picture.

They continue to pop up, and they're recruiting many students, but it's also private schools.

More and more families are homeschooling now or choosing other districts with open enrollment.

And then in northeast, we're seeing a lack of residential development.

And, you know, the development that has been there, according to administrators, has been apartment buildings.

They're not bringing school aged children.

And so a statistic that they brought up on Monday was 70% of that community does not have school age children.

The kids are just not there.

And the demographics, in terms of younger people not having as many kids, yes.

I think people don't realize that we had the San Antonio Independent School District superintendent on who said that is an issue and that they have to look at that long term in a big way.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think it's been about a 2% decrease in the birth rate over the past few years.

And so we're seeing the effects of that now.

And the thing is school districts just can't keep up.

Independent school districts can't compete with the recruitment campaigns that charters and other alternative education options are providing.

It's just not in their budget.

And that's before whatever happens in Austin with the legislature and the school voucher bill.

What are they saying to the people in the in the public schools?

Think about what's going to happen this year and how they prepare for enrollment.

How do they predict?

Yeah, I think that's exactly what all of them are trying to figure out right now.

They don't know for sure what it's going to look like, but they all agree that it's going to be catastrophic.

And, we saw this go to the legislature back in 2023.

Ultimately it failed.

But back then, Governor Greg Abbott had said that he would not allocate any funding to the school districts if vouchers didn't pass.

He, followed through with that from any extra funding, and he followed through with that promise.

School districts did not see that it was about $7 billion.

They didn't see any of that.

And we're seeing the effects of that.

And so, this time around, Abbott is confident that that will pass.

It was passed in the Senate this week and is now with the House, and school districts are just bracing to lose even more students than they're already losing.

They are supposed to get there, or they expect to get more funding because the voucher bill would pass, the public education would get more funding again for the first time since, what, 2019?

Yes, yes.

The basic allotment, which is the per student mechanism at the core of school funding, has not increase since 2019.

And so if vouchers does pass, they will see some additional funding.

They agree though by and large that it will not be enough.

It won't be enough to offset their deficits, and it will not be enough to, bridge gaps and staffing shortages.

They're all facing challenges hiring.

And it's not just teachers we've seen in the ledge.

That teacher pay is a priority item, which is great.

That will help with, teacher shortages.

But it's not just teachers that they're struggling to hire.

It's custodians.

It's Hvac technicians, it's paraprofessionals, bus drivers.

And so they agree they need more, they need relief.

And teacher shortages.

Other shortages is why we're seeing in Floresville at least a look at the four day week.

What's going on there?

Exactly.

Yes.

The board last week had approved the developed of a hybrid calendar.

And so that's key here.

It wouldn't be all four days.

All four day school weeks.

It would be a mix of both traditional five day weeks and then the four day weeks.

They have to do it that way to meet the required instructional minutes.

And so that's instead of days like they used to ten years ago, it's minutes.

It's six minutes you have to have according to the legislature.

Yes.

And that is exactly what provided the flexibility to make those transitions.

We've seen a decent amount of school districts across Texas go towards these four day weeks, and the reason is pretty clear, it's attractive to teachers, who are burnt out, overworked and underpaid.

And so when a school district can offer three day weekends, why would they not take that option?

And it's attractive to teachers.

But what about parents and students and what their reactions say in Floresville?

Yeah.

So they, have conducted a community survey over the past few months.

Of course, staff overwhelmingly were in majority of it, but also, surprisingly, parents too, agreed that they were in favor of that decision.

Now, I think the reason for that was because the school district has promised to partner with the community organization and provide childcare, on Fridays.

Fridays would be the day off because they see a surge in substitute, teaching requests on Fridays.

Students, on the other hand, were less in favor of it, which, I don't know might be surprising, but they don't want the extra day off.

They, I guess, want to be in class with their friends.

What about, similar surveys, say, in San Antonio?

They have said no.

Parents have said no.

At least at this point.

Yes.

The only school district in San Antonio that is even gone as far as to gauge community interest is Northside Independent School District.

And they conducted a survey last year.

Overwhelmingly, parents did not want those four day week.

So for now it's off the table but could come back, especially because it will save districts money as they are confronting record budget deficits.

And now back to the, the district say East Central this week is looking at a bond issue where they would have to build schools.

So people in northeast are wondering why are they building schools?

And we're closing.

Yes.

And this is a bond that failed back in November, but they're going to continue to pursue it because they are seeing a surge in students.

And it's really, you know, kind of interesting to have school districts like East, central, southwest, Medina Valley ISD is where they're growing rapidly, and they cannot keep up with the growth.

They have overcrowded classrooms, students in portables, and they need to erect new campuses while inner city school districts are seeing this exodus.

And it really is suburban sprawl.

People are leaving the cities and, you know, going to those communities more and more.

And a lot of the landlocked districts, meaning it's not landlocked so much as development locked.

They just can't have any more.

Nowhere else.

Yeah.

And you can see, I guess, what are the the most stressed school districts in San Antonio since the Edgewood, that kind of thing.

And yeah, I think it's the exact school districts that we've seen have to close schools.

And so that would be San Antonio ISD south in Edgewood, Harlan Dale, and in December, Judson ISD, chartered that same course.

They decided to close one school.

And so these are districts that feel like their backs are against the wall.

They've tried to do other things, cut programs, find other ways to break costs down.

And ultimately, they had to make that painful decision to close school doors for good.

What are.

Yeah.

Where were they focusing on besides closing the schools?

What's what's the easy pickings right now for our budget?

Yeah.

And northeast ISD highlighted some of these efforts because they've gone through it.

They've exhausted other options before getting to this point.

What it's looked like there is redesigning programs.

They redesigned their hyper accelerated math program to sort of the thing is, it's people at northeast ISD, 87% of the budget is people.

And so it's finding ways to not necessarily get rid of people, but transition people to fill current vacancies and reduce the number of positions.

So just changing programs around, absorbing, you know, consolidating programs.

There was a discussion to consolidate dual language.

Ultimately, they didn't do that because of the community opposition.

But, you know, this move, of course, of closing schools was also, not favored by the community.

Fascinating.

And you're going to have a whole interesting springtime in there with the legislature.

See what happens.

So come back and let us know what's wrong and appreciate it.

Thank you.

Melissa manoa, education reporter, San Antonio Express-News.

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 the 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 Dufilho