Welcome to the final term.

A conversation.

Sit down conversation with Mayor Ron Nuremberg.

It is a moment in his tenure where we get to kind of pause and reflect on where you've been and where you'll be.

This is a presentation with KLRN and the San Antonio Report.

My name is Leigh Munsill.

I'm the editor in chief of the San Antonio Report.

We are joined today by a live studio audience as well as virtually online.

So we're going to get moving.

But please first join me in welcoming Mayor Ron Nuremberg for this conversation.

My question to kick us off is how fast did the first three terms go when you came into the mayor's seat in 2017?

Your emphasis at the time was on public transportation needs, along with the need for a mayor to represent the entire city.

Do you feel like you've accomplished what you set out to do in your first three terms?

Well, thank you very much for having me, Lee.

And to Carla and the San Antonio Report, really appreciate the opportunity to to have a discussion about, you know, the last few years of city government.

I would say that, you know, anyone who says that six years mission accomplished, I think doesn't quite capture the nature of local government.

The truth of the matter is this is a 300 plus year old city.

The challenge is that we have to work on and that we've committed ourselves to are fundamental.

You know, things like economic mobility, which has been a common thread line of my time in office, are generational in nature.

And so, you know, my work and my focus is to make sure that we're making the fundamental decisions necessary and that we take the ball as far down the field as possible.

Because the truth of the matter is these efforts must continue long after I'm gone in order to make the impacts necessary to make San Antonio what I believe it can be and should be, which is one of the best cities in America.

The pandemic's timing had dramatic effects that are still ongoing.

So how much did the pandemic upend the city's plans since 2020?

You know, it's almost as if my time in the mayor's office has been in three phases pre-pandemic.

Pandemic.

And now, you know, we call it post-pandemic, although we're still living in the long tail of the COVID era.

I would say that the COVID pandemic itself was extremely disruptive.

I mean, look at the challenges faced by everyday Americans and certainly families here in San Antonio.

And one of the stories of that impact is that those who were on the margins, those who had stressors already, those stressors were exacerbated.

And, you know, I continually see the image of, you know, William Luther, a photographer who took the image of our food bank lines that had doubled overnight.

Families in San Antonio who were now literally overnight relying on the food bank to put food on the table as a result of this disruption.

That was an image of how fragile the American economy was.

Certainly an exemplified here in San Antonio.

And so that is the work that we began to focus on writ large in the country.

Although San Antonio story has been told through this lens for a long time and my first budget in office, we created the equity lens to start shifting the way we allocated resources to address this very issue.

So, you know, it was disruptive, but I think positive to come out of this is that the pandemic itself was a catalyst for transformative change.

And while we sort of had the seeds of that change planted, the foundational changes that needed to occur in our San Antonio economy, the fact that we now have partnership at the federal level and sometimes even at the state level to make these shifts to strengthen our community through economic mobility, through transformative infrastructure investment, that is now how we can look at the pandemic as not just being disruptive but catalyzing opportunity.

Can you give an example of a state partnership that's working well?

Sure, sure, I can.

And, you know, we just lived through the 88.

And so, you know, I want to give a bit of deference to the fact that that is also a robust discussion that happens in Austin.

Unfortunately, we still live under one party control.

And regardless of whether that one party is yours or not, one party control deadens the conversation and ultimately is not good for anybody.

So with respect to your state partnership, I'll tell you that we made it through the pandemic in part because of state partnership.

We had assistance in opening up our vaccination facilities in response to the need for distribution of PPE.

We had our state partners at the table, you know, in the early days of the pandemic, Governor Abbott and myself and the judge were at the same table planning in concert.

The response to the pandemic.

We saw all across the country, not just here in the state, the politics of Partizanship rear their head.

And unfortunately, public health has taken a backseat to the advancement of people's political agendas and scoring points.

The pandemic and people's lives were lost because of it.

I want to go back to downtown a little bit, and it seems that some of the vacancy issues we're seeing in office space has maybe not compounded safety concerns, but at least has added visibility to our city's issues with homelessness.

And so I want to talk a little bit about what the experiences of someone who comes to San Antonio as a tourist or a local who wants to go downtown.

And what do you want to see change about that experience right now?

Well, certainly, I think, number one, San Antonio has one of the most magical and unique downtowns in the country.

And so we have assets to build from, but we have had challenges just like any other city during the pandemic.

And one of those challenges has been very visible chronic homelessness.

As we're seeing a lot more economic distress and we're seeing a lot more addiction and mental health issues.

Now what we have done is focus on what works and filling the gaps and resourcing the areas that we need to fill in terms of gaps.

We passed a housing bond, which is an extremely important first ever affordable housing bond in San Antonio.

A big portion of that went to permanent supportive housing, which is a big gap for us, that housing that has assisted services attached to it so folks can get off the street first, housing first, and then we can work on restitution and making sure that they stay off the street and that our transitioning into permanent housing.

Another big area is that that actually we have just begun to address, and we did that in part, I think two weeks ago at the city council when we allocated some additional ARPA revenues is low barrier shelter.

There are folks, unsheltered homeless individuals who don't even qualify for permanent supportive housing because their their needs and their functional disabilities are so acute.

Looking forward to your next two years.

So when 2025 rolls around, what would you like to see different in San Antonio than it is right now?

Well, I want to see less orange cones.

Do you think there's going to be less than 20, 25?

Well, more coordinated orange cone activity.

There you go.

We've had some challenges and some of those are supply and labor disruptions.

But we need to get more efficient and effective in scheduling of construction projects.

And a city manager and I have talked about that quite a lot and he's focused on that.

Yeah, there's going to be some big projects going on, but, you know, there's several things that that I want to see happening in San Antonio at the time.

Of course, we're going to be knee deep in the terminal construction.

I'm calling it Terminal Alpha right now because we don't have a name for it, but it's going to be the modern airport facility that the city has deserved for at least 40 years.

HRT, Advanced Rapid Transit, which is legitimate mass transit for San Antonio.

First time ever is going to be underway with construction, our North-South line.

I also am hoping to see us very close to beginning construction on the East-West as well.

So the backbone of our advanced rapid transit system will be underway.

But, you know, I would say that the most important fundamental things that I want to see different in San Antonio and by the time I'm leaving, is the momentum that has been created around economic mobility.

You know, we have made a concerted effort to provide pathways to education and career development through training.

When you stick to that, that's really important.

The other leg of that stool, of course, is housing.

And we've talked a lot about the housing development.

We can talk more about the other aspects beyond homelessness.

Third leg of that stool is transport.

So this whole notion of equity is to ensure that we are creating economic mobility in our city.

The anchor that's been around the city for so long and you remember in 1968, neither one of us were born, but in 1968 there was a documentary created called Hunger in America.

San Antonio was the poster child of that kind of urban poverty.

Flash forward to 2020.

We saw the images of the pandemic shown through San Antonio's lens.

Nothing has changed.

We have to change that.

If we're going to be a city where everyone can thrive.

And that's the that's the work we've been dedicated to doing.

And so, you know, as as I see it, what I want to ensure is that we are we are continuing to see that momentum built on economic mobility last year on those city council, you oversaw the censure of two colleagues, Clayton Perry and Mario Bravo, and accepted the resignation of a long time colleague, Ana Sandoval, who accepted a higher paying job at university Health.

From your perspective, what are the lessons learned from the censure votes and are there any changes being put in place to avoid the behavior issues that led to those votes of no confidence?

You know, I think a couple lessons that have been learned with regard to censure is that the city council doesn't have the authority to hire or fire only the voters of the of San Antonio do that.

And so the censure was one way we could demonstrate that certain behavior was not becoming of a public official, that we can expect more.

And so we've had a lot of conversations, internal conversations about conduct and what we expect from one another.

But, you know, it ebbs and flows over the years.

I would say that voters ultimately have to make the determination of of, you know, what they expect from elected officials.

But I was very proud of the fact that we acted swiftly in each of those or both of those cases in terms of saying that these are things that that you know, aren't appropriate and you should expect more from elected officials.

Speaking to former Councilwoman Sandoval's, her stated intention or reason behind the fact that she switched off the council was because of the low pay.

Sometimes in a mayor's last term, it's a rare opportunity to take a look at council pay.

Mayor Pay.

A city manager pay.

What's your plan on those counts?

Yeah, and I will say that I'm first mayor to serve four terms in quite a while.

And so seeing a lot of permutations of charter changes over the last few years.

So I will be calling together a charter review commission, which is part of an ordinance that was created for this very purpose, probably after the budget, to have that public dialog.

And we'll go from there.

There's a lot of things that have been discussed, including possibly increasing the number of terms excuse me, increasing the number of districts.

Yeah, don't want that.

Just Christine for you.

Sorry.

Definitely not.

That certainly wouldn't pass the household test on that one.

So increasing the number of districts.

We did do a redistricting process for for the for the council I've talked about and a independent ethics authority for the city, which I think would be appropriate.

But ultimately, this is the domain of the city charter commission, a charter review commission, and they'll be discussing those things.

I will say just in my perspective, I came in when there was no council pay.

It was very challenging.

And thankfully we have, you know, two household earners that change to now have an actual council salary is allowed a lot of folks to access this job that weren't before.

And so that's an important discussion.

You know, if it's 50 years until we change that again, we're going to close the door again on a lot of folks who are willing to serve this community, not able to.

I have some questions.

I just want to hit pretty quick and you can kind of rattle off a couple examples or however you want to take them, though.

But I just want to ask, what have you not accomplished so far in office that you'd like to see happen before your term is complete?

Stay tuned.

Okay.

How soon?

Well, you know, it's two years, But no, I would say that, you know, the things that we're doing right now, they're transformative.

I want to make sure get done.

When I came to office, the big infrastructure conversation was transportation.

And so the mass transit plan is significant.

It's extremely important.

We've got to do that.

The other aspect of that, of course, is the airport.

We needed a housing plan.

We are now, you know, in year going into, I believe, year four of the housing strategy.

Prior to me coming to office, all this was laid clear after the S.A. tomorrow plan was put together.

One of the aspects that we have not gotten done, I think well enough, is having those two things talk to each other.

The planning effort and the city of San Antonio is important, and right now we're still seeing a cycle of sprawl continue and that's challenging all aspects of infrastructure and services.

And so we're going through a growth management discussion right now so it can inform decisions at some size and at the city, one that we have not talked about, though, is public safety.

And, you know, public safety is an issue that has ebbed and flowed over the years, and we are seeing that happen in all the other cities around the country.

I do believe San Antonio is doing the right thing.

We're having a sober analysis based on data and how we can augment our our policing services.

But also make it more robust in terms of comprehensive public safety discussions.

We have our, say, core teams with regard to mental health, and we've got to make sure that we're also addressing upstream issues on public safety.

And that's the work that we're going to be doing with UTSA, dealing with infrastructure and services related to youth and youth empowerment, public safety and crime.

I think we're probably the most commonly raised topics of conversation during the municipal elections this year.

It's certainly on a lot of voters minds.

One of the things that we've you have talked about on the city side is the possibility of adding new police officers over the next 3 to 5 years.

And as part of that discussion, you actually suggested that the city's policy of keeping public safety spending below 66% of the general fund is perhaps not a useful number anymore.

Is that still something you believe?

So this is the reason why I said it when we were in the midst of our impasse in the collective bargaining cycle to to cycle two contracts ago, we had public safety expenses mainly related to benefits rising two and a half times faster than city revenues.

That's unsustainable.

That's why it was a it was a significant concern in this community that we addressed that issue, and that's why it was so challenging.

But we finally got it done at this point.

And I will tell you, that's why people say it was crowding out other aspects of services, because as we had to allocate additional resources to address, you know, the rise in costs over there, we couldn't invest those other revenues in basic services like infrastructure.

And in fact, when I got to council there, our streets maintenance budget was $34 million a year.

Today it's 110.

So we were crowding out other funds.

In the midst of that, we said, okay, it's 66% of of general revenue being spent in that area.

Now we've got to say we got to cap it by policy and make adjustments because this is unsustainable.

That was one tool that we went into the negotiations with.

So now we have structural balance in our public safety budgets.

As we've seen, we're starting to see a normalization now of the budget where we can invest in infrastructure, investment services and properly invest in increasing public safety in accordance with our population growth and needs for services.

So it's it's fine, but we've actually seen that numbers start to decline.

And so I go into budget discussions and I've been through what, ten now?

And so I continually hear this this number 66% as if it's a budget two number.

It's not It was just scoring the high watermark.

And so my thought was it's almost irrelevant at this point.

I wanted to ask you, because it's been a fun couple of weeks in San Antonio.

Obviously, tourism is a huge piece of what makes San Antonio's economy tick.

And now the San Antonio Spurs are more closely aligned with Bear County in terms of oversight and governmental responsibility.

It's not exactly your space all the time, but I do have to ask you about when be how these are looking up.

Well, how would you estimate the economic impact of a number one NBA draft pick?

Does the city have any plans to capitalize on the excitement surrounding this moment for the Spurs?

It's almost incalculable, and we have proof of performance in that.

When Tim was drafted and when David was drafted.

So, you know, the economic impact, I think we'll understand over time.

And certainly that is a direct benefit to the Spurs.

But when the Spurs succeed, we succeed and there's going to be a ton of indirect benefit.

One of the things I'm looking forward to is all of a sudden, you know, the sports world in the world generally following the sports world, has been sleeping on our city, you know, not really paying close attention.

All of a sudden we're the center of the sports universe.

Now people are going to start to get to know our city again.

And meanwhile, we've been making all these important investments and moves, improving our city.

And so dramatic ways.

I'm excited for people to get to know San Antonio again.

One other thing I wanted to talk about, which we didn't talk about at the beginning of today, but today is actually the one year anniversary of the deaths of 53 migrants in the sweltering heat in an 18 wheeler found on the South Side, which is considered to be the deadliest human smuggling event in U.S. history.

Obviously, San Antonio doesn't set federal immigration policy, but we're affected by it and have to respond to it.

For you, what are the takeaways from that tragedy and what can a Sapd or other San Antonio entities do to try to keep an eye out for other victims of human smuggling and make sure a tragedy of that magnitude never happens here again?

Well, first of all, that was a devastating moment for our community.

Unfortunately, it's not a unknown feeling because we've been through that before.

It's just that the scale of the tragedy was so profound.

The people that passed away were people, you know, they had families.

Their families were, in many cases, wondering, you know, when they were going to get the call that they had made it.

They were trying to seek a better life.

So, you know, the politics of immigration and the system of immigration in this country are clearly broken.

But our approach in San Antonio, despite the fact that we can't solve the immigration crisis, is to make sure that we we treat people with compassion.

When you get here, it's not our job to ask for your papers.

Our job is to ask how we can help.

And if we see someone in distress, the compassion a thing to do is to try to ease that distress.

The city is growing.

The county is growing.

It's inevitable that growth, even beyond what we've seen already in San Antonio, is coming for San Antonio.

You kind of talked earlier about San Antonio having a moment.

How do you anticipate managing growth over the next two years?

It'll be a challenge.

And, you know, a lot of a lot of people say stop asking them to come here.

It's not really that we're doing that.

It's just we're building a great city.

People want to be part of it and businesses are growing and there's opportunity here so people will come.

And how we manage that is, though, is very important.

I mentioned, you know, we have some you know, in some cases we have one, if not two, hands tied behind our back in terms of how we can plan and manage that growth.

But investment in infrastructure is extremely important.

We've got to recognize that we can't simply build our way out of the challenges of growth.

And I'm speaking specifically about transportation.

We've got to develop alternative modes of transportation and we've got to protect green space if we do it right.

Green space becomes modes of transportation, and we've seen that with the Creek Way trail system.

Then it's the human element.

I'm telling you, we we've got to stay focused on making sure that people have access to education, because when people get here, they're not bringing their jobs.

You know, in some cases where businesses create jobs here, you know, and put jobs here, but we're getting an influx of people.

So we've got to make sure we stay laser focused on the housing cost burden in San Antonio.

And there are two elements of that.

Cost of housing, cost of living, but also the wages that people are making.

If we simply attack one side of that or the other, we're going to fall behind.

We are doing both.

What do you want?

Your legacy, the Nuremberg legacy, to be in San Antonio?

You know, I let other people worried about that and worry about the legacy thing.

You know, I never set out to be in politics.

My dream job is still to be or was and maybe still is to be the beat writer for the Boston Red Sox.

I'm a big baseball fan.

But, you know, I got into this because my wife and I started a family and I really started to get interested.

I had some background in municipal policy research.

I was at the Annenberg Public Policy Center for a number of years, but I was interested in people falling in love with the city, which I experienced and what the future of the city held.

And I wanted to do everything I could to be, you know, to to pour myself into making that future great.

And that's what I've done.

So that's what I've been working on.

And I do believe that this city over the last four or five years has been through an inflection point.

You know, my favorite quote is a quote about the arc of the moral universe.

It's long, but it bends toward justice.

And I've always been interested in those who do the bending.

And, you know, there's a lot of people in this city that qualify for that.

And if I can be one of those, that's what I want.

You know, that's what I want to do.

And in my view, the issues related to poverty and economic mobility are the most profound.

And that's what I've spent my time doing.

And is there anything else we didn't get to talk about today that you want to make sure you can talk directly to the citizens on?

I think we covered a lot.

I do want to say thank you to my wife and my son for tolerating this life for the last ten years.

We've tracked my time in office two ways my hair and my son's height.

And he was three years old when I started just about.

And now he's a 15 year old I couldn't be more proud of.

And so I love them both and I wouldn't be able to do it without them.

Great.

Well, thank you so much for joining us, everyone.

Let's think the mayor for being here and for the conversation.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

This has been the final term.

A conversation with Mayor Ron Nirenberg and the San Antonio Report in conjunction with KLRN and our wonderful partners.

Thank you so much for joining us and for our virtual audience for joining us also for this conversation.

And we'll wrap up here.

Thank you so much.

Thanks a lot for sitting.