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 Beemer.

Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us.

I'm Randy Beemer.

And this week on the record, we begin with the Da, Joe Gonzalez, and we're going to talk about domestic violence that has been in the news recently.

There was a murder suicide over the weekend connected to domestic violence.

Before that, we've had a number of cases, I guess eight out of the 18 murders out in Bexar County this year have been domestic violence related.

It seems like every few years Bexar County has an uptick.

Are we seeing that right now?

And do you have any particular reason you think for that?

I think that we are seeing an uptick.

Unfortunately, that's nothing that's unique to Bexar County or even Texas.

It's across the nation.

When you look at the reasons, there are a multitude of reasons.

But I think primarily it's the economy.

It's the inability to to to hold the job.

It's the inability to afford paying your mortgage or your car payment or feeding your family, putting bread on the table, as I say.

So I think a lot of it has to has to go back to our economy.

I want to get to another reason we're talking about domestic violence.

You've been in the headlines with a local TV station here, the headline.

I want to read it here.

Misdemeanor domestic violence case dismissals climbed to nearly 90% in 2026, KSAT analysis finds.

What do you say to that headline first of all?

Well, that's unfortunate reporting because it's inaccurate, which is the reason I'm here, is to try and clear the air.

You know, the official reporting agency is the Office of Court Administration.

That's the standard.

That is the agency that every court has to report to.

So we rely on them to provide accurate numbers.

And it's not our numbers.

Those are numbers that are coming from the courts themselves for misdemeanors.

It's the county courts that report to OCA for felonies.

It's the district courts that report to that agency.

It sounds like a little inside baseball.

Their numbers came from the Bear County Information Technology department.

And so their analysis is different than your numbers.

Oh, absolutely.

And remember, they're not my numbers.

They're numbers that I'm that I'm.

How are they different and why?

Well, for example, they talk about dismissals, which is what the basis of this reporting was.

They report there were almost 90% dismissals.

Well, that's not true because what they have calculated as part of dismissals or for example, for example, defrauded, which is a form of probation that doesn't result in a conviction.

That's not a dismissal.

That's a case where defendant has come to court, has accepted responsibility, and the judge has put that person on probation.

So that's not a dismissal.

Another another category that they're accounting is a dismissal or rejections.

Those are cases that law enforcement files in our office.

We review them before we file the case.

And that's what's important.

We look at the offense report and to determine if there's enough evidence to go forward.

And when we say we can't follow this case, then we reject that case.

That's different from a court dismissal.

And these dismissals we're talking about are not felony dismissals.

As I understand it, these are misdemeanor family violence dismissals.

How do those differ?

Well, because the Family Lines Division, which, by the way, is the largest division that we have in our office, we have 68 or lawyers, lawyers or so when we're fully staffed, we're about about down about 10 or 11.

But that's the largest unit.

And they handle not only family violence assaults, but they handle child abuse cases.

They handle injury to a child, they handle sexual assault cases.

So there's a multitude of different types of cases that the family violence division handles.

But today we're talking about family violence, assaults.

And now the TV station brought this to the forefront and had one story.

And then your team responded with numbers.

And then they wanted to get back with you, I guess.

Have you talked to them again after the latest report or do you want to?

Well, we've we've made an attempt to try and clarify what the information that they've had.

We have explained to them that, that the numbers don't, don't reflect actual dismissals.

They ran their story.

They knew that we were concerned by the accuracy of that report.

But but they made a decision to to to run their story.

But but the reason I'm here is because I want the public to understand that, that when somebody reports, someone in the media says that there's an almost 90% dismissal rate in the DA's office, and that's not true.

They have a right to know.

The true number is this year so far in the first half of 2026, the number is 4,049%, for example.

And we know that it has been declining for the last four years or so.

In in 2023, the dismissal rate was 79%.

That was unacceptable.

I brought my team in and say, look, we have to do better.

So what we did was we slowed down.

We took a closer look at these cases to see if we could prove them than the following year, and went from 79 to 68%.

Then the following year after that it went down to 56%.

So now this year we're down to 49%.

People might hear that and say, that's still pretty high.

Why?

These are judges dismissing cases you are presenting to them?

No, sir.

Those are decisions that we are making as prosecutors to dismiss the case.

Well, no.

No.

Remember, rejecting happens before cases is filed after we file the misdemeanor case with what's called an information.

That's kind of most people recognize the term indictments.

Indictments for for felonies information or for misdemeanor cases.

So let's say we we look at a case and we decide, you know, that there's there's enough evidence to go forward.

We're going to charge a defendant with with misdemeanor family violence assault.

But then 2 or 3 months, sometimes six months down the road.

The case is not as good as we thought it was because, well, a lot of times it's because the victims themselves.

And I'm going to say this, I don't want to sound sexist, but the majority of our victims are female.

And unfortunately, males are are the the higher percentage of perpetrators and family violence assaults.

So the female complainant may say, look, I don't want you to punish my my boyfriend, husband, significant other because if he goes to jail, if he goes to prison on a felony situation, we lose our home, we lose the ability to live.

And so I'm not going to cooperate, I'm not going to show up.

But some would one wonder, are they being intimidated?

Are they being bullied?

And should you go ahead and try to file this case anyway?

Well, sure.

We know sometimes that happens, especially if they live together, especially if they're under the thumb of the of the perpetrator.

We know that a lot of times the reasons complainants don't cooperate is out of fear.

Sometimes it's out of loyalty.

Oh, I love him.

I don't want him to to end up with a conviction that's going to then affect his job or his career.

So sure, we know we know that.

So we try and work with with victims when we can.

There's a concept called evidence based prosecution.

If we believe we can go forward and prove a case without the victim, then we can make the decision to do that.

But a lot of times with these kind of cases, they are, he said.

She said situations we need the victim to show up to court and when she doesn't, then that creates a problem.

How does this compare to dismissal rates across the country?

Well, I haven't had a chance to look individually at different courts, but I would say probably it's it's about the same, I would imagine.

I would guess, because the problem that we have in this, in this county happened other parts of Texas and they happened across the country.

The reluctance of victims in domestic violence cases to cooperate through the criminal justice process.

So I would imagine, yeah, that's not just unique to us.

Some might wonder.

Also, there were headlines earlier in the year about you've cut the backlog of domestic violence cases.

That was an issue last year a couple of years ago.

And then they connected to this and say, well, you're cutting the backlog because of dismissals.

Is is that accurate?

Well, actually, that's a little apples and oranges, because the backlog that everybody's been talking about has been the felony backlog.

And as a result of the backlog that we had a couple of years ago, it was somewhere around 6300.

We went to Commissioners Court to ask for the ability to pay for overtime work for our prosecutors.

So they spent weekends and evening hours reducing the backlog.

And I'm happy to report that we have gotten the felony backlog down from 6300 now down to about 2500.

But but that's not just family violence cases.

Those are we've focused on violent crime cases involving weapons and crimes of violence.

So again, it's a little apples and oranges.

It's not just the best violence but felony violent crimes.

There has been a backlog in domestic violence assault cases.

Remember we I talked about meeting and coming together and trying to reduce the the dismissal rate and trying to get that backlog down.

So we have succeeded in that.

Thank you very much.

District attorney, outgoing district attorney as of midnight on December 31st.

Not that you're counting the days three and a half months.

Joe Gonzalez, thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you.

Randy.

The city of San Antonio City Council just approved about 640,000 for a diversion center to deal with people who have been detained, but not yet arrested, to keep them out of the system, to help them before they would go to jail.

Here to talk about that.

As Terry Castillo, district five city Council member.

Thanks for coming in.

Thank you so much for having me.

Tell us about this diversion center.

What is the idea?

What is the whole idea of this?

So Bexar County is the only major Texas county that currently does not have a jail diversion and recovery center.

So essentially what this would do is provide another mode of diversion, but prearranged diversion, meaning an individual with a low level fence has an opportunity, based upon the officer's discretion, to potentially be diverted to a recovery center.

So the City of San Antonio has approved roughly over $600,000 for a six month pilot program with the center for Health Care Services to pilot what this diversion can look like in Bexar County and the city of San Antonio.

Understanding that while we are the only major Texas county without one, we need to ensure that we have a pilot that works for Bexar County, and we can't know what works for us until we're in practice to see how we should be changing and shaping the pilot to ensure that we're diverging, diverting individuals rather, but also ensuring that not only the individual that is in need of assistance and recovery is connected to services, but also the costs associated with diverting an individual away from the Bexar County Jail is something to consider.

Now, before we get to the maybe the last half of the system, people would wonder, okay, so these are people that have been detained by officers, but we think of people being arrested before they're taken in.

What would they what would these people be detained for?

What kind of people are we talking about?

Yes.

So these are low level fences that the district attorney, SaPD and the Bexar County Sheriff's Office have agreed upon, which are typically, for example, violating a no trespassing, no trespassing affidavit on a vacant lot, for example.

That's often what we see in our communities, unhoused individuals setting up camp on a vacant lot.

And then there's questionable concerns from the neighborhood, right.

So again, what that can look like is someone calls 911, whether it's a nonresidential lot and or a nonresidential business, for example, the officer would then have the the discretion to say based off of their evaluation, hey, this individual may qualify for diversion and then take that route with the individuals.

Well, now a lot of people have done a number of stories, homeless or unhoused.

They don't want help.

You know, there are a lot of outreach people who go and try to help them.

And if an officer comes up to them, they are usually not arrested or detained.

How many people do you think this program would and could handle?

Now, I think what it's important to emphasize, right, that this isn't a pilot program specific to unhoused individuals.

There are individuals, again, that are in mental health crisis that someone may call 911 on them.

And this is an opportunity for that individual who may have a home to also be diverted to recovery.

So I want to ensure that we're not framing it as a solution to homelessness and housing encampments, because an average person may be in crisis and may need to be diverted to a recovery center.

And there are people there are different units within the department that go out and help with the mental health calls.

Specifically, would this apply more to those people?

So what's being proposed with the pilot from center for Health Care Services?

Is that essentially similar to the mental health unit or the peak team?

They rely on Mediacom, which is a database which will let the officer and the team know.

Has this individual been to a recovery center, has this individual or do they have any mental health needs?

So by using Mediacom, it allows that officer in that unit to triage that individual to the appropriate place.

So to your point, right, we do have these models that are set up and the software through Mediacom to triage individuals that the officer may find and identify as a candidate for diversion as a pilot program.

How many people do you expect would this could handle?

So the proposed pilot is 16 beds.

So this is going to allow us an opportunity on how we can shape the program that's going to fit for Bear County.

So understanding that that 16 individuals that may not be in the Bexar County Jail taking up bed space or 60 individuals in the emergency room, taking up a bed there as well, is going to be critical for our health system and our gel system, but most importantly for the individual that's in need of access to care.

And this is also in a different place from the center for Health Care Services facility, down by Haven for Hope and a number of other places down there.

Is that right?

Yes.

The proposed location for the pilot is East Josephine, which is away from downtown or the west side of downtown.

And is that important?

So what's really key, right, is when we're talking about individuals in need of recovery is a therapeutic setting, right?

When we look at the inner west side where I represent, which has Haven for Hope, center for Health Care Services, University Health center for Health Care services, psychiatric care unit.

There's a lot of activity in terms of of just the activity individuals that are being sent to these facilities.

So again, away from that area allows for a more therapeutic center and recovery space for the environment for them.

And now 640,000 is this for a year and how many people do you will you need for this.

Yeah.

So this is going to be the city's contribution for a six month pilot program.

Grateful that Bexar County yesterday approved their portion of their funding for the pilot program as well.

So again, this is six months.

And as the pilot evolves, my expectation is that we continue to advocate at the state level for state dollars to support a standalone diversion and recovery center in Bexar County.

Again, we've seen other cities successfully secure state dollars, and we have a responsibility and an opportunity to deliver here as well.

And to make it clear as well to people, this isn't for people who have been arrested, who might need help, who have been booked into the jail diversion centers like that, that people state hospital beds.

This isn't for those people.

Even though we we need something like that.

And people have talked about that.

Yeah.

So to that point, right, there are different forms of diversion and deflection.

In Bexar County, for example, there's the community courts that after once you've seen the magistrate judge, you have an opportunity to enter the community court and connect to rehabilitation services, whether it's through Haven for Hope and or lifetime recovery.

This is again a pre arrest diversion.

Another thing you've been working on is the District Community Action Committee.

I can't think of what it's called.

It's basically Project Marvel Advisory Committee.

Tell us about that.

How that's going to work.

A lot of people are concerned about how much input the city will have on the development of the area around the Spurs arena.

So with the large re-envisioning and redevelopment of downtown, which is being coined as Project Marvel, we're expected to invest billions of dollars into this footprint, both public and private.

So we believe that the public should have input in terms of what do they expect with the contracts, with the redevelopment of downtown and what type of amenity should be downtown.

So typically for large scale redevelopment and these public private partnerships, other cities have established community benefits agreement.

And because community should be driving those agreements.

We convened stakeholders from each council district to input and guide council on what the public's expectations are with the redevelopment of downtown.

So it's going to be a huge committee, but we learned from the bond committees where each council member appointed three individuals.

And then, of course, the mayor also appoints their representatives as well.

And at the end of the day, we have a really good bond package that the voters, for example, approve.

So we think the more folks at the table, the better.

And then it allows council to prioritize which type of voices.

You know, we want to be sure that are included.

For example, if labor unions are important, a council member can ensure that one of the three slots is a labor representative.

If public education is important, so on and so forth.

So it allows for a robust and diverse group.

Robust.

It won't be unwieldy and just, you know, loud and obnoxious as we've seen some council meetings get with people providing all their input.

So again, with the 2022 bond committee, with each proposition, it was the same council and mayor makeup in terms of discussion.

They're very robust.

Folks followed Robert's Rules.

There was decorum.

And then at the end of the day, voters approved the propositions recommended from this very large stakeholder group.

Well, we we wish them luck.

And thank you very much for coming in, especially right now.

And we'll have you back to talk about all kinds of things on council coming up after the budget process is now finally done.

Thank you very much.

Terry Castillo, district five, your time.

Thank you.

San Antonio City Council has been battling over the budget literally for months, but especially in the past few weeks, you may have seen the headlines or council members calling it a culture of sabotage, toxic culture.

It's getting very personal.

Joining us to talk about that and other budget battles across the area is Andrea Drew, senior government and politics reporter for the San Antonio Report.

Thank you very much for coming in.

First of all, we're it's only gotten more intense.

Have you been surprised that at the personal level of whatever you would call it in the last few weeks, so gotten a little darker in the last few weeks?

I guess covering them from the beginning.

I thought at some point maybe there would be a gelling that would happen, maybe looking at these budget cuts and that would sort of drive people into their ideological camps.

And that hasn't really happened here.

At the end, you still have sort of an insider outsider mayor who is new council, who is mostly returning, looking at this big budget deficit, that going into it going back to July, when they were on their recess, the mayor was talking about sort of looking back at big spending decisions that are not typically a part of the budget conversation, like what's being spent on the Spurs arena, like what's funded out of the Ters, which funds infrastructure projects.

But that's decided separately from the budget.

So she's wanted to sort of bring these other big buckets of spending on the table and look at them all as one.

And the council members are mostly returning, had a role in some of these decisions that were already made and early on kind of flagged concern about how this was all going to work in this one six weeks, that they have to debate it, that if they start looking at all these big buckets of money differently, they might run out of time to do the sort of work that they do.

And that has kind of come to fruition.

We're here in the final bit.

Well, now some might look at this and go, well, those are nice salacious details, you know, personal clickbait, but it really affects the budget process and the budget itself.

How do you think it has manifested itself at the end here?

Some of these changes, some of these big ideas of like moving money into moving projects, into the tours, those reinvestment zones, some of this stuff is structural changes that may play out over the next few years.

And that may be, you know, a a shift that helps them if this economy doesn't turn around in the moment, in these in the final stretch before this budget was approved, you had the city manager saying, if they don't make some of these decisions, it's going to come back to staff.

There's a lot that's going to just they will have abdicated their responsibility to staff by not agreeing whether they wanted to go with the tax increase or not up until the last minute, they actually the budget before the tax increase.

So they have the ability to approve a budget and then set a different top line number, and staff has to make that fit.

It's not like Congress where you can kick the can forever with a continuing resolution.

They have to balance the budget, and that means that someone else makes those decisions.

It's a lot of pressure on Eric Walsh, city manager, who at one point said, where do you want to go with this?

Basically said, I need direction.

And they had direction earlier, but this time they didn't.

And he said, it's going to get too confusing.

And that it had did indeed did was not the sort of budget process where they are sort of hammering out the final details at the end.

It's a lot left undecided.

And that I think we're talking about organizations that get money from the city, and maybe that is or is not the appropriate way for them to be funded.

But in a bit of a panic and feeling like they're horse trading down to the last minute of are you in or are you not?

And holding press conferences on the city hall steps and, and sort of different ideologies about, like what they deserve in this process.

And a lot of it's come down to they're getting less property tax money.

And so they're talking tax increases to make up for that, which is everyone.

That's not just this area in the state, that's the whole state.

It's cities across Texas.

It's also the other taxing entities, the school districts, Alamo Colleges district, just to prove their first tax increase in a long time.

Bear County, actually, their budget is even more property tax heavy, 80%.

And they brought in they kept their tax rate even, which meant bringing in less revenue than previous years.

At the same time that they were hitting this Arpa cliff of the the Covid relief money.

And so they did that by dipping into their rainy day fund, by forgoing cost of living increases for staff, by cutting positions from their new county health department, making some big structural changes that ended up passing three two as their budget.

And some of the school districts in the area, they're looking at budget problems and they're looking at tax rate increase proposals.

At the same time, the governor is running an ad saying it's not the state's fault that the property tax increases are happening.

It's local governments and local school districts.

So it's putting pressure on them and maybe could affect some of the votes on tax increases, do you think?

Well, it's kind of a weird scenario because the legislature did put this cap on how much they can collect over the previous year, and that in some years, when the valuations were going really high, that meant that these cities and counties were passing tax rate decreases, but your property tax bill was still going up.

If your valuation was going up.

Now the valuation goes down, the rate goes up.

It's sort of evens out in some ways, or going up in May, may or may not that much, which is sort of brought us to this last leg of the stool here, which is the appraisal district that is responsible for setting those valuations.

Tell us about what's happened with the Bear County Appraisal District just recently, because there's been some changes in the makeup of that and that affects what they're doing.

Yeah.

In those years where the valuations were going up really high, the legislature added elected positions to the appraisal district boards, and it was supposed to just sort of be administrative and an eyes and ears on the ground for the taxpayer, because the rest of the board is appointed by the taxing agencies, the city of the county, the school districts, it's an arm of the state, but it has many people to serve in this equation.

And their numbers are used by both the state and the local governments.

And so in the years where the appraisals were going up, you had property owners complaining to them and breathing down their necks.

And now that the valuations are lower, you have the taxing entities are putting pressure on them.

And so one of the things that this group in Bexar County did was create in every other year appraisal, reprieve, where if you got your appraisal lowered successfully one year in 2025, it wouldn't go up in 2026.

And they wanted to repeat that in this next 2027, 2028 plan.

And they thought that they were going to be able to down to the wire.

And then the rest of the board members, the appraisal district staff said, oh, we actually can't because of a change in state law that was aimed at Tarrant County, which did much more dramatic things, but it applies to us here.

And so it was voted down.

They made a change that some believe totally has wiped out the spirit of this policy.

So what does that mean?

Bottom line, if you get your tax valuation decreased in 2627, will it stay the same?

There never was quite a clear answer to that.

If you make major improvements that you were always going to be subject to, perhaps it being reappraised.

But if you're simply market value of your neighborhood goes up a lot, it's unclear what will happen.

It sounds like they will reappraise it and adjust to the market value of your neighborhood.

It doesn't sound like there will be a whole lot of protection in there, but they do operate on on an every other year cycle where they have said in the past that what they did in 20 2024 wasn't a big change for their own policies.

But you had the state legislative delegation from this area look at this and say, wait, we specifically carved out Bexar counties policy in this legislative change.

Their interpretation is different.

Yeah.

Will this go?

Could conceivably be litigated.

I don't know, I don't I just who decides on that one.

There are different interpretations.

That's a good question.

They approved the rear appraisal plan on a vote on Monday.

So somebody could conceivably file a lawsuit.

How about the Alamo Community Colleges district budget?

What what what's going to happen there with that?

This year, they also approved their first tax increase in a very long time, facing some of the similar challenges as these other entities.

And then you have five area school districts Northside ISD, San Antonio ISD, South San ISD, and a few others that are that have to then take they want to raise taxes, but they have to take that to voters on the November ballot.

And you can read about that San Antonio report.

You're going to have some kind of compendium of all of this stuff.

Yeah.

We've been working on a running total of what all of these tax increases would do to the average taxpayer in Bexar County.

We have some versions of this based on what was presented, and we will recap it all later this month with what was what was voted on.

All right.

Well, thank you, Andrea, for explaining all of that, which has been fascinating.

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

You can watch this show again.

You can watch any previous shows.

It's download the podcast as well.

I'm Randy Beamer.

We'll see you next time.

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