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 Beemer 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.

Thank you for joining us for on the record, I'm Randy Beamer, and this week we are starting with another entity here in the area that is looking at a property tax rate increase.

Property valuations have dropped.

Any number of organizations are looking at a tax rate increase to make up for that.

And one of them, the San Antonio River authority, Derrick Bay's general manager, is here to talk about that and more.

First of all, people might not know what the San Antonio River authority does.

Just explain that to them where the where your money goes.

Sure.

So we are a political subdivision of the state of Texas.

We serve four counties.

From here in Bexar County, all the way down to Goliad, through Wilson and Karnes.

Our primary mission, we say, is safe, clean, and enjoyable.

What that translates to is the health of the river, flood control, flood management, water quality, and then recreational aspects such as Mission reach and Museum Reach in other places.

And this is all the river basin of San Antonio.

So it's, I guess, four counties.

Four county jurisdiction.

The watershed actually extends outside of those four counties, but politically we operate within those four counties.

What is the tax rate now and what do you think it's going to be?

It's not finalized yet.

Correct.

So our current tax rate is 0.0183 or 1.8 $0.03 per dollar, or one of the lowest taxing entities that somebody would see on their property tax bill and the current proposed rate.

Just like you said, our board voted a couple of weeks ago to go for public notice, 30 day public notice, as required by law, to raise the tax rate from 1.8 $0.03 per dollar to 1.9 $0.03 per dollar.

What that really means is one tenth of $0.01 of an increase.

And now some of the organizations, school districts and such are going to have to have elections this fall to approve their rate increases.

You won't.

That is correct.

We operate under a different rule than, say, cities or counties.

They are capped at usually a 3.5% potential increase.

We are capped, like many other special taxing districts, at a max of 8% increase.

And is it, as I mentioned earlier, because of dropping property valuations, you need to make up for that.

That is a combination, or that's part of the reason we're no different than every other entity in Bexar County that has seen a drop in property values that does impact our tax, our taxing ability.

But really, what I want to talk about and the reason for the increase is the improvement and the continued improvement of our next gen flood warning system.

You know, after the tragic floods of last summer in 2025, the parent vital flood here in San Antonio, and then the flood up in Kerrville and on the Guadalupe, you know, we worked with numerous partners, but especially Bexar County, to say we need to do better as a community.

Bexar County put forward $21 million in one time funding that is handling improvements of the Gage River gauges, the warning system that happens across Bexar County, but also the modeling that goes into that.

So we have a predictive flood model that has been in place for roughly five years, but it is now.

It is time to use technology to our advantage and make it better.

How will the warning system be different?

Up in the hill country?

We hear more about sirens here.

Are we going to have that?

There are.

Sirens that are being studied right now.

There's a $1.25 million grant that Bexar County has applied for, with us as their technical partner from the state of Texas.

That would fund likely up to around ten sirens in Bexar County.

Sirens are appropriate in certain locations, but not everywhere.

They're oftentimes ineffective and heavily urban areas, and there is no, like, silver bullet that takes care of flood warning.

So we are studying right now, likely like campgrounds and those types of places that would benefit from a siren.

But it's a combination of warning lights at low water crossings, at gates, at certain crossings to prevent people from going in.

It's you know, we are studying in addition with our emergency management partners, how can we push out messages via text to certain to certain areas that might be based on ZIP code or might be based on cell towers?

But all of that is under consideration to get information out as fast as possible.

How about infrastructure and intersections themselves now?

Is the river authority responsible for that with the county?

With the city?

Tex dot.

So it's a combination of everybody that you just mentioned.

The city and the county have been responsible for the Gage network up until really the floods of last year.

In partnership with them, we are working through taking those over.

So there is one single entity which will be the river authority that manages the Gage network here in Bexar County, and then pushes that information to our emergency management partners Bexar County, City of San Antonio and all the other small municipalities within bear to get that information out to the public to keep them safe.

How about that one area where there was the deadly flooding?

What's going to happen there and what's the timeline?

So the city of San Antonio is responsible for that area at the parent vital intersection where that tragedy happened and people lost their lives last year in June.

The city has they did a comprehensive engineering study that came out roughly a year ago, in October of 25.

They have more and that was more looking at the cause of what happened.

They have a feasibility study underway to see how to improve that area.

Tex Dot is working as well, in conjunction with the City of San Antonio, for railings to help keep people from getting swept away there.

And then there's the repairs that are underway to repair all the concrete that was damaged during that flood.

Vegetation improvement to make sure the channel is clear.

There's a lot of different things that are underway there.

We would hope that the city of San Antonio looks actually, as their bond program progresses for stormwater, that they would look at a potential project at that location.

I know they're looking up in the hill country at changing the vegetation on the side to improve the the water that flows there.

It doesn't flow as fast.

The mission reach, we changed what that looks like engineers did from the the funnel of concrete.

Are you doing that in other places here, other creeks where we we drive by and we see drainage ditches.

Sure.

So, you know, we're there are a lot of governmental entities that people are familiar with.

They have a very specific jurisdiction.

It's their city or their county.

We are one of the few regional entities.

So we look across county lines.

We don't worry about, you know, districts, city districts or county precincts.

We try to look comprehensively.

We have an agreement that's been in place with all of our partners here for over 20 years for us to take on that regional technical role.

So we are looking at where can we make the most value and improvement.

We lean on our partners, the city and the county to through bond programs or flood tax programs to fund those drainage efforts.

And there's been a significant amount of work done over the years and continues to go on.

So, you know, I want to give credit to our partners at the city and the county for those investments.

But yeah, absolutely.

We do look at are there places where we can improve channels where we can widen them, you know, a success story, unfortunately, with the tragedy of parent beetle, but there was an area that could have flooded a lot worse on that same creek where we, the county had done a project in conjunction with us as the technical partner, where it had widened that area and it made it more natural.

And we did not see the damage and the devastation right there.

And we had a recent rainstorm over the weekend.

It affected power in a big way.

But in terms of flooding, it also, I saw some of the coverage, you know, the usual places flooded and those usual places have been worked on.

As an engineer, you worked in New Orleans after Katrina.

What can you do at some of those places where it's just collects water and it doesn't seem there's much that can be done.

It is oftentimes a challenge, you know, especially in an urban area.

I think the last thing that most public entities want to do is take people's property.

And oftentimes that would be the only solution.

So we try to avoid that.

And we say, okay, how can we mitigate in other ways.

Some of that is warnings and keeping people out of those flood prone low water crossings.

Some of that is working with developers and other partners.

So when new development goes in, it's not all just concrete or asphalt.

They leave enough green space.

We look at sustainable infrastructure that helps, you know, collect the rainwater more on a site versus funneling it all directly to a street or a drainage ditch immediately.

It takes a lot of different factors.

Some it's just really hard in a built up urban area.

And so you look for other ways to mitigate.

One of the things we love to see when there's an opportunity is to turn an area that might be a detention area or detention basin, retention basin into something like a public park, so that 99% of the time it's green space that the public can enjoy.

But in the time of a flood, it turns into a big holding area that allows water to drain more slowly and not overwhelm the drainage system at the immediate moment.

And other than that, like access roads that we always see are some crossings.

You really you can't raise the road, you can't do something.

So you can just you have to close.

Them off.

Sometimes you have to block them off to keep people safe or put up warning lights and signs.

I mean, we are looking at everything.

Part of this whole improvement project with NextGen is not only making sure that the 198 gauges that exist in Bexar County right now are up and operational.

But looking at do we need more?

Do we need better gauges?

Cameras will be going.

There are some cameras out there now, but more cameras help because oftentimes it it's hard for somebody monitoring the system to tell at night exactly what's happening in a location.

So a camera will help us there.

There's a lot of different things, but we try to hit it.

Redundancy and resiliency is really the name of the game.

All right.

Well thank you very much.

Appreciate your time Derrick Bays general manager of the San Antonio River authority.

Thanks.

Thank you Randy.

I knew orchestra will debut in San Antonio this October with much of its schedule already set.

It's called Harmonium of Texas.

Here to talk about that is Jeffrey Cohan, who is the founding artistic director of harmonium.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Now, you were brought, I don't want to say brought here, but you came here back in 2024 for the San Antonio Philharmonic and obviously had a number of problems.

When did you get this idea?

Where did it come from for the harmonium?

Well, I, I stepped down from my role at the Philharmonic in January of this year.

And in the wake of that, some of the people that I had gotten to know who had been friends and supporters reached out to me and told me that they were sad that I wasn't here and wanted to know what I ever be coming back.

And this started a series of conversations over a period of a couple of months, during which the idea of actually starting a brand new organization came up, and I was initially very dubious that that was possible, or even.

Especially given the background recently in San Antonio.

These folks and this was a small group of knowledgeable, longtime supporters of music in the arts in San Antonio, not just orchestra, you know, all the all the arts organizations, musical organizations.

And they said, well, if you would be willing to give it a try and we will back you up.

And I set myself an initial goal.

This is now we're talking about the first week of March.

So just was that six months?

Yeah.

I said if I could raise half $1 million by the end of May, I would take that as a sign that this was a viable idea.

And we ended up raising nearly that amount in the first three weeks.

And by the time we were at the end of May, we were we had raised close to $1 million and were now over $1.3 million.

And in addition to which we we've already sold thousands, well, few hundred thousand dollars in ticket sales for our first two concerts.

Yo-Yo Ma is coming in November.

That concert is going to sell out pretty soon.

And our opening concert, which is Carmina Burana, also features the great Tessa Lark spectacular.

American Violinist is October 2nd.

Now, the history of orchestral music in San Antonio I've covered from the 80s.

It's been up and down.

You did research on this, I'm sure.

Well, I was also here.

I first came here in the early 90s with the San Antonio symphonies.

And you're aware of the problems they've had up and down in terms of funding and with the Philharmonic.

Were you worried about that when you came in and or when you decided to start the harmonium, especially seeing what happened?

And then I guess there's also the orchestra of San Antonio Tosa, aside from the Philharmonic, which I guess technically still exists.

I wouldn't say I was worried about it.

I was very cognizant of it and the challenges that it represented.

But the the folks that I was speaking with were so enthusiastic about the concept, which was to really start fresh and build something from the ground up that was genuinely new.

And they were they believed they absolutely believed that, that we could do this together.

And it really was, you know, I didn't start this right.

I was obviously instrumental, no pun intended, in getting it off the ground, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't just coming from me.

How do you describe it?

You talk about a new concept.

How do you describe it as different from those other organizations?

Well.

I'm not going to address what other nations are doing, but one of the things that is most exciting and I think most powerful about harmonium, a harmonium is an instrument.

Many people say, well, why are you calling it harmonium?

Harmonium is a musical instrument, and it's a very simple musical instrument.

It's a keyboard instrument, but it's powered by foot pedals and.

Old kind of organ.

It's its main function is to produce harmony and.

Which we haven't had here.

Exactly.

And we have already now half a dozen partners in the city of San Antonio, which are among the most August, you know, beloved institutions.

We have the San Antonio Master Singers, the Youth Orchestra of San Antonio, the Children's Chorus of San Antonio, the San Antonio Chamber Choir, the San Antonio Ballet School.

And there's another major one that I'm working on that I'm not at liberty to talk about, but I think we'll probably be able to announce soon.

So there's we are and these are organizations that immediately and eagerly embraced the idea of long term partnerships.

So one of the most beautiful things about this is that this is not just about an orchestra.

It is about an entire community of musicians and other and dancers and others.

Where will you be playing?

Mostly we are for this season and probably for the foreseeable future.

We will be playing in a number of different venues.

We are very thrilled to be for our opening two concerts at the Lila Cockrell Theater.

We will also be playing there in January and in April, and I think we have altogether about seven programs at the Lila Cockrell.

We'll also be playing at the majestic.

We'll be playing at Stable Hall for some smaller, more intimate programs and some churches around town.

So we're.

How big an orchestra are we looking at?

I mean, obviously from the stable hall to the.

General for the stable hall, it will be a very small group that will be for the Bach Brandenburg Concertos, which is 17 players.

But our opening concert, we have 75 musicians plus members of this is a side by side concert.

So a number of the young people will be playing along.

And who are the musicians?

Because that was, you know, the musicians from the other orchestras.

These are all musicians who live in San Antonio or near San Antonio.

We have a few people coming from Austin there.

There are always a few people who will come down from Fort Worth or Houston.

But basically this is 90 plus percent of San Antonio's finest musicians.

And not union yet.

You don't have a collective bargaining agreement yet, but you expect to.

That's not my call.

That's not.

Your music director.

Music directors don't get involved in that.

But the musicians, I am reasonably certain that they will want to be a union orchestra, not the overwhelming majority of orchestras in this country are part of the AF of the American Federation of Musicians.

And I've heard some people concerned, as you might expect, about the supporters of this orchestral music, that you might split the audience and you might split the supporters.

In terms of fundraising, are you concerned about that at all?

Is there support here?

Well, based on what we've experienced, raising well over $1 million in six months, I don't I'm not concerned about that.

San Antonio is a big city.

It's not as big as the biggest cities in the country, but it's a big, big city.

And what I would like to say, I think what is most important is that we are offering something that is very specific to us.

And, you know, the orchestra of San Antonio is doing wonderful stuff over there, and I haven't had a chance to go to one of those.

Music going to be different.

Your approach fewer pops.

Both.

More.

I would say both the different repertoire to some extent.

There will always be some overlap.

There always is.

You know, I spent 20 years as the music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in the same town with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which is a behemoth that's the most one of the largest orchestras and largest budgets.

And and we generally played different repertoire.

But every once in a while we did.

There was overlap, and that's always the way it's going to be.

But I think our our format, the fact that we have all of these different partnerships and just my particular approach to programing is not better or it's just different.

Just different.

Yeah.

Well again, this starts in October.

October 2nd by the Cockrell Theater 7:30 p.m.. Harmonium of Texas.

Hot.

Yes for marketing.

Yes for people can find out about that.

Thank you very much.

Jeffrey Cohan, founding artistic director of Harmonium of Texas.

Thank you.

Thanks.

On reporter's roundtable this week, artificial intelligence in schools for teachers and Northside Independent School District is starting that this fall here to tell us about that and more on social.

Garcia who is the education reporter for the San Antonio Report.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you for having me.

Okay.

And tell us about this, what is called ChatGPT for teachers.

Some people, first of all, don't understand what ChatGPT is, but what how do you describe it?

So ChatGPT was created by OpenAI a couple of years ago.

It's artificial intelligence, basically a chat box where you put a prompt in, ask a question, and then it spits something out for you.

Last November, ChatGPT decided to create ChatGPT for teachers, which is kind of the same function, but it has more guardrails and is more suited for education classroom kind of work.

And so it's not specific instruction or curriculum or anything like that.

No, it won't be directly used by students or used to teach students what it does.

It helps teachers.

Or it's supposed to help teachers use more efficient use of their time.

Help them create lesson plans, help them create papers, maybe on the administrative side, help with some of those back end things as well in school district.

Is this controversial at all because some people don't like AI at all, or don't want it being used, especially by students, but for teachers?

Is there any pushback to this?

You can tell?

Not that I can tell right now, nor today, as he did tell me that more than half of their staff and employees have already been using AI in some form.

Whether that's ChatGPT for teachers, which you can get an individual account for if you're a verified educator, or there's one called Google's Gemini Notebook or Magic School AI.

And so they've been providing trainings already.

Now it'll just be system wide.

And so they'll have that on their school phones.

Or it's an app that's different from ChatGPT.

It's whatever they're using for school, school district employees, teachers to sign in on.

It'll kind of be another tool that pops up on their tools, home page, things like that.

And this is rolled out in different segments.

Did the district board have to approve this?

Yes.

They've been talking about it for a while.

The first cohort who used chatbot for teachers district wide were a couple other school districts, including Houston ISD as of last year.

And so now Northside ISD signing on to do it.

And when people hear about AI in schools, they also wonder about is my kid use an AI?

Are they cheating with AI?

How do you what are the policies on that?

And can they really ban it?

Well, OpenAI has not created a chatbot for students specifically.

That doesn't mean it won't happen.

They said that could come in the future.

Northside ISD said they are not allowing students to use AI, except for some older students in high school with teacher approval.

They also have a task force group that are making policy recommendations.

Everyone's being very careful from what I'm hearing.

Obviously that doesn't mean students aren't using it in their personal time.

And before we move on to other issues, do you happen to use that as a reporter now and then or just I guess with Google, Siri also can be AI?

Yeah.

Personally, I'm not using when I do a Google search, I do Google search minus AI.

Sometimes I forget.

So then the Gemini automatically pops up.

I can't disable it, but I'm not using artificial intelligence in my reporting.

Tax rate proposals, tax rate increases are going to be on the ballot, and a number of districts here and at a number of different levels.

What do you find out there?

So there's five school districts in the Bexar County region that will have tax rate proposals that voters can weigh way in on this November.

Those include San Antonio ISD, Northside ISD, East Central ISD.

Bear with me, South San Antonio ISD and the shirt symbol Universal City ISD.

The two biggest ones.

San Antonio is have both bonds, which are for capital projects like building new buildings, improving HVAC systems, plumbing, getting new technology, things like that.

And also Vader's shorthand for voter approval tax rate elections, which basically give them unrestricted funds so they can use it for teacher pay, student programs, other things like that.

And the school districts themselves can't promote this officially, but they're just explaining to people why they need it, and it's to make up for the property tax valuations dropping.

As well as this, though, other different entities here are having elections at the same time.

So you could be voting on two, maybe three tax rate increases wherever you are.

Yeah.

Some school districts have been very open about saying we want to do this this November because all of these other things will be on the ballot, including some statewide elections that people are really talking about excited for.

And so even if you show up to the ballot and you're going there to vote for, let's say, Ken Paxton or James Talarico, you may also have these school tax collections.

And so they're banking on more people coming to these elections and actually participating.

And especially this year, because a number of these districts have tried tax rate elections increase in the past and they've been rejected.

Yeah.

Last November we saw a lot of that, a lot of school tax elections didn't pass, including in two of the ones that were coming back this November, which are essential ISD and shirt, Cibolo City, Universal City ISD.

But what they're what the school districts are saying is that if they can explain to their voters why they need this money, how it could help them, how it could help students, they think they could get them on their side.

And they've altered.

Some of them have altered how much they're going for.

And also they can explain, like in East Central, there's a lot of growth.

Essentially, as these one of the few school districts in the area that's growing every year, they have more students.

Every year.

They've had issues of overcrowding in schools, having to add annex buildings.

They've had a lot of bonds that are for new schools.

But that also means that maybe they're not keeping up with paying for security personnel and student programs and investing more in career technical education, things like that.

They went out for Vader last year.

It did not pass.

Now they're coming back with a smaller ask.

School security is a big one.

A number of districts say they need it because of the mandates from the state.

They can't hire enough people.

Yeah, that's one of the things, you know, while they may have the money for the technology or the actual building of like security vegetables or buying certain cameras, things like that, they are not getting paid the full amount of like what it costs to pay an armed officer from the state.

And so that's where they're struggling a lot.

Which are required.

Yeah.

Which are required now.

All right.

Well thank you very much.

Social Garcia AI Google minus AI.

I will have to try that.

Of course.

Thanks for coming in.

You can read her at the San Antonio report.

Thanks.

Thank you for having me.

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

You can watch this show again.

You can watch any previous show as well as download the podcast.

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

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