Commission wants tenure for city manager

City Manager Erik Walsh could be freed from the compensation and tenure restrictions that voters placed on his position almost six years ago as soon as November.

The catch is that San Antonio voters would have to agree to undo a city charter amendment — imposing the salary cap and term limit on the city’s chief administrator — that they passed in November 2018 with 59% of the vote.

The City Charter Review Commission last week preliminarily recommended asking voters to spike the amendment.

Based on what commissioners heard from some members of the public, that could be a tough sell in a city with a high poverty rate when the city manager is earning a base salary of $374,400 this year. His overall compensation is expected to be $390,600.

The 2018 amendment says the city manager’s salary can be no more than 10 times what the lowest-paid full-time city worker earns.

Jecoa Ross, a resident of council District 1, urged the commission to consider “the fact that the city charter already has guidelines for raising the city manager’s salary — you raise the salary of the lowest-paid employees in the city.”

“This is about pay equity,” Ross continued. “Any discussion about money in this city should be focused on the people who need it the most.”

The commission is looking at Walsh’s salary cap differently, through the lens of “market and competitive indicators” — as they were tasked to do by Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who convened the 15-member committee to consider specific amendments to the city’s governing document.

“Our city manager is not competitively paid,” said Pat Frost, who retired as president of Frost Bank at the end of last year. Frost headed the subcommittee that devised the commission’s preliminary recommendations regarding city manager pay and tenure.

Walsh earns less than seven of the 15 cities the subcommittee studied, all of which — with the exception of Phoenix — are smaller than San Antonio. City managers in Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington are taking home a higher base salary.

The subcommittee recommended that the charter be amended to remove the eightyear tenure cap and to return to the mayor and the City Council the full authority to set the city manager’s salary.

The commission will spend the next few weeks finalizing the proposed changes they’ll send to the City Council, which will decide what amendments to put on the November general election ballot.

The San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association pushed the restrictions on the city manager in 2018 when it was locked in a bitter dispute with then-City Manager Sheryl Sculley over a new employment contract. Sculley, who was earning $475,000, retired shortly after the charter election.

“It was a lot of referendum on her — right or wrong,” Frost said.

Frost said the subcommittee wasn’t evaluating Walsh’s performance, but his compensation.

“We are up here talking about the position, not the person,” he said.

Council districts

A separate subcommittee, led by former city attorney Frank Garza, on Thursday surprised some onlookers when it shared its preliminary recommendation that the number of council districts should remain the same — at least until the next decennial redistricting process.

Adding more districts “is not needed at this time” in order to adequately represent the city’s growing population, Garza said. He noted that City Council office budgets and staffs have increased as the population has risen.

The 10 council districts, which were redrawn after the 2020 census, represent about 143,500 residents each.

The subcommittee is recommending a more independent redistricting process than the one Nirenberg employed after the 2020 census. That was the first time the City Council did not redraw the district boundaries itself but instead relied on the recommendations of a redistricting advisory committee.

“We want this committee to be truly independent and the council simply appoint and then basically leave that individual alone to do the redistricting committee’s work,” Garza said.

He presented certain stipulations for the single appointee that the mayor and council members each would get: appointees would have to be registered to vote in the district they represent, and immediate family members, city employees and council staff would be ineligible.

That stands in sharp contrast to the makeup of the 23-member redistricting advisory committee that saw District 3 Council Member Phyllis Viagran appoint her sister, Rebecca Viagran, her predecessor in the Southeast Side district, and District 8 Council Member Manny Peláez pick his zoning director.

“Could you also possibly consider where I cannot have my chief of staff’s husband or wife on the commission?” asked Charter Review Commission member Dwayne Robinson, who like Garza served on that advisory committee.

Under the preliminary recommendation, the City Council still would have final authority over the redistricting commission’s proposed district boundaries. But if council sought to amend any part of the revised boundaries without the commission’s consent, it would require the approval of nine council members instead of a simple majority of six.