San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Mayor steady, cautious in crisis
But Nirenberg still is facing challenges
At the beginning of the year, the biggest question facing Mayor Ron Nirenberg was whether he could win a victory for expanded public transit at the November ballot box.
Now the questions are much bigger: whether Nirenberg can bring an economy wracked by the coronavirus pandemic back to its feet, fix many of the city’s longstanding inequities and keep the disease at bay.
A deliberative policy-maker in normal times, Nirenberg has had to adapt to the fast-paced, unrelenting nature of a global crisis.
When the virus made its way to San Antonio in March, he and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff had to act quickly to put restrictions in place to slow the spread of the disease, even if it meant residents and businesses would suffer economically.
Those restrictions appear to have worked. Of the four major Texas metros, Bexar County has the fewest number of coronavirus cases and fewest
deaths.
Initially, local governments had to make tough decisions on what to close and when, but Gov. Greg Abbott took back the reins when it came time to decide when businesses should reopen.
That forced Nirenberg, along with every other Texas mayor, to find ways to cope with the governor's edicts rather than setting orders themselves.
Some big-city mayors publicly chafed at that. But Nirenberg, while he's made it clear he thinks Abbott is moving too fast, has shied away from starting fights with the governor.
“I think Ron's first thought is, ‘OK, I don't like this at all,'” said state Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, a former City Council member. “‘What can I still do to keep the people I'm responsible for safe and healthy?'”
To that end, Nirenberg has seized on the crisis as an opportunity to put a dent in the city's endemic poverty — in part by trying to bridge the city's long-standing gaps in internet access, train those who lost their jobs for new ones and expand the local safety net for the city's poorest residents.
“What keeps me up at night is making sure that as we focus on rebuilding San Antonio, we're not content to go back to the way things were,” Nirenberg said at a San Antonio Express-News Editorial Board meeting.
At that meeting in late April, Nirenberg said when the San Antonio Food Bank reported it was serving 120,000 households per week, twice as many as usual, he was hit with the reality that it meant “normal” was 60,000 families needing food when the city wasn't in crisis.
It was a watershed moment for him.
“Sometimes, big issues come at you that define who you are,” said Wolff, himself a former mayor. “I think he's really been defined in a very positive way.”
The mayor predictably was cautious in the beginning.
Nirenberg waited until March 13, when San Antonio had its first confirmed case outside of evacuees brought to Joint Base San AntonioLackland, before restricting public gatherings and, perhaps most eyeopening, agreeing to postpone Fiesta.
At that time, Nirenberg was reluctant to close bars and restaurants as other cities had done. Five days later, after a jump in cases, he did so — a move he lamented, though he felt it was necessary to prevent more people from contracting the virus.
Nirenberg managed to pull a skeptical Wolff along, who was unconvinced at the time that was needed.
As it turned out, the governor followed with his own statewide restrictions the next day.
Soon, Nirenberg and Wolff handed down a more drastic measure: ordering residents to stay home except for essential trips.
“It's really the first time that I felt like he took charge of the situation,” Councilwoman Shirley Gonzales said. “I was glad that that happened because there was not a lot of time to collaborate.”
Those moves won early approval from residents, local poll results show — even among conservatives who likely backed Nirenberg's challenger in his hard-fought reelection campaign last summer, said veteran political strategist Christian Archer, who has been campaign adviser to Wolff and former Mayor Julián Castro.
“He is taking people that voted against him and they are saying, ‘Ron Nirenberg is doing a good job,'” Archer said.
Nirenberg has sought to avoid politicizing the virus response. Instead, the mayor has opted to use his bully pulpit to tout the advice of health experts: wear masks, keep your distance from others and don't leave home unless it's necessary.
“I think we have to resist all of the urges in the environment to make this pandemic response a partisan political one,” Nirenberg said.
That attitude came as a relief to health experts, who say Nirenberg has been keen to seek their advice before making major decisions — even if that advice was unpleasant.
“He's very receptive to ideas that are different from his own and especially if we were coming with expertise and data,” said Dr. Barbara Taylor, an infectious disease specialist at UT Health San Antonio who helmed the city-county health transition panel.
Some of Nirenberg's peacetime tendencies followed him into the pandemic. Early on, he drew criticism from council members who felt out of the loop on decisions regarding the city's response to the virus.
But Nirenberg has said acting quickly has been vital in keeping the virus in check, giving that as the reason he suspended council committees.
Instead, he relied on a tool he normally uses to tackle big policy issues like the city's housing crisis or climate change — assembling outside task forces that pull in input from dozens if not hundreds of San Antonio residents.
“The best leaders are the ones who know what their limitations are and seek to get information,” public health consultant Cherise Rohr-Allegrini said.
The five working groups and two transition panels he and Wolff put in place came up with concrete results and created a close collaboration between city and county that wasn't always there, officials said.
The pandemic also has strengthened the bond between their chief political leaders.
In February, the two men teamed against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One of the first actions they took together was to declare simultaneous public health emergencies to assert local authority over the release of evacuees housed at Lackland into the community.
Nirenberg and Wolff were irate when the CDC released an evacuee who later tested “weakly positive” for the virus and visited North Star Mall, coming into contact with more than two dozen people.
An investigation later found she didn't infect anyone, but the incident caused widespread fear and anger.
Now, Nirenberg and Wolff appear side by side every evening for daily city-county television briefings in which they and a rotating cast of city and county officials give the lowdown on the latest case and death numbers and use the live broadcast as a platform to promote issues of the day, such as halting evictions and allowing expanded mail-in voting.
To some degree, Wolff's presence beside Nirenberg insulates the mayor from political battles.
Wolff, a Democrat, rarely passes up a chance to ding Republican state lawmakers for, say, not expanding Medicaid or call local party leaders “crazies.”
“I'm a little bit more confrontational,” Wolff said. “I don't mind taking on a fight.”
Of course, Nirenberg's the only one seeking re-election. The mayor's still nursing wounds from a bruising campaign last year in which former Councilman Greg Brockhouse capitalized on conservative anger to nearly unseat him.
Nirenberg and Wolff haven't faced the same kind of heated opposition from local conservatives that, for example, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo did for insisting on requiring residents to wear masks. Chalk that up to a more active right-wing base in the Houston area and that it's in Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's backyard.
But some of Nirenberg's actions still have fueled conservative outrage.
Protesters lashed out at the mayor after he pushed an “anti-hate” resolution that discouraged residents from using terms like “China virus” and “Wuhan virus” to describe the novel coronavirus.
Nirenberg occasionally has ventured into the political arena during the crisis. When Patrick suggested seniors should sacrifice themselves to save the state's economy, Nirenberg went on CNN and blasted the remarks as “callous.”
After Attorney General Ken Paxton's office sent a letter warning the city and county that their orders were out of step with Abbott's, he chided Paxton for “seeking a cheap political headline.”
But he largely has avoided criticizing Abbott. If he did, it could mean awakening conservative North Siders, who nearly ousted him during the last election cycle.
Observers note, however, that Nirenberg really hasn't had to go after Abbott because the city's coronavirus progress indicators have been looking good.
While hospitalizations have been ticking up for two weeks, the system itself isn't under major stress. The city routinely has more than a fourth of its staffed hospital beds available any given day and 70 to 80 percent of its ventilators.
The time it now takes for local case counts to double sits at 36 days, compared with just a few days at the start of the crisis. And San Antonio has the ability to test nearly 4,000 people a day for the virus. The goal had been 3,000.
“When Ron can point to concrete evidence and say, ‘What's happening is hurting us,' there is no doubt in my mind that he runs to the mountaintop and points his finger at Abbott and says, ‘You need to fix this,'” Bernal said.
But that hasn't happened. At least Abbott has a more detailed strategy for reopening, Nirenberg said. Compare that to Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp reopened the state without much of a plan, Nirenberg said.
“Let's give credit where credit is due and let's offer criticism and object when that's necessary,” the mayor added.