San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Right mayor at the right time — and the time to come
His response to the novel coronavirus is as steady as it has been remarkable.
His actions, early in this public health and economic crisis, have saved countless lives and allowed San Antonio to reopen as safely as possible at an uncertain moment.
His love for this city is evident in the exhaustion so clear in his face these days, but also in his careful choice of words. He is real, honest, direct and affirming. There is no virtue signaling here — as we have seen from so many others in politics, who play to their respective bases at the expense of the rest of us — only leadership and governance.
I’m writing, of course, about Mayor Ron Nirenberg. This story is not over. We know neither the arc of his political journey, nor how San Antonio navigates, recovers and transforms from this prolonged crisis. This is merely a chapter in a larger story for all of us, but it’s a chapter that has been defined by Nirenberg’s exemplary leadership.
He has been the right mayor at the right time. It’s hard to believe this is the same mayor who was pushed to the brink just a year ago, eking out a narrow win in a runoff against then-City Councilman Greg Brockhouse, a challenger dogged by domestic violence allegations with deep ties to the public safety unions. These days, a close race against
seems implausible.
But enough of the political angles. They don’t matter.
As former longtime ExpressNews City Hall reporter Josh Baugh observed on Twitter in April, Nirenberg’s ascent is reminiscent of former Mayors Phil Hardberger and Julián Castro. Hardberger embraced Hurricane Katrina evacuees and reshaped city government for the better. Castro put San Antonio on the national map with his ideas, youthful promise and vision.
Nirenberg’s “legacy, though, will be shaped by his handling of the coronavirus,” Baugh wrote. “So far, it’s been masterful. His commitment to our community has been clear.”
I see Nirenberg’s leadership manifest in three ways.
First, he’s been bold and decisive.
Nirenberg’s early decision in March to limit social gatherings and suspend dine-in restaurant service was a difficult one. I don’t think he’s truly articulated on the record how much anguish that decision caused him or how much sleep he literally lost over it. But it was the right decision as it saved lives and has kept our hospital capacity open.
We don’t know how many lives Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff saved with their stay-home orders. How do you show someone did not die? But Community Information Now, a data-crunching nonprofit in partnership with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health in San Antonio, produced a model suggesting 30 days of staying home potentially saved more than 5,600 lives.
If you want something more concrete, we know the doubling rate here for COVID-19 is 36 days and the positivity rate for COVID-19 tests is 3.6 percent. Nirenberg’s stay-home order laid this foundation.
Second, he has found his voice, bringing an intense focus to our endemic poverty.
When Nirenberg speaks about poverty and economic hardship in San Antonio, he does so with unassailable conviction and urgency that, frankly, was missing in his first term.
When I asked, last month, what keeps him up at night during this crisis, he reflected on concerns about Texas reopening too soon, “but I think the bigger mistake would be for us to be so focused on returning back to normal and getting back to the way things were that we forget this is the opportunity to make sure it doesn’t have to be that way anymore,” he said.
“The Food Bank lines doubled to 120,000 people a week. That means on a normal day here in San Antonio there were 60,000 families who had to rely on the Food Bank for food when we weren’t in a crisis. Under no circumstances should that be an acceptable level of normal for San Antonio, and so what keeps me up at night is making sure that as we focus on rebuilding San Antonio, we are not content to go back to the way things were.”
Third, he is applying this vision and rhetoric to reality with plans to spend more than $100 million on closing the digital divide and ushering 10,000 residents through workforce development and into a new economy.
His policies have saved lives and just might change lives. He has met this challenging moment while also looking beyond it to the next chapter in our story.