Each crisis in city reveals its inequality, poor planning

February’s winter storm crisis was catastrophic, but it would be a fallacy to think every Texan’s suffering was equitable.

Of the millions who lost power, water or both, those with lower incomes and people of color suffered more deeply — and some lost their lives. It is imperative that local and state leaders prioritize equity as they seek to repair these failed systems. This means going beyond the loss of utilities.

At the local level, leaders can’t ignore the gaps that emerged between the needs of our city’s most vulnerable and the lack of a crisis response plan to provide and coordinate help at the peak of the crisis and after. As San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s panel investigates the emergency response, it must also provide a blueprint for quickly and coherently reaching our most vulnerable in a crisis. Panelists must seek out and listen to the stories of the community.

Leaders can’t ignore San Antonio’s inequities or the need. San Antonio Food Bank CEO Eric Cooper reported a 40 percent increase in people served. City 311 operators fielded more than 32,700 calls between Feb. 15 and 21. This is a 140 percent increase from the previous year; 911 calls doubled.

Queta Rodriguez, a community activist who provided aid during the storm, said finding resources to meet the overwhelming needs was beyond challenging.

“I was upset. I was calling emergency numbers and posting messages on Facebook,” she said of finding hundreds of elderly in their cold dark apartments. “(Bexar County Commissioner) Tommy Calvert got the ball rolling to get buses to take them to the Grand Hyatt … but there was really poor planning. I get that we couldn’t have anticipated this, but there was zero sense of urgency from many leaders in helping them.”

We admire Rodriguez’s efforts, and in every disaster heroes emerge, but the point here is our city needs a much clearer, equity-focused crisisresponse plan.

Funding is only part of the solution, said Marisa Bono, VIA Metropolitan Transit’s chief strategic officer and a civil rights attorney: “The city can’t just throw money at this and walk away. There are serious issues that need to be evaluated so this doesn’t happen again.”

Bono helped a friend who drove a 26-foot truck from Florida offload donated items in just hours, another example of heroism.

But Bono also highlighted the gap of not integrating community activists in a crisis-response plan that connects them to support systems already in place, saying, “Community activists and organizers are angry — they are mad. We need to think about how to be outcome-based.”

State Rep. Diego Bernal, a Democrat who represents San Antonio, called the community effort heroic, but said it “signaled a massive system failure.”

“And it should have never come to that,” he said. “The lack of a plan, unified comms apparatus or blockchain-style sequence of responses was harrowing. We must now think in terms of systems, not individual players. Anything less would dishonor those we lost. It’s on us.”

The response by elected officials was haphazard, he said, adding, “When individual offices are engaged in the scramble independent of each other, it’s commendable but wildly inefficient in terms of a government response.”

Just a week after the winter storm, the nonprofit SA2020 published a “Guide to Strengthening Crisis Response, Relief and Recovery.” It asks critical questions in six key areas of inequities — critical information access, safe shelter access, housing affordability, food and safe water access, wage recovery and affordable, reliable transportation. “These inequities are long-standing and pervasive. The storm — freezing temperatures, utility outages, unsafe roads and canceled work — exacerbated the problems that so many families already face,” said Kiran Kaur Bains, president and CEO of SA2020.

SA2020 and the city’s Office of Equity should be included on the mayor’s panel, as should people on the ground who can share real stories of serving the most vulnerable.

There is hope for change. During a recent Editorial Board meeting, when we asked about the lack of planning for vulnerable communities, Nirenberg acknowledged that health and weather crises affect the most vulnerable the hardest and that the city must learn from the experience.

“We have to use that as a catalyst,” he said. Make it so.