Fix SAPD lost battle, but it may win the war
In 2013, Julián Castro won a third term as mayor of San Antonio with a little more than 29,000 votes.
Last Saturday, Ron Nirenberg won a third term as mayor of San Antonio with more than 92,000 votes.
Even when you factor in this city’s population growth over the past eight years, it’s a remarkable difference. But it doesn’t tell us much about Nirenberg or his standing with local voters.
Certainly, Nirenberg’s 2-1 victory over former Councilman Greg Brockhouse was a declaration of support for the mayor’s calm, steady handling of the COVID-19 crisis and a confidence in the economic recovery we sense is on the way.
It wasn’t the mayoral election, however, that motivated San Antonians to go to the polls. The Nirenberg-brockhouse contest was an afterthought, a snoozefest, a sequel that failed to match the drama of its 2019 predecessor.
Of course, the big attraction in this year’s city election was Proposition B, a ballot measure created by the reform group Fix SAPD and designed to repeal the San Antonio Police Officers Association’s right to collective bargaining. There are few moral victories in politics, but Saturday night we saw one in San Antonio as Proposition B received more than 73,000 votes and lost by a margin of only 2.3 percentage points.
Keep in mind that Fix SAPD has been in existence for less than a year. Its leaders are young, sharp and impassioned, but they had little political experience. They got important canvassing and funding help from the Texas Organizing Project, but minimal support from people in the political or business establishment, most of whom didn’t want to tangle with the police union.
That included Nirenberg, who has been one of the union’s most persistent critics over his eight years as an elected official. In 2016, he was one of only two council members to vote against a mediated agreement between the city and SAPOA, because he thought it was too costly for the city.
Last June, during a gathering with police-reform advocates, the mayor declared his allegiance to their cause.
“Hold me accountable for it,” he said, “because I’m the mayor of this goddamn city and we’re gonna make change together.”
But Nirenberg floated above the battle when it came to Prop B. He and most of his council colleagues hid behind City Attorney Andy Segovia’s directive that they not weigh in on a ballot proposition that could affect ongoing contract negotiations with the police union.
Nirenberg walked a rhetorical tightrope, emphasizing his support for reform, but indicating to SAPOA leaders that he thought collective bargaining was a good way to achieve those reforms.
The campaign politics behind Prop B were complex and contradictory.
Eight years ago, you could find many local conservatives who were extremely critical of SAPOA. They regarded the union as an overly powerful entity that used its bargaining leverage to soak the taxpayers of San Antonio for rich benefits packages.
In 2021, being conservative in San Antonio (or most U.S. cities, for that matter) means championing the cause of the police union.
When Gov. Greg Abbott served as attorney general, he introduced a “Workers Bill of Rights” to keep Texas workers from being compelled to join a union or pay union dues.
On Saturday night, however, Abbott celebrated the fact that a Texas union — albeit a publicsector one — had preserved its collective bargaining power.
“Thank you San Antonio for voting AGAINST Prop. B,” Abbott tweeted. “If it had passed it could have been harder for the police department to recruit & retain good officers.”
For Republicans, this wasn’t a referendum on union bargaining power. Voting against Prop B was a “Back the Blue” statement.
Democrats were split on the proposition, with some oldschool, pro-labor liberals simply unwilling to vote against the concept of collective bargaining.
Given such strong headwinds, it’s amazing that Fix SAPD nearly won.
They had to deal with blatant deception from SAPOA. Union reps falsely argued that the proposition would “defund” the police. In fact, Prop B didn’t address any specifics of police funding or disciplinary procedures.
Its framers simply believed that collective bargaining gave SAPOA too much bargaining leverage and they wanted to put a new system in place.
Houston, Dallas, Austin and Fort Worth manage to function without collective bargaining for their police officers. San Antonio is the outlier. But SAPOA reps suggested that our police department would collapse if we joined those cities in using a meet-andconfer bargaining process.
The spirit of Prop B carries into two council runoffs, where movement progressives Jalen Mckee-rodriguez and Teri Castillo — both of whom backed Prop B — appear to be on the cusp of victory.
Hopefully, that spirit will also carry over into SAPOA’S contract negotiations. It’s a new day in San Antonio. If SAPOA leaders didn’t already know it before Saturday night, they should know it now.