Mayoral power on proposal process weakens

Addition of deadline is challenge to Nirenberg

Mayor Ron Nirenberg has ceded some of the power he has wielded over City Council over his last three terms.

He did so after a push by District 10 Council Member Marc Whyte, a newcomer who found support among some of his council colleagues to limit the lame-duck mayor’s influence over their policy proposals.

Nirenberg and council members Thursday voted 8-3 to establish a timeline for when the Governance Committee will take up these proposals, known formally as Council Consideration Requests.

Now that will happen within 60 days of a council member filing their request with the city clerk. That’s a departure from current practice, where it can take months, if not more than a year, for the committee to discuss a request, which — per city ordinance — was supposed to happen “in a timely manner.”

“I think it’s so important — and I know we all up here agree — that everybody has a voice, that we’re transparent and that everybody has an opportunity to put forth their ideas for fixing some of the city’s problems through the CCR process,” Whyte said ahead of the vote.

Reforming the Council Consideration Request process has been one of Whyte’s main priorities since he took office in June. A staunch social and fiscal conservative, Whyte is an ideological outsider on council, most of whose members are politically closer to Nirenberg — and who, until now, have largely been hesitant to challenge the mayor.

But that’s rapidly changing. Because of city term limits, Nirenberg is well into his fourth and last two-year term, with almost half of council eyeing his job. In other words, council members hungry to raise their political profiles have less to fear from a short-timer.

Nirenberg chairs council’s powerful Governance Committee, which is tasked with proposing, reviewing and referring new policy ideas to city staff

or other committees. He tapped council’s four senior-most members to sit on the committee, all of whom are mulling their own 2025 mayoral run.

Nirenberg crafts the committee’s monthly agenda in consultation with staff.

‘A gate’

During a work session last month, council members expressed frustration that Nirenberg and City Manager Erik Walsh have been slow to put their requests on the agenda.

“Even if it’s not true, the feeling is that if the mayor didn’t want something agendized or if the city manager didn’t want something agendized, it wasn’t going to be,” District 2 Council Member Jalen Mckee-rodriguez said at that session. “That may not be true. That was the feeling — that was what many of us have said in discussion with one another.”

Nirenberg and Walsh attributed delays to staff needing time to review and research each request, which could include a legal analysis or a cost estimate.

“Obviously there’s some question about whether or not the city manager acts as a gate,” Walsh said. “I do not, I have not, I don’t think it’s proposed for me to be a gate, and if I was gate then we’d probably have a different process.”

Still too much power?

Mckee-rodriguez is one of council’s more prolific CCR filers and has the most outstanding of all the yet-to-be-discussed requests. The joint request he filed with District 3 Council Member Phyllis Viagran in late November 2022 to ban horse-drawn carriages will finally go before the Governance Committee on April 17.

Mckee-rodriguez was one of three council members who voted against the ordinance change Thursday. He told the San Antonio Express-news that he did so after hearings concerns that District 4 Council Member Adriana Rocha Garcia raised minutes before the vote.

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable still with staff being able to tell an elected official that represents its residents what it can and can’t move forward within policy,” said Rocha Garcia, a potential mayoral contender.

She told the Express-news that the new ordinance was overly “prescriptive” in telling the Governance Committee how to handle someone’s CCR.

If the committee were to decide that a request could not be funded “without changing council spending priorities,” the ordinance says the committee could punt it to the City Manager’s Office, which could then decide whether to bring up it during annual budget talks.

In Rocha Garcia’s view, that gives the city manager too much power. “While I think that Erik is great right now and his team is great, what’s to say that the next city manager is not going to have an agenda?” she said.

District 5 Council Member Teri Castillo opposed writing a new ordinance simply because the one in place isn’t being followed.

A slow process

Others options available to the Governance Committee include asking staff to return within 90 days to give more details about a CCR or passing it along to another council committee for discussion to decide whether to send it to the full council for a vote. Or the committee can remove a request from further consideration — effectively killing it.

While the Governance Committee now will take up policy requests more quickly, that won’t always translate to faster outcomes for council members eager to tally up policy wins.

Walsh cautioned council of that possibility during a Feb. 21 work session, pointing to a January committee meeting that was stacked with seven requests.

“We did very little work on those CCRS,” he said. “They were very high-level. There was not a lot of analysis and work and due diligence.”

“I’ll tell you that that will be the case going forward,” he added.

On Wednesday, city staff quickly briefed the Governance Committee members on eight requests. Of those, only one — regarding a memorial way designation for civil rights activist Jovita Idár — was OK’D for a May council vote. Most were pushed off to select committees for what could be multiple rounds of discussion.