San Antonio is gearing up for a high-profile municipal election in 2025, but residents will have less insight into who’s funding local campaigns than they did in previous years.
By a 10-0 vote Thursday, City Council approved a handful of changes to the city’s Municipal Campaign Finance Code, including stripping out a requirement that candidates in municipal races file quarterly campaign reports.
Among the council members who voted for it were one announced mayoral contender, Councilman John Courage (D9) and two other prospective candidates, Adriana Rocha Garcia (D4) and Melissa Cabello Havrda (D6). Councilman Manny Pelaez (D8), who launched his mayoral campaign in April, was absent from Thursday’s meeting and therefore did not vote.
The move was part of a larger, regularly occurring update to the city’s ethics and campaign codes.
Campaign finance reports offer constituents a limited glimpse into who donated and how much, which consultants campaigns have hired and generally how candidates are spending the money they’ve raised. In an effort to improve transparency, the city’s Ethics Review Board recommended increasing their frequency from twice a year to quarterly in 2018, and City Council signed off on it.
Now, starting Oct. 1, the city will adopt the state’s policy of collecting them only twice per year, in January and July. Additional reports ahead of an election will still be required, showing any previously unreported activity 30 days before election day and eight days before election day — in most cases, after early voting begins.
Council members have long grumbled about the quarterly reporting schedule and did not debate the merits, or the risks, of undoing it.
Courage — the first council member to throw his hat in the ring for mayor in January — proposed putting the change into effect even sooner, noting that “most of the council members would not like to do an Oct. 15 report.”
His idea was shut down after city staff said the October reports would already be cancelled under the current implementation timeline.
After the meeting, Rocha Garcia, who chaired the Ethics Review Board when it recommended increasing the reporting frequency in 2018, said San Antonio shouldn’t be in a rush to lower its ethics standards to match the rest of the state. Still, she voted for the changes.
“I wanted to keep [the quarterly reports] but I know my colleagues hate it,” said Rocha Garcia, who represents the Southwest Side.
“I do my own campaign reports. It is manageable,” she said. “But I know some of my colleagues have to pay to have them done for them. Last I knew the going rate for that was $500 to $1,000.”
System upgrades delayed
Among the other changes approved Thursday, the city will no longer require candidates to submit monthly bank statements from their campaign accounts.
The statements were supposed to help the city verify transactions on the campaign finance reports, but doing so has become more challenging after a rise in credit card donations, City Clerk Debbie Racca-Sittre told reporters. Instead, collecting them was becoming a liability for the city, she added.
“You can’t email sensitive information, and bank account routing numbers are pretty sensitive, … so we were keeping them in filing cabinets,” she said.
Racca-Sittre has been pushing for a wholesale update to the city’s antiquated campaign finance reporting software system since she took over as clerk several years ago.
But San Antonio’s unique campaign finance rules, such as the quarterly campaign finance reports and the donation prohibitions during high-profile bids, have made that process more challenging than expected, she said.
Racca-Sittre hoped transitioning to the state’s reporting schedule of two reports in a calendar year, rather than four, would make it easier for the city to purchase a new software system. But she told reporters Thursday that even after the change council members made Thursday, existing systems the city could purchase won’t be compatible with its needs.
The city imposes contribution limits — $500 per person in a single election cycle for council candidates and $1,000 per person for mayoral contenders — which the state’s system doesn’t account for, she said.
“There’s also some functionalities, such as the blackout period reporting, and the ability for our city auditor and our ethics auditor to pull down a report based on who contributed,” she said. “The state system doesn’t allow you to do that.”
The city will likely have to build its own system in-house, she said, and will have to make a sizable budget request in the coming years.
Untangling business interests
One change that generated more discussion from the council was a plan to expand the rules intended to stop donors from influencing who’s awarded city contracts.
The city has policy in place that says business leaders can’t donate to a council member right before the council awards a large contract, if the person’s business is competing for that work. It currently applies only to company board members, but Thursday’s changes extended it to include nonprofit board members as well.
Councilwoman Phyllis Viagran (D3) argued that the city was placing an unnecessary burden on nonprofit leaders.
Rocha Garcia contended that the rule should have been in effect already, but nonprofit leaders were carved out of the policy in against the Ethics Review Board’s recommendations in 2018.
