Before undoing the voter-approved limits on city manager pay and tenure had even been proposed Thursday night, a chamber of commerce president and a prominent progressive leader had already signed up to stake out opposite positions on the issue.
The city manager’s salary is currently capped at 10 times the amount of the lowest-paid, full-time city employee. City Manager Erik Walsh has already reached that limit with his current salary of $374,400.
To the business community, that’s hardly enough to retain top talent for such an important role.
“It’s important to acknowledge that city managers act as chief executives of municipal corporations,” said North San Antonio Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Brett Finley, the first constituent signed up to speak on the issue at Thursday’s meeting of the Charter Review Commission.
“The size and complexity of city operations should be a fundamental consideration in creating a transparent, market-responsive, competitive approach to compensation and performance evaluation,” Finley said.
Business groups have played a big role in funding past campaigns to change the charter, and Finley’s perspective matches the group tasked with recommending potential changes.
Chaired by Pat Frost, who recently retired as president of Frost Bank, that subcommittee made its first formal presentation on Thursday, highlighting data suggesting that San Antonio’s city manager is underpaid compared to city managers in other cities comparable in size and population. No other Texas city has a tenure cap for its city manager, according to their research.
Frost said his group believes the power to set the salary and employment terms of the city manager should return to the City Council, as it was before the 2018 changes pushed by the firefighters union.
At the time, the firefighters union was at odds with then-City Manager Sheryl Sculley, who announced plans to retire shortly after voters approved the union’s restrictions by 60%.
“It was a lot of referendum on her, right or wrong,” Frost said.
To others who signed up to speak, however, the idea of paving the way to increase Walsh’s salary in a city where so many residents struggle financially seemed unfathomable.
Jecoa Ross, a faculty instructor at San Antonio College, said he was disappointed the subcommittee’s research didn’t seem to consider the fact that the City Charter already has guidelines for raising the city manager’s pay: “You raise the salary of employees in the city.”
“This is about pay equity,” Ross said. “Any discussion about money in this city should be focused on the people who need it the most.”
Among the speakers at Thursday’s meeting was Ananda Tomas, a formidable progressive organizer who gathered signatures to get two police reform initiatives on the ballot in recent years.
“We don’t get to elect the city manager who has more power than the mayor himself,” said Tomas, who is already organizing support against the proposed changes. “Taking power away from voters to decide tenure and pay for the city manager is frankly undemocratic.”
Redistricting
A separate subcommittee focused on City Council representation also made its first formal recommendations Thursday night.
It was asked to determine whether the city should add council districts to serve a growing population — something it decided wasn’t necessary.
“One of the most important parts is being able to be responsive,” said Frank Garza, a former city attorney who chairs that subcommittee. “We looked a lot at the [council office] budgets and how they’ve grown in the last 20 years basically in response to constituents’ needs.”
The group was also asked to consider whether San Antonio should use a Michigan-style independent redistricting commission the next time council districts must be redrawn.
At the city level, Austin, New York City, Minneapolis, Portland, San Diego and Syracuse, New York have all moved to that style of redistricting, which aims to curb gerrymandering and keep politics out of the process by allowing a group of citizens — instead of consultants or the elected officials themselves — to draw the maps.
Garza said his subcommittee preferred a hybrid approach instead. Their proposal suggests that a citizen commission create the maps, but members of the council must vote to approve them, retaining some oversight.
“[Council members are] the ones elected by the residents. They’re the ones that, if a citizen has a complaint about the map, that’s where they go,” Garza told the San Antonio Report. “That’s why we think it’s very important that they have a final say.”
San Antonio employed a similar style of redistricting commission last year after the 2020 census determined the city’s growth was not evenly distributed among the council districts.
But the commission’s work was criticized for letting politics in anyway because its members were chosen by the council, and there weren’t clear guidelines about how council could influence them. Some appointed members of their staff or family.
The proposal unveiled by the Charter Review Commission Thursday sought to correct those problems, by prohibiting council members from choosing family members, council staff or city employees to serve on the commission — and from lobbying their work outside of open meetings.
