After months of grumbling from San Antonio City Council members who say their policy proposals are getting stalled, the city plans to institute new deadlines for action on their ideas.
A Council Consideration Request is the first step in creating a new city policy or ordinance. Once a proposal is filed with five council members’ signatures, it’s supposed to come before the council’s Governance Committee, which is chaired by Mayor Ron Nirenberg.
At a meeting of the Northeast Neighborhood Alliance Tuesday night, Councilman Marc Whyte (D10) explained the procedure like this: “I listen to you all, you all tell me what the problem is, we go try to find a solution, and then we’re allowed to put that forward and get an idea moving through the council committees.”
“The problem is, our council consideration requests weren’t moving,” Whyte said. “There was no transparency. The mayor was able to kill the ones he didn’t want and slow-play some others.”
On Wednesday, City Council members discussed a proposal Whyte helped craft to mandate that CCRs be placed on the next Governance Committee agenda within 60 days of being submitted, or by the second scheduled committee meeting, whichever is sooner.
“The feeling is that if the mayor didn’t want something agendized or the city manager doesn’t want something agendized, it wasn’t going to happen,” said Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), whose CCR to end horse-drawn carriages downtown has been awaiting a first committee meeting since November 2022. “It may not be true, but … that’s what many of us have said in discussion with one another.”
Changes to the CCR procedure are one of a number of efforts council members have been working on to rein in Nirenberg’s authority.
Last month the council approved a new code of conduct that some members said they hoped would put guardrails on how the council doles out public admonishments of its own members.
Another effort to clarify how the mayor handles three-signature memos — such as the one progressives Teri Castillo (D5) and McKee-Rodriguez submitted in December calling for an Israel-Hamas ceasefire resolution — is currently in the works, Whyte said Wednesday.
The three-signature memo process came under scrutiny after Nirenberg announced plans for a meeting on the ceasefire resolution in February, then scrapped that plan after Councilman Manny Pelaez (D8) asked to remove his name from the memo.
Nirenberg said CCR delays often happen because staff needs time to assess the feasibility of a proposal, or because a council member asks for it not to be discussed immediately.
“In terms of adhering to a CCR processes … it’s going to be some collective accountability,” Nirenberg said. “We’ve got to communicate with each other. How’s it going? Are there improvements that you want to see happen?”
“Have that conversation with me as the governance chair … because that’s the kind of mechanism we have in place for making sure there’s compliance to our best of intentions,” he added.
Gatekeepers?
In August, Whyte met with Nirenberg, City Manager Erik Walsh and City Attorney Andy Segovia to discuss what he saw as a gap between city’s existing policy for moving CCRs and how it’s been applied.
Segovia said Wednesday that the current ordinance setting those guidelines, which was last updated in 2007, includes some confusing language.
In one instance it says submitted CCRs should be put on the Governance Committee’s “next available agenda,” Segovia said. In another, it states the Governance Committee should merely schedule it in a “timely manner,” Segovia said.
After the Aug. 3 meeting, Nirenberg put out a statement agreeing with Whyte’s call for procedural clarifications.
“I’m always going to prioritize transparency and accountability in our policymaking process and welcome any attempt to improve our efforts,” Nirenberg said at the time.
On Wednesday, Walsh addressed the criticism from council members directly. He said all submitted CCRs are moving through the system one way or another, and none have been removed from consideration arbitrarily.
“Obviously there’s some question about whether or not the city manager acts as a gate. I did not,” Walsh said. “… Nothing comes off this list unless there’s a document that documents why.”
Segovia said after Wednesday’s meeting that Whyte’s proposal would come before the full council for a vote, perhaps as soon as March.
Seniority
The Governance Committee includes some of the council’s longest-serving members: Adriana Rocha Garcia (D4) and Melissa Cabello Havrda (D6), who are in their third terms, and Manny Pelaez (D8) and John Courage (D9), who are in their fourth and final terms.
Once a CCR makes it to the Governance Committee, the committee can ask for a financial or legal review of the proposal, push it to a council committee or the full council, refer it for consideration in the next budget goal-setting process, or remove the CCR from further consideration.
On Wednesday, some the council’s newer members backed one another up on their desire for fairness in the process.
“I really like the idea of setting the timeline for CCRs to be heard,” said Councilwoman Sukh Kaur (D1), who joined the dais in June. “It all, at the end of the day, comes down to a little bit of subjectivity, so the more that we can remove that, I think it’s important.”
McKee-Rodriguez noted that public comment isn’t allowed at the Governance Committee, nor are council members who aren’t on the committee allowed to speak at its meetings.
“Representation matters,” said McKee-Rodriguez. “Communities without representation on that committee don’t even have an opportunity to weigh in on a policy before it’s shut out.”
Whyte, the council’s lone conservative, said some of his supporters questioned whether his proposed changes to the CCR process might open the door to ideas that are better off buried.
“My answer to that is yes,” said Whyte. “No matter who initiates the CCR, it only gets moving if other council folks sign on, and everybody here was duly elected by the people in their district.”
