176. The Education of a Texas Public Servant: Ron Nirenberg's Memoir and Vision for Bexar County

Welcome to Big City, Small Town, the weekly podcast all about San Antonio and the people that make it go and grow. I'm your host, Bob Rivard. This week's guest will need no major introduction. We're with former San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg and current Democratic frontrunner for the Bexar county judge seat he will face in November on the ballot, the Republican candidate, Patrick Von Dolan. We'll have both of them in, or at least we'll invite both of them in after Labor Day sometime to talk about the campaign as it picks back up after the summer. But today we're here just to talk to Ron Nirenberg about his new book that was published by Trinity University Press recently. And it is a memoir. Mayor Nirenberg, Ron Nirenberg, welcome to Big City, Small Town. Great to be with you, Bob and Cory, appreciate it. Congratulations on publishing your book. Thank you. Tell me a little bit about that. And your co author, David Lesh, who who's an esteemed Trinity professor, a Middle east expert and somebody with a high national security clearance. I know from my own foreign reporting background who's considered a real expert on Syria and some of the countries that are right in the news right now. But you're a Trinity grad, and as people who don't know your background will learn if they read the book, you also had the job of running Trinity University's jazz station. That's right. K R T U. Yeah. In my professional transition life, I was the general manager of KRTU FM 91.7, the best jazz radio station in the world. I will say, and I'm not just biased saying that they are a fantastic outlet. Yes. But this is a project that I have to say was a little bit of a reluctant one for me. As you mentioned, David Lesh, who's a friend of mine, who I never actually had his class when I was a student. Oh, really? But we became friends later on and he became a political advisor to me, had been encouraging me to consider writing about my time in office. And I just, when he first brought this up, really pre pandemic, I didn't think that, you know, there was enough there to warrant writing about. But as the years went on and certainly as we got through the pandemic and some of the other crises that cascaded into it, he encouraged me again. And at that point, I really did start thinking about it because over the course of the 12 years I was in City hall, there's a lot of things that have occurred, a lot of decisions made stories that have happened where, you know, I think the general public knows the broad contours, but there's a lot of intimate moments. There's a lot of deliberation. There's a lot of stress on family and friends that you go through that, you know, at that point, as I'm looking to exit the mayor's office, I wanted to at least put down in writing and in part to explain it to my own family, to my wife and my son, about all those days and weeks that they didn't really see me much. This is a family endeavor, public service, as anyone who's done it knows. And I thought I owed it to them to put it in writing. And it turned into, in my view, and this was actually a frame that a Carrie Clack encouraged me to think about. A letter to my son and my wife as I began to write. As you know, we worked on this project together, David and I. It became clear it was a letter to not just my wife and son, but also to the entire city that I served and fell in love with many times during the course of my life. The title of the book is the Education of a Texas Public Servant, and that's appropriate. But what was news to me as I read the book, Ron, was what an intimate portrait of your family. It is your time as a college student, a young man going to the Annenberg School at Penn in Philadelphia, which is where you met Erica Prosper, your wife, who's now an executive with H E B. And you're very candid about what all of us know, which is marriage is a beautiful union, but it's also a struggle. And you don't hide the fact that, you know, going to work as a $20 a week city councilman put a lot of stress on the family. Not just because the fact that it was an unpaid position for quite a long time. Really. You became, you know, a lowly paid mayor at some point. I would still argue the salaries are low, but for most of the time, Erica had to be the breadwinner. And also the hours that anybody in public office works are basically, it's from sunup to sundown and beyond. Your son Jonah was probably, I don't know, four or five years old when you first became a councilman and then a teenager by the time you left the mayor's office. So he sort of grew up watching his dad, A, be gone and B, be a very public person on television. He actually accompanied you to quite a bit of the things you did. So I would just say kudos to you for being so candid and Erica being so candid because you invited a number of people important to your life and career to write essays that are included in the book. And Erica is the author of one of those essays, and she, too, was quite candid about certainly how proud she is of you. And not only no regrets, but more proud than ever now that she knows what you went through every day down at City hall and every night. But she also acknowledged this stresses families enormously. Yeah, and that's really how the title came about. I mean, that. That wasn't really the. The working title that we had in mind as. As we were going through this project and I was writing this. But in hindsight, that's exactly what it is. And. And frankly, you know, in order to capture the 12 years of, I think, pretty critical moments that we've experienced together collectively in San Antonio, you have to talk about the things that led up to it. You have to talk about perhaps your cultural and philosophical framework to make decisions that you've. You've made. And so in the course of writing this, it became a memoir, because I don't think you can explain the things that have happened over the last six years without explaining who the people are that were in those positions of authority to help us get through this. And so that's why it became a memoir. That's why the title, I think is appropriate, is An Education of a Public Servant. Anyone who's been in public service knows you accumulate wisdom from a lot of different places in your own background and. And experiences as a person growing up also influence your work. You know, when I was growing up, and people probably are tired of me saying this, but my dream was to be the beat writer for the Boston Red Sox. I went to school to be a sports journalist, and obviously those things evolved, and I found myself in public service and fell in love with it at the same time, I fell in love with the city as a student in school. But all those things, I think, are part of the story, in my view that needs to be that I wanted to tell for my family and for the people I served. Well, not to be antagonistic, Ron, but my mother's father was one of the head cops at Yankee Stadium, and I became a lifelong Yankees fan starting as a very young boy. And George Steinbrenner almost drove me away from the team. But I'm back, and we enjoy our rivalry with your Boston Red Sox, you know, and I've got many friends and political supporters that are Yankee fans, Bob. And if you. And if I can do that. I think the Democrat Republican divide is pretty much child's play. On a far more serious note, I was present for your entire public career, Ron, but I had no idea until I opened the book. And it's the opening sequence of the book where you share the really tragic loss of your baby, Sophie, with Erica, which was your firstborn. And here in San Antonio, it was a foregone conclusion. The baby wasn't going to survive, and you got to hold it briefly, but the baby passed on the day it was born. And for all of us who are, you know, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, it's a tragedy that. That you live with for the rest of your life, and, and it's not something that you've used in your public life. And maybe you've told friends about it, but I didn't know about it. I'm glad to know it about you because I think that it explains a lot about your character. So Sophia is. Is very much present in our lives, the way we lead it, Erica and I, and we haven't talked a lot about it, and certainly I did not want to speak about it in any public way without Erica being comfortable. But over the years, because Sophia was born in 2007, over the years, we've gotten to be in a place where, in hindsight, it has become, in many respects, the first chapter of our story, you know, and that's why I think, as you know, David was a fantastic co author. He was doing interviews of me and Erica to start creating a wireframe of my story. And as he was having these interviews with us, you know, the story of Sophia kept coming up. And that's why it's chapter one, because maybe not as a life lived, but in hindsight, you realize that there are certain points in your life that become critical junctures. And for anyone who's been close to me during my time in office, I have always tried to view my work through the eyes of my son and through his generation. I've been very focused on the future, sometimes maybe to a fault, because I think the essence of public service is to make the world a better place. And I want to do that for the people who come behind us. And so, you know, in hindsight, I think one of the reasons why that has been such a crystallized framework for me in public service is because of Sophia and just counting blessings every day that we have a healthy son and we've been able to raise him and put our heart and soul into trying to raise a good human being and do so in a great world. And that's our frame. That's my frame for public service. And that's why, you know, frankly, while it wasn't a story that has come up much in the course of telling my story and what public service has meant and how I got here, it became a critical, probably the most critical story. You tell another story in your book that also was news to me and that's the origin story of, you know, your, your own family and your father, who kind of struck me as a counterculture kind of bearded guy from my generation. Remind me, but I think maybe the Peace Corps took him to East Asia and Malaysia. Yeah, so. And folks know my dad is probably the most loyal volunteer I've ever had in a political campaign and he loves it. But he is very much somebody who thinks about, observes and appreciates all of the world. And when he was in college, he decided he wanted to go to the Peace corps in the 60s, and that's what he did. He went to Malaysia. He was stationed in Malaysia, which at the time is nothing like it is today. My mother was from Malaysia, born in Malaysia. She was born in Penang, was living in Kuala Lumpur, and they met, fell in love, got married, and he moved the entire family back to the United States. And when you could do that back then, my mom was naturalized citizen in the bicentennial year. Malaysia is a melting pot in Asia, just like the United States is. And so her father was from the Philippines. Her mother had English and Indian heritage. On my father's side, they were from Eastern Europe, Russia and Poland, what is now Ukraine, and came over to the United States through Ellis island, like many others fleeing the fascism that was beginning to take root in Europe. When a friend of mine gave me a subscription to 23andMe several years ago because I was describing this to him, he was quite excited to see the map where all of the countries pretty much in the eastern hemisphere were lit up. It's part of my, what I love about being an American. I feel quite at home here. And it's because I see family in all corners of this community. You're definitely melting pot category, ethnically confused. Whatever you want to say when it comes to checking the box, but I brought that up not so well. It must have been culture shock for your mother to come over. Without a doubt, the marriage didn't work. I think you were a nine year old boy with an older brother and a sister when, when, when the marriage did break up and you know, you ended up just living with your mom. And once my mom and then my dad. Yeah, we around a little bit. Yeah, I don't think we need to spend a, a whole lot of time on that. But you come from a, a broken family and that surprised me a little bit because you just look like such a high performing person who got into Trinity and then an Ivy League school for your advanced degree and on and on. But your background was one where you didn't really have a model for building your own family, is what I would say. And that is kind of the world I came from. So it interested me that, hey, if you're going to build a good family, you're kind of starting from scratch because you can't turn back to the family you came from. Well, and I think, you know, like so many other people who I grew up with, you know, our parents, marriage didn't last. But you can be just fine in that occasion, in that situation. But what I learned from that, especially growing up and having most of my early childhood years with my family trying to keep it together, I learned that I want that I want my children, should I ever have them, to experience that and the security and safety and love of a family. And so I also have valued that. And it's why, you know, through some of the challenges that we've been through, Eric and I, why we still have a strong marriage. It's interesting, isn't it, the fine line between failure and endurance. But it's there and we've all experienced it one way or the other. Well, let's switch to public policy, because I said earlier that I've been, you know, I've had a front row seat on your entire public career. But I learned a lot from the book. Part of it is memory and forgetting. Just what we went through with the pandemic and what this city went through and what you and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolf went through together through that period. I didn't realize until I read the book that at first we were in relative concert with Governor Abbott at the state level. I don't remember us being in concert with him. I very much remember when it turned the other way and suddenly with the pressure from the first Trump administration coming down on the state, suddenly people didn't care about masks. Suddenly there was questions about vaccines, there was questions about shutting down. I even hear people today say it was to shut down and close the schools. And I think to myself, our 300,000 people that we saw go down from COVID might have been millions if we hadn't shut down. And I wonder when you look Back on that, beyond what you wrote in the book, are there things you would do over, or are you pretty satisfied with the way things unfolded? So, first of all, from the safety of hindsight and the fact that we were dealing with an unknown set of variables, we have to remember that Judge Wolf and I, the bottom line was we were trying to save people's lives. We were trying to save the lives of the members of our community. And we were operating with the best knowledge and guidance from public health professionals that we could at the time. And they also were dealing with very limited data and understanding of a virus that was literally mutating as the days were unfolding. So the work that we did to try to break the chain of contagion, which was our number one role in responsibility, was to shorten the duration of the impact as much as possible. And so, arguably, we did that better than most communities around the country because we had great cohesion among different industries, among our public health officials. And the judge and I worked to make sure that we were collaborating at all times. Of course, in hindsight, knowing what we know now, there are some things that we would do differently. One of them is we understand the total impacts of school closures on children that go far beyond the immediate impact of the pandemic. And so in the rush to support our public health officials and teachers and people who are on the front lines of a very dangerous period, a lot of schools closed. We didn't have control over that, but we did have the voice and the bully pulpit that perhaps we could have, and we should have given space for a broader debate about that particular issue. And I would urge us all to remember that during the height of the pandemic, we were literally losing hundreds of people a day in our own community that were healthy, that had really little to no medical conditions, and this was scaring our society to its core. And so what we were doing is trying to save people's lives. All told, again, this whole pandemic lasted much longer than it should have, most likely because of the disjointed nature of our response from the federal, state and local level. We did have a lot of collaboration from Governor Abbott, from the state officials, DHS and federal health officials, and federal health officials as well, for opening vaccine sites, for testing, which we didn't have, for distribution of personal protective equipment. All that stuff from the very beginning of this was in a total state of chaos. And we worked together with the governor, with others, to make sure that we could get that under control. As the pandemic became partisan and polarized, and Trump started his antics. That's when things went into flux. And I felt, and I think we've all observed, that the governor started to go in that direction as well, perhaps in response to the partisan nature of the debate. But needless to say, those kinds of actions prolonged the misery for everybody. There's just so many dark moments from that period that, not to be a pessimist, but I think it's important for us to remember them because as a society, we may go through this again. And I, you know, people lost their livelihoods. Some of us were able to work remotely and continue to thrive, and we've been privileged or blessed in that regard, but many other people were not. The bottom fell out of our city's hospitality industry, and that affected hundreds of thousands of people. We didn't, we didn't have a vaccine for most of 2020. Who can ever forget that iconic photograph that the Express News photographer William Luther took, probably with a drone of 10,000 cars. I think it was lined up at the Alamo Dome for a food bank. It is regrettable that this whole episode and where we have gone to now with regard to the debate and the politics of public health has, I think, put us back to Square1. The two things we could ill afford to forget as a result of this entire pandemic and aftermath were, number one, the conditions for average American families, and certainly San Antonio families that went into with made us far more vulnerable for the impacts. So the food insecurity, the lack of affordability, the wages that had slowed, the fact that millions of American families were literally one paycheck away from needing to go into a food bank line to, to have food for the children. We began an effort to shore up housing affordability, enable people to get into a workforce with higher wages so they can sustain their families working on the pillars of economic mobility so that the next time we face a crisis, we weren't right on the brink of devastation. The second thing is the pandemic taught us that we were not ready for a public health crisis and we need to work as a society to shore up our public health infrastructure. And what have we done in the era of Trump and Robert F. Kennedy? We've dismantled it. So not only were we less prepared as families, as a society for the economic impacts of this, we are less prepared in terms of the public health outcomes. And that is entirely regrettable because it's all preventable and it's all politics. What are your thoughts as the former mayor? And in my view, soon to be county judge about public health spending at the city and county level. And I'll say that Metro Health, which is the department of the city, is one of the departments that was probably most in touch with the county, but it was also very dependent on federal grants for a lot of its funding of different. Different endeavors. We beefed up that funding and staffing during your time as mayor. I'm not sure where it is today. The county started to spend on mental health and some other initiatives. I don't think they're as far along as the city, but that's something to think about, I believe, as you enter a new role. And I wonder what your thoughts are on where we go with that. We can't afford to waste any effort or any resource. And so to the extent that there is redundancy and that we have two departments that are not coordinated and not speaking to each other, that's a problem. And I want to address that. We're going to address that. But with respect to our public health infrastructure, it's barely scratching the surface. Dr. Jacob, who is the leader of the Metro Health department, now, has done an incredible job to organize that department. We have five year strategic plan, I believe that's being updated right now, to continue to build up community health resources and to do the policy work necessary to make us as resilient as possible. We have dialed down the dependence on federal grants to operate our public health authority. On the other side, the concern I have with the public health function of the county is that it had been started with COVID relief dollars. These are dollars that are finite. They go away. And to the extent that the public health department at the county is performing essential functions that need to continue, we need to find new sources of revenue. The first question needs to be answered, though, with respect to the collaboration and coordination of these two major departments in this metropolitan area. Why do we have two? What are they doing? What can we be doing in better collaboration? I think that you will get a lot of people to sit up and listen closely. Closely. If you start to talk about city, county collaboration and consolidation, which the big C words which seem to elude people. And oftentimes in public office it gets very territorial and traditional. But there's a lot of appetite, it seems to me, in Bexar county and San Antonio, for that. Let me ask you one more question, if I can, before we leave this subject. I don't think you covered this in your book, but I want to ask you what your thoughts are about public private partnerships, which tend to be in the economic development and real estate world. But if we look at bio bridges and what happened during the pandemic, you had Graham Weston and the 8020 foundation, you had the Tobin foundation and Bruce Bugg and Tullis Wells all come in together and form a partnership with MetroHealth and launched this school testing initiative, which really enabled us to say we can probably open up here and in a safer way and quickly identify where the virus enters and shut it down at that point and keep going. But you didn't really delve into that. It was a complex proposition that got national attention because we were the first city to do anything like that. What is your view on that a couple of years out? I view our partnerships with Community Labs and other Community Labs, that was the name, as part of the team. We're all part of a team here. And that's what makes San Antonio, I think, very special, is that we work cohesively, regardless of jurisdiction. And, you know, public sector, private sector. I think we have to be realistic. We don't have enough resources to do the kind of public work that's necessary, not in the United States, not in the world, and not here in the state of Texas. A huge need to shore up things like the safety net, the social safety net, which frankly, is the last. It is the safety net for so many different important functions that a family must maintain. We have increasing needs for infrastructure. We have a need to improve the alternatives for our transportation system. There's a whole host of things that we need to do to be a better prepared, more resilient society, and there's not enough resources to do all of it. So let's be realistic. We have to work in partnership with the private sector where it makes sense. And so I embrace that opportunity if it's done the right way. And, you know, I think you're going to see that as we continue to move forward, especially with respect to the state of play in Texas and rollback rates that the legislature has changed four, five, six years ago now that are now just beginning to be felt because of the downturn in the economy. The impacts of those kinds of legislative changes were not being felt during economically prosperous boom times. When there's a downturn, you're going to start to feel that because we can't recover those funds to start putting them back into the public service. So we're going to have to work better in partnership. We're going to going to find ways to collaborate with each other. But certainly private sector is one of those partners that we need at the TABLE well, on the subject of public resources, it seems to me we're facing something of a tsunami right now. Both of our municipal utilities saws and CPS energy need rate increases to balance their budgets. City Manager Eric Walsh has made it clear that the only way to face the deficit that we just had in the fiscal year budget and is going to grow quite a bit in the next couple of years is to raise city taxes for the first time in more than two decades, more than 25 years, I think. And he's also pointed out that our because of the economic downturn, our bonding capacity has probably fallen by as much as 50% which when you're talking about infrastructure investment, that's devastating. I didn't want to force you to talk too much about your, you know, your former job, but that's the reality we face. And I wonder if you are more optimistic than I am or if you see it as in similar terms. It's frustrating because these are self inflicted wounds. Texas is especially vulnerable to the kinds of changes that we're seeing in the volatility within the supply chains within the manufacturing ecosystem. Specifically, we are exposed to trade volatility with Canada and Mexico and the rest of the world. So all of the politics that you've seen interrupt our normal global economic cycles has impacted San Antonio in particular within Texas because of the high vulnerability we have among our population. So you know, it's frustrating because we don't need to be here, but it is going to be an impact in the short term. We have to shore up our reserves. I think it would be a mistake to make short term decisions to, you know, soften the blow that will have long term impacts on our overall fiscal health. I think we are going to see a reduction in our bonding capacity in the near term, but at the same time we've got a lot that we can do to be more efficient and productive with the resources and the dollars that we do have. Judge Wolf and I were working on functional pillars of collaboration within the city and the county, working on those redundant areas of service in 2019 and the bottom fell out of our society when the pandemic hit. But those conversations need to start and I'm looking forward to doing that with the, with the mayor. I want to talk about a couple of your signature initiatives as mayor before we run out of time and how actually our bonding, reduced bonding capacity might affect that. I would say the truly lasting impact of your eight years as mayor was, you know, to use the abbreviation, the equity lens, which was to step back and Say, how are we investing in our city? Is it all going to the new sprawling parts of the north and northwest? Or are we investing adequately in the inner city that's always been here? And of course, the answer to that letter question was no. And we've gone a long ways toward that. And when you have $1.2 billion in your bond, you can do a lot more than when you have 500 million. And secondly, I would say that the long term commitment to addressing the housing crisis, and we had our first ever housing bond in 2022, $150 million. And that has been, I think, very smartly invested in concert with the private sector and nonprofits and others, and in partnership. I worry about the long term future of that. If we have everybody fighting over the scraps of bonding, probably want to talk about ready to work too. And so do you see those things lasting beyond your time in office or because of circumstances? Do you fear that we're going to lose our momentum on any of these issues? So I would frame all of that work as work towards shoring up the pillars of economic mobility in our community. It's the fundamentals of what make our community prosperous, but also inclusive. People need to be able to afford the roof over their head in order to do that. They need a good paying job with a good wage that allows for them for career mobility in order to do that and also raise a family to have those same likely outcomes. A parent needs to be a able to be home with their children. And so how do we make sure that we increase employment opportunities and reduce underemployment in our community? Good jobs, transportation alternatives and education and workforce development to allow people to obtain better paying jobs that have career mobility. The one pillar that we haven't been able to address much in this community that frankly is more the purview of the community county is health care, access to health care. Those are the pillars of a resilient family. And so I would characterize my time as mayor as shoring up those capacities. So do I think that any specific brand or bond program is going to look exactly like it was when I was mayor? Probably not. But I do hope the emphasis on those pillars of economic mobility will remain and we include some additional others that come into alignment, like the fact that, you know, we are a metropolitan area of 2.2 million people. We have every available asset in medical care, some of the best in the country, if not the world, right here on our doorstep. We're one quarter the size of New York City. Why are people still ending up in our ER from basic health care. So there are things that we can do to improve on this whole foundation of economic mobility, which I think is the fundamental component of equity. And we're going to continue to do that. I think those emphases will remain. Do you believe that the historic issues of inequity and poverty that we're facing are the basic foundation of why we're not competitive with Austin and Dallas when it comes to corporate relocations? And in the time you were mayor, we went from the San Antonio Economic Development foundation to Greater SatX. Much more private sector involvement in that initiative. A lot of leadership energy. But when you look at the numbers post pandemic of all these west coast transfers to Texas, we just weren't in the game at the same level as other metros. Do you look back at that and go, there's just not much we can do about that until we get our education attainment levels up and our workforce looking differently? Or do you see some things that we can do and that you would want to do if you become Bexar county judge? Every employer I've ever talked to wants to make sure that they have a good skilled workforce. And in order to have a good skilled workforce, you need to have a place where the workers want to live. And so it's really two components. Do we have a workforce that's educated and skilled for the jobs that we want to create? And do we have a community that they want to live in that they can afford to live in? Those two things have been our focus in terms of. Of economic development. And so, yes, poverty, socioeconomic inequity has been the limiting factor in terms of our ability to continue to see our economic profile rise. But we can't stop by just naming the problem. We've also got to talk about what does it look like to solve it, or do we want to just talk about it? I don't want to just talk about it. I want to do something about it. That's why we focus on. On housing, education and workforce training for people to obtain those jobs, transportation, so they can get to their job. It's not enough to name the problem. And so here's the challenge, because I know there's a lot of criticism. Why are we putting all this money into workforce training or housing? And the needle barely moves. If you look under the hood, the needle is beginning to move. San Antonio's wage gap is shrinking faster than most major metros in the States. United Retire United States. So is our poverty number. But it's not just enough. We can create a program with great training for whatever jobs that we want to create. What is it that keeps people from wanting to do that training program? It's real life. And so that's where the social safety net comes in. Mike Flores will tell you, chancellor of Alamo Colleges will tell you the most important element to the success of Alamo Promise is not the tuition payment. It's the community of support surrounding that student that if that person has a health event or a transportation issue or what have you, life gets in the way. There's a community of support around that student to make sure that that person stays in school and finishes their program. That's what the Ready to Work program is all about. That's what Promise program is all about. That's what the housing program is all about. It's the safety net coupled with the program that allows us to find success within those pillars of economic mobility. And if we continue to show a commitment to that, if we recognize that we didn't get here overnight in terms of the status of poverty and it's not going to happen, it's not going to be fixed overnight, we've got to stay committed to the approach. I think we will have success in the long term and I think we're on the right track. We can do the big things, the flashier things. We're rebuilding our airport. That's another part of my tenure that I'm and an initiative that I'm very proud of. You know, we are going to see one of the best downtowns in America come out of the ground soon. There's a lot of great things we can do as long as we continue to stay focused on the fundamentals. And that's what I'm proud that we were able to do during my time as mayor. I'm glad you mentioned a great downtown, Ron, because we're. We're just about out of time here. But I have a fear that as we are scrapping over scarce resources, which looks like the, the world we're going to live in for the next year, that we're going to have people turn the downtown investment that is underway both on the west side with everything Western urban's doing, the Missions ballpark coming in and on the east side at Hemisphere and Project Marvel and everything we want to do at the convention center, the Alamo Dome, build the new spurs arena, and the people are going to get into an either or argument when in fact we need to continue to address poverty and its historic roots and at the Same time, we need to be a dynamic 21st century city that's attractive to smart people that are educated and want to work and raise their families in a great community. It's both and not either or. And again, in order for us to create the great jobs that we want to have here, we've got to not only educate and skill up the people that we have, we also have to create a city that's worth living in and quality of life is critical. And let's remember that the investments that we're making in downtown are for locals. They're not so much for visitors. For people who live here and want to go, you know, have things to do downtown in addition to going to the events, places to stay, we're going to see students down there, thousands of them with utsa. So we're creating a downtown for locals. And the most important element of all this is that we shouldn't abandon our fundamentals. And so when we talk about what does it cost, where's the money coming from, what are the opportunity costs, let's remember that the dollars that are being used to develop downtown with respect to the venues are being derived from the economic investments that are being made by the spurs and by the visitor industry. So those dollars don't exist unless we're doing these projects. And those dollars are not opportunity costs from any of the other fundamentals that we need to maintain. Well, the book is the Education of a Texas Public Servant. Congratulations on writing it and I hope you have a lot of success with it and I hope you'll come back after Labor Day and we'll look at the Bexar county judge race and how it's going. Sounds great. Appreciate it, Bob. Thank you. Thanks. Work. All right, y', all, thanks for listening to this episode of Big City Small Town. If you if you enjoyed the conversation, please do share it with friends and colleagues who might find it interesting. You can also keep up with our newsletters, Bob Rivards, Midweek and my own San Antonio Something. You can find those linked up@bigcitysmalltown.com Our show, Big City Small Town is made possible by Westin Urban building a city our children want to call home Geekdom, where startups are born and smart ideas become businesses. And now Esther wbc, a San Antonio based financial services company that has been putting clients first for decades, serving individuals, businesses and financial institutions across insurance, investments, payments and more. If you're part of a business or organization that believes in strengthening San Antonio's media ecosystem and you'd like to explore a partnership with us at Big City, Small town. We'd love to hear from you. You can reach out through our website or connect with us on social media. All right, y', all, thanks for being here. We'll see you next time.