Monday Musings #23: Mayor-elect Gina Ortiz Jones

Congratulations, Mayor-elect Gina Ortiz Jones. This week’s newsletter begins with those welcoming words, and the wry acknowledgement that I stand 0-2 in the endorsement category.

I focused my first-round support on tech company founder Beto Altamirano, and then in the runoff, on San Antonio attorney Rolando Pablos, believing they represented the city’s best chance to grow the economy and jobs base along with the fast-growing population. Shared prosperity comes, I believe, not by how elected officials apportion existing resources, although that’s important, but how they grow those resources.

Voters disagreed with my choices, which I respect.

While Ortiz Jones was not my choice to lead the city of San Antonio for the next four years, now that she is days away from taking the oath of office, it’s only fair to root for her success and hope she can govern on behalf of the entire city, and not only those who voted for her.

“We’re going to move forward with everyone in mind, and now the hard work begins,” Jones said Saturday night after her victory became official. She defeated Pablos with 54.3% of the vote to his 45.7%—a decisive margin, despite the low turnout: just 142,686 of the city’s 841,653 registered voters (17%).

It’s hard for me to reconcile how 698,967 people, or 83% of the city’s registered voters, decided this local election didn’t matter enough to warrant their participation. The race drew national interest, witness Sunday’s New York Times coverage, as well as unprecedented funding from Republican and Democratic-aligned interest groups. 

Pablos, a San Antonio attorney and former Republican appointee to statewide office, ran an aggressive runoff campaign, fueled by more than $1 million in outside contributions and a strategy of attacking Jones on several fronts. Consultants who run political campaigns swear by the power of negative barrages of attack ads, mailers, and social media posts, but in this instance, that proved ineffective in reversing Ortiz Jones’ frontrunner status after she finished first among 27 candidates in the first round of voting.

Ortiz Jones, meanwhile, regularly dismissed Pablos as “Abbott’s puppet.” It was not a friendly contest in a city accustomed to nominally nonpartisan elections. Pablos was surely hurt by the widely held view among voters that Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican state leaders have targeted San Antonio on a number of issues over the last decade.

In what will go down as the city’s most partisan political contest in contemporary history, and one that, perhaps, portends future local elections, San Antonio once again voted blue, favoring Ortiz Jones, a two-time Democratic congressional candidate and former Under Secretary of the Air Force in the Biden administration. Pablos was seen for better or worse as an ally of Abbott, whose favorability ratings in San Antonio are among the lowest in the state.

With a more familiar background in San Antonio’s professional and public service circles, Pablos was seen as more rooted in the city, even though he was born in Mexico and raised in El Paso. In contrast, Ortiz Jones was born and raised here, yet has spent much of her adult life serving in the Air Force and living in Washington, DC.

I believe Pablos has a future role in public service, whether in elected office or otherwise. Like Ortiz Jones, he is smart, highly educated, broadly experienced, and he has the personality and people skills to serve effectively. Like many, however, I was put off by his “criminal alien” debate rhetoric, a turnoff in a majority Hispanic city where so many families, like Pablos, trace their roots to south of the border.

While Ortiz Jones has not been an equally familiar presence in San Antonio, she certainly proved herself a quick study. She displayed a confident familiarity with the opportunities and challenges gleaned in her relatively recent return to the city and on the campaign trail. After two failed attempts to win a congressional seat, she now will have the chance to demonstrate her leadership skills in elected office.

Ortiz Jones will preside over the most progressive city council in memory, despite conservatives adding a single seat to double their presence on the 10-member body. In many ways, she represents a continuation of the direction four-term Mayor Ron Nirenberg took city council with an “equity lens” approach to resource allocation, periodic efforts to symbolically weigh in on divisive national and international issues, and struggles to respond to continuing efforts by Republican state leaders and legislators to curb home rule power in the Democratic major cities.

Jones and other new council members have promised to address the city’s generational poverty, work to reduce rising housing costs, and expand access to early childhood education.

The mayor-elect and the council she leads will soon find that delivering on campaign aspirations will not be easy. For at least three of the first four years that Ortiz Jones and council members will serve in newly expanded terms of office, they will face rising budget deficits.

City Manager Erik Walsh and his team will be focused first and foremost on finding ways to balance the fiscal 2026 budget, which will be presented to city council in August after the traditional summer recess and voted on in September. Without new sources of revenue, that means cutting programs or staff. City staff and council also will face the challenge of negotiating new contracts with the city’s 4,000-plus police and firefighters, who traditionally have sought and won salary and benefits packages exceeding those awarded to the city’s 9,000 civilian workers.

Another challenge will be supporting Walsh and staff as they work out the financial terms of Project Marvel, an ambitious, multi-billion dollar public-private plan to expand the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center with an additional high-rise hotel, overhaul the Alamodome with a connecting pedestrian land bridge over Interstate-37, and at the heart of Marvel, bringing the Spurs back to Hemisfair in a new arena surrounded by a new entertainment district.

District 2 Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez was one of several council members at Ortiz Jones’ election watch party, where he told celebrants, “We deserve candidates who recognize that in order to succeed we have to invest in human beings, not in skyscrapers or stadiums.”

I am unaware of any “skyscraper” investments on the part of the city. The Frost Tower is the only new office tower constructed in the last three decades in San Antonio, completed with private funding by Weston Urban and its partners. McKee-Rodriguez’s comment, nonetheless, suggests he and others on the council might see major economic development initiatives and community investment as mutually exclusive. They are not.

One measure of the Ortiz Jones administration and the new council will be whether they stray from local issues to tackle socially and politically divisive topics such as public funding for out-of-state abortion travel, pushing resolutions opposing U.S. military aid to Israel, or expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Hamas-controlled Gaza. 

The Trump administration’s increasingly harsh use of federal law enforcement agencies and now the National Guard to target immigrant communities for mass detentions and deportations is also likely to become an increasingly confrontational standoff here and in most other major U.S. cities.

The office that Ortiz Jones has won is surely the hardest job paying $87,500 a year in the city.

My aim here is not to rain on the Ortiz Jones parade. She fought and won an intensely contested battle for the mayor’s office and proved to be the fighter her resume claims. Now, the battle shifts to governance. It’s in everyone’s interests that she succeeds.

Good luck, Mayor-elect Gina Ortiz Jones.