Monday Musings #37: Voters, Not Polls, Will Bring Spurs Back Downtown

If you’ve lived in San Antonio as long as my family, you probably recall the UTSA poll showing tepid support among voters for using the county’s “tourist taxes” to help fund a new arena for the San Antonio Spurs.

I’m not talking about the latest UT-San Antonio poll, which shows such a result. I’m talking about a UTSA poll conducted 26 years ago that I’ve never forgotten.

It was 1999. And I remember the poll well, the same way you remember a nightmare. I was the executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News who led the newspaper’s partnership with UTSA to produce and publish the poll in a city that otherwise did not have public policy polling. A former political science professor of mine was in charge of the poll.

We published the results across the top of page one, showing that only 40% of voters said they supported the arena. That decision still pains me. Voters overwhelmingly voted in favor of the new county arena, passing the measure 61-39%. The UTSA poll missed the mark by about 20 points. By 2003, the Spurs had vacated the Alamodome and moved into the county’s new SBC Arena on the Eastside.

I am feeling deja vu. The latest UT-San Antonio poll shows a slight majority of voters approve Proposition A, which would trigger a major county investment in the Frost Bank Center (same arena, contemporary name) and the adjacent Freeman Coliseum and surrounding grounds. Proposition B, in which voters are asked if they support county visitor taxes being used to help fund a new Hemisfair arena, showed 40% in favor, 46% against, and 14% of voters undecided or unwilling to tell pollsters how they intend to vote.

The current poll remains the only organized public policy survey in San Antonio, so it’s important that it exists. I signed on two years ago as a member of the advisory board and a former partner of the now-defunct Bexar Poll. Yet I hope the poll proves to be an inaccurate measure of how county residents will vote. 

I will join other early voters this week and enthusiastically cast my vote for a new Spurs arena in Hemisfair, bringing back the five-time world champions to Hemisfair, where the team played from 1973 to 1993. This time the city of San Antonio will own the $1.3 billion arena, which will help erase 26 years of regret for letting the team leave Hemisfair and become a tenant of the county. 

Proposition B on the Nov. ballot will authorize county officials to dedicate $311 million in visitor taxes to the new arena’s cost, while the city will contribute $489 million and the Spurs ownership group will contribute $500 million. The team will also pay for any construction cost overruns.

Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, appearing on the bigcitysmalltown podcast last week, reminded county voters they are not paying for the new arena. No money is coming out of their pockets. The county’s contribution, Judge Sakai noted, will come from “tourist taxes,” specifically the hotel occupancy tax and the car rental tax.

There is a lot of confusion out there about who is paying. Voters should understand that virtually every U.S. city uses visitor taxes tacked on to hotel and car rental invoices to fund its own visitor economy. That’s why the room rate you book and the final bill appear to be two quite different numbers. San Antonio does the same, and we have many urban amenities today paid for by our robust visitor economy. 

City taxpayers are not on the hook, either. The city will issue revenue bonds to pay for its share, and service that debt via a 30-year Spurs lease generating $75 million, private development ground leases, and the Hemisfair Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone and Project Finance Zone authorized by the Texas Legislature.

No new property taxes or sales tax increases for city residents. That’s an important point to drive home after months of Proposition B opposition campaigning by COPS-Metro in which the organization's leaders have repeatedly misled inner city residents into believing that city and county tax revenues invested in Hemisfair is money being taken away from neighborhood investments and anti-poverty initiatives. In one recent post I saw on social media, a COPS organizer claimed the project would siphon off $1 billion from the city’s general fund over the next 30 years.

I respect everyone’s right to hold a position for or against Prop B, but if you have to con voters to win support, you deserve to be called out.

What is true is that significant revenues captured by the city to help finance the arena would otherwise flow to the state, not the general fund or inner city neighborhoods.

Mayor Gina Jones, who tried and failed to stop the city from negotiating a non-binding term sheet with the Spurs to build the new arena and surrounding entertainment zone, has become an opponent of Prop B, hoping to convince voters to do what her colleagues on City Council refused to do.

“I am not — and have not been — against a new Spurs arena,” Jones stated in a Saturday op-ed published in the San Antonio Express-News, yet her opinion piece is headlined, “We can negotiate a better deal for a new Spurs arena.”

Can we? I’ve explained why I think the current deal is a fair deal for city and county taxpayers, and for the Spurs, and I’ve shared my misgivings about what a No vote will signal to other cities eager to induce the Spurs to consider a move. With team ownership now diversified to include billionaire owners who do not live here, that is all but guaranteed to happen. Does San Antonio want to risk a protracted standoff with the Spurs that convinces owners to open the bidding?

Given how much the Spurs have united the city over the decades, and how much they have elevated the city’s international stature, I think it’s tragic that this election has divided the community.

Inner city neighborhoods, which are predominantly home to minority residents, have been historically cheated in San Antonio, and somehow this debate has been twisted into an opportunity to resurface old grudges. A century of economic, racial and ethnic discrimination has been widely acknowledged by new generations of city and county leaders. For many years now, significant infrastructure investments have been made on the city’s Eastside, Westside and Southside. It will take decades more—perhaps longer—n catch-up public investment to give inner city residents safer city streets with sidewalks, lighting and tree canopy. Flood mitigation projects, creek improvements and more remain on the drawing board. 

In that time, tens of thousands of good jobs have been created in the inner city, 19,000 alone at Port San Antonio, thousands more at Toyota and its supply network, at Texas A&M-San Antonio University, and at Brooks. Velocity TX anchors near-Eastside business development. British heavy machinery manufacturer JCB hosted a media event last week at its new Southside plant, now under construction, with 500 good jobs coming online there in 2026 and many more to follow.

We are a different city today.

Yet it isn’t easy to explain to voters that economic development initiatives supported by state legislators cannot be redirected to neighborhood projects or anti-poverty programs. Construction of a new arena and entertainment zone, followed by another expansion of the Henry B. González Convention Center and a rebuild of the Alamodome, will create a lot of good jobs over the next decade, and the businesses and new residential enclaves that take root in and around a revitalized Hemisfair will provide more jobs and tax dollars.

Improved education outcomes and good job creation are the most effective anti-poverty measures I’ve seen in my lifetime. The best measure to fight poverty in San Antonio would be for state elected officials to improve public schools by paying educators fairly and increasing per capita student spending. Let's not let our unhappiness with low state funding for public education influence our vote on the biggest economic development project in the city's recent history.

Voting Yes to approve Propositions A & B will accomplish a lot for everyone in the city. Early voting starts Monday and runs through Oct. 31. Election Day is Nov. 4. Let’s prove a poll wrong.