Monday Musings #45: Goodbye, 2025!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I still like wishing people well in the season, although some people seem to approach those words as if they are walking on eggshells. Happy Hanukkah, and happy holidays to all the people of other faiths who don’t celebrate these holidays. Like all of you, I look forward to more time with family and friends, and a welcome respite from my weekly bigcitysmalltown podcast and newsletter. We’ll be back in your inbox in the new year. But…

If you have not yet completed your holiday shopping, please consider giving the gift of a link to bigcitysmalltown or Monday Musings. It won’t cost you more than a minute of your time, and it might encourage your friends and colleagues who are community-engaged residents of our city and metro area to vote.

Mayor Jones Scores

Mayor Gina Jones scored a victory at City Council on Dec. 18. Okay, a narrow 6-5 vote that supported the mayor’s hurried proposal to follow Dallas and other Texas cities by moving odd-year municipal elections from May to November is not exactly a return to productive normalcy at city hall, but it’s a start for the embattled, isolated mayor.

It’s also a sensible step forward, since local elections now held in the spring seldom garner much voter participation. Only 8.2% of the city’s registered voters bothered to show up for the 2025 mayor’s race, which featured a ballot groaning from the overload of 27 candidates, only a handful being fit and ready for office. All people have to do in this city to run for mayor is fork over $100. That’s it. You don’t have to campaign. You don’t have to raise money. You don’t have to be serious or even demonstrate a basic understanding of municipal government.

I’d like to see Mayor Jones and this City Council raise the entry requirements so we don’t have another election like the last one. 

Did Mayor Jones make any new friends or allies on the council with this vote? Probably not. It didn’t help that her public remarks seeking to build support for a yes vote included her cutting remarks, claiming that council members concerned about the short time frame to assess the issue with constituents had no problem signing on to the non-binding term sheet that City Manager Erik Walsh and his team negotiated with the Spurs.

“This is super important for our community, so I’m going to be super frank,” Jones said at a public hearing held at the Central Library in the week before the vote. “Some of these folks that have said there’s not enough time for community engagement on this topic, voted on a term sheet to sign our community up for $489 million [for a new Spurs arena] and were not concerned about community engagement.”

Who is advising Mayor Jones? Snapping at her colleagues is a poor strategy for winning votes, and for many of us, it simply served as a reminder that Jones pays little heed to what has transpired at city hall before she lived and worked in her hometown. Just because she was new to the lengthy discussions and negotiations that led to a successful public vote favoring the new Spurs arena and entertainment zone doesn’t mean her previously elected council members were.

I am rooting for Jones to build on her first significant win at council.  Let’s hope in the months ahead she remembers she lost in her bid to stall the negotiations and get people to vote no on the two county propositions that passed. Any efforts to untrack the election result will only backfire.

Megaregion: Writing a book with Henry Cisneros

Our final episode of the year was released on Friday and featured Executive Producer Cory Ames in the host seat, while I joined former San Antonio Mayor and Secretary of Housing & Urban Development Henry Cisneros in the guest seats. We were there, along with our third author, longtime San Antonio Express-News business journalist David Hendricks, who now works with Henry, to talk about our new book, The Austin-San Antonio Megaregion: Opportunity & Challenge in the Lone Star State. 

The book is available locally at The Twig Bookshop at the Pearl and Nowhere Books in Alamo Heights, as well as Amazon and other online booksellers.

As Henry often notes, the U.S. Census Bureau prediction for our fast-growing region is that the equivalent of the population of Chicago – three million people – will be added to the Austin-San Antonio megaregion by 2050. We are absolutely not ready for that growth, although Texas is blessed with greater financial resources and reserves than any other state. We can meet the challenges and bring greater equity and prosperity to all of our neighbors if we plan smartly. Or we can stand back and watch traffic and air quality worsen, water and energy issues grow, housing shortages multiply, and education outcomes continue to fall short of expectations.

State, regional and local leaders need to come together in the two major cities and all the corridor cities to form a regional public-private entity that can lead Central Texas into a better future. Our book is a call to action. We hope it doesn’t just sit on the shelf of policymakers. In that regard, we will continue to find opportunities to engage the public and leadership on the issues in the year ahead.

Hope you’ll take a listen to our conversation and consider reading the book.

Thank you, Cory Ames and Mariana Pasillas

Speaking of Cory, we are in year three now of the bigcitysmalltown podcast and finishing the first year of this Monday Musings newsletter. This year has seen remarkable growth for our small team. Thanks to Cory, a gifted writer and videographer, we launched our YouTube channel this year, added video to our weekly podcasts, and started the newsletter. Mariana is a recent Honors College graduate and a communications major at UT-San Antonio.  She started with us as a paid intern and is now working regularly here. Mariana has a bright future ahead of her, whatever direction she ultimately decides to take in life and work. I hope San Antonio can keep her.

Look for Cory to host more of our weekly episodes in 2026. He and his wife, Annie Bright, a visiting professor on the faculty of St. Mary’s School of Law, moved to San Antonio a few years ago and are raising their two young boys here. Our plan is for Cory to eventually take over while I focus more on book projects, and staying active and healthy as the years add up. 

It has been a productive year here and at the Maeckle-Rivard household. Monika followed her 2024 release of the Monarch Butterfly Migration: Its Rise & Fall, with the 2025 publication of Plants With Purpose: Twenty-Five Ecosystem Multitaskers.

I am doing my best to keep up with her, but we will take a break for the rest of this month and see you in January.

Enjoy the holidays. We wish all of you and your loved ones the very best in this season of peace.