Monday Musings #54: City Council Faces Tough Choices in the Year Ahead
Mayor Gina Jones and Council members Edward Mungia (D4), Ric Galvan (D6), Ivalis Meza Gonzalez (D8) and Misty Spears (D9), all elected in 2025, did not run campaigns promising multiyear spending cuts to balance the General Fund or rate increases for CPS Energy and SAWS, much less what appears to be an inevitable conversation about raising taxes in the city for the first time in more than 20 years.
That, unfortunately, is what lies ahead for the newly elected officeholders as well as the veterans on city council as 2026 progresses. City staff’s contract negotiations with the police union, already underway, promise yet another budget challenge.
Some of this is not news. City Manager Erik Walsh told the new mayor and council shortly after they were sworn in last year that the city was facing a two-year budget shortfall of $179 million. The shortfall for the fiscal 2026 budget, which went into effect on Oct. 1, was $31 million. That’s been met. The anticipated shortfall for the fiscal 2027 budget is $148 million. City Council will face that later this summer.
The city’s elected leaders face hard choices over allocation of scarce resources, even if that isn’t why most of them ran for office. It’s the reality San Antonio faces in an uncertain economy. Real estate values have stalled or even declined, and sales tax revenues have been less than anticipated since the last quarter of 2025. Texas limits cities to 3.5% in tax revenue growth annually, regardless of a city’s growth and needs. The reduction in the Trump administration's domestic spending is placing additional pressure on the city to help fund the resulting gaps
In short, there isn’t enough money to continue the status quo. Ratepayers will be asked to pay more for energy and water, and the city’s continuing fast growth, the infrastructure needs that come with the growth, and the city’s continuing sprawl all come at a cost.
The city’s biggest expenses––police, fire, EMS––as well as pensions and the cost of everything rising with inflation, all mean revenues do not and will not equal expenses without spending cuts.
For a mayor and those city council members who want to focus spending on greater anti-poverty initiatives, this will not be an easy year. Their job is about to get real hard.
Walsh and his senior team are gearing up for challenging fiscal times in the months ahead. He told me in a recent interview that the city’s capacity to sell bonds for the next five-year cycle will also be constrained. San Antonio’s 2022 bond, approved by voters, was a record $1.2 billion. That sum is funding 183 projects, including major investments in streets ($471.6 million), parks ($272 million), and for the first time, affordable housing ($150 million).
If San Antonio were to estimate its bonding capacity for the five-year cycle beginning in 2027, Walsh told me, the city’s borrowing capacity would be more like $650 million, just over half of what it was in 2022. Infrastructure needs identified by city staff in 2022 added up to $6.6 billion, and requested spending totaled $2.8 billion. The estimate was considered conservative and has only grown in the five years since.
I don’t know that Mayor Jones and City Council face a perfect storm, but the months ahead will test elected officials. Taxpayers deserve candor about what lies ahead and what choices we face in meeting the moment. You can expect multiple episodes of our bigcitysmalltown podcast devoted to the topic as the year progresses.
Host, bigcitysmalltown
Robert “Bob” Rivard is a veteran American journalist whose 46-year career has taken him across Texas, Latin America, and beyond. He co-founded the Rivard Report (later named the San Antonio Report) with his wife, Monika Maeckle, in 2012, building it into the city’s leading nonprofit news organization before retiring in 2022.
Bob has worked for five Texas newspapers, beginning his career on the border at the Brownsville Herald, then moving to the Corpus Christi Caller, the Dallas Times-Herald, and later serving as a foreign correspondent and chief of correspondents for Newsweek. He returned to Texas as senior editor of the San Antonio Light before becoming executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News (1997–2011).
His journalism has earned widespread recognition, including being named Editor & Publisher’s “Editor of the Year” in 2000 and receiving the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia University for his reporting on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border.
He is the author of Trail of Feathers, a nonfiction book chronicling the disappearance and murder of journalist Philip True in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. The book, published by Public Affairs in 2005, was widely reviewed, excerpted in Esquire, and selected by People magazine as one of five recommended nonfiction works that year.
Bob now hosts bigcitysmalltown, a podcast featuring the people shaping San Antonio’s future. He and Monika live in Southtown, where she runs the Texas Butterfly Ranch blog and previously founded the annual San Antonio Monarch Butterfly and Pol…Read More
