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News
HJohn Esquivel, the beloved street performer known to the city as Hispanic Elvis, has died. Esquivel, whose Elvis act was a fi xture at Market Square for more than 20 years, was 76 years old when he was hospitalized earlier this year with COVID-19 and an esophagus infection.
HThe San Antonio Spurs raised $200,000 by selling NFTs in honor of head coach Gregg Popovich last month breaking the NBA’s all-time record for regular season victories. Minted in collaboration with a Toronto-based cryptocurrency platform, the “1336 Coach Pop Collection” features images of fi ve off ensive plays drawn by Popovich. The average price of the NFTs is $6,500. Celebrating Pop? Priceless.
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HThe San Antonio Police Department shut down multiple residential streets around the St. Mary’s Strip last Thursday through last Sunday, testing the impact of restricting access to the popular nightlife district in response to noise and traffi c complaints. Some residents raised concerns about an increased police presence in the neighborhood, while business owners said they are commi ed to being “open-minded” about the reduced-access testrun.
A Houston-area student won a $90,000 se lement over allegations her teacher harassed her for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. The student objected to the inclusion of “under God” in the pledge and also believes the U.S. doesn’t off er “liberty and justice for all.” In response, the teacher said that he would give the student a zero on an assignment, and the student’s suit alleged he went on a racist diatribe in class. — Abe Asher
Patrick Von Dohlen and the Power of Positive Thinking
Assclown Alert is a column of opinion, analysis and snark.
Last Friday, the Texas State Supreme Court found that conservative activists failed to deliver the required evidence in their lawsuit claiming the City of San Antonio violated the state’s controversial “Save Chick-fi l-A” law.
The all-Republican panel sent the suit back to a trial court, maintaining that Bible-thumping activist Patrick Von Dohlen and the San Antonio Family Association failed to show harmful action taken by the city after the law’s passage.
The suit alleges the city offi cials broke the state law by failing to approve Chick-fi l-A with an airport food concession. However, city council’s vote not to cut the Atlanta-based chain in on the contract happened six months prior to the measure’s passage and can’t be applied retroactively, the state’s high court ruled.
Sounds like defeat for the San Antonio Family Association, right? After all, the justices agreed with the city’s argument, and in media statements, City A orney Andy Segovia predicted a speedy resolution by the lower court.
But that didn’t stop the San Antonio Family Association from giving the ruling the rosiest of spins, announcing on its website that “religious liberty WINS.”
“Now we will re-plead with facts and merits of the case showing adverse action after the effective date of the enactment, and we will win in the name of business owner conscience rights and religious liberty for all,” the group said its word salad of statement.
Interesting take, to say the least.
Von Dohlen, who sits on the association’s board, is no stranger to statements that embrace of what former Trump White House shill Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts.”
Last year, during his third failed a empt to represent District 9 on city council, the activist falsely labeled incumbent John Courage a “Marxist.” He also incorrectly accused Courage of wanting to defund the police and supporting “federally funded abortion on demand.”
It’s unclear whether Von Dohlen had a hand in penning the Family Association’s statement, but it certainly bears his assclownish grasp of political reality. — Sanford Nowlin
Facebook / Vote Patrick
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YOU SAID IT!
— Jessica Cisneros
Democratic congressional candidate on her primary opponent’s vote against the House’s landmark marijuana legalization bill.
Less than a month after voting with just 16 other members of the House against banning Russian oil imports, U.S. Rep. Chip Roy announced last week that he’s a leader in “advocating for Ukrainian orphans.” As justifi cation, he explained that he’d signed a le er with other lawmakers asking the White House to make it easier for U.S. families to adopt children from the war-torn country.
Federal health offi cials have restored $7 million per day in funding to Texas hospitals after a six-month pause over concerns about how the state pays for services that hospitals provide to Medicaid patients. The feds paused the funding after saying some hospitals were potentially in violation of the state’s agreement with the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. A San Antonio jury ruled on March 24 that a gay couple’s 25-year relationship constituted a common law marriage — allowing Christopher Hoff man the ability to legally divorce his partner and be eligible for alimony and other benefi ts. Though gay marriage wasn’t yet legal when Hoff man and his husband began their relationship in 1996, the jury found that they were married under Texas Family Code. Legal observers said it’s the fi rst fi nding of its kind in Texas. — Abe Asher
Find more news coverage every day at sacurrent.com
CURRENT EVENTS
The silence of Mayor Ron Nirenberg on the symphony strike is deafening
BY SANFORD NOWLIN
At the end of March, as the San Antonio Symphony strike stretched into its sixth month, the musicians held a rally in front of the Tobin Center to signify the solemn anniversary. Speakers ranging from labor leaders to congressional candidates spoke up for the players’ demands that their salaries and benefi ts not be cut to the core.
Among those voicing support was former Mayor Phil Hardberger. Although unable to a end in person, a representative read Hardberger’s le er of support, which praised the musicians and urged a swift resolution to the strike.
“The musicians’ cause is just, the demands reasonable,” he wrote. “They want a living wage and need health insurance. The musicians give us much for li le. Their music soothes the spirit and smooths out the wrinkles of the day.”
Hardberger also noted that he frequently used the symphony as a selling point when trying to recruit businesses to the metro. In his words, the orchestra “sets us apart from our competitors” and makes San Antonio a “charmer of a city.”
There was a notable absence at the rally.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg — considered by political observers to be Hardberger’s protégé — didn’t a end. Nor has Nirenberg said much of anything about the strike. Publicly, anyway.
When the Current requested a comment on the walkout’s six-month anniversary, a spokesman responded that Nirenberg is unwilling to comment while a federal mediator is working on a resolution.
However, Nirenberg does have a history of intervening when it comes to the city’s perpetually troubled symphony. During the organization’s 2017 fi nancial crisis, he and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff created a nine-member city-county task force to help put it on a path to fi nancial stability.
It also seems that Nirenberg should show at least a li le concern that the symphony management’s proposal to cut the size of the orchestra and slash pay and benefi ts — the trigger for the strike — directly contradicts the recommendations of the DeVos Institute, a consulting group hired by the task force Nirenberg helped create.
DeVos is helmed by Michael Kaiser, renowned for helping turn around other troubled musical organizations. During his time working with the San Antonio Symphony, Kaiser said the orchestra’s managing body shouldn’t scale it back from 72 members or slash its 30-week performance schedule.
“A lot of people think it starts with cu ing your budgets or saving money — it doesn’t,” Kaiser told Texas Public Radio at the time. “You don’t save your way to health and the arts; you excite people; you energize people.”
Kaiser suggested changes such as having the symphony back popular touring artists and boost its social media savvy. Largely, though, he put the emphasis on management increasing its fundraising prowess. The money is here, he noted.
“This community is very generous with contributions,” Kaiser said. “If you do a good job of maintaining the level of the excitement after the work and the engagement with the individual.”
Without naming Nirenberg, Musicians of the San Antonio Symphony chair Mary Ellen Goree expressed frustration that high-level city offi cials haven’t spoken up during the current crisis. Especially since management appears to have put Kaiser’s recommendation through the shredder.
“They dismissed all of his advice,” Goree said in an interview the day after the Tobin rally. “It’s extremely frustrating that someone of Michael Kaiser’s status came and told them not to cut the size of the symphony and they just dismissed him.”
So, given what’s at stake for one of the city’s artistic crown jewels and the management’s apparent disregard for 2017’s suggested course of action, is the mayor reluctant to weigh in?
Could Nirenberg be afraid that signaling support for the musicians and their demands would suggest he’s not willing to do the bidding of the city’s anti-labor business community?
Could he be concerned what signal he might send to San Antonio banker J. Bruce Bugg, the deep-pocketed Republican donor who oversees the Tobin Endowment?
Could he simply not believe that a full-size symphony comprised of adequately compensated professional musicians is important to San Antonio?
Until the Nirenberg is willing to speak up and follow the example of strong leadership set by his mentor, Phil Hardberger, it’s anyone’s guess
Meanwhile, the musicians — and San Antonians who appreciate their artistry — are waiting.
Sanford Nowlin
MMusicians picket in front of the home of Kathleen Weir Vale, board chair for the Symphony Society.
CITYSCRAPES
Hotel Giveaway
San Antonio should have recognized its Grand Hyatt project was a debacle all along
BY HEYWOOD SANDERS
Editors Note: CityScrapes is a column of opinion and analysis.
The “Mother of All Hotel Giveaways.” That’s what the late Express-News columnist
Carlos Guerra dubbed the plan for a 1,000-room convention center hotel in March 1996. The city and county had already doled out tax abatements to two downtown hotels, the Westin Riverwalk and the Adam’s Mark, later the Wyndham. But city staff decided that we needed a really big hotel next to the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center to lure the most enviable conventions to town.
When Guerra used the “mother” characterization, the hotel was just a gleam in the eyes of city staff and local business interests. It wasn’t clear who might pay for or develop the property — just that a whopping big public subsidy would be required. But there would be gold at the end of the rainbow, they promised. Without the new hotel, we wouldn’t see the full benefi t of the convention center expansion then planned. They sold the project as crucial to our place in the convention business — a central element in the continuing development of downtown.
Now, 26 years later, with the city paying Hya to take that “mother” hotel, the Grand Hya , off our hands, it’s imperative that we ask how the City of San Antonio got into the hotel business, how that plan worked out and what went wrong. For that, we need to start in March 1997, when city council approved ITT Sheraton as the developer of the new convention center hotel, doling out a $7 million, 10-year property tax abatement.
The project came with a host of promises neatly set out by then-Mayor Bill Thornton. He pledged the project would “increase annual visitor spending in San Antonio by $100 million, create a payroll of $15 million for 850 jobs and pump an average of $777,000 in sales tax rebates into city coff ers. The city’s share of hotel occupancy taxes from the hotel when it is in full swing will be about $1.3 million,” according to the Express-News.
There were lots of comments from councilmembers about how much more other cities had to dole out in subsidies, about the quality of the promised jobs. They were “fi ne jobs,” then-councilmember Lynda Billa Burke said. “These people need to be proud of what they do.”
But during that discussion, no one at the city bothered to explain why a major corporation like Sheraton needed a subsidy to build a hotel in downtown San Antonio.
That should have been the fi rst hint the project was uncertain and that it carried real risk, despite repeated promises a major expansion of the convention center would draw more visitors to San Antonio.
It took a few years for the second shoe to drop, or perhaps we should say “the second hint.” In 2000, Sheraton agreed to a revised deal, promising a 1,200-room hotel in exchange for a reduced tax abatement deal of just $3.1 million, together with a commitment to a minimum of $7 an hour to hotel employees. Finally, in February 2002, with the convention center expansion complete and Sheraton still unable to come up with fi nancing, the city pulled the plug on the deal. How much clearer could that have been? A major hotel brand couldn’t make the numbers work.
So, did the city staff call a halt, or even a timeout, and ask if the longsought hotel was really viable? Simply put, no.
A year after the collapse of the Sheraton, after all those warning signs, staff — notably assistant city manager Chris Brady — pressed the case for a headquarters hotel, indeed one even larger than the 1,200 rooms Sheraton had proposed. To get an outside perspective on the need for such a massive lodging property, Brady proposed creating an “advisory board of experts.”
That body largely consisted of local hoteliers and hospitality interests, and rather predictably, it endorsed the need for a big, new hotel. Former councilmember Art Hall seemed to sum up their thinking when he said: “For me, the bo om line is we have to compete.”
So, to get that long sought-after hotel, city staff in 2004 promoted a scheme to use “mostly private” fi nancing aided by $130 million in federal empowerment zone bonds. And when no such private fi nancing materialized, the city fi nanced the project by itself with a $208 million empowerment zone bond backed by citywide hotel taxes.
Hint after hint, warning after warning. All as what began as the “Mother of All Hotel Giveaways” morphed into an even more substantial public commitment. Over a decade of changing mayors, new councilmembers and diff erent city staff ers, the dream of a grand convention center hotel remained unabated, carried along by promises of a convention boom.
Yet once the new Grand Hya opened in 2008, our elected offi cials and city staff appeared to remain willfully ignorant — not questioning the Hya ’s performance, not asking if the convention boom had ever materialized. Indeed, even before the Hya was fully operating, the city commissioned yet another consultant study of a convention center expansion. And just as predictably, even as the Grand Hya consistently underperformed its forecasts, the city moved ahead on that expansion.
There was no serious inquiry. There was no evaluation. There was no accountability.
Somehow, San Antonio for all its charms and appeal, seems to regularly manage grand public policy failures: Fiesta Plaza, Rivercenter, St. Paul Square, SeaWorld, Fiesta Texas, the Alamodome, Sunset Station, Downtown TriParty, PGA Village, the Regional Mobility Authority. When do we learn from those mistakes?
But don’t worry, an Elon Musk-built tunnel from the airport to downtown will surely fi x everything.
Courtesy Photo Grand Hyatt
MThe City of San Antonio’s eagerness to back the Grand Hyatt has been problematic from the beginning.
Heywood Sanders is a professor of public policy at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Right Turn
South Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar breaks with party, votes against marijuana reform, defends Title 42
BY SANFORD NOWLIN
Progressive Jessica Cisneros, an immigration a orney looking to unseat nine-term U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar from his Texas district stretching from San Antonio to Laredo, has accused her rival of being a Democrat in name only.
Last week, she gained two more pieces of ammunition as she looks to bolster that claim ahead of a bi er May 24 runoff for the 28th District’s Democratic nomination.
Last Friday, Cuellar split with his party to vote against a landmark marijuana legalization bill that passed in the House largely along party lines. Only one other Dem — U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire — gave it a thumbs down.
“I’ve seen the consequences marijuana charges have in my community and clients I’ve worked with — families torn, deportations, loss of jobs and housing. The list goes on,” Cisneros tweeted after the vote. “Meanwhile, Rep. Cuellar sees criminalization as a way to line the pockets of his private prison donors.”
The vote came days after Cuellar bucked his party to sign a le er sent by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and other Lone Star State Republicans urging the Biden Administration to keep in place a Trump-era rule that lets immigration offi cials quickly expel border crossers without allowing them to apply for asylum.
The Trump White House used the pandemic to justify the controversial measure, called Title 42, which has been decried by civil rights groups and many Democrats as cruel and unnecessary.
“As an immigration a orney & border resident, I saw the violence Title 42 caused,” Cisneros tweeted about the le er. “Cuellar advocating for its implementation is him advocating for the cruel and inhuman treatment of people whose stories and families resemble our own. This is an issue of basic human decency.”
Offi cials with Cuellar’s offi ce were unavailable for comment at press time.
Cisneros, who ran a near-miss campaign to unseat the congressman in 2018, got a boost this time around from news that the FBI had raided her rival’s Laredo home in connection with a probe related to the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.
Cuellar has denied wrongdoing and said his offi ce is cooperating with authorities.
Sanford Nowlin
Online broker RedFin names San Antonio the ninth most popular metro area for relocations
BY MICHAEL KARLIS
In the latest sign the local real estate market isn’t slowing down, a new report from online broker RedFin ranked the San Antonio area as the ninth most popular metro for those looking to relocate.
RedFin compiled its report by sampling 2 million users which it deemed serious about relocating. To get that sample, the company focused only on those who viewed at least 10 homes in a specifi c metro area during the study period. What’s more, that same metro area also had to make up 80% of their searches.
Southern metros topped the company’s top 10 relocation markets, with Miami, Phoenix and Tampa claiming the top three spots, respectively. Dallas, which came in at No. 8, was the only other Texas city to make the list.
“Sunny, relatively aff ordable metro areas perennially top the list of places homebuyers are looking to move,” according to the report. “The trend has grown even stronger over the last year as remote work has become permanent for many Americans.”
While Austin has frequently popped up in similar lists, RedFin found that Austinites are actually looking to move to San Antonio, making up the majority of in-state users considering a move to the Alamo City.
Los Angeles is the starting point for the largest number of people looking to move to San Antonio from out of state, according to the list.
San Antonio is in the throes of a rapid expansion, recently being named one of the fastest-growing metros in the nation. However, with that come growing pains. Median home prices reached $314,000 in February, a 19.6% increase from 2021.
13th Annual
Open Weeken :
Now – Apr 24
10 AM To Dusk Rain Or Shine | No Pets -Camping AvailableLocation
1883 Old Hwy 20 Mcdade, Tx 78650 35 Miles East Of Austin -Or2 Hrs Northeast Of San Antonio
Ent tainment
Join Robin Hood & Lady Marian as they host full contact jousting, falconry, swordplay, archery, juggling, comedy, theater & more. Medieval England comes to life in Central Texas. Art a + M chan We host a grand selection of hand-cra ed goods in Central Texas. We o er demonstrations like glass blowing, blacksmithing, pottery spinning, leather armor making, weaving, jewelry & art creation, & others.
Song + Dance
You'll nd minstrels, bards, storytellers, magicians, jugglers, & all types of performers strolling our lanes & playing on our stages. If you're lucky, you may spot a faery or two!
Food + Drink
From trenchers weighty with tasty fare to tankards over owing with foamy mead, there's plenty to eat and drink at Sherwood Forest Faire. You'll discover medieval treats & delicacies.
