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Three San Antonio councilmembers have signed a three-signature memo to force a public council meeting to discuss changes Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones made to a key policymaking process they said goes beyond what a local ordinance allows.
District 5 Councilmember Teri Castillo, District 7 Councilmember Marina Alderete Gavito, and District 10 Councilmember Marc Whyte signed the memo on Thursday two weeks after writing a letter asking Jones for a meeting about her proposed changes to the Council Consideration Request (CCR) process, the primary way council members write and change city policy.
The memo called for a full council discussion by Aug. 15.
Alderete Gavito explained why she and her colleagues decided to take action with the rarely used procedural move: “We weren’t seeing any traction. We weren’t seeing any movement with that. We gave her two weeks. We have CCRs in the pipeline that we need to start working on.”
Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones shared changes to the city council’s policymaking process last week that at least three council members believe goes beyond what a local ordinance allows.
Jones’ changes to the process would require city councilmembers to get a signature from the city manager and city attorney and share the proposal with the mayor’s chief of staff before moving forward with collecting their colleagues’ support.
CCRs require five signatures before an item is reviewed by the council’s Governance Committee — four plus the council member who wrote the CCR.
Alderete Gavito and her colleagues have said they worry Jones’ changes are an overreach that could give the mayor’s chief of staff or other city officials the ability to block policy proposals before the entire council even gets to see them.
“With a couple of these prerequisites, what it essentially is is allowing unelected officials to stifle and or kill policy before the general public has an understanding of why something can’t move forward,” Castillo said.
The trio, who span the ideological spectrum on the council, jointly wrote an op-ed in the San Antonio Express-News, and Whyte joined TPR’s The Source this week to discuss their concerns.
After Jones’ Monday town hall in District 4, she called the issue “petty” and said the city attorney has said she has the authority to make the kinds of changes she outlined to improve efficiency in the process.
“We’ve got a tough budget season, we’ve got Spurs discussions,” she said. “We’ve got real business to do, right? And that is what I’m focused on.”
Alderete Gavito said she believed the issue had a substantive impact on her constituents: “These concerns are not petty, and it’s disappointing she describes it as that. We use the CCR to resolve resident concerns, and so taking their voice away from that process is extremely concerning.”
Jones declined TPR’s request to comment on her colleagues’ three-signature memo.
