City leaders in San Antonio — one of the most impoverished large cities in the country — spent hours Thursday debating what fair compensation should look like for the City Council and mayor.
The tense and at times emotional discussion was uncharacteristic of a group that’s normally eager to highlight its members’ diversity of backgrounds and perspectives.
Many of them also credit that diversity to the council’s last major pay adjustment in 2015 — when voters agreed to increase their salaries from $20 per meeting to $45,722 per year. That number matched the city’s median income at the time, which has now risen to roughly $60,000.
On Thursday, the City Council was considering sending a pay raise to the November ballot that would bring the 10-person panel’s salaries up to $70,200.
Ahead of that vote, Councilman Marc Whyte (D10) made a motion to separate the salary proposal from the rest of the council’s proposed City Charter amendments, a move that was quickly rebuked by Councilwoman Teri Castillo (D5), who referred to it as an opportunity for colleagues to cast a “performative ‘no’ vote.”
Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito (D7) led off the discussion by suggesting higher salaries would ensure more people could serve. Her predecessor, Ana Sandoval, had vacated the seat with more than two years left of eligibility, citing the need to make more money after becoming a mother.
“If we chose to go with lower pay rates … we might just become a council with only members who are attorneys,” Alderete Gavito said jokingly. She went on: “I prefer to see a diverse council. … Folks who know what it’s like to sit at the kitchen table at night making tough financial decisions for their families.”
But the attorneys on the dais didn’t find Alderete Gavito’s comments funny, and the discussion turned more contentious, with City Council members bitterly disagreeing over issues of class and pay equity. In the end, the council’s three lawyers — Whyte, Manny Pelaez (D8) and Melissa Cabello Havrda (D6) — voted no, leading the measure to pass 8-3.
“Y’all can make a big issue about lawyers up here being against [the pay increase], but I was not born a lawyer. … I worked my butt off in restaurants to get my education,” Cabello Havrda said. “With one side of your mouth you talk about the need for educational attainment, and with the other, you’re knocking a brown girl from the West Side for getting her JD.”
Several council members stressed that higher council salaries should come with the expectation that it’s a full-time job. Among those was Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), a former high school math teacher, who said he couldn’t afford to start a family without taking on a second job.
“I would be willing to ask my constituents for compensation, but I understand why some of my colleagues probably wouldn’t do that,” McKee-Rodriguez quipped. “Anyone who has missed 10 to 15 council meetings probably shouldn’t [ask for a raise].”
Pelaez, who maintains a law practice and consulting company in addition to serving on the council, seemed to take his colleagues’ comments personally.
“I try really hard to not punch down when I’m at the dais, but I can’t not comment that one should never underestimate the eager alacrity of politicians to come up with reasons to get paid more,” Pelaez said after several of his colleagues gave their reasons for supporting the increase.
“Play back the video here and what you’re going to hear is false dichotomies, plenty of ad hominems, straw man arguments, appeals to division, appeals to emotion, appeals to pity,” he added.
Pelaez added that some of his colleagues were being disingenuous about their circumstances, and noted that higher salaries have done little to raise the sophistication of the council.
“I will tell you that City Council, with all this talk of service and humility, is the closest thing to royalty in San Antonio that you can get,” Pelaez said. “All of us get invited to every Spurs game and all the high-ticket concerts.”
” … Those of us up here who talk about regular a– people and regular folks, … you’ll see them all of in the luxury suites and at luxury events and galas,” he added.
Nirenberg, who initiated the pay increase through his Charter Review Commission, remained quiet through the debate. Afterward, he appeared baffled by the direction the discussion had taken.
“If you look at the dais today, and you look back 20 or 30 years ago, there’s a big change — I would say it’s a good change — more reflective of the community that we serve from an age perspective, from a race and equity perspective, from a socioeconomic perspective,” Nirenberg said of the impact past salary increases.
Before Thursday’s meeting, Nirenberg had already scrapped the Charter Review Commission’s salary proposal, in which his appointees suggested they believed fair council pay could be as high as six figures.
The mayor’s intention, he said, was merely to institute a cost of living adjustment, and prevent future councils from having this debate by tying future salaries to the average median income of San Antonio families.
“There has been a lot of debate about the level of pay, but from my perspective, … let me tell you exactly what’s happening,” he said. With this proposal, “we are forevermore taking the power of setting wages for City Council members away from City council members.”
