Mauricio “Mau” Sanchez is an executive at a San Antonio-based financial management firm.
Hear from the candidate
Please tell voters about yourself.
I am a life-long San Antonian who has seen our city’s ups and downs for the past 35 years. My parents moved here from northern Mexico in 1989, 3 weeks after I was born, in pursuit of a better education for my brother and me. I grew up in a small duplex home on the corner of Broadway and Austin Hwy.
When the great San Antonio Flood hit in 1998, our family moved to the northside, where I ended up graduating from Clark High School in 2007. I pursued higher education at the University of the Incarnate Word, majoring in Economics and Finance and a minor in Philosophy. I’ve served on the Hot Wells of Bexar County board and have been a member of Rotary Club of San Antonio for several years now.
In a field of 27 mayoral candidates, what differentiates you from the others?
Economics driven. The city of San Antonio has many issues, but they all stem from one very real fact: economically, we are behind every Texas metropolitan city. My 15 years as a financial analyst, 10 years as a wealth manager, and 18 years studying capital markets, municipalities, and economic cycles puts me ahead of every other candidate when it comes to fixing what is truly wrong here. Political experience means nothing in this race.
The citizens of San Antonio are struggling in more ways than one, and “political experience” will not fix that. Furthermore, the people are ready to feel safe in their city again, something that the majority of citizens haven’t felt in the past 8 years.
We have other candidates looking to continue carrying the same torch of irresponsible leadership and fiscal irresponsibility that has held our city back for decades, among those some who aren’t even from our city. San Antonio deserves better, San Antonio deserves San Antonian leadership. We must instill confidence back in City Hall. The public, as of now, has ZERO confidence in city leadership.
If elected, you would be taking over at a time when the city has spent more than a year negotiating a massive downtown redevelopment effort in Project Marvel. How would you approach this project?
I don’t believe this project is in the best interest of San Antonio. Certainly not now, but maybe in the future. We lag in economic diversification, among many other things, which would only create further constraints for the average family in the city.
No I don’t currently support continuing as planned. Furthermore, it is irresponsible to use taxpayer funding for this project. At this stage, what’s important here is to acquire interest from publicly traded companies and other well-capitalized companies (i.e. Fortune 500) to compete for our workforce and land. Once we pave these paths and begin to acquire larger organizational interest (think Major League Baseball, NFL, etc.. not minor league) then we can begin to focus on an idea like massive downtown redevelopment. We are a long way from that.
We must focus on providing the best education, filling the labor force gaps, and providing families with wages aligned with (if not exceeding) the state and national averages. The productivity machine needs to be fueled here; quite frankly, productivity has fallen short in San Antonio. Our economy needs a larger presence in the higher growth sectors of the economy; retail and tourism aren’t doing it.
In the city’s 2024-2025 budget survey, residents ranked homelessness, streets,
housing and animal care services among their top concerns for the city to address. Which issues do you consider a top concern and how would you work to address them in your first 100 days?
Household Income, Public Safety, Animal Care, Homelessness (this actually means mental health and addiction assistance, as we must re-integrate our homeless population back into the economic machine in our city). To address these issues, we must begin roundtable discussions with experts in tackling mental illness and heavily integrating these organizations in the national private sector into our local private sector through public-private sector partnerships. This same philosophy applies to addiction experts.
Additionally, tackling public safety means integrating a strong police presence in our city, in addition to investments in technology and city-state-federal relationships and roundtables.
Animal Care Services is one of our biggest issues in our city, 1. providing the resources to the public while 2. mandating the proper repercussions (fines, penalties, petitions to our state leaders to enact legislation) for violators and those responsible for our constraints on the city level is how we change this.
Household incomes can only rise by inducing and manipulating market forces in a manner that serves the public’s best interest. Every council member is a fiduciary to the citizens of our city. Every corporation is a fiduciary to the shareholder. It is our job as city leaders and mayor of the city to negotiate in a manner that serves the public’s best interest only.
Instilling a policy of radical transparency within council members and the mayor’s seat is the only way we will be able to conduct these kinds of negotiations in the public’s best interest. Human nature is self-interested, and government leadership is self-interested; therefore, we must infuse policies and actions that will deter this type of behavior. I have just the right plan for this.
For the past four years San Antonio has worked closely with the Biden Administration on federally funded projects like airport development and Advanced Rapid Transit. How would you approach working with both state leaders in Austin and a new presidential administration in D.C.?
Simple, actually have discussions and roundtables with state and federal leaders instead of criticizing and fighting them on common sense policies and prerogatives. Fiscal irresponsibility has put us in this position of relying heavily on these dollars. The solution is that we must empower and diversify our private sector further. To put it simply, we have politicized our city’s budget and that has introduced constraints on fixing the real issues within San Antonio.
Past leadership opened a migrant center in which we are still owed millions in FEMA dollars (as of today March 2025), which the current administration will likely not approve paying out. That was a very irresponsible decision to pursue opening in the first place. Second, we have irresponsible programs like Ready to Work that further constrain taxpayer dollars. “Generational poverty and stagnant economic mobility,” quoting the previous mayor, in the United States is dealt with by raising your standard of education and skill set to meet the demands of employers and companies.
Employers today, especially ones that pay livable higher wages, demand skill sets and knowledge that far exceed what this program supplies. We must think of the bigger picture here and demand better of our city leadership.
Read more about Mauricio “Mau” Sanchez
Inside the expensive, ‘confusing,’ 27-candidate race to be San Antonio’s next mayor
