The race to represent San Antonio’s Northwest side is now a choice between an experienced city political hand and an attorney calling for a conservative reboot in city government.

From a field of six candidates, Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s former chief of staff, Ivalis Meza Gonzalez, finished first with 40% of the vote. 

Paula McGee, the attorney, took 22% — edging out progressive realtor and landlord Sakib Shaikh, who had been a top fundraiser and benefitted from big spending by an education-focused PAC.

Now headed into a June 7 runoff, District 8 is one of three nonpartisan council seats, plus a mayor’s race, that have all come down to progressive-vs.-conservative matchups, adding fresh tension to a race that’s already been quite ugly.

Meza Gonzalez and Shaikh hurled accusations at one another in the first round that wound up even requiring an outside attorney to review — and ultimately dismiss — a city ethics complaint. But Meza Gonzalez now enters the second round a prohibitive favorite, with a more confident approach. 

“I came into this runoff with a two-to-one lead, and that means a lot to me,” Meza Gonzalez said at a San Antonio Report debate Thursday night. “It means that I connected with residents, and it means that the residents connected with what I want and what I envision for District 8.”

Meanwhile McGee, who previously served on the city’s Ethics Review Board and positioned herself as a voice of calm and reason earlier in the race, is now sharpening her pitch for an uphill finish.

Within minutes of taking the podium at Texas Public Radio’s Malú & Carlos Alvarez Theater on Thursday night, McGee picked up on some of Shaikh’s attacks from the first round, knocking Meza Gonzalez’s role as government affairs consultant for Andrade-Van de Putte & Associates.

“I’m not a lobbyist. I’m not a politician. This is not a stepping stone in a future political career,” McGee said in her opening statement. “ … I’m doing this to be an agent for change that needs to come to City Hall.”

While she stressed that both candidates have a clear grasp of the issues, McGee framed Meza Gonzalez as a continuation of a council with a left-leaning agenda that has gone beyond the scope of city government: “policies that are, I do not believe, reflective of the mainstream in our community.”

Early voting starts Tuesday and runs through June 3 for the June 7 runoff election.

A district unlike much of San Antonio

District 8 encompasses the city’s far Northwest side — some of San Antonio’s wealthiest enclaves, fanciest shopping areas and gated communities. 

Current Councilman Manny Pelaez (D8), a business attorney who is cycling off after an unsuccessful mayoral bid, generally embraced many left-leaning social values, but also leaned in to residents’ impatiences with homeless encampments, panhandling and a rise in property crime.

While the Northside districts typically see less crime and housing insecurity less than the rest of the city, their residents notice those problems very acutely, and both Meza Gonzalez and McGee said Thursday that making them feel safe will be their top priority.

Meza Gonzalez said District 8’s nice amenities are part of what makes it a target for crime in the first place, and why it should stay a priority in the city’s overall policing strategy.

“We have large shopping centers in District 8, with The Rim, La Cantera, Huebner Oaks, so all of those are really prime spots for property crimes to occur,” she said. “And then, of course, our homes, right? So yeah, I do think that we need to make sure that residents feel safe.”

McGee, who generally wants to undo the city’s approach of putting more resources in the areas with the greatest need, said District 8 is at risk of bigger problems in the future if it doesn’t get its lower-level crime under control.

“I believe that we need our share of resources,” McGee said when asked whether District 8’s crime levels should be a top priority for the city at-large. “The issues related to crime … change from time to time, and area to area, so what we may have is property crime, [but it] can become violent crime in another time.”

McGee said she wouldn’t necessarily support spending more money on alleviating homelessness after the city’s 2025 budget included a big increase on such issues from the previous year.

“I don’t think that anybody in our city thinks that we’ve gotten our money’s worth related to the homeless population,” she said. “We haven’t seen any reduction in the numbers. We see encampments appear here and there, and they get cleaned up, but then the people reappear.”

Meza Gonzalez disagreed with the sentiment, saying District 8 residents understand that “nobody wakes up and is just homeless.”

“In the last budget cycle we invested [$44 million] in homeless strategies, from affordable housing to permanent, supportive housing to rapid rehousing for residents that are in an emergency,” she said. “That’s what we need, a coordinated effort in this space. … There’s a lot of layered issues.”

A new era of conservatism?

Both candidates are taking note of potential headwinds from an expensive mayoral runoff between Former Air Force Under Secretary Gina Ortiz Jones and former Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos.

Pablos’ allies are spending big trying to rally conservatives on the Northside, and McGee is part of a slate of other candidates local Republicans are promoting.

At a gathering of the Republican Club of Bexar County at Chester’s Hamburgers last week, McGee drew applause for calling Jones her “worst nightmare” and for criticizing her opponent.

“She has a degree from a law school but has never practiced law,” McGee said of Meza Gonzalez.

Pointing to the D8 race and the others like it on the June 7 ballot, McGee said San Antonio has an opportunity send its city leadership in a different direction — and keep it there, thanks to new longer council terms.

“We need to take our city back. We have people in every runoff that can make this happen,” McGee said. “With [Councilman] Marc Whyte (D10) already on the council, if we can add common sense conservatives and a mayor, we can put this city on the course that it needs to be on for years to come.”

Seated with her husband, the sharply-dressed couple stuck out from the crowd of seasoned activists slinging yard signs and campaign T-shirts, which included some of the city’s most outspoken social conservatives.

But McGee’s speech was received warmly, and as she spoke, several women in the audience likened her to one of their party’s most respected conservative standard-bearers — state Sen. Donna Campbell (R-New Braunfels). 

A steady hand at City Hall?

Long active in Democratic circles, Meza Gonzalez has taken the opposite approach.

She ran for Bexar County Judge as a Democrat in 2022, but when the Bexar County Democrats made its council runoff endorsements, she asked them not to include her on that list.

And after a rough-and-tumble first round of the race, Meza Gonzalez let McGee’s criticisms go largely unchecked at Thursday’s debate, stressing her own qualifications and her campaign team made up of friends and family members.

Her pitch to the audience reflected years of experience navigating city budgets and departments, noting that the role was “too important” for the next council member to “learn on the job.”

“I feel like I am the right person for this for a number of reasons, but specifically, because I’ve sat through three budget cycles during my time at City Hall … and saw firsthand what our budget encompassed and the needs that our community has,” she said.

This year budget cuts are expected, and council members will have to make decisions quickly.

But Meza Gonzalez said she’d already lived through a variety of different budgeting circumstances, from banner CPS Energy years to the drop-off in federal pandemic relief.

“I think it needs somebody that can get in and get to work on day one, and that budget is that first job we have.”