Facing ongoing complaints about a sluggish procurement process, Bexar County Commissioners Court is embracing a new policy that gives county department heads authority to make purchases up to $100,000 without coming before the elected leaders for approval.
The change was made possible during the last Texas legislative session, and the five-member Commissioners Court largely agreed Tuesday they should make the change — given the amount of frustration they’ve heard surrounding slow-moving contracts.
“Hopefully what we’ll see in return is a more effective and efficient process of executing contracts and the procurement process, which has always been a prior criticism,” Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai said of the new policy. ” … We can move very fast as county government. We don’t have to have that, ‘Well, the county takes [forever].'”
Earlier that morning, a voter registration vendor seeking to work with the county came before the court to air grievances about a contracting process he said was stringing his company along much longer than expected, and putting Bexar County out of step with other major Texas counties — albeit for a contract much larger than $100,000.
“In June of 2025 we sent a budgetary quote … In July, we sent the initial contract for review and editing so we could negotiate,” said Ben Martin, Chief Operating Officer at VR Systems Inc. “In September, the Commissioners’ Court approved this activity, and then it took four months after we sent the contract before we received any response back from the county.”
In acknowledgement of the county’s procurement problems, Bexar County traded out its purchasing agent at the beginning of last year.
New purchasing agent Gregory Galloway, who previously oversaw contracts and procurement for the Alamo Area Council of Governments (AACOG), took over the role at the beginning of 2025, and addressed the court Tuesday to explain other changes also coming down the pipeline.
Changing the contract threshold from $50,000 to $100,000 is just part of a large update to county purchasing policies, he said, driven in part by the federal government’s crackdown on race-conscious scoring systems.
Though Bexar County has never had a race-conscious scoring system in its regular procurement process, it used one to distribute federal money to businesses after the COVID-19 pandemic, and had been working toward expanding such preferences to other contracts going forward.
That idea has now been scrapped, Galloway said, and the county is instead creating a system that awards preferences for local businesses when awarding contracts, rather than businesses owned by women or people of color.
“We had to reclassify some of the demographics, remove some language,” he said, while stressing the policy update on Tuesday’s agenda was rooted in being in “compliance” with changing laws.
But Larry Roberson, chief of the Civil Division of the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office, noted that the provision allowing bigger purchases to be made without the court’s permission was optional — and should at minimum be approached with heavy caution.
“I have concerns about the value because $100,000 is real money. You’re talking about not coming to Commissioners Court, these are going to go through purchasing … It doesn’t even require a contract,” he said.
“Just because the statute allows it doesn’t mean the Commissioner’s Court has to require it by policy. That’s an issue of discretion.”
Several commissioners echoed that concern, but citing the need for more efficiency, approved the new policies unanimously.
Commissioner Grant Moody (Pct. 3) said AACOG recently made a similar change, as did the City of San Antonio, which gave City Manager Erik Walsh authority over contracts up to $1 million.
“The goal is to simplify the process without taking on additional risk for the county,” Moody said.
Commissioner Justin Rodriguez (Pct. 2) said he worried about handing off some of the responsibilities voters expect their elected officials to oversee, but the commissioners could take the power back if it wasn’t working after the first year.
“Ultimately, folks put us up here for accountability, but we are trusting staff, in some instances here, to make these decisions without our approval,” Rodriguez said. “I’m hesitant to do it, but I think in visiting with department heads again, there’s a level of trust we’re having.”
