Bullhorns in the street and scathing social media posts from local bar and restaurant owners left a mark on San Antonio’s 2023 City Council races.

Now, headed into a highly consequential 2025 municipal election, a group of small business owners who have been some of the most vocal critics of the city’s downtown construction projects are professionalizing their political efforts.

Aaron Peña, the bar impresario behind Southtown’s Amor Eterno, Gimme Gimme and A Perfect Day, registered a political action committee called the Business Community PAC on July 15, according to reports filed with the Texas Ethics Commission.

The PAC’s founders include the Friendly Spot’s Jody Bailey Newman and Chad Carey of the Empty Stomach Group. They are working with San Antonio political consulting firm Düable to take on a more formal role in the next city election, which includes an open mayoral race.

Peña, who was forced to close Squeezebox on the St. Mary’s Strip, and Carey ramped up their social media presence by organizing local bar and restaurant owners who lost revenue or were forced to shutter during the city’s prolonged renovation of the St. Mary’s Strip. That $12 million project began in 2021 and didn’t formally conclude until earlier this year.

The business owners responded by rallying behind candidate Sukh Kaur to unseat then-Councilman Mario Bravo (D1) in 2023.

Peña told the San Antonio Report last year of the experience: “I learned how to, I guess, be civically disruptive, how to figure out, what’s the head of the snake? And how do I go after that?”

Now the group hopes to repeat its political success by supporting a mayoral candidate and council members who will hold City Manager Erik Walsh accountable for the failures they see in every city construction project.

“They talk about the failure at North St. Mary’s like it was some big one-off,” Newman told the San Antonio Report on Monday. “But every project is North St. Mary’s.”

Carey said he hoped that business owners getting more involved in local political races will help other entrepreneurs avoid the challenges he faced.

“The only thing that’s going to change, in my opinion, the way that these projects actually get accomplished is if we have a council and a mayor who’re going to look at Eric and say, ‘Dude, what in the hell is going on?'” Carey said. “Right? It’s embarrassing. This is your job.'”

A growing chorus of construction skeptics

Both city leadership and local business owners say they’ve taken many lessons from the St. Mary’s Strip project.

The city has sought to hold contractors accountable for project delays, offered millions of dollars worth of grants to businesses impacted by construction and sought to provide businesses more frequent status updates on the project around them.

Small businesses, however, still don’t feel like the city fully grasps the burdens that lengthy construction projects put on them.

When the city announced late last year that East César Chávez Boulevard would be closed for construction at Santa Rosa and at South Alamo streets, Peña and Newman were among the first to flag concerns about a lack of communication.

This week their concerns about the project were validated by revelations that the city will not complete a decade-in-the-making plan to replace a 100-year-old water main under Alamo Street in time for the Final Four — just the latest example of the city’s failures, they say.

“I think we just kind of have to do this,” Carey said, noting what he called the city staff’s “arrogant” attitude toward small businesses. “If anybody did their job the way that Public Works and Development Services Department are doing theirs, they would be fired.”

The bar and restaurant business typically keeps owners too busy for politics, the trio says. By bringing on political consultants, they hope to continue organizing small businesses that haven’t been civically engaged.

“If you have a coffee shop, you have a small bakery, if you have a small salon, … you don’t have a lot of extra time, and you have zero knowledge of what to do when Development Services and Public Works screws with you,” Carey said.