In a fiery one-hour debate Tuesday night, Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai and Democratic primary challenger Ron Nirenberg talked over one another, rewrote history on a major downtown development project and cast blame over who was at fault for a faltering relationship between city and county officials.
The two men overlapped as top leaders of a blue city and county — Nirenberg as San Antonio mayor and Sakai as Bexar County’s top executive — for two and a half years.
Now opponents in a heated Democratic primary, they’ve gone deep into the weeds on past policy fights to differentiate themselves in a race where few ideological differences exist.
“We may go back and forth, there may be a lot of words said,” Sakai warned the crowd of more than 500 people at Stable Hall in his opening remarks. “But I’m asking you to look at who I am.”
Early voting for the March 3 primary starts on Feb. 17.
Read about all of the candidates running for office in Bexar County
The debate hosted by the San Antonio Report, the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce and Tech Bloc came just days after Sakai shocked political observers by distancing himself from the downtown development project known as Project Marvel — made possible by a $311 county venue tax contribution Sakai just asked voters to support on the Nov. 4 ballot.
Sakai was initially a critic of a city-driven project that started under Nirenberg’s mayoral administration. But at the urging of the business community, both men ultimately played a role in making it possible, including filming ads for a PAC aligned with the Spurs ahead of the November venue tax vote.
Now Sakai says the downtown development doesn’t do enough to make good on promises made to the East Side, despite county leaders once suggesting that property taxes from Project Marvel would help pay for corresponding East Side developments.
“I caught holy heck from the community in regards to Project Marvel,” he told the crowd Tuesday night. “I was given a 30-minute briefing last year, and that was the extent of it. I still don’t know what Project Marvel is.”
Meanwhile Nirenberg, who was mayor during the years of closed-door negotiations residents were so upset about, is attacking Sakai for not involving the community enough in a vision for the East Side.
“We need to make sure that we’re engaging the entire community, to make sure that they’re envisioning and they have some self-determination in the efforts that are happening outside of the Freeman Coliseum grounds,” Nirenberg said.
Adding to the sharp-elbowed attacks, the candidates’ old political consultants swapped sides for this race, giving them each tremendous insight into one another’s records and potential weaknesses.
For example, Sakai used a question about the controversial Guajolote Ranch development to hammer Nirenberg for directing sales tax dollars away from the aquifer to fund public transit and a workforce development program during his time as mayor.
“You were an environmentalist, and you moved away from that,” Sakai said.
Meanwhile Nirenberg accused Sakai, a longtime district court judge, of falling short on his promises to use the county judge position to resolve longstanding issues with the judiciary.
“The issues that we’re going to be debating today are the same ones that Peter promised to solve three and a half years ago,” Nirenberg said. “We are reacting to every issue in our community right now, from a case backlog that persists because of lack of prosecutorial resources in the courts, as well in the district attorney’s office, to jail overcrowding issues that continue to be exacerbated.”
A judge without the robe
Some of the most heated disputes came over their interpretation of a role that isn’t a real judge, but that most leaders come to with a law degree or legislative experience.
Nirenberg repeatedly called the county judge position a CEO-type role that requires strong leadership like he learned in his eight years as mayor.
“As [former County Judge] Nelson Wolff said, this is one of the weirdest forms of government under the sun, because you have a number of different elected officials that have their own operational control of various parts of this government,” Nirenberg said. “They have budgetary control in some matters, but it’s the commissioner’s court, along with the county judge, that have to work together and control the budget and manage.”
Wolff once endorsed Sakai as a successor when he was retiring in 2022, but has now lined up behind Nirenberg in this race, after Sakai spent the past three years disparaging Wolff’s record as too focused on major development projects.
Sakai fired back that Nirenberg, a former radio station manager who served as the program director for the Annenberg Public Policy Center, lacks the basic skills required for the job because he doesn’t have a legal background.
“It’s not weird. It’s state law. It’s the Texas Constitution. All those authorities, the District Attorney’s Office, the sheriff, the county judge, the county commissioners, are all defined by statute … you need to understand the law,” said Sakai, who noted that as a district court judge he once ruled against San Antonio’s paid sick leave ordinance.
“The city had to spend a lot of money defending what was clearly an unconstitutional ordinance,” Sakai said. “I support paid leave. I think it should be required, but it was unconstitutional.”
Nirenberg contended that Sakai has leaned too hard on his experience as a judge, and never learned the leadership and political skills required to find consensus on big decisions.
The county has repeatedly kicked the can down the road on major spending decisions, like which programs funded by federal pandemic relief it will cut once that funding dries up.
“I’m running to lead at a time when leadership is needed the most,” Nirenberg said. “We are facing extraordinary challenges in this community, but we have the resources and talent to move our community in significant ways with the right leadership at the top.”
