After decades as a county employee, Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai had plenty of time to think about how he’d run things differently.
Now that he’s the chief executive with the power to implement some of those ideas — like updating technology and making the county’s spending decisions more transparent to the public — he’s finding not everyone at the county shares his enthusiasm for change.
“I’ve inherited a system that has done things a certain way,” Sakai said in a wide-ranging interview on Tuesday, which marked his 100th day in office. “They’re having difficulty looking at things in a new way.”
After spending his first months on the job listening and observing, Commissioners Court took an early step toward Sakai’s vision for modernization in March when its members unanimously approved his request for an audit of county policies.
The move called for County Manager David Smith, whose job was created by former Judge Nelson Wolff, to present explanations for the way every county department conducts business.
The first of those presentations — a tense, lengthy discussion of the county’s budget process — occurred at Commissioners Court last week, where some members fought for more influence in the process.
Sakai is also seeking changes to the county’s procurement process, which he said has been one of the thorniest issues he’s sought to address since taking office.
“We’ve got people that have apparently thought they were awarded money, and it turns out we have no documentation, so the procurement process is something I’m trying to unravel,” said Sakai, who suggested an outside consultant might have to be brought in.
“Running county government is like driving the Titanic. … I can’t turn it around on a dime,” Sakai said. “All I can do is maneuver it so that it avoids the icebergs.”
Sakai was joined at the Double Height Courtroom on Tuesday by third grade students from the Harlandale Independent School District whom he’d invited to come learn about county government.
The students peppered him with tough questions like: how old he was when he first became a judge (28 years old); and how many problems had he solved since taking office? (More than he could count on his fingers, Sakai said.)
Sakai is still navigating the courthouse in a wheelchair after falling at the state Capitol several weeks ago and receiving knee surgery for a torn meniscus.
He was in Austin asking the state to help the county fund mental health beds to help move mentally ill inmates out of the jail. That money once seemed within reach but lately looks less likely to happen, Sakai said Tuesday.
Though he’s still attending Commissioners Court in person and other meetings over Zoom, it’s clear the accident has put a damper on Sakai’s plans.
“Until I got hurt, I was coming to my office every day by 8:30 a.m. and I was staying to 5:30 p.m. or 6 p.m.,” said Sakai. “I’m trying to show by example. I’m punching the clock and I’m trying to figure this out.”
Opening up the budget
Sakai’s plans to open up the budget process were met with skepticism by county staff last week.
Compared to the city’s hourslong open budget meetings, commissioners are typically far less involved in the county’s spending decisions.
The county manager has signature authority for budget transfers under $100,000 — a policy designed to free up the commissioners’ meeting agenda for larger items in the county’s roughly $2.9 billion budget.
“The first real look at appraised values that we will get is July 25th,” said Smith. “That fact leads to a very compressed next six weeks for both you, departments and everyone involved in the budget.”
The City of San Antonio and Bexar County’s fiscal years both run Oct. 1- Sept. 30.
San Antonio City Council will hold its first goal-setting meeting for the 2023-2024 budget Thursday. Council already heard preliminary presentations on some of the stickier parts of the budget, like law enforcement funding, last week.
Last year, the county’s first public budget presentation on Aug. 23 featured a dramatic gap between Sheriff Javier Salazar’s requested staff increases and Smith’s proposed budget, which did not include funding for any additional deputies.
Though commissioners ultimately approved a budget with additional deputies and sheriff’s office staff, the rift spurred legislation in the state House that seeks to regulate Bexar County’s law enforcement staffing levels. The county is now scrambling to fight the bill.
“If you had one of those [budget work] sessions earlier in the process, would that not help you in being able to determine kind of where the court stands on some of these big items?” Commissioner Grant Moody (Pct. 3) asked Smith last week.
Moody, like Sakai, was elected to the court in November.
“Depending on how valuable that input from the court is, yes,” Smith replied, the county could have a budget meeting before the staff proposal. “If, on the other hand, there’s a list of 100 priorities … then it’s really not a priority list, right?”
Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores (Pct. 1), who was elected in 2020, came to Smith’s defense.
“I’d like to recommend that we see how this first year goes with the new court,” said Clay-Flores. “If we start making all these changes right now, it does nothing but stress out staff.”
But opening up the process, Commissioner Tommy Calvert (Pct. 4) said, “is maybe an important thing to democratize… the internal conversation amongst the commissioners and the department heads.”
“By way of comparison… City Council [has] a lot of budget hearings, budget meetings, surveys, samples,” said Calvert. “All of those things are informing the council budget.”
On Tuesday, Sakai said no final decisions had been made regarding the budget process, but that increasing input from the court was a priority to the majority of its members.
“I have made it clear in my initial conversations with the budget office and the county manager that there needs to be open dialogue, and that he needs to get feedback from the commissioners,” Sakai said.
“The entire court is looking forward to see more openness [and] more transparency,” he said.
