Two young activists whose careers have so far been spent pushing local leaders to the left suddenly find themselves seeking broader appeal as they compete for the same fast-growing, politically swingy Westside council district.
District 6 is hardly a bastion of progressive politics — sending the more moderately liberal Councilwoman Melissa Cabello Havrda to the City County for the past six years, and conservative Greg Brockhouse before that.
Yet the race to represent it is now down to a June 7 runoff between labor organizer and Democratic precinct chair Kelly Ann Gonzalez, 34, who completed a leadership program for progressive candidates before this race, and District 5 special projects manager Ric Galvan, 24, who is endorsed by the San Antonio chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and several teachers’ unions.
The two ideologically similar candidates — who spent much of a Wednesday night debate agreeing with each other on policy — finished just 28 votes apart in a 7-way race that included many different political resumes.
With little time remaining before early voting starts Tuesday, both are rapidly working to display some broader appeal, particularly when it comes to issues surrounding law enforcement — a topic that’s been top-of-mind for many voters in Texas’ urban centers.
This week Galvan, who sought the backing of the progressive police reform group Act4SA, was poised to get help from the group’s independent expenditure arm — but reversed course and asked the group to take its endorsement off social media, according to Act4SA founder Ananda Tomas.
Galvan didn’t respond to a request for comment about why he made the ask.
Gonzalez has also worked with Act4SA in the past, and is likewise seeking distance from some of the group’s more polarizing work.
She was involved in the so-called Justice Charter in 2023 that Act4SA gathered signatures to place on San Antonio’s municipal ballot, proposing wide-ranging police reforms, along with decriminalizing marijuana possession and abortion, on a single ballot measure.
It was rejected by roughly 72% of voters mainly due to the unpopularity of a provision expanding the city’s cite-and-release policy for low-level non-violent crimes, and at the San Antonio Report debate Wednesday night, Gonzalez said she only got involved because of the abortion provision.
“I would like to be very clear about my involvement in Proposition A. In my early twenties, I was in an abusive relationship where having an abortion saved my life,” Gonzalez said.
“There were other parts of that charter amendment — because it was a whole package — that I do believe were a little bit far-reaching,” she said, “I do believe [some provisions] were not well thought-out.”
After the debate, Gonzalez declined to specify which elements she was referring to.
A lightning rod issue
Police reform became a major priority for progressives after the death of George Floyd in 2020, but political strategists on both the right and left agree that efforts to cut police funding backfired with voters in Texas’ progressive-minded urban centers.
While San Antonio didn’t actually reprogram any of its police budget, groups like Act4SA put pressure on officials to rethink their approaches to criminal justice, and plenty of candidates are still seeking to score points on an issue that resonated loudly with voters.
This year a PAC supporting Councilman Manny Pelaez’ (D8) mayoral bid ran TV ads saying he fought efforts to “defund the police,” and conservative Rolando Pablos‘ mayoral campaign is trying to frame his left-leaning opponent, Gina Ortiz Jones, as a threat to law enforcement and public safety, though Jones has not called for cuts to police funding.
The San Antonio Police Officer Association (SAPOA), which reported about $1.3 million in its campaign coffers as of April 25, has been meeting with candidates all across the political spectrum ahead this year’s pivotal city election, including Galvan and Gonzalez early in the District 6 race.
Though the police union didn’t back a D6 candidate in the first round, SAPOA Vice President Johnny Perez, who chairs the group’s PAC, said he had breakfast with Galvan ahead of the runoff and came away impressed — just before Act4SA’s endorsements dropped.
“We were leaning towards endorsing Ric,” Perez told the San Antonio Report. “While I’m talking to my committee, I’m getting text messages from people saying, ‘Hey, this person is being endorsed by these people, and you should watch out.'”
Act4SA had been much quieter since the 2023 Justice Charter loss, but regrouped ahead of this year’s runoff election and started raising money for a PAC to help progressives in general, including backing Jones in the mayoral race.
“We started as just a police reform group, but we have stepped into broader criminal justice advocacy all over, and the Action PAC itself is just a progressive values-aligned PAC,” Tomas said.
In spite of that, she said, they still find alignment with the police union disqualifying, and cancelled plans to spend money to help Galvan.
“We don’t endorse SAPOA candidates — pretty obvious,” she said.
A politically swingy district
With now only progressives to choose from in the runoff, some are perplexed about the future of a district that’s long had more moderate representation.
District 6 starts in the city’s inner West Side, stretching up past Alamo Ranch to include some of the city’s fastest-growing territory in its Northwest corner.
Cabello Havrda, who ran for mayor this year instead of seeking reelection, chaired the council’s Public Safety committee and was a big advocate for San Antonio’s firefighters in their recent contract negotiation.
Brockhouse even consulted for the local police and fire unions before running for council.
This year the San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association has stayed out of D6 altogether, and SAPOA said it’s troubled by recent developments in the progressive sphere.
“I do worry, because when you have two candidates like [Gonzalez and Galvan] with the people that are backing them, which are notoriously anti-police activists … it is a little concerning to us,” Perez said. “We’re not looking to fight anybody in these council districts. We’re looking to make the community good.”
At Wednesday’s debate, both candidates sounded friendly to law enforcement and stressed the need to continue investing in public safety.
“We have to accept the reality that we are going to have to ramp up our police force,” Gonzalez said. “We also need to have the real conversation about the fact of the matter that our police’s relationship to our community has deteriorated over the last few years, and we need to take real solid steps in repairing that relationship.”
Galvan and Gonzalez also sought to display fluency across a broad swath of less partisan issues: making sure the district’s infrastructure keeps up with its population growth, ensuring its large community of veterans has access to housing, and fighting for public resources in a city that’s been overwhelmingly focused on its urban core.
They expressed concern for the area around the Nelson W. Wolff Stadium, where the Missions’ Minor League Baseball team will soon be leaving for a new home downtown.
Galvan said that much like the East Side’s Frost Bank Center, which the Spurs basketball team could vacate to move to downtown, the Missions’ stadium never brought the surrounding economic development that was expected, and the city needs a plan to connect the stadium area to other nearby amenities and trails.
“We could look at human development, youth development and economic development too, that supports the folks there, doesn’t leave anyone behind, and creates a destination that our folks are excited to go to,” he said.
Gonzalez stressed the need to keep pushing for safety improvements to Culebra Road — one of the city’s deadliest thoroughfares — while protecting its small businesses in that corridor from another city construction debacle.
“Culebra started as a two-lane road, it was never meant to be this large thoroughfare that it is now, four-way intersections are places where some of the highest rates of accidents happen,” said Gonzalez, who owns a screen printing businesses and wants wholesale Culebra corridor improvements included in the city’s 2027 bond.
“We need to make sure that we are investing in making that part of our city — of our corridor in District 6 — safe, but at the same time, making sure we are including our small businesses into that conversation, because a majority of our small businesses are actually located on Culebra Road,” she said.
Among the D6 race’s other contenders who didn’t make the runoff, support has been split between the two finalists.
First-round candidates Vanessa Chavez and Lawson Alaniz-Picasso lined up behind Galvan, while two of the more conservative voices, Bobby Herrera and Carlos Antonio Raymond, are supporting Gonzalez.
A third candidate with more right-leaning views, economics teacher Chris Baecker, said both candidates had reached out to him, but endorsing anyone with their backgrounds would be “a bridge too far” for him, politically.
A small community of activists
Despite being in similar lines of work, Galvan and Gonzalez had only met a handful of times before both filing to run in District 6 this year. But their head-to-head race has made things complicated for a progressive activist community divided between the two.
Galvan currently works under Councilwoman Teri Castillo (D5), one of two DSA-backed candidates elected to the council in 2021, and who has backed him in the D6 race.
Until recently, Gonzalez worked for AFSCME, the union representing city employees, which partnered with Cabello Havrda during last year’s City Charter Review process, and earned her the councilwoman’s backing.
Cabello Havrda and Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) — the other DSA-backed member — share the same progressive campaign consulting firm, Düable, which has a staff member volunteering on Gonzalez’s campaign.
McKee-Rodriguez has endorsed Gonzalez and was in attendance at Wednesday’s debate. On social media he’s celebrated the two-progressive runoff as a win no matter what happens June 7.
The candidates’ respective supporters lined up on opposite sides of Texas Public Radio’s Malú & Carlos Alvarez Theater, with some venturing across to acknowledge opponents they could soon team up with again after this race.
In response to a question about their activist backgrounds, both Galvan and Gonzalez each lit up talking about the good they’ve seen come from progressive groups’ work in San Antonio.
Galvan described the role activists played in pushing San Antonio to change its bond purpose in 2021 so that the city could borrow money to build affordable housing.
Housing insecurity was on the rise during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, he said, and other cities were also exploring ways to address it.
“What I saw a lot of was folks that I knew who were getting involved and making sure the city was really pushing on expanding affordable housing on every single level,” he said. “… Ultimately we were able to not only put a housing bond — $150 million — on the ballot, but then it got passed as well, overwhelmingly, in our city.”
Gonazlez described her work during last year’s Charter Review Commission, where AFSCME got the city to amend its charter so that city employees could participate in local elections by endorsing, volunteering and otherwise electioneering — a prohibition dating back to 1951.
“One of the first things that I did when I was brought on [at AFSCME] is read every single administrative directive that the city workers have to follow,” she said. “When I discovered administrative directive 1.2 — which was the political prohibition on city employees — I thought, ‘Wow, what is this? Why are people being punished, threatened to be fired, for expressing their full political voice?'”
Knowing that a Charter Review Commission would likely be called near the end of Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s final term, Gonzalez said she approached the mayor and city manager about asking the commission to consider deleting that directive, but was told no.
“We organized our members, we taught them how to give public comment on this very important issue … what it meant to have their voice not counted in that conversation,” she said. “We went to every single charter review commission hearing, we gave public comment, and then on the back end, we met with every single individual council member.”
The council ultimately agreed to ask voters to remove that directive from the City Charter in the changes they put on the November ballot, and it was approved with 63% of the vote.
“I am very proud to say that this is the first municipal election since 1951 that city workers are able to raise their voice and speak about who they want to see on the dais,” she said.
Watch the full D6 debate:
Video credit: Kristin Quintanilla / Texas Public Radio
