Ron Nirenberg has another 16 months left in his final term as mayor, but political jockeying to succeed him is already ramping up among members of the City Council and bleeding over into the council’s daily operations.
So far four sitting council members — Adriana Rocha Garcia (D4), Melissa Cabello Havrda (D6), Manny Pelaez (D8) and John Courage (D9) — have signaled interest in the May 2025 race.
By the end of the week, at least two of them will have publicly declared intentions to run, while a third is still reeling from a profile-raising policy endeavor gone awry.
“If you say that you’re running, you get a certain level of attention from lobbyists and interest groups,” said Rocha Garcia, who is not among those racing to start a mayoral campaign. She has one more term of eligibility representing her Southside district and plans to make a decision on entering the mayor’s race sometime this summer.
“I’m trying not to be distracted by it because we’re still about a year out, and there are so many things that we have to focus on,” she said.
On Thursday, Courage plans to formally launch his mayoral campaign on the City Hall steps after the council’s meeting. The longtime Democratic activist was reelected to his fourth and final term in one of the city’s most conservative Northside districts with 63% of the vote in May.
Last Friday Cabello Havrda, in her third term representing the West Side, told an audience at a Dream Week event that she is angling to make history in a city that hasn’t yet elected a Hispanic woman as its leader.
“They told me Westside girls don’t become lawyers … but I proved them wrong. They told me it’s too late in life to get an MBA, it’s too late in life to start a business, but I proved them wrong,” Cabello Havrda said at the event. “… They’re also telling me there has never been a Latina mayor, but I am determined to prove them wrong.”
Those moves come as Pelaez, who is term-limited from seeking reelection in his Northwest district, spent the past month rolling out and then walking back support for a City Council resolution calling for a cease-fire in Israel’s war with the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
His signature on a memo calling for a meeting on the issue was widely viewed as an olive branch to progressives and put Pelaez in the company of liberal City Council members Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) and Teri Castillo (D5). After Pelaez scuttled the meeting by removing his name, however, he told the San Antonio Report he was still exploring whether his personal politics are right for a citywide race.
“I think when [Pelaez] signed the three-signature memo, he felt like this was going to be a way for him to differentiate himself from other mayoral candidates,” McKee-Rodriguez said of the move. He changed his mind after “the slightest bit of criticism or fear that it wasn’t gonna be successful.”
Formally announcing a campaign comes with some perks for members of the council. Candidates for mayor can collect campaign contributions as much as $1,000 from a single donor, compared to the $500 contribution cap for City Council candidates.
“On the plus side you can take double the money. … The downside is now everyone has an excuse not to give you money” because of their relationships with other candidates, said San Antonio political consultant Kelton Morgan. Morgan worked on Nirenberg’s 2017 and 2019 mayoral campaigns.
Campaign finance reports covering July 1 through Dec. 31 showed none of the potential mayoral candidates currently on the City Council had much campaign cash in their reserves.
Pelaez lead the pack with about $20,000 raised, $41,000 spent and $12,500 on hand. Rocha Garcia and Courage each raised around $3,500. Rocha Garcia reported $27,000 on hand, to Courage’s $9,000. Last week, a Courage supporter sent out an an email appeal asking supporters to donate to retire a $25,000 loan Courage and his wife made from their retirement account.
Cabello Havrda’s most recent report was incomplete, but she said she has roughly $52,000 on hand.
Next year’s race will be San Antonio’s first truly open mayoral contest since 2009, when Julián Castro defeated eight opponents to succeed Phil Hardberger, who was term-limited, as mayor. There was no elected incumbent on the ballot in 2015, but Ivy Taylor had been serving as interim mayor since July 2014, and she won in a runoff.
San Antonio hasn’t elected a mayor without experience on the City Council since Hardberger won in 2005. With no clear frontrunners in 2025, however, a number of candidates outside the current council are said to be considering the race.
Morgan said a successful mayor’s race would require about $300,000 for the general election alone.
“Nobody is raising the kind of money to run a truly dominant campaign,” he said. “That’s the way people see the field right now.”
