San Antonians will see six questions at the bottom of a very long ballot in November — and the outcome will shape the city’s local political landscape for years to come.

And while San Antonio voters may vote “for” or “against” each proposition individually, a number of business leaders, elected officials and local institutions have banded together to urge them to vote for all six.

RenewSA, a political action committee or PAC backed by local business and political leaders, plans to raise more than $1 million to get all six propositions on San Antonio’s ballot approved — though its top priority is Proposition C, aimed at removing caps on the city manager’s pay and tenure.

There is no well-organized or well-funded effort against the measures — at least not yet.

Meanwhile, 80% percent of San Antonio registered voters continue to be unfamiliar with the measures, according to UTSA’s first poll on the topic released last week.

Gordon Hartman, local philanthropist and entrepreneur who serves as a chair of RenewSA, said these charter amendments are necessary to govern a growing, large city like San Antonio.

“We need to come of age,” Hartman said, “and that’s what the benefit of a charter is: You adjust it from time to time to make it come to where you are as a city.”

Proposition A, the first of the measures, would enhance and clarify the Ethics Review Board’s authority. Proposition B would remove out-of-date language across the charter, Proposition D would allow city employees to engage with local political campaigns, Proposition E would raise the salaries of the mayor and City Council members and Proposition F would lengthen the term lengths for the mayor and City Council.

Click here to download a copy of how the charter will read if voters approve these propositions in November.

Raising the mayor, City Council and city manager’s pay and lengthening council tenures means they’ll have more time to do the jobs they were elected to do, Hartman said.

“It’s very short-sighted for a city of this size — and the growth of the city — to continue to have … potentially part-time council people” who have to work another job to support their families, Hartman said.

And the two-year structure means city elected officials are essentially constantly fundraising for their campaigns, he said, “which is causing them to be around a [certain] circle of people … because they’re asking them for money all the time.”

Possible opposition

In recent years, charter elections have been used as a tool — via local petition drives — in labor contract negotiations and police reform efforts.

In 2018, nearly 60% of voters supported a charter amendment that capped the city manager’s pay at 10 times the lowest-paid city employee (a sum that currently equals $374,000) and tenure at eight years. This stemmed from a longstanding labor contract conflict between the previous city manager and the previous president of the fire union, both of whom served uniquely long terms themselves.

Proposition C would revert control over city manager pay and tenure back to City Council.

Hartman attributed the 2018 proposition’s victory to the firefighters union.

“They had firefighters at every polling place, and it’s hard to tell a firefighter no,” Hartman said. “When they voted on that, it was more of an emotional vote than it was a practical and logical vote. Today, you cannot hire a city manager to run a $4 billion, 14,000-employee operation properly at $375,000.

“You can find someone, yes, but are you gonna find the right person? The answer is no,” he added.

Current City Manager Erik Walsh would have to leave the position in March 2027 if Proposition C is rejected. “He’s got to leave even if he’s done a good job,” Hartman said. “I have 300 employees among all my nonprofits. I keep all the good ones. I don’t want the bad.”

And there is a mechanism in place to hold the city manager accountable, Hartman said: City Council.

“At any moment, six votes and he’s gone,” he said. “It’s not like [the city manager has] consistent employment no matter what.”

The San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association, which recently scored a three-year contract with more than 20% in raises for paramedics and firefighters, has not yet determined whether it will wade into another fight over the city manager.

Previous leadership had a “devastating impact on our organization and our department,” said Joe Jones, president of the union. But another consideration for Proposition C is the “power struggle that exists between a term-limited or non-term-limited city manager. Especially within a strong manager, weak mayor [city government] system.”

Just putting a charter amendment or proposition on the ballot doesn’t mean voters will go for it.

In 2021, voters narrowly rejected a measure brought to them by police reform activists that would have stripped the police union of its ability to bargain for a contract in the same way it has for decades. Another slate of proposed public safety reforms, known as the “Justice Charter,” was soundly rejected by voters in 2023.

After that experience, it looks unlikely that ACT 4 SA, the police reform group behind the Justice Charter and whose leadership was involved in the 2021 proposition fight, will get involved with this one.

“While the city manager amendment should be very concerning to any San Antonian … I don’t know that we’re going to get involved on the charter amendments anymore,” said Ananda Tomas, executive director of the ACT 4 SA Action Fund. “There’s a lot of people spending big money that we can’t even compete with and it makes more sense to save our resources for municipal [City Council] elections.”

In two years, however, there may be an appetite to reverse the city manager pay and tenure provision, she added.

When asked if the police union wants to again wade into a charter fight, San Antonio Police Officers Association President Danny Diaz responded simply: “No ma’am.”

At least one other organization may be considering it.

At a kickoff Thursday evening for the newly formed Business Community PAC, a representative said the group would not be endorsing or “targeting” City Council candidates but would instead be focused on issues.

It’s unclear if that will include a campaign against Proposition C or any of the others.

But PAC founder Chad Carey has said the group would like to see Walsh “held accountable” for what they see as leadership failures around ongoing construction projects and the city’s response to suffering small businesses.

Politically active city employees

During his final term as mayor, Ron Nirenberg assembled a commission to review changes to the City Charter — basically the city’s constitution — that he prioritized for the next election: ethics procedures, compensation and tenure for elected officials and the city manager, expanding the number of council districts and modernizing the charter’s language.

Increasing the number of council districts didn’t make the cut, but another issue, regarding political activity of city employees, was added to the ballot after the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) lobbied the commission and council.

“This was a citizen-driven process from the beginning,” said Kelton Morgan, a political consultant working for RenewSA. “You had a Charter Review Commission, you had all these public input meetings. … The six reforms that actually made it onto the ballot are reforms that people want.”

For more than 70 years, city employees have been prohibited from engaging in political activity related to local elections, meaning they can’t campaign for, work for or donate to City Council or mayoral campaigns.

“Whether it’s grabbing a phone and phone-banking for a candidate on the weekend or block-walking on another weekend, [city employees] at the moment are unable to do so,” said Chris Reyes, an organizer with AFSCME Local 2021. “This political prohibition … sets a dangerous precedent because we’re kind of telling city employees what they can and cannot do on their own time.”

And the prohibition limits their First Amendment rights, Reyes added.

If approved, Proposition D would not override a state law that bars city employees from engaging in that political activity on city time or using city resources. It also adds language that protects employees from retribution if they choose to or decline to engage in political activity.

“This gives the City of San Antonio employees the option to be politically active” but doesn’t mandate it, said Armando Flores, interim director of the local AFSCME chapter.

The progressive group Texas Organizing Project has endorsed Proposition D but is not taking a position on the other propositions, according to Michelle Tremillo, co-executive director of TOP.

Internal polling

While UTSA’s poll showed a lack of understanding of the measures on the Nov. 5 ballot, it also showed broad brushstrokes of possible voter support (or lack thereof): Only the Ethics Review Board measure had more than 50% support, according to the poll’s registered voters.

At the same time, a private survey commissioned by RenewSA suggests that the hill to get voters to support the measures may not be quite as steep.

The Baselice & Associates poll was conducted from Aug. 28 to Sept. 1 and polled 601 likely voters — not just registered ones — with the actual ballot language for each proposition, according to RenewSA. The internal poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Ethics Review Board reforms (Proposition A), allowing employee political activity (Proposition D) and increasing City Council pay received more than 51% approval from respondents in the Baselice poll.

Nearly half of respondents were unsure about the “housekeeping” proposition (Proposition B) that would modernize out-of-date charter language — the longest charter item on the ballot.

Fewer than 48% of respondents supported increasing term limits (Proposition F) and giving City Council authority over city manager pay and tenure, according to the internal poll.

But after “informative statements,” which weren’t disclosed, explaining more about Proposition C, support for that measure “increased for Prop C to 51% while opposition remained at 31%,” according to a Baselice memo regarding the poll results.

The exact wording of those informative statements is proprietary, Morgan said. But they will likely inform the RenewSA campaign strategy in the coming weeks and months, he added.

One of the biggest challenges the group faces is awareness, Morgan said. These “are at the very, very end of a very long ballot. So it’s A) just letting people know that it’s there and B) making sure that they go all the way through to the end. ‘Finish your ballot strong’ is what we’re telling people.”

Another challenge, common with most charter elections, will be educating voters about why the charter needs to change amid an especially fiery U.S. presidential race.

“Within the City of San Antonio, a little over 600,000 people are most likely going to turn out in this [November election] … 465,000 of whom have never cast a ballot on a municipal issue before,” Morgan said.

But the polling is promising, he said.

“We’re confident that they will all get [passed],” he said. “We’ve got unions, we’ve got elected officials, we’ve got business community, we’ve got community groups. So within these six proposed reforms, there are a lot of groups who find good things.”

Disclosure: Erika Gonzalez, a tri-chair of RenewSA, sits on the San Antonio Report’s board of directors.