Councilwoman Sukh Kaur, who faced one of toughest reelection races of any sitting council member this year, fended off nine challengers to win a second term in District 1.
She bested challenger Patty Gibbons with 65% to 35% in Saturday’s runoff.
Speaking to supporters Saturday night at Roundabout in Beacon Hill, Kaur nodded to how unusually personal the race became.
Critics used the open records process to pore through District 1 council staff’s emails and text messages, hired a private investigator to follow the councilwoman to a bar, and even dug up a sealed DWI record from 12 years ago, when Kaur was a 24-year-old teacher in Houston.
“This has been a really tough campaign,” Kaur said Saturday, drawing laughter from the audience. “Politics is dirty. I have learned how thick my skin truly is.”
This year’s race to represent San Antonio’s most urban council district turned into a heated referendum on the city’s plans for a new NBA arena, Minor League Baseball stadium and other major development projects — all happening within District 1.
Kaur, 37, has broadly supported plans to turn San Antonio into a more modern city.
But in a district stretching from downtown all the way up past Loop 410, her first reelection race drew a slew of critics unhappy with the city’s handling of such projects, with a particular emphasis on those worried about preserving San Antonio’s historic neighborhoods.
Of the nine challengers, however, the race came down to a runoff with Gibbons, an outspoken neighborhood leader from the district’s northern edge.
Though Gibbons’ anti-urbanization platform and complaints about public input on big projects matched many of the other candidates in the race, her conservative personal politics presented an uphill challenge in one of the city’s most progressive district.
‘Breaks in the system’
Kaur, who unseated an incumbent two years ago by harnessing voters’ frustration about city development projects, acknowledged that communication breakdowns over major projects are still an urgent problem.
The city is hiring a new Public Works director, it recently audited the department’s communication process, and Kaur and other council members have even requested an independent auditor be brought in for a more thorough investigation.
“This is the biggest issue that we are facing,” Kaur said at a recent debate. ”I believe in order to move forward, we have to understand what is happening. Where are the breaks in the system?”
Further, she suggested, the council was also often left in the dark on big projects — something other council members have also lamented on the campaign trail this election cycle as they also faced criticism over city projects.
Overall, however, Kaur said the city has to keep pursuing big projects, like a Bus Rapid Transit route and affordable housing, if it wants working-class residents to be able to live here.
As for the downtown entertainment district known as Project Marvel, she said, the city has to keep finding ways to expand its tax base to fund the needs of a growing community.
“If we just move all of our dollars towards streets and sidewalks, we won’t have funding for anything else, like public safety,” she said. “So we need that additional generation of revenue to be able to fund the needs of the neighborhoods, and that’s what’s important.”
On Saturday night, Kaur took a moment to appreciate all that she had endured in the reelection race.
“They threw everything at me this election cycle,” Kaur told supporters. “From a private investigator to making comments about who I am and who I’m not, all of the mail that we can imagine, to changing the color of my face — if that’s not racism, I don’t know what is.”
She went on: “Residents don’t care about the negativity. What our residents want to hear is policy. … That’s why I’m so proud that the residents voted in our favor today.”
