As Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai was wrapping up his countywide listening tour on UTSA’s main campus Wednesday night, another group of residents was laying plans to force changes to the way the county formulates its next budget, spurred on by Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert.
Roughly 60 neighborhood association leaders, nonprofit representatives, officials of local municipalities and community organizers packed into San Antonio College’s William R. Sinkin Eco Centro at Calvert’s invitation.
Calvert is now the longest-serving member of the court, reelected to a third term last year at the same time voters picked Sakai to succeed longtime Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff.
In recent months, Calvert has also become the loudest critic of arcane county governing procedures, which have long lagged behind the City of San Antonio in terms of community input and transparency. He has dominated recent Commissioners Court meetings by sparring with colleagues over how to spend federal pandemic relief, how many public discussions they should have about the budget and how much influence of county staff should have over policy.
On Wednesday night he launched his latest attempt to influence the county’s spending priorities after the court signed off on a nearly $3 billion budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year last month without his support. Calvert abstained from the vote and vowed to spearhead the formation of a citizens advisory committee that would take a closer look into how the county is spending its money.
“Many of you have served with the city, in the budget process, on bond committees, reviewing those things,” said Grace Rose Gonzales, one of three committee chairs who opened Wednesday night’s meeting. “That really doesn’t happen at the county.”
Headed into the budget vote, Calvert produced a list of numerous projects and organizations he says he requested funding for from the county, but that staff either did not fund to the level he had requested, or did not fund at all. He invited many of the potential recipients of that spending to make their cases at a budget work session the day before the budget was approved.
“What does that mean to democracy? That means that the staff is running the county, and your elected officials are not,” Calvert said Wednesday.
“In my office I’m creating a department of government accountability and resources,” he said. “There’s definitely a disparity, not only in funding, but how staff treats different precincts, and we want to follow it like a hawk.”
$10 million requests
County staff and Calvert’s colleagues contend the budget process was no different this time any other year that Calvert has served on the court.
“What happens every time, near the end of the budget cycle, is commissioners come in with specific requests, whether for infrastructure or programmatic for some organization,” Commissioner Justin Rodriguez (Pct. 2) said.
This year “every commissioner’s requests were all roughly in the area of $10 million, other than Commissioner Calvert’s, which was significantly out of line with the other commissioners,” he told the San Antonio Report.
County staff concluded that it would direct $10 million to requests from each commissioner, a move that caused Calvert to list out loud each of his requests and the amount he was reducing it by to get down to $10 million.
“None of it makes sense to me,” said Rodriguez of Calvert’s behavior. Rodriguez said he offered to help Calvert find funding for some of his initiatives outside of the budget cycle.
“I’ve never seen anything like this and I’ve had almost 20 years now in public service, working on school board district budgets, and even in Austin,” Rodriguez said.
New dynamics on the dais
Up until the budget discussions, Sakai and Calvert, both Democrats, had been allies in their critiques of county procedures, to the frustration of some county staff.
Sakai also raised many concerns about both the county’s lack of transparency and the staff’s largely unchecked influence on past spending decisions during his campaign. Shortly after taking office he initiated a review of county procedures by asking County Manager David Smith to account for every department’s operating procedures and present them to the court for discussion.
During an April presentation on the budget procedures, many members of the court agreed they want to explore changes to increase transparency and help newly-elected members advocate for their priorities. A majority of the commissioners concluded, however, that major changes would have to wait until next year, because staff was already too far along in the budget process for the 2023-24 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.
In the aftermath of the budget’s adoption, Calvert has openly accused Sakai of mismanaging the process in email blasts to his supporters. He has also played video clips of colleagues, including exchanges he had with Rodriguez on the dais, at meetings of his supporters.
“Commissioner Calvert, God bless him, can do whatever he feels is appropriate,” Sakai said in an interview after his own meeting with Precinct 4 residents last month, aimed at soliciting feedback on spending priorities for the coming year.
Calvert did not attend the town hall meeting, a version of which Sakai has now held in each of the county’s precincts.
“He can do whatever he does, from advocating from the dais, or, as he’s indicated, he’s considered litigation,” said Sakai, who characterized the conflicts as evidence of “the passion and the intensity” Calvert brings to the role. “But I’m a judge, I’ve got to balance that with all the needs of the community.”
A diverse coalition
Calvert’s Eastside precinct includes some of the county’s most economically disadvantaged communities, and his push for additional funding to make up for past inequities has resonated with some constituents.
“I’m going to call this what it is, it’s the outcome of gerrymandering and redlining,” said Kimiya Factory, director of the racial justice group Black Freedom Factory.
Over the course of roughly two hours Wednesday night, Calvert ran through a list of groups and events he requested money for that he says were shortchanged in the budget, including the NAACP, a Juneteenth celebration and the River City Cluster of Dog Shows.
Leaders from some of the organizations were in attendance, including Corazon San Antonio and Windcrest Councilwoman Cindy Strzelecki. (Calvert’s list stated he requested $1 million for a pool in Windcrest, but the county only funded $535,000.)
“The press coverage is all wrong,” Calvert told the audience. “They try to say these are Tommy Calvert’s things. These are your requests, they are not my ideas.”
So far Calvert’s effort has drawn a diverse coalition of allies, from civil rights activists with whom he’s had long relationships, to government accountability hawks who have previously focused on spending by the City of San Antonio. Wednesday night’s audience even included former San Antonio City Councilman Roger Perez, who thanked Calvert for his efforts to increase transparency.
Details of committee’s directives were still being hashed out the day of the meeting so some attendees arrived with little sense of the time commitment. Still, many seemed eager to get to work.
Along with Gonzales, who serves as one of Precinct 4’s appointees to the Small, Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprise Program Advisory Committee, the leadership team included Dan Rossiter, a computer scientist who ran unsuccessfully for San Antonio City Council earlier this year, and Colette Holt, a lawyer who specializes in procurement and contracting.
An agenda distributed at the event indicates the group plans to convene seven times between November and May to come up with formal proposals to take before the court.
In an interview after Wednesday’s meeting Calvert declined to comment on whether he was still considering legal action pertaining to the new fiscal year budget.
As the group members introduced themselves, however, several people were already calling for Calvert to take on a bigger role.
“I want to recommend to all of us that in the future … maybe we can see Tom Calvert in a higher position so can he help everybody,” said Diana Castillo-Perez, an organizer with the League of United Latin American Citizens.
