This column has been updated.
When the heads of search committees also happen to be board members, it’s not unusual to see them end up in the top job themselves. But timing, coincidence and optics aside, that’s not how Trish DeBerry, Centro San Antonio’s interim chair of the board for all of 26 days, suddenly fell into the CEO position of the downtown advocacy organization.
Wednesday’s announced departure of CEO Matt Brown, who held the job for four years, and the appointment of DeBerry to replace him initially had me thinking she must have accepted the interim appointment to the board in a Texas two-step engineered by the board, which she previously chaired in 2018 and 2019 when she was the principal and CEO of her public relations firm, The DeBerry Group.
That’s not what happened. As I spoke to various individuals connected to Centro, I learned that Brown, indeed, wanted to pursue personal interests in California — and while remote work is a thing, leading Centro San Antonio is a hands-on, downtown San Antonio task, keeping everyone on staff visible and close to local businesses and City Hall.
Rumors of a looming change at Centro began to circulate months ago, according to various stakeholders who confided in me at the time. Some in the downtown business community and the city leadership felt Brown “was not a good fit” as Centro’s key liaison between city government leaders and downtown business owners.
Brown, recruited here from Santa Fe, New Mexico, always struck me as someone a bit too hip and New Age for the Centro position, whose leader has to speak the same language as downtown developers, River Walk business operators and senior city staff members. Brown, in my estimation, was an arts and culture devotee more interested in placemaking.
Pre-pandemic, downtown was all about placemaking. Now it’s about redefinition.
Brown, to his credit, presided over the stabilization of the troubled organization after a 2017 embezzlement scandal led to the departures of Centro CEO Pat DiGiovanni and its chief operating and financial officer, Tony Piazzi, who were let go in the wake of the embarrassing theft. People with short memories forget how the troubled organization was effectively stabilized in recent years.
Still, the sudden departure of Brown and rapid hiring of DeBerry caught many by surprise.
The usual board strategy in such shifting circumstances is to reach a mutually acceptable agreement with the departing CEO, followed by the hiring of a search firm to conduct a national search. Finalists are brought in for interviews and then a new CEO is hired. It’s expensive and it takes months.
Centro, its board members say, needed new leadership now. The convention and visitor sector is far from full recovery, downtown office towers remain hollowed out and several local companies have decamped from downtown digs to new addresses at the Pearl, elsewhere in River North or even farther from downtown.
Board leaders met late last month with DeBerry in her interim role to discuss the urgency of refocusing Centro San Antonio on addressing new strategies for downtown revitalization. They didn’t want to recruit another newcomer. They wanted someone who knows all the players and the issues and could hit the ground running.
Would she step in? DeBerry said yes.
DeBerry comes with some political baggage she will have to shed after her arguably ill-advised campaign for county judge, her questionable alliance with former city councilman Greg Brockhouse in that campaign and her profile as an overly ambitious Republican who quit her county commissioner seat less than one year after taking office to pursue the chair long held by former Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff.
DeBerry’s record in pursuit of elected office does not mean she can’t succeed as Centro’s new CEO, but how well-suited she is to advocate and help lead a downtown revival remains to be seen. She won the job without anyone else being seriously considered, board members confirmed last week.
On the plus side, DeBerry, a former on-camera television reporter, did build a successful PR agency and gained a reputation for competence and responsible conservative business credentials. She is no Trump Republican. She has strong support from the board. And, in a city that still has too few women leaders in business and civic circles, her appointment is one more step in the direction of gender equity.
Coincidentally, two retirement announcements made last week by Witte Museum CEO Marise McDermott and San Antonio Area Foundation CEO Marjie French add up to a serious loss of accomplished women leaders in the nonprofit sector.
The DeBerry I know is warm and personable with a sharp sense of humor in private among friends and colleagues, but she appeared far less friendly in her short tenure as county commissioner, routinely using her seat on the dais to target Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar, a Democrat, who might have the most challenging job in the county: administering the overcrowded county jail and a corps of underpaid deputies.
During her county judge campaign, DeBerry took issue with San Antonio Express-News veteran reporter Bruce Selcraig, whose unpublished profile of DeBerry was subsequently spiked by the newspaper’s publisher and editor after an unusual face-to-face meeting with DeBerry. That led to another reporter being assigned to the story. Selcraig shortly afterward was dismissed, prematurely ending a distinguished reporting career that dates to our shared years as young journalists in the Dallas newspaper wars of the late 1970s.
Neither DeBerry nor Brown returned my calls for comment.
DeBerry is taking over as Centro’s CEO weeks after the organization unveiled its new Downtown Tomorrow Strategy. Implementation of that plan will be a challenge. It identifies a downtown residential population at 60,000 people, which represents a footprint far greater than the narrow downtown zone now occupied by Centro.
Will Centro expand to serve the fast-growing neighborhoods of River North and Southtown as well as the near East Side and near West Side? Last time I checked, its staff didn’t even venture as far south as Hemisfair. Yet the new plan identifies its two “core foundations” as a “clean, safe and resilient” center city with enhanced “mobility.”
Good luck on both objectives. The broader downtown community, if we draw a circle around those 60,000 residents in surrounding neighborhoods, is an area beyond the tourist zone, with many streets unsafe for cyclists and pedestrians and tarnished by litter. It will take a much larger army of Centro ambassadors to expand its reach and a major culture change at City Hall to convince engineers to make surface streets safer for those of us who prefer to travel on foot or by bike.
Most San Antonio residents who live, work or socialize downtown, or who entertain visitors on or around the River Walk, are aware of Centro’s ambassadors, who wear brightly colored shirts, khaki pants and straw hats. With welcoming smiles, these unsung workers keep downtown neat and tidy while providing conventioneers and other visitors with friendly advice on restaurant and bar recommendations, as well as directions to the Alamo.
I donned their garb one evening some years ago to experience their work firsthand, which you can read about here.
DeBerry will be successful if she can take this under-appreciated program and, with the necessary city funding, expand it. Centro’s ambassadors are 95% funded by private property owners in the Public Improvement District (see map). Stakeholders would like to see a substantial increase in city funding.
That is, after all, the major challenge for Centro and local government: to treat the people who live and work in and around downtown as well as San Antonio treats its many visitors.
