Two websites cropped up this week that have to do with voting in San Antonio. Vote210 shares basic information about voter registration, polling locations and what’s on the local ballot Nov. 5 — including the six charter amendments. The other, Decision210, focuses on the amendments and encourages voters to approve all except Proposition C, in the interest of pay equity.
Prop C would remove the salary and tenure caps from the city manager’s position and give the authority to set the terms of their employment back in the hands of City Council. Currently that pay is limited to 10 times the lowest-paid city employee (about $374,000) and tenure at eight years.
Advocates for the change say it would help the city attract and retain top talent to operate the city organization, which has a nearly $4 billion annual budget, more than 40 departments and about 14,000 employees. San Antonio has a council-manager form of government, meaning the city manager runs the organization’s day-to-day.
“When we are talking about recruiting top talent, one might argue that that’s something we want the entire city organization to do” by paying all workers a comfortable wage, said Molly Cox, who is self-funding and updating the websites with a team of volunteers, including her partner Kiran Kaur Bains and their former colleague Mary Kate Hull.
Cox and Bains are former leaders of the now-shuttered nonprofit SA2020, which was involved in civic engagement activities, data analysis and equity initiatives.
“All propositions, including Proposition C, were developed with community input through the Charter Review Commission,” said Gordon Hartman, local philanthropist and entrepreneur who serves as a chair of the RenewSA political action committee. “Voting for Proposition C ensures that San Antonio can compete for top talent with cities like Austin, Dallas and Phoenix. Currently, San Antonio is the only Texas city to cap its city manager’s salary and tenure, which limits our ability to attract the best person for the job.”
One of the propositions, however, was added to the ballot after the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees lobbied the committee and City Council. Prop D would ease limits on city employees’ political activity.
RenewSA plans to raise and spend more than $1 million to get all the propositions passed, with an emphasis on Prop C.
Cox does not plan on fundraising or actively campaigning. She estimates she has spent about $1,500 on the websites so far, with friends and experts donating their time. They were planning to launch the sites for the likely contentious mayor and council member elections next year, but the placement of charter amendments on the ballot expedited the launch.
The pay and tenure caps come from a charter amendment in 2018 that nearly 60% of voters supported. At the time, Cox did not support it, she said.
“I definitely was like: Hey, I don’t think we should be doing this,” she said, and that was mostly because the proposition was targeting then-City Manager Sheryl Sculley. Sculley was embroiled in a yearslong battle with the firefighters union, which got the measure on the ballot.
The union has not yet decided if it will oppose Prop C, officials said Friday.
When Sculley announced her retirement later that year after 13 years on the job, she was the City of San Antonio’s highest-paid employee, earning a base salary of $450,000 in 2017 and $475,000 in 2018. In 2016, she earned close to $590,000, with a base pay of $425,000 and other compensation.
“That referendum was definitely about Sheryl Sculley, just as I believe this one is about [current City Manager] Erik Walsh,” Cox said. “I think today we know better. … The fact that we’re having a [complex] conversation about local government, our entire local government, and boiling it down to the recruitment of one position feels very short-sighted.”
The new websites’ founders saw an opportunity to start a serious conversation about pay equity within the city — not to criticize Walsh, she said.
The lowest-paid city employee in fiscal year 2024 received about $37,400.
In Bexar County, according to the nonprofit United for ALICE, a “survival budget” for an individual is $29,520 — that’s with minimal contingencies and without children or savings. A regularly updated MIT calculator puts that number even higher, at nearly $42,000 for an individual.
“Inside our charter currently, it is already written that our city manager could get raises by simply raising the salary of the lowest paid employee,” Cox said. “A 10-to-1 executive-to-worker ratio is not horrific.”
But it is unique to the City of San Antonio.
“San Antonio might be the only large city that ties [city manager] pay to ten times that of the lowest paid employee, and it’s also one of the only cities that is spending millions of dollars on a voter-approved workforce development program,” Cox said. “And what an amazing conversation that could be if we were talking about all of these things together.”
SA2020, which Cox led for 10 years before handing the reins to Bains in 2021, dissolved this year after the city stopped funding the nonprofit and it called for City Council to support a cease-fire resolution for the war in Gaza.
The new websites have nothing to do with that history, Cox said.
“We have no dog in this fight other than we love our city,” she said. “We want our city to be better. We want our city to do better. And so here’s some stuff we were contemplating. If it makes sense to you, great, and if it doesn’t, no problem.”
Disclosure: Erika Gonzalez, a tri-chair of RenewSA, sits on the San Antonio Report’s board of directors.