There is a huge pay disparity for elected officials in Bexar County and San Antonio.
Proposition E, one of six charter amendments that San Antonio voters will see at the bottom of their November ballots, which would raise council salaries by roughly 45% — still lands City Council members and the mayor nowhere near the salaries of their county counterparts.
After a 3% increase for fiscal year 2025, Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai’s salary is nearly $205,000 and the Commissioners Court’s four commissioners each receive $162,000 with an additional $9,000 vehicle allowance. They oversee a budget of nearly $3 billion.
Currently, the city’s 10 council members get $47,500 and the mayor gets about $61,700. The City of San Antonio has a nearly $4 billion budget.
Prop E would bump that up by about 47% and 42%, respectively, to $70,200 for council members and $87,800 for the mayor. Pay increases will be tied to area median income for a four-member household of the San Antonio-New Braunfels metropolitan area, which fluctuates every year.
The federally calculated area median income for an individual in 2024 in this region was $62,000.
Officials recently interviewed by the San Antonio Report generally agreed that the qualifications and workload were roughly the same for the court and council — so how did this gap get so large?
It has to do with how the government entities were established. Under state law, commissioners can give themselves raises whenever they want, experts explained.
Raises for council members are up to the voters.
What should council pay be?
Earlier this year, San Antonians pushed back against six-figure salaries for council members when the idea was floated by the Charter Review Commission, and even the scaled-back amount sparked fiery debates before it was placed on the ballot.
In order to fully serve constituents and attract candidates, proponents said, council members should at least be paid what they referred to as a living wage — otherwise, only retired, independently wealthy, or people with lucrative, flexible jobs can afford to be elected officials.
Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), a former high school math teacher, said in August that he couldn’t afford to start a family without taking on a second job.
“My focus is ensuring this role is accessible to regular, everyday people,” McKee-Rodriguez said last week. “It would be extremely challenging for a teacher to leave their job, as I did, take a more than $10,000 pay cut, and serve full-time on City Council.”
Last year, Councilwoman Ana Sandoval (D7) cited the low pay as one of the many reasons she resigned as her family grew.
But others have characterized the pay increase as greedy.
“… [O]ne should never underestimate the eager alacrity of politicians to come up with reasons to get paid more,” Councilman Manny Pelaez (D8), who maintains a law practice and consulting company, said in August.
Contrastingly, there was no similar public or commissioner outrage in 2023 over a plan to standardize and steadily increase commissioners’ pay.
“Some people will think we commissioners make too much. Some people think we make too [little],” said Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores (Pct. 1) said last year. “With my degrees from Princeton and Harvard, compared to my classmates, I could be making a whole lot more.”
Texas Constitution vs. City Charter
County commissioners don’t need to ask voters for permission to give themselves raises because they are automatically granted that ability, and others, by the Texas Constitution and local government code, said Professor Jon Taylor, chair of the Department of Political Science and Geography at UTSA.
“County governments are essentially administrative arms of the state, so they tend to fall under different rules,” Taylor said.
“There are some counties that pay very well and other counties that are smaller population that do not pay very well,” he said. “It just depends on what part of the state you’re in. We are in one of the largest counties in the state of Texas — there is an expectation that you would pay our county commissioners and the county judge well.”
The court, along with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, oversees the jail and various infrastructure.
“The biggest thing for county commissioners is roads and bridges,” Taylor said. “They’re kissing babies and breaking ground.”
Unlike council members and the mayor, who can serve up to eight years, commissioners do not have term limits.
“That is typical of Texas law in general,” Taylor said.
The only people that have term restrictions within the state’s three branches of government are Texas Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals judges — they cannot run for the position again once they turn 75.
When the City of San Antonio in 1951 adopted its current city charter, which functions as a constitution for the municipality, it became a council-manager form of government. At the time, council members and the mayor were part-time, more akin to a volunteer board, Taylor said, while the city manager handled implementing policy and overseeing the day-to-day operations.
“The idea was that city council members and the mayors were much more like citizen legislators,” he said.
They were paid $20 per meeting, capped at $1,040 per year — which continued until voters approved the current council salaries in 2015.
“Now, in the large cities of Texas with council-manager systems, we pay them much better than we did, say, 30 or 40 years ago,” Taylor said.
This November, voters in Dallas will consider raising the mayor and council’s salaries to $110,000 and $90,000, respectively (up from $60,000 and $80,000). Future raises would be adjusted according to the local consumer price index.
Higher pay, higher quality?
Former Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who served as a council member and mayor in the ’80s and ’90s, said there are some justifications for the gap in how city and county officials are paid, but argued that council members should get paid more.
“There should be some disparity,” he said. “The commissioner’s court is in charge of management as well as policy. City council doesn’t do management.”
The county also oversees a bigger population, Wolff said. The city’s population is nearly 1.5 million, the county is about 2 million. On the other hand, council members typically have more official meetings to attend, plus they develop local laws and oversee planning and land use.
But paying council more won’t necessarily mean higher-quality leaders, Wolff said: “I really don’t think pay has to do with quality. Look at Congress.”
Higher salaries can, however, broaden the pool of candidates, Taylor said.
“Are you going to be able to attract people to run for office, to run to serve as city council to serve as mayor? If you’re paying a pittance, the answer is not necessarily,” Taylor said. “What you get instead is what we had before: … Developers, developers and more developers and financiers. … They had the deep pockets of self-finance.”
Council has seen diverse sets of leaders — certainly not all of them wealthy — throughout the years, but it’s unclear how many others chose not to run.
“We need health care workers, educators and folk from backgrounds that represent San Antonio in all its diversity to serve in elected positions and, unless we want our council to be comprised of part-time council members with outside employment, there has got to be a change,” McKee-Rodriguez said.
Prior to 2008, council members and the mayor were limited to two, two-year terms.
“Looking back, under the constraints that we had in terms of pretty much zero pay, I probably couldn’t have done it much longer than four years,” Commissioner Justin Rodriguez (Pct. 2) said of his time serving as District 7’s representative on council in the late 2000s.
“It [was] just hard to sustain,” Rodriguez said. “We had a young family at the time, and so I was kind of juggling a law practice. … In fairness, it is a full-time-plus job. I mean, it’s hard to do anything else in terms of the demands from your constituents and your neighborhood associations and all the other committee meetings and assignments that you have.”
Members of City Council may choose to decline all or part of their salaries — a practice that was recently halted at the county level.
Several commissioners had been declining to receive pay increases for years, which meant that their successors would also be paid at a lower rate, ranging between $131,000 and $148,000.
That changed in 2023, when Bexar County assembled a salary review committee that recommended a base pay of $150,000 plus a 5% pay increase for the 2024 fiscal year.
The committee found Bexar County’s elected official salaries — which includes the county judge, legal judges, sheriff, district attorney and constables — were roughly $5,000 to $30,000 below the average for the state’s five largest counties in 2023.
The court was slated to receive another 5% bump in 2025, but voted to decrease that to 3% in a tight budget year.
Bexar County ‘judge’
Why is the county judge called a “judge” if they aren’t a practicing judge? While the current Judge Sakai served as a district court judge for 26 years, the position does not require any legal experience.
The “judge” is really the county’s executive, Taylor said, but “for some reason, we decided we want to still use archaic terms from 200 years ago.”
It actually stems from European colonization of eastern North America, he said. “When we established the Republic of Texas, they borrowed certain legal antecedents and constitutional antecedents, and one of them was basically borrowing from Virginia and Kentucky and elsewhere that had these county commissioners or county judges that served as executives.”
In an emergency situation, a county judge can preside over a legal proceeding — which may have come in handy back in the day, Taylor said. But it’s a largely outdated function, especially in urban counties.
“Unless you are in a situation where you have no judges available in some small county out in West Texas somewhere, it’s just not happening,” he said. Ironically, “people from outside of Texas, particularly in the East Coast, are like: ‘What the hell is a county judge?’”
Reporter Andrea Drusch contributed to this article.