 Welcome everybody. Thanks for coming out on this very hot evening. My name is Francine Romero. I'm an associate dean in the College of Public Policy here at UTSA. It is my great pleasure to welcome Mayor Ron Nuremberg. I'm going to start by doing a very short version of his bio just for any of you who don't know some of the basics of your bio here. So Mayor Nuremberg grew up in Austin. He came to San Antonio and got his bachelor's degree at the other university, Trinity University, and his master's at the University of Pennsylvania both in communications. He was a program director at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which works to inform public policy debates from a fact-based and non-partisan perspective. He also worked as a program director for KRTU. In 2013 he was elected as the councilman from District 8. He was re-elected in 2015. And of course on June 10th of this year he was elected our mayor. And we really want to thank you for agreeing to do this first major dialogue of your administration here at UTSA downtown campus. Oh, it's my pleasure. It's always going to be back at the other university. I get my stuff arranged. Just a full disclosure of how we know each other. I met you several years ago. We were the civic engagement partner for SA 2020. And I'll call you Ron, because then you were wrong. Ron helped us out a lot of our projects. I was councilman Nuremberg's zoning commissioner for District 8. And we have worked together on some other projects. I would say that we agree on many things, but not everything. So for the format tonight, we have a lot of questions that were submitted online in the last couple of weeks. A lot of questions. So thank you, everybody who took the time. And it was on a diverse number of topics, but they also clustered around some particular topics. And I think you'll see what those are as we get into the questions. I haven't shared the questions with the mayor, with one exception. And if we get to that one, I'll tell you all what that is. I also had just read as much as I could find on all of these topics in the last few weeks. I wanted to find out what people were saying. I wanted to find out the facts of the issues, but also people's opinions on a variety of issues. And because I want to make sure we get some background. I know that sometimes when people ask questions, they know all about a topic. But I want everybody else to know a little bit of background on that topic as well. And I do want to mention that one of the things I really looked at was the mayor's campaign booklet, The City You Deserve. And I want to remind him, because a lot of you do this in your questions, to remind him of what he said he was going to do here. And we're going to talk about those things. It was a contract. The anniversary was a contract. So we want everybody to learn a lot tonight, but of course we don't expect you to have all the answers. This isn't a campaign event, obviously. And I think that citizens will appreciate your frankness on tough issues and challenges. Maybe there are no easy answers on some of these questions. So we'll get into that. I want to get us into the details as much as we can, but I also want to keep us out of the weeds and we'll try to avoid acronyms and inside baseball kinds of things as much as we can. And we'll try to keep moving so that we can get to as many of these issues as we can. And I'm going to take off my watch so I don't forget. We are slated to go until 8.30, and we are doing a live web stream, so I'm going to try and keep to that. Okay, so how are you doing? I'm great. Just to set the stage, so you obviously have a big change right now. You've gone from representing district day as a council member to representing the entire city as the mayor. So can you give people a little bit of a sense of what are the specific new duties and expectations formal and informal as mayor? And I think we all know you're very well prepared, but do some issues require more of a steep learning curve than others? And if you can also help people understand, we have a council manager form of government. So if you can also mention some of the powers that you don't have as mayor, because we don't have the strong mayor or even the weak mayor form of government, San Antonio? Yeah, well maybe I'll start on that and work backward. We are a council manager form of government. I actually like that form of government because it tends to remove some of the politics of day-to-day decision making that we see grip a lot of our major municipalities throughout the country. With the council manager form of government, the council is much like a board of directors for the executive team, which is a staff led by our city manager, Cheryl Scully. I think it works very efficiently. It has for many years in our city and the results are pretty clear. Obviously we have great count of people in those positions, but it's also the structure that allows for the success that we've had in financial management. We know we're one of the strongest financially managed cities in the country. We are efficient. We do a lot more with with less in many cases. So I like to tell people and we talked a lot about this on the campaign side during the campaign that the mayor is just another member of council. In fact, every member of council and mayor simply has one vote. The difference is the mayor sets the agenda, whether it's an A session or a B session, the mayor is essentially the chair of the board. So when it comes to the priorities that are put in front of the council, whether it's policy change, it's initiative, it's a new project, or it's a continuation of ideas or the assembly of council members in different committees and things like that, the mayor is the one that establishes the structures within the policy making body. You saw that recently, last week or the week before, we announced the new subcommittees and that was a first opportunity for me, the council committees, to make some changes that I think would help us, you know, shift direction in some areas of the city. For instance, we established a new city council committee on community health and equity, something that we've never done before at the council. We also established one in arts and culture and world heritage. And these two committees allows us now to have really deep dives and issues focused in those particular areas, whereas in previous councils they may have gotten short-strip or maybe not even talked about at all, more shifted on to the process of just day-to-day staff administration. And the first part of your question was how is district day different, you know, what's new? A lot of things are new. And I've told people that I'm not drinking out of a fire hose, but I'm looking for the two extra hours every day. The volume of work in the mayor's office is different. But I will say that the work is not very much different than it was in district day. And we've talked about that before, district day in the city is known politically as a swing district. It's very diverse. It has an extraordinary number of challenges. It's perhaps one of the most diverse places, I think, in the state of Texas. Demographically, it's a minority, majority district on the north side. It has the whole spectrum of socioeconomics that you would find in the city of San Antonio from the most premier neighborhoods to density of subsidized and affordable, subsidized and sectioned housing. It has a demographic mix that includes the largest refugee population in the city. And then politically, it's split right down the middle. Take a look at any national election presidential or even pre-K for SA, it was a difficult, contentious vote in district day when it happened. It's always right down the middle. And that's not to say, and people call it a moderate area, more centrist thinking. And that's not true. Depending on what side of the street you're on in many cases, you have very conservatively people. And on the other side of the street, you have very progressive liberal thinking. So it provided me an opportunity to navigate a city that's diverse, much like we're sitting in now. And govern well to the whole community. And that's what I would say is just a little bit different as mayor. Now it's as important to me to go into extremely challenged areas of the west side or the east side or the south side as opposed to just staying within a small geographic area where we could target more resources. Now we have to work with 10 districts, with 10 different sets of priorities and achieve equity across the city. That is an extraordinary lift for this council. And I have to applaud them already at this point. It wasn't a week into the job. And here we are at our budget planning session, talking about the fact that we want to make sure that our district resources, our infrastructure management program, which is funded by all of our tax dollars, we wanted to make sure that we're focusing those, not in 10 different sections, but in a way that it focused the resources to the need. So some districts are going to be a little bit more funded than others when it comes to certain infrastructure. And that's because they've been disinvested in for years. So we're having a robust discussion about equity that is a huge quantum leap from where we've been 20, 30 years ago. Okay. That's really helpful. Thank you. Moving into the issues, I think probably the most difficult thing we've all experienced this summer. During the campaign, you referenced the skyrocketing violent crime rate. You called it unacceptable. You said it was probably the most significant issue to voters. This summer, just since the campaign, we've had several shocking episodes of violence. What do you believe is responsible for this increase? And what is the city's strategy of responding to it? Well, this is a big challenge for us not just to determine the causes of it, but to deal with it. You know, one of the challenges is obviously disparity of socioeconomic, of socioeconomics in San Antonio and the fact that there are many areas of town that correlate to the fact that there's high poverty, high crime, and lack of infrastructure and basic services. One of the reasons why one of the approaches to fighting crime is to enhance equity investment. So when we're building streets and sidewalks in San Antonio, we're not just again dividing everything by 10. We're ensuring that we're reinvesting in communities that have not seen new sidewalks and new streets in a long time. This is also important from a school standpoint because the other thing that we see correlated to high crime is low educational attainment. We can do a better job with our public school systems and to support public schools, not by getting directly involved, but by ensuring that our investments in our community, the things that the city does from services to infrastructure, are aligned with the priorities of the school districts to reinvest and to bring up poor performing schools that are invariably in difficult neighborhoods. From a crime fighting standpoint, I've spent the week with the SAPD really marring hands on some of the things that they've been doing over the last few years. The focus for San Antonio Police in fighting crime is preventing it through community policing. We have to restore community policing relationships wherever we can. I worked with a new innovation that Chief McManus brought to the department. We used to have what is called problem oriented policing where we would take staff resources and basically police resources and focus them in hotspots. We still do that to some extent, but he's combined that. The department has combined the problem oriented policing with anti-gain units to what is now called street crime unit. This is a separate unit of the police department that goes throughout a particular area of the community and really gets to know their community. I drove around with them on Tuesday night and 90% of that ride was simply stopping at the hotspots where crime occurs and where drugs are trafficked. Just talk to the community members there. Many of them have been arrested before. Obviously we're not there to arrest them if they're not engaging in any crime, but we're there to get to know them and to ensure that the police are having contact with them to again be present, but also address issues before they arise. That's one element of community policing that also includes things like neighborhood crime prevention, the safe officer program, which need to be supported by the budget. The last thing about crime fighting and really ensuring that we're on a path to success for fighting crime in the future is the budget. I've been very clear about this. We have a structurally unbalanced budget within public safety, meaning that the revenues of the city are growing slower than the expenses in public safety, and that's a big challenge. If we don't have resources growing, if we don't have had proactive policing resources and personnel who are firing our police department, as the city grows, we're going to find ourselves further and further behind the opportunities to prevent crime. So it goes uncomfortably as it does into how we negotiate and how we arrive at contracts through collective bargaining that are balanced for the public, that keep our public safe, that also allow for the resources we need to do a good job and have structural success within the department. Okay, and are you hopeful that this recent increase is not a long-term trend, or what are you hearing about the likelihood that that's going to be a long-term trend that we're just going to have to expect to have to deal with? Well, I had a meeting with Judge Wolf regularly, and obviously they're concerned about the same things. And I asked him to just brainstorm with me a little bit about what he did in 1991 when he became mayor. We were facing some of the very same challenges with regard to drugs, gangs, and just street crime. And we talked a lot about this, neighborhood crime prevention, community policing. These were some of the innovations we're bringing. We're coming to San Antonio for the first time, summit meetings with communities that have been gripped with gang activity. We saw a shooting of a four-year-old boy at a victim of a drive-by just two weeks ago. The community is outraged. We want to bring a focus to that anger into productive dialogue that helps the community heal, but also prevent these things from happening again. The one thing that's different in our community that I am concerned about becomes a larger trend, is the availability of drugs that are far more potent and readily made by our community, inside our community. It's not just drugs from Mexico. It's drugs that kids are making in their garages, opioids, cannabinoids. These are extraordinary challenges for our community because they're cheap, they're available, and they're in some cases deadly on the first contact for some of these folks. We're highly trafficked, and because of that, it's making the policing of gang activity and drug activity much more complicated. It's dangerous for our police officers to work in this environment. We see that every day, which is why my hat is off to the folks that we do have work in this, but that is a challenge that we have not faced before. So the county and the city has been working on a task force to address that issue specifically. I want to get to a little bit more on police community relations because that was one of the big topics that I got a lot of questions on. In your plan, you talked about working tirelessly to restore respect for the police department from citizens, and I got three different questions all about the same topic, but all from a little bit different direction. One was, in your opinion, is there still the need to strengthen relations between the SAPD and minority communities? Another question of what will you do to ensure that the African-American citizens of San Antonio can live our lives without fear, but the police will use undue force and worse when answering our calls. And finally, police rely on community and community on police. How do you plan on working with Sheriff Salazar, Chief McManus, and community leaders to help mend this relationship? So is there a need, what do you plan to do, and how are you working with those leaders in particular? Yes, there is a need. And San Antonio stands in the very best of company when it comes to strong community policing relations. We know what's happening in the rest of the country, just turn on it, let the nightly news on any given day. But we do need to work on police community relations because of, illustrated by the questions that you've got, but also there are politicians who want to destroy that trust. It's one of the reasons why we're fighting so hard against bills like SB4, that would put politics in between the relationship of community members and their police department. We need to restore trust. I went on the street crimes unit right along with a young man named Zeke Holkeen. He's 26 years old, he's a five-year veteran, and he is doing and approaching and working with some of the most dangerous criminals in our community. Coming up to them and talking with them about he's there to serve, there's a better way he wants to help them get out of the life that they're in. He's been on the force for five years, has not discharged his weapon one time, never. So that tells me that police, and he also made that remark that 90% of the arrests they make are repeat offenders, people that they see over and over again. So that tells me that the solution to our policing issues and public safety issues is building stronger communities. I guess we need to work on that. Can you read the second two questions? The second questions were, especially what can you do to ensure that the African-American citizens of San Antonio can live our lives without fear of under force, and how will you work with Sheriff Salazar, Chief McManus, and community leaders in particular? Well, I think it means, and I think both of them are pretty related. I think it means that we should have a zero tolerance policy for actions that are unbecoming of an officer. And I think that the community will demand that. And the reason why that's important is because those are very rare. We know when they happen. We just need to treat them the way we should as a community. That will help us restore trust in communities that have been afflicted the most. The other thing we can do is what the police do on a daily basis, which is to go out in the neighborhoods, to be available, to go do coffees and talk with schools. I mean, Chief McManus and every single one of the police officers I interact with is very serious about being friends and neighbors to the community that they work. It's very unfortunate that a few officers who are out of line drag down the entire police officer community relationship. That's why I think we need to support the work that the police officers do, that the police department does. It's great work. Again, go on a ride along, see the difficulty and the danger that they put themselves in on a daily basis. Work together as a community to really set aside the issues when they do happen and treat them as they should when they do occur. And one of the comments that came up, I thought it was really insightful. Somebody said there's a divide in this community between people who know what it's like to be wrongfully arrested and detained and people who have no idea what that's like. Do you see that? Do you agree with that? I mean, it's hard to say that I understand being in someone's shoes when you haven't been in their shoes. So I do acknowledge that the vast majority of people in this community have no idea, including myself, what it would be like to be wrongfully arrested. So we have to give thoughtful responses and we have to be compassionate with people when they are concerned. When they're angry, they're protesting and we have to work together as a community to restore that trust and the relationship there. And again, it doesn't mean we have to compromise on the fact that we can support our police department and our first responders fully. But we do also have to work together to acknowledge that we will never know what it's like to be in a group that has been, as we see on the news all around the country, disproportionately affected by violence. Alright, well thank you. I'm going to switch gears to charter reform. I brought the charter in case any questions come up. I'm surprised if you carry around that every day. I do too, actually. And so full disclosure, I am on the Charter Reform Commission and I'm actually on the subcommittee that's considering changes to term length and election date. But our role is simply to talk to citizens to discuss it a bit and make recommendations to councils. So we were very much an advisory body. And just to be clear, the city charter is basically the constitution of the city of San Antonio. It sets all kinds of rules and it can only be changed by citizens voting in favor of that change. But we are having a discussion about some changes and you talked about some of these, isn't it? Sure. I guess so. So, one of the things that we've talked about is moving from- By the way, that's also available in Spanish. Oh, yes. Okay. Moving from four two-year terms to two four-year terms. So, either way, we have eight total terms, but the structure will be different. And you pledge to advocate for that change. And we've had a lot of citizens at the public hearings at the public library, probably some of you have been there. And I think citizens are about equally split on whether this is a good idea. Some people are opposed to it. They are very concerned about removing bad apples from office. You know, somebody gets elected, they are not to be terrible. If it's just two years, it's not so bad, but four years, only gosh, you have to wait them out. So, there is also a suggestion to lower the required number of signatures for a recall election. Because right now it's very hard to do a recall election. And so, there may be a suggestion to do that. But even with that, a lot of citizens still think two years is just fine. On the other hand, we know that two-year terms trigger an almost constant election cycle. So, you know, because we don't know, because we're not there, can you really frankly give us some insight on what that's like? I mean, you've just been elected. Are you already having to think about fundraising and the next election being around the corner? Not that that's all that you would think about, but it is, just kind of around the corner. At the same time, would you agree that maybe some citizens' fears of four years being too long is a legitimate fear? Well, my answer to wanting to make sure we have the opportunity to unelect bad apples is let's not elect them in the first place. You know, I support the four-year terms. I think that would be, as I mentioned with the council manager form of government, I'm looking at any opportunity to reduce the amount of politicking in our governance. But, yes, on fundraising, absolutely. The fundraising never ends. It's like congressional fundraising, albeit at very lower, much lower levels. That's not fun and does take some time and probably would be better spent elsewhere. You know, we could perhaps as just thinking off the top of my head if people are concerned about the constant fundraising and perhaps not being able to unelect bad apples, we could propose something like a four-year term but also restrict when fundraising can happen to a shorter period of time. The reality is though, for me, governing sincerely and making listening and civic engagement part of the way we do things, which is what I've done as a civic engagement professional for some time, if you do it that way, you don't really ever have to start or end a campaign. You just have to start putting out some brochures about the work that you're doing. To me, it's hard to say when a campaign begins or ends other than the announcements that are made if you're doing your job of trying to engage the public in the work that you're doing. So bear with me here, this sounds really technical but I think it's going to be something we talk about which is if we were to ask the voters to consider moving to four-year terms, the question comes up about how you handle the transition because you have people right now like yourself that were just elected to a two-year term. There's no way you can make that change from two-year to four-year terms and keep the eight-year total. So the decision has to be made as to whether those of you who are just elected to a two-year term can run for one four-year term and then you would just have six years total or if you could run for two four-year terms and potentially have ten years total. And this is why I would just be gone with the whole conversation about that and just set the changes to a time when all the council members would no longer be there. That's how I understand Mary Hartberger did it when they changed the term limits. I would say just to keep everything objective and on the level for everyone, you just set those changes in a date far enough away that it doesn't affect the seat of the council. Okay. All right. Well, another issue that's coming up with charter reform, something else that you're advocating is changing the municipal election to November. And if you say November of even years for right now, a lot of citizens actually oppose this for a lot of reasons. Some of them say even though we have nonpartisan city elections, it will be on a partisan federal and state ballot, so it has parties. It says that Democrat or the Republican just gave me that quote. People would say yes, this will increase municipal election turnout, but it almost does it falsely. Of course, there'll be more people going to vote because they want to vote for president or senator. And yes, they may or they may not happen to vote for the municipal office too. So you're not really getting informed voting. It's almost like a trick to get people to increase turnout. Or people might choose not to even go down the ballot to the municipal races. Now, Move San Antonio, the young people from that group have been coming out and they have this idea of moving it to November of odd years. Because then you don't get the partisanship piece. Mostly what's on the ballot in odd years is state constitutional amendments. But their idea is that way people get in the habit of just voting in November. Because you guys hear people say, oh, we have another election. They're in May, they're in June, they're all over the place. You could just say no, they're in November. But again, a lot of people say it's just not worth the trouble. If you end up with runoffs, you have runoffs around the holiday season. You leave the school districts on their own having their elections in May. So how will you convince people and are you at all swayed to think about November of odd years as opposed to even years? You know, that's much deeper thinking on the issue of November versus May than I actually have. Just to be honest with you, my sole concern is just to put municipal elections in the best position to get more people to turn out. You know, for me, the argument about informed votes kind of falls flat because we see uninformed votes even in municipal elections that draw 13% of the turnout. You know, having to inform people about who's on the ballot and so forth. The concern about having voters come out who are not totally informed about the election is always going to be there. And then with regard to the partisanship, we can still maintain nonpartisan ballots. And frankly, the legislature kind of likes that idea at least because they've eliminated straight ticket voting, which is a really good thing in my opinion. So why I like November ballots? Number one, you don't run the risk of getting into a runoff in the middle of the summer when students are gone. Two, you know, by past experience when municipal elections in different cities have moved to November, you get huge increases. Austin moved there as they had a three-and-a-half, four-fold increase from one election to the next. Three, by virtue of the fact that seating candidates and council members know that the next election is going to be 40% of a population versus 10%, you end up having to govern to a larger portion of the community, which is good for policymaking, taking into consideration larger portions of the community as opposed to small segments that are just voting. And then fourth one being a great example here, and this is just candid. We have six new council members, seven in new seats if you can count me. In position, who have been in the office now for a month, their first major vote, a couple of them are big already, but their first major vote is going to be on passing a two-and-a-half billion dollar budget for a city that is the seventh largest in the United States. And regardless of your professional experience and your background, there is some basic learning about the city's departments and how city functions and how the city budget is put together and its priorities that has to occur for us to do it well. Thankfully, we have some bets on the council that we will help lead the discussion of in the budget. But it is a concern if we're having the vast majority of the council come in and vote on the most significant thing of the council here two months after taking office. I have extraordinary confidence in the council that we have now, but structurally speaking I think we'd be a better position of the election order in November. Okay, and a lot of people asked if you're going to advocate for a larger council, adding more council members as our city population increases. Right now we have, every council member represents about 150,000 citizens. In Austin it's about 94,000 citizens. In Dallas about the same, another option, the way Houston does it, they have one for over 200,000 citizens, but they also have a five at-large members. So that's another option for us. Would you advocate adding more council members, which would also be a charter division? And when would you think that would be the time to do that? Yeah, I think we certainly should be discussing that as the next census comes on. The redistricting process happens naturally after every election, so we'll be set to take up a new district alignment I think in 2022. But San Antonio has one of the largest constituent to council member ratios in the country. Thankfully not also the lowest salaried council members in the country at the same time. But this is a challenge you end up having to govern a bigger area of the city by virtue of the fact that there's more people to answer to and listen to, you have less time to really focus in on neighborhood planning and so forth. So I think, I haven't jumped to a conclusion yet about what that should look like, but I do think it's a worthy discussion. Councilman Gallagher who's no longer on the council brought it up, he was really concerned about that. I think he was right. And just following up something you said, there's a lot of, we're going to turn it over to your staff. A lot of people submitted questions and said that they call your office or they call various council offices and they don't get return calls back. It can be frustrating, not necessarily with your office, but, and I know you had addressed this in your plan. I called a few city departments trying to get some information to prepare for this but some of them they ring and you don't even get a message. A lot of them you get a message that says we'll call you back, you don't necessarily get called back, but it's hard. I mean you have a small staff, you have a lot of people calling. How are you trying to leave the council and city departments on dealing with that? Well, call me because customer service is hugely important to re-establishing or to building trust within an organization. We take pride in my office. I know we're not 100% that people get calls back or emails back or return letters back depending on how they contacted us within, you know, 24 hours if it's a phone call or an email. I know we're not 100% on that, but that is a standard that we try to live up to and it needs to happen in the city organization as well. And as a board member for the city organization, I want to know if we're not meeting that standard because we certainly want to do that. And I know that our city manager Cheryl Scully also wants to meet that and we just need to be informed. A lot of times an email gets lost in the ether and I hear about it a week later and I tell people when they come in and say, why didn't you answer me? I said, I don't get it. I didn't get it. Email whoever it is you email and copy me. That way you have some redundancy there. We actually do care that we respond. We're doing a lot of participatory activities in the city, participatory budgeting. We've got a speak out program as we build the budget. So we're doing a lot of feedback and closing of the loop of inputs that citizens give us during the normal process of city governance. We want to show you that it works. So when it's not working, we need people to let us know. All right. Kind of a quick question here, but you had talked about in your plan... I need one of your lodges. Oh, yeah. They're not cigarettes. They're less. You talked in your plan about establishing an independent office of policy research for the city and full disclosure, my college would be very interested in working on that. Just full disclosure. But for the sake of argument on the other side, isn't that kind of the job of the city manager and department heads? I mean, aren't they supposed to be providing you the objective, neutral, reliable information and recommendations? Is it a problem? I agree with you that maybe you need that, but is it a problem that you're needing to get that from an independent source? Well, let me be clear. This proposal I never intended to include to consume the whole city process. I think though, just in terms of confidence, we have, well, I haven't lived in many cities, but I think our staff and the competencies and the expertise that our staff has, you should be very proud of and confident in. But we all know that in public institutions, whether they're higher ed, their government or whatever, there's a real challenge for our society to restore trust in our public institutions. One of the ways that we can do that is to show that the processes, when they get difficult and they get controversial or objective, I fully acknowledge in some difficult issues people are concerned that the information that they receive from the city, from the policy side or it's a staff side, they're thinking, well, yeah, they're just trying to advance their own conclusions. We can disprove that very easily by ensuring that we have some, in certain cases, bodies researching and providing data that has been sanitized from any politics or city process. That's the point of the Office of Policy Research. I'll give you an example. The non-discrimination ordinance. This was hugely controversial and there had been a lot of dialogue, a lot of concerns raised, a lot of challenges, and then a lot of research and information provided to the council. If this was coming to us in a structured way, I think that we may have been able to bypass some of the really real craziness that occurred, which brings me to the second point of that proposal, which is equivalent of a federal registry. People who are familiar with the federal registry know that when Congress passes a proposed legislation, wants to put in the law, there's a federal registry where it's listed. The public can go online, it's published, it's held in basically an ice, on ice for a period of time so that there could be very transparent public disclosure. You have a concern, you can write a letter, you can write an email, and all those public concerns and comments are posted for the world to see. It'll be very helpful, not in every case, but in certain circumstances, like a non-discrimination ordinance, to have that kind of dialogue and feedback. So it prevents two things. It prevents people from hiding behind, anonymously, really ugly comments of divided community, and it lets that bright light of scrutiny shine through because the public is being able to see the comments that are being made. But also it prevents us from doing what I consider to be bad governance, which is that we change, holistically change, laws and ordinances on the very day that we're voting on them. So after that law or ordinance comes down from that registry, we know it has been fully vetted and we know that's what the vote is going to be on, up or down, and you can't holistically change an ordinance from when it goes on to the agenda to when the vote is taken. I happen to have still some part burned on how the whole Uber Lift thing went down on that particular topic, but that's another example. And again, I offer this as an idea proposal. I've talked to a few council members about it. I've talked to staff about it for a couple of years, and we just want to explore good ideas and we want to reject bad ideas, but that process goes nowhere unless we're honest enough to bring them forward and that's what that one is. Okay. All right. I want to switch gears. Another topic we've got a lot of questions on is income inequality in the city. And so I want to talk about the Distress Communities Index because I think that's a good way to highlight this. So the Distress Communities Index ranks cities on a number of indicates, like a number of citizens with a high school degree, the median income ratio compared to the state median income, changes in employment levels, changes in commercial establishments, housing vacancy rates. And on that list, this came out about a year ago, San Antonio came in 55 out of 100 cities, which right in the middle is not great, not terrible. But the inequality rank, in terms of when you get into the cities and rank it by zip code according to those indicators, that we are number one in terms of the discrepancy between our best zip codes and our worst performing zip codes and 07 zip code, which is where we are right now, is one of the worst, probably the worst in the city on those in the Kansan. So just as a comparison, 49% of adults in this zip code lack a high school degree, whereas in the 58 zip code, only 2% of adults lack a high school degree. And this is all, there has been a recent decline in poverty rates in San Antonio, but those inequalities remain. And of course cities are limited in how much you can do to fix the problem, you can't have a redistributive tax really in the city. But in terms of making it matter less, I think this one question really summed it up as mayor, what plans do you have to change the quality of life for people in the income segregated neighborhoods, and will you have support on that from the full council? This is an extraordinary lift, but I, you know, I've led on to what I'll say already, which is that we, I think yes, I think this council is ready to address it. One, because we've been talking about this notion of equity, restoring equity in our community, as a basis for budgeting. That's the first thing. And two, we have a public that's demanding it. There were great changes on the council, electorally, because the people who are there on council were giving a message of restoring equity in our community, acknowledging history's mistakes, acknowledging that there are members in our community that often are on the short end of the public investment stick, and we're going to do something about it. And I think it starts with using equity as a guide to reestablishing our budget priorities. And that's going to be done across the board. We established that as a priority during our goal setting session that I mentioned during our budget process, and we were only days together as a council. But we've established committees, in one case, Community Health and Equity Committee, and Community Health is a good indicator for equity. But also through a comprehensive planning process, and this was the foundation of work during our SA Tomorrow planning process, which I, again, was proud to chair since its inception, and I'm glad that we now restored a committee to focus on that. The SA Tomorrow plan is meant to accommodate growth that we know is going to occur in our city, and make sure that it benefits every part of our city, and that we restore equity. The challenge to that, and the reason why it was so important to reestablish this committee, is that the implementation of SA Tomorrow is the day-to-day operations of the city, how we do transportation, how we do housing, how we do all these different things that we do on a daily basis. We can't let that simply become an administrative function of the city. We have to make sure that we are watching the city grow and recalibrating as we need, but focusing investments in areas and doing projects and initiatives, starting initiatives, that achieve equity. And that's why I'm glad that we now have a body, a committee of council, that is going to be watching that, doing the recalibration, bringing things to the attention of the full body to vote on. And it's headed by Councilwoman Gonzalez who has been talking about this for years, because she represents what is one of the most impoverished areas of our city historically, which is the west side. And I'm really excited to watch her work on this committee. So what specific quality of life indicators do you think we might see improvements in in the next few years? Well, I'll tell you the ones I want to see improved. I think the ones that we're ready to see improved. Some of them are already trending in the right direction. Things like teen pregnancy recidivism. What we also need to see improved though, educational attainment. We've been crawling in the right direction. We need to make much more significant gains. We also need to see crime improved in areas of town, from drugs to levels of gang violence. And then affordability. We need to make sure that incomes rise and affordability is maintained as we reinvest in communities, particularly in the urban core, near west side, near east side. We're doing some great work there. A lot of it is subsidized, but we need to make sure that as we make those investments, that we're maintaining affordability. And that's the basis for me of what needs to be a comprehensive housing strategy. Okay. And I hope we can get to some housing questions. But you focused a lot on infrastructure. Do you see human capital as one of the key pieces of infrastructure, especially with the younger people? I had asked Priscilla Camacho from the San Antonio Chamber for some data. One of the things she told me that was disturbing is there are about 40,000 young people in San Antonio, 16 to 24-year-olds, who are completely disengaged from school or work. So how do you focus on the human capital infrastructure piece? Yeah, I think that's a great question. That's something we constantly have to remind ourselves at the city, because we get involved in filling potholes, we get involved in putting cars on the street, and cleaning parks. We forget everything we do as a city. If it doesn't benefit the citizens of San Antonio, if it doesn't benefit the families of San Antonio, then what are we doing it for? So there is absolutely the foundation of that as human capital. With regard to the people who have been disconnected either educationally through crime or simply are just not engaged, that's why the basis of my work has always been civic engagement. We are always looking for participation in our systems of governance, whether it's the planning elements that we're doing, whether it's community policing, or simply being engaged through neighborhood associations, and we're trying to restore that activity. So does that answer your question? Yes, I think so. These young people in the front room had asked, I asked them if they had a question for the mayor, and they came right up with a question, so I want to pose that to you. Okay. Which I hope I get this right. Skateboard parks, and we hear this a lot. Why don't we have more skateboard parks or BMX parks, which I don't completely understand, but parks that have... Wow, you guys are already skateboarding? Oh my goodness. Why don't we have more skateboard parks? It's because we don't have enough young people boating. There have been some skate park projects which I'm pretty proud of. I will readily admit I don't understand the skate park phenomenon I did when I was 12, 13 years old. But if that's something that we think is needed in our community to help provide young people an outlet for fitness and for productive activity, that I certainly supported. I know Councilman South Island, I think, has built a skateboard park in his community. I'll go take a look at it, and see if that's helpful. See what he thinks, and I'll ask him, should this be a bigger priority? But we can certainly do that. But we need you to vote when you turn 18. I think you will. So, because you're into fitness, do you eat healthy all the time, or do you sort of backflop? I don't eat healthy all the time. I try to whenever it's available to me. But one of the reasons I enjoy maintaining my fitness routine is because I love the ETH. And so I try to balance that out. Well, another big issue, transportation, so let's just get into that. One of the statements in your plan is to advance the vision of new high-capacity transportation options like commuter rail, in addition to better bus service, more bike lanes, et cetera. And one citizen asked in part, what opportunities do you envision to convince people that San Antonio must develop a robust mass transit system? And someone else asked, can you ever really convince people that mass transit reduces congestion? Probably not. But how would we go about convincing people that we're ready for mass transit in San Antonio? Tell them to go fetch something for me at the northern end of 281 and 5 o'clock. You know, truthfully, people who are waiting for a pain threshold with regard to traffic congestion in San Antonio shouldn't need to wait much longer. The challenge is people won't blame us for not doing transit. Our peers won't blame us for not doing mass transit. Our children will. The truth of the matter is we're going to bring another million-and-a-half people. They'll be born here, they'll move here to San Antonio in the next 30 years. We'll be the size of the city of Chicago. And if we don't do something about transportation, we already know what's going to happen. Your average commute time we're going to add another half a million vehicles to our roadways within the next 20 years. Those bottlenecks that you sit at, the ones that really drive you nuts, your wait time will be up 900%. That's if we just do what we're doing now, which is build roads and just kind of implement the current system that we have today. I tell people we can't afford not to do transportation, right? Modern transportation. And so we're going to actively work on this. And I campaign on this so nobody should be surprised. However, everybody should feel comfortable that at the end of the day, if we're going to do mass transit, voters are going to tell us whether or not it's going to happen. We're working on a plan. It's citizen directed. It connects the major arterials and points of congestion in our community where people live, work and play. And we're going to connect those and it's going to cost money. We're going to invest in it as a community. And we're going to do that if the public I think it is. I've been having conversations about this since before. I was a council member in the far north ends of town the Lotus area, all the way to the deep south side, west side, east side, everywhere in between. And they're all saying the same thing, which is don't waste our money. Don't waste our money on transportation projects that don't provide transportation relief. So when we come out with a plan for transit it's going to work. It's going to address transportation problems. But to answer your question more directly is this going to reduce congestion? It's going to provide us options so that if you don't want to wait in congestion, you don't have to. We're not going to be able to force people out of their cars, nor would we want to. Everybody here I'm sure drives a car. The goal is to reduce the rate at which we are adding cars to the road, which will help us to reduce congestion as we build the capacity. We need to do this. I'm convinced of it. And that's why I really want to work on getting the youth vote out. Because those folks are the ones that are going to have to live at the consequences of our transportation choices in the longest. I'm really proud that we've already chosen some right paths on this. We're investing in a railway trail system. We're doing safe bike lanes. We've got a continued build on to that. We're doing our Vision Zero plan to build pedestrian pathways in a safe way. We're doing elements of a multi-modal system correctly. We just have to now take the big leak, the quantum leak, which is to get a mass transit system in San Antonio. What are the options for funding that? So, we do know that in order to build a mass transit system anywhere in the country, you do have to have federal cooperation. My hope is that the current federal administration will know that transportation is important and will continue to keep the programs funded that are currently there, which would basically provide for local communities who are willing to invest, would provide roughly half of the capital expenses for that. We do have to do work through our MPO to steer dollars towards capital improvements on a mass transit side. One of the reasons why I'm really, really excited and proud to have Councilman Saldana as a Vice-Chair of our MPO. But then we actually have to come to the voters and I'll be honest with you we don't have all of the solutions yet. We're working on those. I believe that we will find the solutions within the next couple years. We're going to bring a plan that you can vote on for a better transportation future but it's going to require us to make a choice between whether we're willing to invest in the future and transportation to actually improve quality of life and keep our economy going or whether we want to mortgage our future on our children's back by not investing and make it cost more for them in quality of life and our economic slowdowns and things that occur when we don't have a transportation system that works. I don't know if this would involve a sales tax but I did want to talk about that in 2020. I think that of course we're limited in how much of a sales tax we can have limited by the state. In 2020 Pre-K for SA would be up for reauthorization. Edwards Up for Protection Program which I know you love as much as I do. And the Greenway system would all be up for reauthorization but there's going to be a lot of other solid projects maybe some transportation projects that are going to be competing for those two eighth of a cent slots in there. Have you given any thought yet because probably in about a year these discussions are going to start. Have you thought about which of these you will do? Let me rewind because everyone who doesn't like one particular part of that sales tax initiative that everyone voted on better than another will quickly say well once you get rid of that or once you get rid of that we should be proud despite the fact that we have an underfunded bus system that we use the strength of our public investment to do really innovative things. The Edwards Up for Protection Program has done amazing things for our community to preserve water to protect our natural habitat to really provide for quality of life. It has provided the Greenway trail system which we surpass any community in the country in terms of building a Greenway trail system that will be part of a transportation system that is also providing recreation and quality of life. On pre-K for SA this is the newest initiative perhaps the most controversial. I don't think anyone would disagree that education in San Antonio needs to be a priority and the elements that are working on it are not enough certainly not enough in the state. We need to make sure that we're putting children into a path of success and one of the leading indicators for that is whether or not they're ready to enter kindergarten. I voted for it and we are seeing enormous gains from this program for the kids who are enrolled. They enter in as you would expect below their peers and they're leaving the pre-K year far better than their peers nationally on cognitive ability on math skills on literacy. That's hugely important. Now will they retain those skills and when we see efficacy into 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade that's what we're going to be observing over the next several years as those cohorts move through the higher grades. If the program doesn't work let's talk. If the program works but there are other programs available that can allow us to do other things with those funds, let's talk also. But if the program works works well and there are no other solutions to pre-K early childhood education that this community can lean on, I'm going to support it. Brandon, it's going to require a lot more people to support it because it's a voter-approved initiative. But, you know, we can't compromise on education in this community. I'm a strong supporter of the environment as I know many of you are. So we've made choices strategically. Now how do we get to transportation? There are ways we can fund that we haven't chosen not to you know, the staff has proposed some other options. We have to have a discussion about how we're going to invest in MasterAins and I do not deny that one bit. But we also have to acknowledge the fact that we are subsidizing to a huge extent transportation that simply does not work anymore. We all know that as we expand lanes we're going to continue to do that because we have to. But as we expand lanes, as we add these big interchanges and so forth, that's a subsidy. And this is why. If you look at the connectors between 281 and 1604 that cost a couple hundred million dollars each, I love that because I used to work over there. I used to live there. But, it is a subsidy for the vast majority of this population and we consider the fact that they're used at full peak about four hours a day. The vast majority of this public doesn't thrive on the roadways that we all choose to invest in. And certainly not to the extent that they're needed in 612 lanes at a time. So we have made choices and some of them I would argue are the least efficient. We're going to have to make choices on new directions coming up soon again. Okay. That's a solution that works for both. Okay. Local control, we had a lot of questions on this. Right. So, just sort of a state, local government 101 came across a Texas municipal league publication and they were talking about the cities and where they get their money from. So property, taxes and bonds and how little of it comes from the state. And so the statement they said was instead of revenue Texas cities receive something more important from the state. The broad authority to govern themselves. Well that's something changing obviously with that. So we have a lot of citizen questions about what's going on in Austin in this special session. We have bills in place right now to limit our municipal authority on well the whole sanctuary cities issue on annexation property tax increase maybe on tree protection. We were talking about that as a little confusion of what's going to end up with that on cell phone and texting and cars and of course the bathroom bill. And I think people have seen you testifying in Austin and people are clear on your strong disagreement on this. But we got a lot of questions about, you know, we're not going to be able to stop this. So how are we going to deal with it? And I did want to speak separately about annexation and how are we going to assuming all these bills pass can you, I know it's a big question, but how is the city going to deal with this with the limits on property tax? I know the city has not increased property tax in a long time, but that rollback election would be triggered not by you raising the property tax but by more income coming in which just naturally happens because the values go up. Of course if you want to address the sanctuary cities how much that's going to impact, talk about a little bit about how that will impact our community relations. Chief McMann has talked about that here at the town hall. The bathroom bill what do you do about enforcement? We have to enforce it here you have to enforce it at city hall the soul cell phone use that would all go away. That's a whole airing of grievances Francis. At the same time many citizens support what the state is doing so I don't want to be here saying the state is terrible there are people who very much support what the state is doing but how much effort is it going to involve for the city to just have to deal with all these massive changes so quickly? Going to Austin these days is like going to the whaling mall it's it's difficult it's challenging and that's because we all don't want to see these things happening we know by and large that they're bad for the cities we know that the cities are where the state is generating it's miracle it's strength in its economy one of the largest economies in the world yet it continues to happen and we say what are we going to do about this? Well that's why elections matter we have to remember that we have to raise our voices because the same constituents that I hear from that all these things that you just listed would be terrible which they are are the same ones that are electing the folks that are doing this? Actually no because our barrage county delegation has actually been quite helpful but we're all Texans and it's frustrating to say the least what we're going to continue to do is speak out on all these issues and try to get the public engaged try to get people to call and write their legislators but it is curious the fact that most of these things that are on the agenda were already defeated in a special session and the governor has called a special session in the middle of the summer to fast track a number of these items which would be devastating to our communities I have hope that a number of them will be watered down or if not killed because we do have some strong members of the house we all know that one of the best examples of a statesman in Texas is our speaker Joe Strauss and he seems to be listening about the local communities and truthfully the real sin in this attack on local authority is the fact that we know what our constituents want because we live with them we talk with them on a daily basis we know their needs and their concerns and you know, sure if citizens in Brenham don't want trees they can pass a local ordinance that allows them to do whatever they want in San Antonio we've fought and scraped the little local authority we have to protect trees and we don't even tell local homeowners to do in their own backyard yet the state from representatives far outside of our community are coming in and telling us what we can or can't do this flies in the face of some of the basic foundations of governance self-governance and democracy um gosh I just feel like I'm complaining do you want me to talk specifically about any particular so yesterday was pretty bad day as far as annexation goes so it looks like that bill will probably pass the state senate yesterday prohibiting unilateral annexation so any annexations from our city would have to have a vote from the property owners a majority vote it looks like it'll pass in the house since the governor had an op-ed last week that referred to the current practice of unilateral annexation is tyrannical taxation without representation the king george would be proud of so I think he's going to sign the bill um so uh rather than complain about this what can we do I mean that annexation is an important way that the city does control development as it spreads out is there a way to try and work with maybe some of the special districts that would be formed in the unincorporated areas how can we fix this it all passes well and again this is another reason why mixing up annexation and legislature's dreams of controlling the entire process for cities is really running up against best practices and what we know is good for communities we had a knock down drag out in our own annexation program in the city of san Antonio as you remember for many reasons we do that well as local communities because I have to talk to all the community members around there before we actually support something like that so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that one of the local authorities that they're going after in the cities is to allow us to grow which again is one of the few ways that we can continue to support economic growth because the bulk of what the city the state uses for the funded services comes from our growing communities you know we're going to continue to work on this and I believe that there's a strong compromise that addresses the issue of allowing people to vote but also does our very basic job and maintaining some land use authority we have to do that if we're going to protect our military bases we have to have some land use authority around our military bases to protect from encroachment that would threaten our military we have to make sure that we have some land use protections around important public elements like our aquifer or our troop again habitat land use protections because the state has not granted that authority to counties must happen within cities and if we're going to drastically change annexation authority around the growing city they have to provide us some land use protections to this point there's no solution being put forward by the state to do this and we're very concerned because the joint land use study that protects our bases in San Antonio from Lackland to Randolph to Camp Bullis to Fort San Houston calls for a five mile buffer of land use protections around the bases Senator Campbell has some early ignored that guidance and we believe that there's a great compromise to be had if provide for a vote around the bases provide for a vote in the areas that are going to be annexed but we just provide those land use protections in the end everyone gets what they want and we are able to protect what is a national priority our department of defense and the assets that we have here in joint base San Antonio so you're hopeful there might still be a compromise on that bill I'm an optimistic person I'm optimistic that at the end of this session agenda there is an item called adjournment that gives me great hope you mentioned this there was some confusion and some drama about annexation over the last year there were all these areas were in and then some were in, some were out I think a lot of citizens felt that maybe some council members didn't or the mayor at the time didn't want new citizens annexed to then be angry and voting in the mayoral election you did vote against the 281 do you think we sent a message that despite all we said about well annexation is always in the public interest that we kind of sent a message that it's getting a little political here and that it drew some pushback well you know maybe so and you know you'd have to go back and look at the deliberations so you know there's always going to be some of that politic that enters into in terms of voters who are angry and all that but truthfully if you look at the transcripts of the base that we were having at council they were about land use authority they were about concerns of whether or not our actions on city council would end up advancing density or creating density in areas of the city where we actually want to control for sprawl that was my concern you know it's not in our best interest to building a sustainable resilient city if we continue to see density go up to 81 and density go up by 10 it's going to happen but if we can best focus our development and make it more profitable for developers and for businesses and for private citizens to live and to build and within the urban we're building a community that's more sustainable for future generations that's that's my concern and within those concerns there's still opportunity though opportunity though to control for land uses that would be dangerous for deterring encroachment from our military bases encroachment on to our military bases all right we're getting a little close on time but I definitely want to talk about Mr. Ridge Mr. Ridge Water Pipeline so I think Josh Bordesky's here and he said that this is arguably the thorniest most pressing policy decision that you face we had a lot of questions from citizens still concerned about the impact on their water bills you had spoken out about a year ago about concerns about changes to the contract it was not illegal for changes to the contract but you felt they were inappropriate I think there's still a lot of concerns I talked to Amy Hartberger a little bit concerns about the impact on the Carisa Wilcox aquifer which is this is drawing from concerns about unsolved water the ideas that's going to get sold down the line and we'll just get that perfect amount that we need but there are questions about what if we get more than we need we're going to have to use that instead of the cheaper aquifer and obviously concerns you've raised about transparency so where are you right now on that well I'm still concerned which is why I'm really glad to be on the board of saws now where we can actually directly address some of these issues so there's a number of concerns that you mentioned there at council we did not have the authority by virtue of the contract to approve any changes that were made to the contract for this rich contract between 2014 October 2014 to today changes have been made in the contract that I believe fundamentally changed the nature of the project the nature of the Vista Rich project those changes in my mind because council has a fiduciary obligation to the public it serves those rate payers need to come to council because the city of San Antonio is a signatory on the Vista Rich project that was one concern I had as a member of the saws board as ex officio now that I'm mayor I'm on the saws board my commitment is any major changes to that contract are going to come to council because I think that's the right thing to do with regard to the actual production of the water I still remain concerned and I've voiced this to saws at our first meeting that the permits that produce the water are different from the permits that transport the water and if the transport permits are not at the length of time of the production permits for the life of the contract we may end up finding ourselves with producing water but not being able to legally transport it to San Antonio that's a problem because we know that San Antonio is a growing community if we don't have a long-term source of water for our city that's an issue which is why I also support the project unless there's a better alternative because we can't afford not to take care of long-term water security in San Antonio and right now this has been the most elegant solution to long-term water in San Antonio and we have to continue to do better on conservation that was also a concern that I had that we're just going to address and you know I know that some people are concerned about stage one watering I plan to with Councilman Sandoval who's setting up the equity community help committee we're going to take up that conversation again because it's a council issue it's a policy issue and I also want to make sure that as Amy said that the other end of this pipe because it's not just San Antonio now we are partners with Burleson County and Milam County that when we engage in a long-term transfer of water from one part of the state to another we are at destinies we are tied so I want to make sure that even if the science is wrong that there will be that even if there is drawdown in those wells where property owners rely on for water that we have solutions in place to make sure that we're doing our part as partners to address that and so we talked about a well mitigation fund to allow for the equipment those property owners have to be dropped lower so they can access the water so at the end of the day though I want to be very clear this is a nuanced issue I know it's hard sometimes to fall all the comments that are made and certainly my position is a nuanced one but as a matter of priority for economic reasons for quality of life reasons for life sustaining reasons we can't afford not to secure a long-term water for this community which is why we are always going to be looking at best available best available options and this includes a robust portfolio that will that will have the south the brackish water the south land on the south side of town stronger supportive conservation efforts and again full use of Edward's aquifer as the basis of affordable waters play okay and we're running out of time I was going to say it's just strange because I was reading the report about why they recommended not going to year-round water restrictions and it was because we would actually use less water and as a result SAWS would have to increase their rates so SAWS does a great job in conservation but they aren't the business of selling water and this is where we disagree I had this debate with councilman Crier it was a great debate on council SAWS is not in the business of selling water and that's why watching how these projects develop is really important SAWS is in the business of providing water to its public it's a public utility it's not a profit making enterprise we want it to do well but we wanted to make sure that we have water to supply for us in future generations at an affordable rate if we're only in the business of selling water we'd be buying up every drop that's available in Texas and selling at the highest rate possible that's a clear distinction I have which is also going has color the way I approach these different projects I know we're running out of time sorry to believe we're running out of time let's keep going I did want to just talk a little bit about the campaign we're dealing with the campaign it's over but I think for people the story of this campaign is the sort of going to be the day they saw the liberal ronde roll out what was your first reaction to that and how do you think it changed the campaign it didn't change ours it's a fair question when I saw liberal ronde the website it was so ridiculous that I knew at that point we had won the election because you don't resort to those measures unless you're truly desperate and we had saw it seen it in the numbers before even back in February that this was our path to victory and you're going to walk it and part of that path is just being as sincere and open as possible so that nobody's surprised and that I don't have to be somebody else I can be wrong and that we can talk about this as a contract and I'm not going to change my tune now that's what was going through my mind and sometimes when we got the angry and stuff like that I had to go outside and get some air but it was a reminder to stay focused and just continue to campaign the way we were doing the one I didn't share with all of you ahead of time okay so I wanted you to share with us some places just to bring this in real quick because our city is so big people don't experience all parts of our city so for example a lot of people with history date never see the cool things downtown and maybe vice versa so what are sort of three things, three events that you think really reflect the unique aspect of our city that you'd like to share with people so Bruce told me this in a little different way so let me answer the question that he gave me okay three places in San Antonio alright well so I was racking my brain on this because you immediately go to the places that you're familiar with that are usually on brochures but you wanted something a little off the people path yeah so I was thinking about this and three that I would name the first one is Fox Tech it's the first high school in San Antonio it is a part of our history it's a part of our past but it's placed in San Antonio's downtown quite clearly is the link I'm not talking about what they might do there but it's quite clearly the link to San Antonio's future what happens at the Fox Tech site will be significant for this entire city economically and growth wise and everything else the second site I would name is the quadrago at Fort San Houston we are military city USA that is the birthplace of that moniker it's the center of activity for joint based San Antonio and if nothing else that is the center of what we know as modern San Antonio and then the third place I was really having trouble with this but there's some really exciting things I'm interested in sustainability I'm interested in resiliency obviously I'm a nut on water I would name the Twin Oaks the Dos Rios area where we have our desal facility where we have our water reclamation sewage blanking on the word you know what I mean sewage treatment plant there's some really innovative stuff that have put saws on a map nationally internationally perhaps that it's happening there on the south end of town which is also a link to our future because that's going to be going forward part of the focal points of water security in terms of the desal facility and how we do recycle water and so forth and I would encourage anybody who hasn't been there to go visit it you can see how the sewage is treated but it will really make you proud because that's all publicly invested infrastructure that is really paving the way for utilities across the country those are great suggestions and remember that documentary I think you can still see it online called Water Blue's Green Solutions and they looked all around the country at amazing examples of things and that plants one of the places they went to and towards so yeah I mean those are amazing suggestions thank you for those and well thank you I can't believe we spoke on that thank you all very much watch our basement clients