In the race for mayor, incumbent Ron Nirenberg and challenger Greg Brockhouse have starkly different visions for how to resolve what is sure to be a central issue of the campaign: How to rebuild the city’s economy and get residents back to work.
The COVID-19 pandemic devastated much of San Antonio’s economy, particularly the city’s restaurant and hospitality industries, initially wiping out more than 120,000 local jobs. Though the region had regained tens of thousands of jobs by the end of last year, many businesses and low-wage workers are still struggling.
To kick off his campaign, Brockhouse released a number of lofty ideas — among them building a brand-new airport and having the city’s lobbyists get more involved in legalizing marijuana and gambling at the state level. The former city councilman believes those efforts will help the city get out of its predicament.
“Our city needs a mayor who is solely focused on protecting and helping create jobs for our citizens, with a relentless pursuit of employment for every San Antonian,” Brockhouse said.
Nirenberg has at least a few economic wins in his corner to make a case that he’s the “jobs” mayor.
Voters gave the mayor the go-ahead in November on his $154 million sales tax initiative to pay for job training and college degrees for tens of thousands of residents over the next four years — resulting in the biggest electoral victory of Nirenberg’s career and marking it as his signature economic achievement.
Nirenberg also has touted more than $1 billion in major manufacturing investments announced over the last two years — Toyota’s planned $391 million expansion of its South Side plant, Navistar International Corp.’s $250 million truck plant and Japanese transmission maker Aisin’s incoming $400 million plant in neighboring Cibolo.
“Jobs has been the singular focus of the work we’ve been doing towards the rebound,” Nirenberg said. “We’ve made some incredible strides while not placing an undue burden on our taxpayers and residents. That’s the kind of work that will continue as we recovery from this pandemic.”
But Nirenberg fell short on a bold pledge in 2018 to add 70,000 jobs within two years and “to help create more jobs than any mayoral administration in San Antonio’s history.”
Nirenberg sees it differently.
“I set an aspirational number for creating jobs to inspire our community to continue pushing forward on job creation,” Nirenberg said. “We have landed some major economic development projects during that period, and we will continue our work to provide job options for San Antonio residents.”
Even without COVID-19, Nirenberg likely would have fallen short of that goal. The San Antonio metro area added 39,200 jobs from when the mayor made that pledge in an April 2018 speech to January 2020 before the pandemic began in earnest stateside, employment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show.
Chalk that up partially to “historically tight labor markets” in San Antonio as well as across the country in the years before the coronavirus hit, said Keith Phillips, senior economist at the city’s branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The city’s unemployment rate averaged 3.2 percent from February 2018 to February 2020, a historic low but also a “factor that restrains job growth,” he said.
Others say mayors — who can set at least some economic policy such as tax incentives for businesses, development regulations and property taxes, among others — have little sway on broader economic conditions and are largely at the mercy of the market.
“I really wouldn’t blame him for not getting to 70,000,” said David Macpherson, chair of Trinity University’s economics department. “I wouldn’t give him all the credit for getting there.”
To Brockhouse, Nirenberg hasn’t taken an ambitious enough approach to job growth, COVID-19 or not. The city’s response under Nirenberg to the immediate economic crisis spurred by the pandemic has focused too heavily on long-term recovery like workforce development, he says, and not enough on immediate relief for small businesses — a view the mayor has often contested.
“He would rather train them into something else,” Brockhouse said. “I call him a ‘job snob.’ He thinks those jobs are beneath him.”
Many of the jobs lost because of the pandemic will take years to come back if they come back at all, Nirenberg said. That’s why it’s important to train people for jobs that are open now, he said.
“We’re trying to bridge that gap so people who have been unemployed or are underemployed as a result of the pandemic get back into ladders of opportunity,” Nirenberg said.
Since the pandemic began, the city has spent more than $37 million helping small businesses stay afloat, whether through grants or by helping mom-and-pop shops get their hands on protective gear such as hand sanitizer and masks to safely open their doors.
For Brockhouse, that isn’t enough.
Brockhouse wants to dip into the city’s reserves — which sit at more than $200 million — to help pay for $50 million in loans to small businesses to expand and hire back workers.
“To me, it’s criminal that families are struggling, businesses are struggling and we’re sitting on this cash,” Brockhouse said.
City officials have repeatedly warned throughout the pandemic that raiding the reserves would result in serious consequences regarding the city’s finances. Doing so would damage the city’s credit rating and borrowing power needed to take out debt to build roads and capital improvements, officials have argued. It would also leave the city in a worse position to cover costs such as police and fire protection in case of a sudden, catastrophic blow to its coffers.
“It’s that last resource we would have in the event we were really having difficulty making things like debt service payments or just keeping our basic operations functioning,” said Ben Gorzell, the city’s chief financial officer. “That’s where we would tap into it.”
Nirenberg agrees.
“If a dam breaks, if we can’t keep our fire department or police department running, that’s what this fund would be used for, an option of last resort,” Nirenberg said.
It’s unclear whether it’s still necessary for city leaders to go digging around in their own coffers for money to help small businesses, said Macpherson, the Trinity professor.
Congress pumped $325 billion into small business assistance as part of a larger federal stimulus package in December — which included $284 billion for another round of the Paycheck Protection Program, through which businesses receive forgivable loans for paying employees and utility bills. The new Democratic-majority Congress is more open to passing robust stimulus bills and is weighing another $50 billion in small business aid.
“They have to be faster than the feds,” Macpherson said of city leaders. “And the feds have got a head-start.”
But the reserves aren’t the only place Brockhouse would want to dip into to fund his small business loan program — he’s also eyeing Nirenberg’s prized workforce development program.
Brockhouse opposed the plan when it was on the November ballot, arguing that it wouldn’t do much to help out-of-work residents in the short-term. But after voters overwhelmingly backed the measure, he says he doesn’t want to see it dismantled.
Still, he sees potential fat to be trim from the program that could instead be put toward loans. Under a plan presented by city staff in December, the city would hire 63 new municipal employees to staff a new agency to enroll participants in job training and college programs and help make sure they don’t drop out. The city has mounted a nationwide search for an executive director.
“That’s his job creation: city bureaucracy,” Brockhouse said.
Brockhouse wants to see the money that would pay for the agency used for business loans.
But it’s looking increasingly unlikely that City Council will agree to the 63-person plan. The idea drew swift criticism from local grassroots advocacy group COPS/Metro, which backed Nirenberg’s ballot initiative and turned out voters to pass it.
Council members “won’t allow for a top-heavy program,” the mayor said.
“Based on what the staff proposed, I think we can conduct the program with far fewer city staffers hired, that those funds will be going to program implementation by the partners involved,” Nirenberg said.
Another idea Brockhouse has to foster economic growth: buy land and build a new airport there.
The idea isn’t a new one. Business leaders and policymakers have complained for years that San Antonio International Airport is a drag on the city’s ability to lure new employers and talent. More than a decade after AT&T moved its headquarters to Dallas, the parting words of CEO Randall Stephenson still haunt them — the airport is outdated and has too few nonstop routes.
In addition to giving a new airfield room to expand, Brockhouse posits a new airport would stimulate growth in the neighboring area if it were placed on the West or South Side.
“By all means, we will outgrow that airport in due time,” Brockhouse said.
But a Nirenberg-appointed committee to examine the city’s air service needs and figure out what to do with the airport have ruled out building an entirely new airport.
Doing so, they determined, would cost billions upon billions of dollars in land and construction costs and, depending on the location, might drive even more travelers toward Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
Instead, the panel determined the city can rework the airport at its current location on the city’s North Side to meet projected flight demand. The plan now is demolish and replace one terminal, renovate another and build a third terminal — at a cost of at least $2 billion. City Council is expected to hear the plan in March.
Going that route, Nirenberg said, can meet the city’s air service needs “while saving taxpayers’ money, which ends up with the fact that SAT, in the heart of the seventh largest city in the United States, is a strategic competitive advantage for the future of air service in San Antonio.”
“There’s multiple aspects to that vision of the long-term future of SAT,” Nirenberg said. “But the question of where does it go, where does it fit has already been answered.”
Brockhouse doesn’t have any specifics about how to go about building a new airport — most importantly, how to pay for it. But he wants residents to reconsider the idea.
“I put that in there because I wanted people to say, ‘what the hell’s this guy talking about? That thing’s ridiculous and expensive and we can’t do that right now,’” Brockhouse said. “You’re absolutely right: We can’t do it right now. But if we don’t start it and get it done and we don’t do it in 10 years, this city is so upside down.”
Among the more novel ideas Brockhouse is putting to help revitalize the economy: look to the possible legalization of marijuana and gambling at the state capitol to create new revenue streams for the city.
Brockhouse — a steadfast ally of the police union — sees decriminalization of marijuana and gambling in Texas as inevitable, even if state lawmakers overall have been slow to embrace those measures or in Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s case, oppose them outright.
San Antonio should try to prepare to accommodate the potential expansion of the marijuana market, whether through “zoning and development strategies” or by directing the city’s lobbyists in Austin to weigh in on such matters, Brockhouse said.
“This is that forethought, thinking of what we need to be prepared for, because the name of the game is city recovery, getting cities back to work getting cities bringing in revenue,” Brockhouse said.
"enter" - Google News
February 14, 2021 at 05:07PM
https://ift.tt/3jPybc4
Marijuana, gambling enter debate on post-coronavirus economic recovery in San Antonio mayor’s race - San Antonio Express-News
"enter" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2TwxTMf
https://ift.tt/3d6LMHD
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Marijuana, gambling enter debate on post-coronavirus economic recovery in San Antonio mayor’s race - San Antonio Express-News"
Post a Comment