We’re shortly approaching San Antonio’s first open mayoral election in 16 years, and the stakes for native voters couldn’t be larger.
A whopping 27 candidates threw their hats within the ring to switch outgoing Mayor Ron Nirenberg, and 59 candidates are operating for 10 Metropolis Council seats, all of that are up for grabs on Saturday, Might 3, smack-dab in the midst of San Antonio’s annual Fiesta celebration.
On the similar time, quite a few Bexar County municipalities are additionally holding their very own elections, plus bond and faculty board elections in a number of districts.
That’s loads of candidates to maintain monitor of.
The San Antonio Report’s authorities and politics reporter Andrea Drusch has been working additional time to get to know all 86 candidates by monitoring marketing campaign filings and finance stories, attending reside occasions, dissecting their web sites, conducting in-person interviews, and wrapping collectively every part we learn about them right into a single Voter Information the place you could find out extra about what they hope to perform if elected.
The following mayor and council members will determine what San Antonio appears like for many years to return.
We’re within the midst of a number of city-shaping financial growth efforts like a downtown stadium for the Missions baseball group and a doable relocation of the Spurs to Hemisfair within the works, on the similar time the town is going through ongoing challenges of housing affordability, public security and infrastructure, to call a couple of.
At the moment’s Voter Information launch is simply step one in all our complete plans to cowl the upcoming races.
On April 8, we’ll host a mayoral debate with the Better San Antonio Chamber of Commerce that’s free and open to the general public. Ship us your questions by textual content, and perhaps you’ll hear them requested on the talk stage!
We’re additionally partnering with KLRN to tape and air a brand new version of the Voter Information present we premiered final yr, with the objective of reaching as many citizens as we are able to with the detailed data on this information. Our group can be working laborious to place collectively boards within the 4 open Metropolis Council races, with extra particulars on these to return quickly.
Placing collectively the Voter Information has turn into a labor of affection on the San Antonio Report. We spend months monitoring down candidates and sifting by way of Q&A responses with the lofty objective of making particular person candidate profiles for every candidate on the poll.
This yr we confronted a brand new problem after we seen an uptick in AI-edited imagery being utilized by numerous campaigns in official marketing campaign supplies.
This got here as a shock — and doesn’t reside as much as our journalistic requirements. Within the period of LinkedIn headshot mills, we determined to permit handout photos for the Voter Information in circumstances the place we didn’t have a greater possibility.
For our information protection, nevertheless, our customary will stay that we’ll solely use staff-produced photographs, with out using AI, to cowl these candidates.
Over time, readers’ response to the Voter Information has been so overwhelmingly constructive that we all know this effort is a necessary a part of our nonprofit newsroom’s civic engagement work.
Every election, we attempt to enhance the method and reply voters’ questions extra absolutely than we ever have earlier than. This yr we additionally sought so as to add some readability about what these Metropolis Council districts appear like, with maps made by photojournalist Brenda Bazán.
When you have concepts of instruments you’d like see within the subsequent Voter Information, tell us!
You possibly can click on by way of every web page of our 2025 Voter Information right here:
