San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones marked her first 100 days in workplace by sending out an announcement blaming the town’s lack of high quality information for her failure to ship on key marketing campaign guarantees she’s pledged to ship on by now.
Friday marked the 100-day milestone for Jones, who promised to carry radical change to Metropolis Corridor throughout that point interval.
Amongst different issues, the previous Below Secretary of the Air Power mentioned she’d streamline the approval course of for low-income housing initiatives, develop a home-ownership program for frontline employees and replace the town’s Tenant Invoice of Rights, in response to her mayoral marketing campaign web site.
She additionally mentioned she’d increase Pre-Okay for SA enrollment and maintain “company landlords and buyers accountable for his or her function within the housing disaster” throughout her first 100 days.
To date, none of that’s occurred.
“In exploring options on subjects like early childhood schooling, reasonably priced childcare and workforce improvement, the info shouldn’t be available to tell our decision-making, and by working with Metropolis Employees, we are able to higher perceive and tackle these gaps to place plans in place that construct a powerful basis throughout the town,” Jones mentioned in an announcement issued Thursday.
St. Mary’s College political science professor Artwork Vega advised the Present he can’t say for certain whether or not the town retains tabs on these information. Nonetheless, he mentioned it’s doubtless an absence of file protecting bought in the best way.
“I wouldn’t be shocked that if that seems to be the case that [the city] shouldn’t be succesful or doesn’t have the capability or time to gather that information to assist together with her agenda,” he added.
Nonetheless, Vega added that the problem extra doubtless hampering Jones’ means to get stuff executed at Metropolis Corridor is an absence of a voting coalition.
“The opposite a part of that is constructing the agenda amongst a majority of the council in order that she will then transfer ahead together with her plans,” Vega mentioned.
Information questions apart, a lot of Jones’ time in workplace has been mired in political squabbles, most notably over how Council Consideration Request are introduced up for dialogue. That battle has put her on the other facet of many on council and led to a 10-1 loss as she tried to close down an animal-welfare proposal that she thought-about too imprecise.
In Jones’ assertion on her first 100 days, she targeted on wins akin to a gathering with a delegation of semiconductor chip producers from Taiwan.
She additionally pointed to council’s unanimous passage of a Metropolis Constitution modification that encourages council members to chorus from signing non-disclosure agreements. A ban on council signing such agreements was additionally among the many issues she promised to ship throughout her first 100 days.
Even so, Jones’ lack of ability to expedite her aggressively timed Metropolis Corridor agenda isn’t her fault alone, UT-San Antonio political scientist Jon Taylor mentioned.
Certainly, Jones took workplace as the town faces a $170 million-plus finances deficit, a flood catastrophe that killed 13 San Antonio residents and a large downtown sports-arena challenge initiated by her predecessor, Ron Nirenberg.
Even so, Jones’ political missteps made an already tough state of affairs tougher, Taylor added. Particularly, he pointed to her determination to go to warfare over the CCR course of towards council members with way more expertise in metropolis politics.
“I don’t suppose she would have created a notion in each print and broadcast media that she was in over her head if she wasn’t choosing fights with incumbent metropolis council members that had been needlessly confrontational,” Taylor mentioned.
Subsequent week’s print version of the Present will embrace a extra in-depth take a look at Jones’ first 100 days in workplace.
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