Feb. 16, 2023 | Development over recharge zone

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Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us for this week's edition of On the Record.

We have a lot to get to this week, including a look back at the life of Jesse Trevino, who passed away this week.

Also, all those downtown construction headaches.

The latest on those.

But first, we are starting with a policy update with the city that could affect just how the city develops over the coming decades.

Joining us to talk about that is trustee of the San Antonio Water System, Amy Hart Berger.

Thank you for joining us today.

We appreciate it.

Now, first of all, tell us about what sorts is kind of in a position in the middle now in terms of some of the planned developments just outside city limits or in the what they call the city's extraterritorial jurisdiction?

How did this happen?

So so in terms of service area, it's called the CCN.

And so we already have an area where we're designated to provide services.

But as the city has grown, there are developments that are happening outside of our care.

And so when that happens, if the development wants stores to service their water, they provide something called a USAA.

It's a utility service agreement.

So that then would come before the board.

And it's the board's decision to extend water services to these areas.

What has happened now that San Antonio's growth is sort of hitting the boundaries of both the CCN and the county in many ways, And certainly, as you mentioned, the city limits in the T.J. is that many times a development or a proposed development comes to size.

First, they need to know if they're going to have water.

And so that has put scores in the position of in some ways regulating growth without the input of at least as it stands now, without the input of the city, when it's really the city that is charged with and actively involved in figuring out sort of where we want the city to grow and so we're just trying to solve solve that problem.

Right.

As I understand it, in some areas.

Now, there was a controversy about one of them.

Where you going to be required by state law to provide the water service, but they aren't going to use your services for sewer.

And that's an issue in terms of the size of the development, the size of the lots that are being developed.

Yeah.

So a lot of issues are coming up because of this conundrum.

And so one of them is that there is a separate CCN for water than wastewater.

And I don't know the history on that.

It seems strange to me as well.

And so sometimes so the development that you're mentioning, there were concerns about the density of the growth that was being proposed that would be facilitated by source approving the wastewater there.

And so if we didn't want to go forward with the wastewater, then there is a state law that then comes in, if they want to use septic, which would actually make it less dense growth.

And what's really driving all this is the recharge zone and the contributing.

So so we're not seeing the level of conflict on sort of the south side of town or outside of the recharge though, But we are still very reliant on this very amazing natural resource.

San Antonio would never have been able to grow without it.

We have to protect it both with the water quality of it, but also if you pave it over, no water is going to go into it.

So that's the catch 22 of the Edwards is it fills up quickly, but that means other things can come in as well.

So what is likely to be the changes and know you've had just recent meetings with the city about this.

The mayor has talked to us about this.

Where are you right now?

What's going to change, you think?

Well, what we're hoping is, is to have either a joint process at the time that the developer comes forward, because we do want to be respectful of the fact that, you know, developers are trying to figure out how to get their work completed and what they need to do.

So if we're, you know, changing the system or making them go to too many meetings or those meetings conflict with one another, that helps nobody.

So what we really want is a coordinated system.

So either they go to the city first and the city reviews the proposed development in, you know, with thinking about the growth plan or they meet with maybe saws and the city at the same time.

And then by the time it comes to the board, we're going to be able to benefit from whatever those conversations are.

Right.

So somebody will have reviewed this and let us know this is consistent with the city plan or we have concerns.

And one thing I would note is we're now seeing development outside of the eight.

So we just this last month had one that was outside that that is very concerning to us from an enforcement standpoint because the city has no regulatory authority outside that.

So we don't want ratepayers, existing ratepayers to suffer if somebody is misbehaving outside the area and we don't have any authority over that.

So, you know, this is the problem with us being kind of up against our edges.

Well, we're out of time.

We appreciate you explaining all this and we're going to hear more about it, I know, from the city soon and we hope everything gets gets worked out as we keep an eye on all that potential sprawl.

Amy Hard Berger, trustee of the San Antonio Water System.

Thanks.

Thank you so much.

Now to the latest on new developments by the city and city council to deal with these long term construction headaches that are going on on places like Broadway and the St Mary's Strip, where businesses have really been hurt and in some cases killed by the construction work that's dragged on literally, in some cases for years.

Joining us to talk about that, Mario, Bravo, Councilman, District one.

Thanks very much.

Thanks for having me.

What is going on literally right now that's new helping some of these businesses trying to stay afloat?

Well, you know, we just approved $2.25 million in aid for small, small business grants for businesses that are immediate, immediately alongside construction projects that have been delayed.

They their customers have had a hard time getting to their businesses.

And so we're trying to help them out.

So these are grants that are anywhere from 15000 to $35000.

Applications opened this Monday, and they'll be open through the end of the month.

And hopefully we'll be able to start cutting checks out the first week of April.

And you're pressing also now for not just the lowest bidder, but for the lowest responsible bidder to get rid of some people who haven't been doing the work.

Right.

Just a few weeks ago, we passed the responsible bidders ordinance.

So now we're making sure that even right now the city gives out construction projects to whoever the lowest bidder is.

They may not be a good operator.

You know, we ended up having to fire one from the North Saint Mary's strip because they weren't getting the job done.

So in the future, even if you're the lowest bidder, if you have poor performance history in the last three years, you're not eligible anymore.

And we go up to the next person and that helps to put pressure on jobs on or St Mary's right now on the Broadway and across the city.

And coming up, you filed something else.

Sure.

So I want to do more to make sure that we're delivering our projects on time.

So I just put forward a policy proposal so that in the future when you get a contract with the city to do a road construction project, that there are always daily fines.

If you don't if you don't finish on time.

Cost your books.

Right.

But but also also always daily bonuses for finishing early.

Right.

And raising the amount because we already do daily fines.

Sometimes we do the daily bonuses for early completion.

But I want to raise the amount and let me give you an example.

Right now, I think the most that a daily fine is is $2,000, right?

If it's a $10 million project and you're a month late, that's $60,000.

Not a big deal on a $10 million project.

So we we need to increase the size of the sticks, increase the size and intensity of the carrots to just to move the needle and get those projects done on time.

Let's say that there's $150,000 in fines and the city is not the one that's hurting the most.

So let's not give that money to the city.

Let's take those fines, put it in a separate account and distribute it to the small businesses that are being impacted by the delays on that construction project.

That's my favorite part.

And now there was a creek under the St Mary's strip that affected the construction.

That's amazing to me, but the way it did really put it off for a long time.

Yeah.

I mean, city staff tell me from Public Works that it's been a really challenging project from an engineering standpoint.

This project started a lot later.

It was a 2017 building project and it didn't start until 2021.

The goal was as they did this project, they were going to keep road lanes open so traffic could come through there and access the businesses.

The problem is they were trenching 20 feet deep for the utilities and it's loose soil that used to be a creek bed.

Right.

So with that loose soil with cars driving right by, there were vibrations and these trenches kept collapsing.

Right.

So then we worked with local businesses and said, is it okay for us to shut down the street completely, block by block?

That's allowed us to get the job done a lot faster.

And so while the timeline was delayed considerably, we've been able to start pushing it back sooner and sooner.

And so we should be able to have those roads open again by the end of March.

And again, right now, if you're a business that's affected by one of these projects and there's 15, I guess, across the city now that are doing something like this, what can you do?

Where do you go to get help?

So you can go to Lift Fund.

They're the ones who are processing applications.

And if you need any trouble, you can also reach out to my office and we can get you the right resources to make sure that you can file your application.

But yeah, there are 15 projects, five of them in district one where you can qualify.

And again, it's 15 to $35000.

It's a competitive process.

We're going to help the people who need the most help, but the application process that we stop accepting applications by the end of the month, and that's only because we want to get these funds to the businesses sooner so we can help them.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

Appreciate you explaining all that.

Mario Bravo, Councilman, District one, Thanks.

Thank you.

San Antonio lost a legendary artist on Monday when Jesse Trevino passed away at the age of 76.

A towering figure in the art world with works in the Smithsonian American Museum and collections all over the world.

He is best known here, maybe for his huge murals like the Spirit of Healing on the side of the Children's hospital downtown and La Bella Dora Votive Candle with the image of the Virgin Mary.

Much of his work reflects and honors the people and places of the West Side where he grew up and his personal story of losing his painting hand in combat in Vietnam, and then teaching himself to paint with the other hand.

Well, that's as amazing as his talent.

It's wonderful to see drawings that are done and.

They almost come alive.

I knew Jesse for some 40 years shooting stories about all the different types of his work, from set design to hand-cut tile murals and paintings.

But the last couple of years, I spent some more time with him.

And when we talked, sometimes I put a microphone and a camera or two in front of him as a kind of notepad.

I hope everybody can know what drove this amazing man.

As a kid.

The biggest imprinted in my mind was was the Whitney Museum.

Where did that contest?

They presented me with a little plaque.

Jesse Trevino started winning art contests and getting his name in the papers for it while still just a young boy at Crockett Elementary School on San Antonio's West Side.

Like most of his 11 brothers and sisters, he zuse composed.

Trevino was born in Mexico, but his family moved here when he was four, and his nickname at home was Chuey.

At school, he became Jessie and from walking on stage to accept that very first art award at the Whitney Museum, he knew what he was meant to be.

I'm so nervous of I could never get in front of a crowd or anything.

But I remember I thought, Wow, this is great.

This is a museum.

And people clapping and and I give their approval to what they saw.

I mean, like, wow, everybody.

A lot of attention.

I come from a world of a low attention.

So obviously that recognition of made me feel great.

My family seen and right there there is just huge.

This is what I want to do.

I want to be I want to be an artist like that.

But I knew that I wanted to be a reserve, to have my work, you know, collected by humans and that I was going to take a lifetime of of of art education and learning about art.

So he kept at it and kept winning more contests in middle and high schools.

And then he won scholarships.

After graduating from Fox Tech, Jesse took off for the prestigious Art Students League of New York, and he loved it, even making extra money doing portraits for tourists in Greenwich Village.

I got hired as a village artist and I was always the kid of all the other who were all the people I could for like 200 bucks and a night and back there in jewelry, books and a lot of whatever.

But I thought, Wow, this is really enjoying it here.

Is living there is really to go to school.

But the very next year he was drafted and though he was born in Mexico and might have avoided military service if he wanted, he decided to go ahead and join the Army and go to Vietnam.

Because I come from a family that everyone before me had had written to serve as, you know, an army, the Navy Marine, you know, served then, you know.

But it's that I wasn't I didn't realize what kind of danger I was going to get into, You know.

Less than three months into his tour of duty.

Not long after he sent this painting home, a booby trap and a sniper's bullet shattered his leg and severed nerves through his hand, which later had to be amputated.

And that right hand was his drawing and painting.

Hand like like a catapult.

Sort of like it threw me from here, like fifth of 50 feet.

Then there's like, like a spring loaded boom that when I when I fell on the mud and water face down mud.

But my right leg from right here was shattered.

There holding my arm.

And I felt like it was on fire.

What I can do is to take what I had.

This is the hand I do everything with, right?

The medic.

He showed me some morphine.

And then from that moment, I started thinking, Wow.

Well, certain people are.

I guess before you die, you start like everything started getting passes through.

The through is like paintings.

I never done.

Paintings.

He had never done yet.

And I think it'd be great if I could paint, painting my mother, my friends.

And it's almost like, what a revelation of what a great idea I was.

You know, I don't see paintings like this in museums or in collections ideas of what I would paint and how important that was or what I wanted to say changed the world.

But on the chopper ride out of the jungle, he began to have doubts, already feeling how tough it would be.

After he was wounded, Jesse was sent back to San Antonio to recover at Fort Sam Houston's Brooke Army Medical Center.

But he was terribly depressed, Beginning a lifetime of countless surgeries and in constant pain, he was convinced he'd never paint again.

It seemed like I was at the end of the road here, which would be the end of my life.

But during more than a year at BAMC, Jesse met other seriously wounded veterans who were also from San Antonio.

We started our camaraderie in the hospital.

Armando Alboran had lost both legs in Vietnam and asked Jesse to push his wheelchair over to rehab.

And he would push me and he would just stand there and wait for me to finish.

I said, Jesse, they've.

Got things for you to do, too.

You know, you can get involved.

He said, No, I don't feel like doing it.

So it took about maybe.

Maybe almost a month coaching him every time we would come.

He just said, Look.

There's a canvas, an easel, paint.

Why don't you start this?

Oh, no, no, no.

I can't do it anymore.

Jesse, It's like riding a bicycle.

You never you never lose the talent of riding the bus just because you can paint with one hand, you can paint with the other.

And then he went on this long one day.

And it started with the brushes and just painting colors on the canvas.

And.

And I said.

Jesse, you can do better than that.

I'll be your first subject.

And he agreed, and he painted me as the first subject.

And that's what started it all.

But that spark reignited a fire that at first was faint and often dark.

Once he got out of the hospital and started going to San Antonio College, some of his first works were on black backgrounds, like the one he painted on an entire wall of his house.

Me either.

My life, but gradually, over a period of years, his canvases would brighten lit up by that spirit he wanted to share.

I painted it because of it was my neighborhood.

They tell a story of where I come from.

San Antonio.

To capture so much, they say so much that they don't have people in it, just the building itself or whatever.

But that's what it's about.

Like I said, the rest of my people tell me where it.

But you study the whole situation, not just that his life.

He does that every day and it does that for his family.

So it's a lot of bore and I think a lot a lot of people can relate to that.

It's kind of jobs that sort of lifts them up, kind of makes it feel good to see themselves in an image as important as a canvas.

And you want somebody to feel something.

That's exactly what oh, what I what I if it doesn't do that, then I feel like I'm missing an opportunity to do that.

And as his career started to take off with paintings everywhere from the Smithsonian to Buckingham Palace, with trips to the White House and more collectors taking notice of his work, Jesse also took on new and bigger challenges.

He created massive murals of hand-cut tile, like this Spirit of healing.

Nine Stories High on what's now Children's Hospital of San Antonio and the Villa Dora.

40 feet tall at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center.

He also designed a set for an opera at the Majestic Theater.

Building it being part of the whole process, something that that has always intrigued me.

So this is a great opportunity for me to to see what I can do.

And and what he did to complete one of his biggest murals was to spend most of 14 months on a scaffolding above the bank tellers at what's now a Wells Fargo office on Castroville Road.

The design of the 54 foot wide story of his San Antonio was still developing in his mind as he painted it.

Columnist Rick Casey once dubbed Jesse Trevino style as affectionate realism, labeled Jesse proudly accepting.

Still as fun as it was.

Oh, yeah.

I think it always is.

I mean, it's not as easy, but I'll get it to look like, you know, for I'm happy here.

I'll make some.

I could think a little bit about where they live, what they're surrounded by, how people feel about something you want them to think about that.

I'm also working now on a special show about Jesse that will air in the coming weeks here on Color n. Jesse, we already miss you.

Rest in peace.

The latest now on what's going to be on the ballot for the May city elections.

Joining us to tell us all about it is Joy Palacios, who is the city hall reporter for Texas Public Radio.

Thanks for coming in.

Thank you.

First of all, this is going to be a mayoral race.

All the city council candidates for this year anyway.

It doesn't look like there's going to be a lot of focus on the mayor's race.

Yes.

So this is going to be probably one of the most quiet mayoral elections we've seen since the Castro administration.

You know, we've seen every mayoral race except for 2021 go into a runoff.

And it's almost likely not going to go into a runoff this time.

You have Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who's been in office since 2017.

And you know, this is going to be his final election.

And in the mayor's office, you know, as folks know, you can only run for four two year terms.

This would be Nuremberg's final two year term if he wins.

And usually by now, if there is going to be another major contender there, they would have announced it with only filing closes tomorrow and there's only a handful of people on the ballot other than Nirenberg.

It's it's you know, I can't say for sure whether or not he will be reelected.

But given the the other names that are on there, you know, they maybe not be as recognizable.

But there will still be some things on the ballots, people on the ballot that are going to draw.

You think a lot of voters out in May, some of them the city council races.

But as well, this injustice charter amendment.

All right.

So let me talk about the city council races first.

You know, we could see some runoffs in districts, one potentially district two, because district two has gone into a runoff over the last few years, not guaranteed.

It's kind of a it's really a toss up whether or not that will go into.

East Side, the wrong.

Side.

District one downtown.

District seven is probably going to go into a runoff as well after we had former Councilwoman Anna Sandoval resign at the end of January, which took a lot of people by surprise.

This would have been Sandoval's last term had she chosen to run, but she stepped down to take care of family and her and her newborn baby and also start a new job.

And so we're already seeing some pretty prominent candidates come up in District seven.

But even if you're out of those districts, it isn't justice Charter amendment that could decriminalize things like minor marijuana possession that could draw people from all over the city.

That is going to be a big draw.

There are about 35,000 signatures connected by groups to be collected by groups like Act for Essay and Ground Game Texas.

To put these six initiatives on the ballot as one big package and it would decriminalize abortion within San Antonio, would also decriminalize very small amounts of marijuana.

It would also put in place a justice director for the city.

It would be a position that would be selected and appointed by the city council, almost linear to the city manager, the city auditor, and the the municipal court judge.

And because of the controversies over that, it's going to be a lot of money spent on both sides right in that race to get you out tomorrow.

Right.

And so you will see a lot of campaign ads, I think, on on one way or the other.

And the city.

I want to add real quick, the city has actually taken a very unique approach in making a comment about the city's center and petition normal.

The city cannot make any type of comments about it.

But we saw last week city attorney Andy Segovia saying some of the propositions are or things within the charter amendment would not be enforceable because they would try to sort of circumvent state law being a marijuana possession and decriminalization of abortion.

And so it was a very unique situation to see the city attorney come out and saying like, you know, if this passes, most of this, except for the justice director position, would be unenforceable by the city.

And I know the city is also coming out with new drawings for the airport.

So you you've got a lot to cover in the next few months.

We appreciate it.

Joey Palacios, City Hall reporter, Texas Public Radio.

Thanks.

And thank you for joining us for this edition of On the Record.

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