At only twenty-six, Castro became the youngest ever member of the city council. Over his four years in the seat, Castro pushed for more funding for seniors’ meals, proposed a ban on all tax abatements for recharge land projects to prevent more development on such areas (which failed), put forward a ban on using cell phones while driving in school zones, pushed to allow city employees to buy cheaper Canadian drugs, and championed ethics reforms that for the first time put limits on campaign donations and loans in city elections. The
thing Castro’s mother had fought for thirty years earlier — to sit at the table and make policy rather than pound on the door from the outside—appeared to have been fulfilled.
Early in his first term, Castro resigned from his relatively lucrative position at Akin Gump in January 2002. For Castro, whose wife is a public-school teacher, the decision was a genuine financial risk given the comparatively paltry pay of a council seat, and he later talked about falling behind on mortgage payments and coming close to foreclosure.
But Akin Gump’s large client base meant frequent conflicts of interest, forcing him to abstain from votes. And no vote was more charged than the battle over the proposed PGA Village golf resort on the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone, which would dominate Castro’s four years at the council and, ultimately, his mayoral run.
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The PGA Village saga was the issue that defined Castro’s early political career. The project’s evolution over the years mirrored Castro’s own transformation away from his early image of an idealistic, principled young politician standing up for the community against moneyed interests.
The PGA Village project was a 2,855-acre development proposed in 2001 by the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA), Marriott Hotels, and Lumbermen’s Investment Corporation, with the finished project planned to feature homes, apartments, two hotels, and three golf courses. The problem was, part of the resort would be built over a recharge zone that replenished the city’s primary source of drinking water, the Edwards Aquifer, drawing the ire of local residents, activist groups, and environmentalists who were
concerned about water contamination, and pitting them against the city’s business and developer community, including Akin Gump.
Owing to this conflict of interest, Castro initially sat out the issue, though having opposed tax abatements over the recharge zone in the past, it wasn’t difficult to figure out his personal feelings on the matter. In fact, Castro had previously said the city shouldn’t encourage any development on the aquifer.
In March 2002, Castro became the first council member to take a firm stand on the project, rejecting it. He called it a “golfopolis” and the “kind of creation I can’t support,” and decried the “corporate welfare” involved. He was one of only two city council members to vote against approving the project.
A hail of controversy led the PGA to withdraw from the project in August 2002, killing it, only for then-mayor Ed Garza to put forward a new, in some ways substantially worse, plan eleven days later. This time, through legal maneuvering, it would have neither public comment nor be subject to a referendum, the causes of the original project’s demise. Castro was again the sole vote against approving it.
The story typically stops here when retold. As Henry Cisneros, San Antonio’s first Latino mayor and something of a mentor and role model to Castro,
told Texas Monthly in 2002: “I think Julián’s position on the council, especially on this PGA matter, has assumed the proportions of a long tradition in San Antonio … as the person of conscience.” Castro had been “the sort of protector of the grassroots, community-based person, who is willing to call it as he sees it no matter where everybody is, whether it’s the political community or the business community,” Cisneros said. When the
LA Times covered the 2005 mayoral race that Castro was part of, it stated that he had “opposed and helped to kill” the project.
But this wasn’t the end of the story. Following two years of pressure from activist groups, the PGA again pulled out of the project in May 2004, after opponents charged the city’s agreement for the resort was illegal, owing to missed deadlines and undisclosed contract changes. Castro had called for the city auditor to investigate the contract.
But by this point the mayoral race was getting closer, and Castro couldn’t afford to anger developers. This time, having subtly moderated his stance on the issue, Castro remarked upon the pullout that “nobody won today,” and that he was “glad this division is behind us.”
But it wasn’t, because a month later, Garza and other officials revived the deal again. This time, opposition to the deal had weakened. Activists were exhausted after the previous fights, and city officials had cannily planned to hold public hearings and the council vote during the holidays, ensuring scarce attention and even scarcer turnout. The new plan reduced the amount of impervious cover — things like houses and concrete paths that keep aquifiers from absorbing rainfall and recharging — from 25 to 15 percent. But in exchange, the project wouldn’t be annexed into the city for twenty-five years. In other words, its developers would avoid paying the city’s property taxes for a quarter of a century.
One other thing had changed: Castro, previously the lone voice against the deal and development on the recharge zone in general, had now come around to support the project.
He flew to the PGA Tour’s (distinct from PGA of America, from which the PGA Tour had taken over the project the third time around) Players Championship course in Jacksonville and came back praising their environmental standards. According to the
San Antonio Express-News, Castro’s image among the project’s supporters shifted from “obstacle to progress” to “champion for a major development.”
“People are saying how useful Julián has been, how impressive it is that he’s come around on this issue, and some members of the chamber community are echoing those sentiments,” one official involved in the meetings told the paper.
“I think we can both grow our economy and protect the environment with this agreement,” Castro said. Besides, he “honestly believe[d] this is scientifically better for the aquifer and better policy for San Antonio than the alternative.” He insisted to the project’s opponents that it was the best deal they were going to get, and asked them: “are you going to hold a grudge now and forgo something that is better for the environment, or are you going to let this pass and address the other issues sometime in the future?”
It was a far cry from his belief years earlier that there should be no development on the recharge zone, period.
“[Castro] wants to be mayor. He’s under pressure to be pro-development,” Graciela Sanchez of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, one of the groups opposing the project, said at the time, calling it an “about-face.”
In January 2005, the city council voted 10-1 to approve the project, even as new details were rammed into the agreement just hours earlier, including an extension of the tax giveaway from twenty-five to twenty-nine years. This time, the lone vote against was a different council member. At a public meeting, activists complained that the council was rushing the vote through.
Castro, previously mistrusted by business and pilloried in newspaper editorials, showed he could play ball with developers, just as the mayoral race was beginning and his opponents were raising tens of thousands of dollars from business interests. He had disappointed the activists for whom he had been a champion. But as San Antonio journalist Ken Rodriguez pointed out, they couldn’t abandon him: “To whom would they turn?”
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Castro’s chief takeaway from his [mayoral election] 2005 loss was that it would be impossible to win the San Antonio mayoralty without the support of local business. When asked in 2007 what he would do differently, he said that he had “spent the last two years building bridges with folks who did not support my campaign in 2005.”
By the time his campaign got going in 2008, Castro was endorsed by and hired as treasurer Mike Beldon, a local businessman who had served in that position for Hardberger in 2005 and had been instrumental in securing him business backing that year. Beldon had previously chaired the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce’s PAC in the nineties during a battle to prevent federal control of the Edwards Aquifer. He had also been part of that era’s “Majority of Six,” a pro-business group likened to the Good Government League of the 1970s, the political arm of the city’s business establishment whose iron grip on the city council Castro’s mother had ironically tried to beat in 1971. With Beldon on board, Castro got the support of several local businesspeople and developers.
“He’s broadened his horizons,” Beldon said of Castro. “He knows that he must be a mayor for all of the city, not just one area.”
“They know I don’t have horns now,” Castro said about how the hiring would impact his business standing.
He promised to continue “the progress that San Antonio has made under” Hardberger. Besides Beldon, Hardberger’s former campaign manager came on board to run Castro’s bid for office.
Castro now also had a substantial sum from his personal wealth to invest in the race, allowing him to claim he would be free of “undue influence.” In the years between his campaigns, Castro had
received an undisclosed seven-figure referral fee from local personal injury lawyer and influential Democratic donor Mikal Watts, after passing a client with a potentially lucrative lawsuit on to Watts’s much bigger firm. Castro lent his campaign $215,000 in 2008, and in April 2009, Watts held a fundraiser for the former councilman.
Castro said all the right things. He expressed regret for being so “strident” on the PGA Village issue and insisted he had done “what I thought was right” when switching on the issue. Even as the city manager ordered city departments in February 2008 to plan for budget cuts of 2 percent in response to economic recession, and Castro warned that the “city’s going to have to tighten its belt the way families are having to tighten their belts across the nation,” he tentatively backed tax cuts.
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Castro’s approach to job growth often involved the kind of corporate giveaways typical of today’s Democratic politicians. A month after insurance company AllState announced it was opening up a bilingual customer information center in San Antonio, receiving $1.1 million from the state government for the trouble, Castro backed and voted for an incentives package that gave the company a six-year, 65 percent tax abatement, a $30,000 grant for permitting and development fees, and nominated it to be able to receive a $1.25 million refund in sales and uses taxes. He reportedly also worked overtime to try and get Tesla to move to the city, focusing, in the words of the
Express-News, “on giveaways — a lot of giveaways.”
An admirer of Silicon Valley, Castro courted tech entrepreneurs and looked to “learn from Silicon Valley CEOs,” even as those same CEOs were pricing working-class families out of their homes a few states westward. He warmly welcomed Uber and Lyft’s 2014 entry into the city, even as San Antonio taxi companies filed a twenty-three-plainitiff suit charging the companies were in violation of a local vehicle-for-hire ordinance, and seeking a temporary restraining order and injunction stopping them from operating. When the city’s police chief issued the companies a cease-and-desist letter in response to the violation, Castro announced he was open to changing the ordinance.
It’s little wonder the business leaders who had once been suspicious of Castro were now fully on board with him. “We believe in your vision and we believe in your leadership,” the chairman of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce told him after a 2011 speech to local businesspeople.
In meetings with business leaders, Castro promised not to use the mayor’s office to empower unions. While Castro backed the right of non-uniformed city employees to “meet and confer” with the city manager, something unanimously approved by a 2008 council vote, he stressed that “it’s non-binding, it’s not collective bargaining,” and opposed granting such rights to civilian city employees. Nonetheless, he received the endorsements of several local unions, including the San Antonio Police Officers Association.
He easily trounced the competition. Raising $373,000 over his run, a combination of business and small-dollar support, Castro far outspent his opponents. Citing his “significant” newfound business backing, willingness to expand nuclear energy production, and opposition to collective bargaining, the
Express-News now endorsed him, and he increased his support in the wealthier districts he’d previously lost.
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All the while, throughout Castro’s two and a half terms, the city continued to suffer from the tax freeze he’d backed and voted for before he was mayor.
By the time Castro won the mayoralty in May 2009, the city was in the midst of a major tax shortfall: revenue from the sales tax and hotel occupancy tax had both dropped, and, for the first time since 1993, so had the property tax base, as it would continue to do over his tenure. This coupled with the recession meant Castro’s first order of business as mayor was dealing with the first of a series of austerity budgets he had helped produce.
The city manager’s first budget in 2009 cut 334 jobs, froze wages, made across-the-board cuts to all programs, reduced hours for libraries, and cut back on services like lawn-mowing at city parks. Insulated from this pain were firefighters and police, who actually saw more personnel hired that year, the latter thanks to federal stimulus funds lobbied for by Castro. This was a regular feature: the 2010 budget would see $12 million in cuts and efficiencies balanced out with $13 million of new spending, some of which would go to yet more police and fire department staff. (Incidentally, the police and firefighters union had backed Castro early on.)
While $64 million over ten years was certainly a drop in the bucket, it started looking a lot bigger once the city government began nickel-and-diming its residents for every spare scrap of cash possible. City manager Sheryl Scully actually welcomed a 2009 summer heat wave that caused power plant shutdowns, because higher energy bills meant more money for the city, and successive budgets would continue to rely on higher energy use to make up budget shortfalls. Meanwhile, she ended events like the Houston Fair and Market and a Winter Wonderland, saving a measly $82,000 a year, while instituting $3.6 million worth of fee increases.
Castro and the council balked at raising property taxes. In fact, the 2009 budget cut them by less than 0.2 cents. When one council member suggested raising them in 2010 to avoid continued service cutbacks, Castro demurred. “I’m very comfortable leaving the property tax rate where it’s at,” he said. “We have made significant spending cuts over the last couple years and that has served us well during this budget year.” By the time he left office, property taxes in the city hadn’t gone up for more than twenty years, while their revenue intake shrunk year after year.
“Over the last six years, we’ve dropped our property tax rate three times and we’re the first big city to embrace the senior tax freeze in 2005-6,” he boasted in 2012.
But the city spent his mayoralty continuing to drain more and more from San Antonians through regressive means. With Castro and the rest of the council’s approval, public utilities raised rates, which were 80 percent of customers’ bills, year after year: 7.5 and 4.25 percent for electricity in 2010 and 2013, respectively, and 7.9 and 8.4 percent for water in 2011 and 2013, respectively.
“Nobody ever likes a rate increase,” said Castro. But,
he explained, this was “a reasonable rate request that benefits the entire community” and the hike was “a necessary and prudent thing.” In 2013, with Castro’s backing, the San Antonio Water System (SAWS)
hiked water rates yet again.
Castro and the council also had no issue proposing a hike to the sales tax to fund worthy projects, as they did in 2010 to fund protection of the Edwards Aquifer. He was sanguine about any public opposition to reauthorizing the sales tax hike, saying that voters would do it “if we remind them of the benefits.” Indeed, it later passed for the third time in ten years.
There were exceptions of course. When all but one of the SAWS board members suggested doubling a water supply impact fee on developers in 2014, Castro supported it, despite opposition from business leaders and developers who claimed it would halt all development. He ultimately
supported a compromise, phasing in the much higher fee over the course of a year (though this fee ultimately tends to be passed on to ratepayers anyway).
But the sum total of Castro’s time in San Antonio saw him help gradually starve the city of funds, even as he lamented the rise of hunger in San Antonio and the city’s lack of investment in “human capital,” all while austerity at the state and federal levels further hit the municipal government. Meanwhile, more and more of the funding burden fell disproportionately on the city’s poor and working-class residents, while its older, wealthier, white residents disproportionately avoided paying.
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If Castro is the “Latino Obama,” it’s because his career has followed remarkably similar beats as the former president: a likeable, ambitious young politician who plotted out a path to national power from a young age and sublimated his political goals to that overarching ambition.
In the process, rather than pursue a fundamental break from or transformation of the existing political consensus, Castro accommodated it, working in the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Meanwhile, his tinkering, while welcome when it came to programs like Pre-K 4 SA, was not enough to halt the accelerating decay in quality of life for a widening swath of people — a decay exacerbated by some of his own policies. Castro’s mayoralty was the Obama administration writ small.
It may be true that Castro was one man who could do only so much to resist the wider political atmosphere he was in, one hostile to most left-wing reform. Yet any Democrat who finds themselves in the White House in 2021 will be faced with not just a far more ruthless and hostile Right than this, but an oligarchic class united to prevent even moderate changes to the existing consensus. Castro’s quick accommodation to moneyed interests as mayor — and his failure to mobilize to his cause most of the city’s working people, who overwhelmingly didn’t see it worth their while to even vote for him in his three election wins — suggests how he might respond to such a challenge.
Castro could of course surprise the world once in office; no one would’ve expected Franklin Roosevelt to end up railing against “economic royalists,” either. But based on his record in power, don’t count on it.
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