2007 State of the City Address

“A FOUNDATION FOR OUR FUTURE”

By
MAYOR PHIL HARDBERGER

Sponsored by the San Antonio Greater Chamber of Commerce
Marriott Rivercenter Hotel | San Antonio, Texas

January 25, 2007

The Bond Election  |  Education and Workforce  | 
Quality of Life  |  Voelcker Park  |  Conclusion

One year ago, I predicted we were entering golden years in San Antonio. We are now in those years. San Antonio reached new heights in 2006. We exceeded what we imagined. We surpassed our hopes. In developing our economy and improving the way we live our lives, we made our city stronger, and better.

Yet there is much to be done. Our potential still exceeds our accomplishment.

2006 was a time for planning. 2007 is a time for doing.

2007 will be a year of building. It will be a year to make good on the promise of our dreams, and a year to see a new San Antonio rise up before our eyes.

Winter still has a tenuous hold on our land. But we are too busy to wait for Spring. Now is the season of breaking new ground in our city. Within the next 90 days, three historic public/private projects will begin work: the Museum Reach of the River Improvements Project, the Main Plaza Redevelopment Project, and the construction of a new facility to care for the city’s homeless. None of these would have moved much beyond mere ideas without the support of the people of this room. But because of your commitment to this city, all three will be built.

Our business community is also building—in an unprecedented way.

AT&T, with the completed acquisition of BellSouth, is building the largest voice and data network in the world, and has just been named Company of the Year by Forbes Magazine.

Tesoro, another of our Fortune 500 companies, is building a new facility on 122 acres of land off US-281 in North San Antonio, which will consolidate their headquarters and more than double their current space.

DPT Laboratories has just opened a $24 million, 258,000 square foot research and development facility that will anchor the development of Brooks City Base and the entire South Side.

Microsoft has just announced it will build a $550 million data center in Westover Hills, and Lowe’s is building a $68 million facility right next door. These data centers tend to cluster around one another, and they are clustering right here in San Antonio.

Drury Inns are nearing completion on their flagship national hotel at Main Plaza, with 370 rooms and almost $40 million in renovations.

Condominiums are springing up all over our downtown, one after another: the Vidorra, the Vistana, Alteza, Piazza San Lorenzo, the Broadway, La Cascada, and many more to come.

The Museo Alameda, an affiliate of the Smithsonian, is a $12 million investment to showcase Latino Arts and Culture, and will open its doors to the public in April.

And finally, $1.6 billion in new construction is slated for Ft. Sam Houston, which will have a tremendous impact on our entire community. We need to make sure adequate funds are appropriated in Washington this year to ensure this happens. I want to thank Joe Krier, Brenda Vickrey Johnson, and everyone at the Chamber for staying on top of this with the Congress.

There is a vision amidst all of this activity, both public and private. What we are doing, in everything we have undertaken and in all that we plan to do, is rebuilding the foundations of our city. We are building a strong foundation so that our city can be successful in the future. We are creating the conditions that will allow our city to prosper not just for the next decade, but for the next century. The combination of city, county, and private partnerships broadens all boundaries, and we are limited only by our imagination.

Speaking of partnerships, I want to acknowledge my great partner, Judge Nelson Wolff. Nelson and I have a formal meeting each week and we talk on the phone daily. His experience and wisdom are invaluable. Please stand Nelson.

I have other great partners in the work at hand. This City Council shares a common vision of where they want the City to go. Their collective voice gets distilled into my words, but the heart is theirs. We have a strong working relationship. They put full working days into the governance of this city. These are not part-time jobs, and the day frequently extends into the evening. They are paid virtually nothing. I am privileged to work with them.

As I call your name, please stand and keep standing:

Roger Flores, Sheila McNeil, Roland Gutierrez, Richard Perez, Patti Radle, Delicia Herrera, Elena Guajardo, Art Hall, Kevin Wolff, Chip Haass

Please give them a hand.

Finally, let me say unabashedly that San Antonio has the finest City Manager in the United States in Sheryl Sculley. I have said she is the Tim Duncan of City Managers. I stand by it. She gives definition to the concept of excellence in a CEO. Please stand Sheryl. Let’s give her a hand.

The world is changing around us. A new economic order is emerging that changes the way we do business and the way we live our lives. You know this from your own businesses. You adapt to the changing global marketplace in order to succeed and grow. Our city government must do the same.

From streets and sidewalks to education and quality of life, we are building a foundation for an American city that will thrive in this new economy. We are building for the future, and we shall not fail.

The Bond Election

A critical stage of laying this foundation will happen on May 12th of this year. This is the day we vote on the bond package. It is an important moment for our city.

A bond election is a city’s vote of confidence in itself. It means that San Antonio’s citizens have optimism about their city and their future. It means that they trust their government to deliver on its promises, and that they are willing to invest in what is needed.

And what is needed right now is a major investment in the most basic building blocks of our city: streets, sidewalks, drainage, and parks.

It is a large bond—as large as we can make it without raising taxes. It is a five year, $550 million package to address our most basic needs. Dallas, Houston, and Austin have all passed larger bonds, but this is our largest. It is large because our needs are large, but we did not want and will not have a tax increase. We have kept our city’s financial position strong over these past years precisely so that we could undertake something of this magnitude. We have built strong reserves and used business methods for prioritizing what problems need to be addressed first.

This bond package is also historic for the manner in which it will be spent. Four committees of citizens, 128 people in all, have worked over the past several weeks to gather public input, hear testimony, and educate themselves on the needs of the city. They cover the four priority areas of this bond: Streets and Sidewalks, Drainage, Parks, and Community Initiatives.

This was done with a purpose. A bond of this size, requiring this kind of commitment of confidence from the people of San Antonio, ought to be determined by the citizens. We trust the people, and I know that trust is well placed.

These citizens’ committees are conducting final deliberations now on their recommendations to the City Council.

Education and Workforce

Our city’s foundation rests on more than just streets and roadways. Our city’s greatest strength is our people.

Asphalt and concrete are the foundation of our infrastructure, but education is the foundation for our future economic development. And just as we are rebuilding the foundations of our roads, so are we building a stronger foundation for our education system in San Antonio.

This is not an easy task. In fact, over the past year, I have found that its complexity is only matched by its importance. Nevertheless, we are making progress in San Antonio to meet this challenge.

Last June, I convened a Summit on Education and Workforce Development. Over 300 leaders in education, business, and government met for the first time in one room to set forth our common, community expectations on education. They agreed on some 40 different strategies and goals for improvement. And they agreed that our actions must be bold, and they must be swift.

The question before all of us now, is: “Where do we begin?” With so much to be done, in so many different areas, it is critical that our effort be focused and concentrated if we are to be successful.

That’s why last month I convened an advisory panel of educational leaders and asked them to tell me what steps need to be taken this year.

Over the next several months, we will be working on 3 specific goals:

1. Create incentives in the scholarships we already provide through the San Antonio Education Partnership that will encourage our high school students to strive beyond the basic requirements for graduation and reach excellence.

2. Develop partnerships with employers, with the Alamo Community College District, and with our school districts to implement a curriculum that focuses on the practical workplace skills that our businesses tell us are critical.

3. Expand programs to address functional illiteracy that affects one-fourth of the adults in Bexar County, and create opportunities for adults who need extra skills to re-engage in the educational system.


The effects of these actions will not be immediate, but they will be long lasting, and they will be profound. We must start now and we must make a difference today in order to build a foundation for a competitive economy in the future.

Quality of Life

We must also build a new foundation for our quality of life: parks, arts, and the environment.

Cities are more than buildings and streets. They are centers of thought, culture, and vitality. Cities are an expression of the human spirit, and we must embrace those things in order to build a lasting foundation for a high quality of life in our city.

We have invested more in the arts than at any other time in our history: $ 6.7 million this year. The reason is simple: the creative economy adds value—both real and unmeasurable—to our citizens. Our museums—the McNay, the Witte, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and all of our smaller venues—are true treasures in this city. They enrich our minds and spark our own creativity. And with the commencement of work on the Museum Reach of the River this spring, we will lay a path to these museums so that our citizens can grow intellectually as well as economically.

We are working to preserve our natural environment, too. The quality of our air and the quality of our water have a direct impact on our lives, and those of our children. San Antonians have a strong spiritual bond to this land. It is our heritage. When we can’t smell mesquite, we get nervous. We are products of our South Texas heritage. We are entrusted with its care, and we will guard it.

We will also strive to ensure that our River Walk maintains the character and charm that its founders had envisioned. The Native Americans, dependent on its life-giving properties, felt the river was sacred. So do I.

A few days ago, I called together a working group of river stakeholders to advise me on the creation of a comprehensive River Walk Commission. Like most good ideas, it is both new and old. In decades gone by, the old River Walk Commission served as the “wise men” of the river during the critical early years of its development. We need to bring that back, so that as the River expands, to the North and to the South, it is well planned and well maintained. In doing so I am cognizant of the dangers of the layering of bureaucracies. Simplicity works best, and government should assist, not hinder, well-meaning citizens.

Voelcker Park

Voelcker Ranch is a part of our strategy to get back to where we need to be in terms of parks and open space in our city. We have lost ground in the amount of open space we have for the size of our population fairly consistently for a century. No more. We encourage development, but quality of life is not a minor thing. It is how we live our lives.

For those of you who haven’t seen the virgin land of Voelcker, it is truly a humbling and awe-inspiring experience. It may even move you to hug a tree, though you won’t be able to get your arms around many of them.

To walk among those trees—many older than the heroes of the Alamo—is to know our history. To feel what our forebears felt upon arriving in South Texas…that they had come to a land of great plenty: a place to raise a family and make a home. It is a breathtaking expanse of urban wilderness. And it sits right here, in the heart of San Antonio, just a few miles from where we sit today.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Max and Minnie Voelcker for maintaining that land, and for having the foresight to entrust their estate to those who wanted to see it preserved. With all certainty, those trees would be gone today and that land swallowed whole by the city around it had they not exercised such vision. It is an oasis, and it is now ours to keep.

Preserving that land for our posterity is not a dream. It is reality. In August of last year, the city completed the purchase of the first 107 acres of that property, and with the passage of the bond in May, we will finalize acquisition of the other two thirds.

We have already begun the process of enlisting the best minds in the world to help design this new park through an international competition. The land is beautiful to start with, and I know that it will attract the artistic talents of the greatest architects and park designers in the world.

We welcome that. We want the world to know what we are doing here. This new park will raise the quality of life for our own community, and it will distinguish San Antonio as one of the great livable cities of North America. The world will know that this is a place that values its open spaces, and that this is a community that invests in the things that make our lives fuller and more joyous.

Our own lives are short, paltry things but in Voelcker we build for the centuries.

Conclusion

These are our tasks, and this is our undertaking: to rebuild the foundations of our city so that it can succeed in the future. We do so because we believe in the promise of San Antonio.

Some of you may know the story of Walter Mathis, one of our citizens who we lost back in 2005. He is known by many as the founder of the King William neighborhood.

In 1967, when Walter bought his first of fourteen homes in King William, his vision for the neighborhood was little more than a dream. King William had been run down and ignored for decades. Walter wanted something different, and rather than just wishing it, he decided to make it so.

Every family and every citizen who has walked through King William and taken in its architecture has experienced the work of Walter Mathis.

But the truth is: it wasn’t only his work. It was the work of the people who moved into those homes. He just made it possible for them to be successful. He created the conditions that allowed them to achieve their own dreams for that neighborhood.

Walter bought old, run-down homes that had promise but needed work. He fixed the foundation and fixed the roof, and sold them to families that were willing to put in the work that was needed. Walter knew that if you give a family a strong foundation, and if you give them a good roof, then there is no limit to what they can do.

Every house needs a strong foundation. That was what Walter did. He rebuilt the foundations of those homes, and in the process he built a foundation for a proud neighborhood.

That is what we must do now for our whole city. We must seize this opportunity to build a strong foundation that will allow our city to thrive in this new century.

Government needs to be comprehensive, but government can’t do everything—and shouldn’t try. Government lays the foundation. The most important thing that I can do at City Hall is to build a strong foundation that will allow all of you—your employees and their families—to grow and achieve. You are the engine that drives this city. You make this a city of greatness. I will do everything that I can to make sure that you are able to do that.

The successes that we will achieve in the next 3 years will be great, but they will be nothing when compared to the successes that we will achieve in the next 30 years. The successes will happen because we—you and I—built a strong foundation to make them possible.

I thank the people in this room. Thank you for being partners in seeing the future as it can be. There is a kind of glory that only those involved in a team effort can know. You are that team. San Antonio is ready.

Let us now move forward and build a city together so that when life’s shadows become long, we can say: “I was there. I helped. We made a difference.”