San Antonio’s Chick-fil-A fans will get a chance to strike back at the polls Saturday when the mayor who led a successful effort to ban the popular restaurant from the city’s chief airport is up for reelection.
Incumbent Mayor Ron Nirenberg, like many big city liberals, has stood apart from the overall conservative trend in Texas and steered San Antonio, now the state’s second largest city with more than 1.4 million residents, on a progressive path.
He helped defeat a proposal to bid on the 2020 Republican National Convention, which he described as a bad fiscal deal for the city, and was a key figure in the battle against Chick-fil-A, known for its Christian values, which he said needed to be denied a foothold for the sake of the city’s message of inclusion.
Mr. Nirenberg’s opponent, Councilman Greg Brockhouse, tried to capitalize on the backlash against San Antonio, attempting to overturn the ban in April.
With some council members who originally voted to ban the restaurant reconsidering, Mr. Brockhouse’s motion fell 6-5, with the mayor casting the deciding vote.
“These folks downtown, they don’t represent San Antonio,” Mr. Brockhouse told The Washington Times this week. “They’re trying to pull off a social re-engineering of City Hall.”
San Antonio is one of several Texas cities with mayoral contests this weekend, in the state’s somewhat unique system of semiannual “nonpartisan” contests.
Dallas appears headed to a runoff to replace the term-limited incumbent, while in Fort Worth, the incumbent, Mayor Betsy Price, is one of the few remaining Republican executives in a big U.S. city.
She is seeking a 5th term. Her chief opponent, Deborah Peoples, is chairwoman of the Democratic Party in Tarrant County.
Mayoral races are increasingly becoming political strongholds for Texas Democrats, with Ms. Price and Mr. Brockhouse hoping to keep the GOP relevant in big city halls.
It’s something of an uphill task, according to Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Fort Worth.
“Austin has been for a long time, of course, and for a while El Paso and San Antonio,” Mr. Jillson said. “Dallas went blue about 10 years ago, Houston is right on the brink, and even Fort Worth, the reddest of cities, elected a Democrat as a state senator in the last election.”
The establishment of Democratic political machines in the cities is one of the party’s key moves in its ongoing effort to turn Texas at least purple.
And Chick-fil-A has become a flash point.
“He keeps saying this is about a fast-food restaurant,” Mr. Brockhouse said. “It’s not. It’s about religious liberty. This whole virtue signaling thing is absolutely happening, but they lit a torch for religious freedom when they hit that touchstone.”
Mr. Nirenberg counters that he’s focused on public safety and the economy.
“We’re building a solid, quality city here for the present and the future,” he said. “I’m confident that my track record of getting things done for the city, along with crime at historical lows, that these are the things that matter to residents and taxpayers.”
As an example of its emphasis on the nuts-and-bolts of municipal leadership, Mr. Nirenberg and his staff told The Washington Times this week that traffic is the No. 1 issue in the election.
To combat congestion on the roads, the mayor pointed to his comprehensive transportation project, a sort of liberal urban dream of technological developments that will, proponents claim, dramatically improve movement in the city while also reducing its carbon footprint.
The details of the proposal, however, do not yet include a price tag. Mr. Nirenberg said both the cost and the funding mechanism for the project are still under consideration, but vowed what is presented to voters next year “will include no tax increases.”
He also said that if Democratic National Committee had offered the city “the same deal” as the GOP, he would have voted against their convention, too.
The city’s Firefighters Association endorsed Mr. Brockhouse earlier this year.
“We just feel the mayor has dropped the ball on so much and he’s done so on his own,” said Rudy Morales, legislative director for San Antonio’s Firefighters’ Association.
The mayor dismissed that opposition as a sideshow “for political benefit,” the same broad claim he made during the debates over Chick-fil-A and the RNC convention.
Still, Mr. Brockhouse has managed to make the election a referendum, in part, on the Chick-fil-A and RNC votes, along with the mayor’s recent votes for property taxes, potent issues.
Those topics dominated the second debate between the men, according to local accounts, especially as Mr. Brockhouse managed to stress what many felt was the less-than-transparent manner in which the decisions were made.
“The record is pretty clear on this: I was in favor of bringing the Republican National Convention here — it was a bad decision that was done behind closed doors, period,” he said, noting the call was made in executive session. “I was in favor of keeping Chick-fil-A, period. The mayor opposed both of those measures.”
Every vote will count this week: Texas municipal elections traditionally draw a very low turnout, with voting participation falling somewhere between the mid-single digits and low teens, Mr. Jillson said.
“I would expect this one to come right in the middle of that range, so not a big turnout at all,” he said.
• James Varney can be reached at jvarney@washingtontimes.com.
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