Analysis: Time may be running down for Mayor Jones to rethink her lone wolf approach

San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones speaks during a recent town hall. Credit: Michael Karlis

San Antonio didn’t elect Gina Ortiz Jones to play nice. But it also didn’t elect her to run City Hall like, well, how it’s working right now.

A month shy of her first year in office, the mayor has burned through seven staffers — an eyebrow-raising level of turnover. Her second chief of staff, Jenise Carroll, exited last month — just a week after another key departure.

Meanwhile, City Council in late February formally censured Jones after she shouted at a colleague during a heated behind-the-scenes discussion. The 8-1 vote marked the first time in modern history that San Antonio council censured a mayor, and in remarks to the media, members of the body painted Jones as vindictive and bullying.

Amid that fractured backdrop, Jones has emerged as a lone wolf on council.

Earlier this month, amid a contentious debate, she cast the sole vote against issuing the first city contracts for the massive Project Marvel sports-and-entertainment district. She also drew early criticism for unilaterally trying to change the city’s Council Consideration Request (CCR) process.

One of Jones’ most notable victories so far — a proposal to move municipal elections from May to November during odd years — barely squeaked by on a 6-5 vote even though it was widely praised by voting rights groups.

“Perception is everything in politics, and the perception right now is that there is instability in [Jones’] office, that she’s not able to keep top staff people,” UT-San Antonio political scientist Jon Taylor said. “And that may end up impeding her ability to lead city council and the City of San Antonio while going into a tough budget situation and an economy that’s looking worse by the day.”

Expecting receipts

To Taylor’s point, all the City Hall turmoil under Jones’ watch isn’t a good look. Still, it doesn’t mean Jones has cratered her chances of emerging as a successful mayor, political observers said.

Municipal politics has a dirty little secret: most voters don’t follow it closely. Unless trash pickup stops or property taxes spike, the blow-by-blow of council drama tends to live and die among staffers, insiders and the handful of residents who treat council meetings like must-see TV.

Jones may be skating on that reality. For now.

“You don’t always have to get along with the people you work with, and you can burn through staff and still get things accomplished — although getting things accomplished becomes harder in both of those situations,” veteran San Antonio political consultant Laura Barberena said. “Ultimately, at the end of the day, voters care about whether you have the receipts. Did you get things done?”

Still, City Hall observers said time may be running out for Jones to learn from the tumultuous opening months of her tenure and stake out a different path.

Churning through staff

High staff turnover doesn’t just make for awkward goodbye cakes, it drains institutional memory, slows policy progress and makes it more difficult to recruit top talent, political experts said.

UTSA’s Taylor called the churn in Jones’ office “unprecedented,” adding that it would set off alarm bells if it was occurring higher up the political food chain, say, in the governor’s office.

“It makes me wonder how well the policy can be formulated, let alone implemented, when you have such a lack of continuity with the person that is supposed to help coordinate the mayor’s roles and coordinate her policy agenda,” he said.

At least two people familiar with the inner workings of Jones’ office said she will need to change her management style if she wants to stop bleeding staffers. Those people declined to be named because they don’t want to risk their future political work.

Ortiz regularly cuts off and interrupts staffers as they try to apprise her of situations, according to the first person, who’s worked closely with her in the past.

The other person familiar with Jones’ office said she hastened a staffer’s resignation by publicly dressing the person down for taking a seat at a meeting.

“Who told you you could sit down?” Jones reportedly snapped.

Jones’ military experience and tenure as the Biden administration’s Under Secretary of the Air Force suggest she developed a management style more about getting things done than playing well with others, the first observer said.

“There’s just people that don’t work well with others and work better by themselves,” the person said. “She’s a great technocrat. You give her something to do, and she’ll do it. But when you tell her to work with others and manage personalities, situations and conflicts, that’s just not her skill set.”

One mayor, one vote

Likewise, the longer Jones and the remainder of council remain locked in trench warfare, the less likely she is to rack up accomplishments the way San Antonio’s most successful mayors have — by building consensus behind the scenes.

Our city’s “strong council, weak mayor” system limits the executive’s power, meaning success depends heavily on coalition-building and back-channel diplomacy. Alienate too many colleagues and even modest initiatives end up sputtering before they reach the finish line, observers said.

“Mayors in San Antonio can be as blunt as they wish, but that doesn’t move the dial very much when you’re in a vulnerable position, when you don’t really have the chips to play that get you leverage,” said Char Miller, a historian at California’s Pomona College who’s written multiple books on San Antonio.

“So, some of the best mayors in the city’s modern history have been people who understood that limitation of the position, but had other skills, which were in collaborative engagement.”

Those are learnable skills, the professor added. Especially now that Alamo City mayors are elected to four-year terms.

“The advantage of a four-year term is that a mayor can learn the job in year one — one-and-a-half or so — and if necessary, pivot and still have time to pursue the agenda that they came into the office with,” Miller said. “And I think part of that is about a flexible personality that goes, ‘OK, that didn’t work. Let me try something else.’”

Jones campaigned on promises that require coordination, persistence and cooperation: housing affordability, economic development and infrastructure improvements. She’ll also need to collaborate as council tackles the city’s $170 million budget deficit.

None of those get done by a mayor operating in isolation or constantly rebuilding her team, political experts said. If the administration can’t translate its agenda into tangible wins, voters will notice — even the ones who don’t read the local news every day.

And an inability to deliver on objectives doesn’t just complicate Jones’ bid for a second term. Observers warn it also could cast a long shadow over her using the office as a political steppingstone — say, for a congressional run. Opponents would be quick to frame her time as mayor as being more about acrimony than accomplishments.

“Very soon, the public is going to want results,” UTSA’s Taylor said. “They want to see tangible results, and that’s where the mayor is going to have to deliver, and that is why having continuity and stability … is extraordinarily important.”

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