Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar is pushing a proposal he says could eliminate a redundancy in the criminal justice system that’s costing taxpayers millions every year.
Salazar wants to turn the Toudouze building — a training facility for sheriff’s deputies near the Bexar County jail on the near West Side — into a hub for booking arrestees into jail. It would be jointly operated by the city and county.
Detainees wait for processing in the intake section of the Bexar County Adult Detention Center.
Christopher Lee/Staff Photographer
A class of cadets learns CPR in the Toudouze building, the location for the Sheriff’s proposed new booking facility on Aug. 13, 2026.
Blaine Young/For the Express-News
A room in the Toudouze building, the location for the Sheriff’s proposed new booking facility on Aug. 13, 2026. Sheriff Javier Salazar said it could be used as a store room for inmate belongings.
Blaine Young/For the Express-News
His proposal aims to fix what’s known as “double magistration,” a quirk of the county’s criminal justice system that requires people arrested by the San Antonio police to undergo two similar hearings before their bail is set.
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Magistration is the first legal step authorities take after an arrest. In San Antonio, it starts with a municipal court judge explaining the charges to a defendant, gathering information about the case and reading the person their rights. The arrestee is later taken to an annex at the Bexar County jail, less than a mile from the municipal court building, where they stand before a magistrate judge who conducts a hearing along the same lines as the first one.
The key difference between the two proceedings is that the municipal county judge can’t set the bail amount. That authority belongs to the county.
Critics say the system wastes both arrestees’ time and taxpayer dollars. A county-commissioned study by UTHealth Houston’s School of Public Health found last year that double magistration can increase an arrestee’s processing time by 16 hours or more while driving up costs.
Salazar said his proposal, if the county and city rally behind it, would end double magistration, making the booking process much more efficient.
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He discussed the idea with the Bexar County Commissioners Court on Aug. 3, saying the building’s size and layout could address longstanding concerns raised by the San Antonio Police Department about the jail’s current magistration facility.
The five-member court, which controls the county’s budget, welcomed the proposal. But commissioners cautioned that turning the Toudouze building into a central processing facility would take time, money and coordination with the city.
“Having seen the Toudouze, it’s not going to be plug and play,” Precinct Two Commissioner Justin Rodriguez told Salazar at the meeting. “It’s going to require investment, and I hope we can continue the conversation with the city to collaborate and work in the best interest of the community.”
Salazar’s proposal comes with several looming questions. How much would it cost to renovate the Toudouze building? Who would pay for the work? And could the city and county agree on how to operate the booking facility?
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If history is any guide, the last question might be the hardest to answer. Double magistration, after all, is the result of a power struggle between the county and the city of San Antonio.
A city-county clash
The system dates back to 2018, when the county opened the Justice Intake and Assessment Annex in the south tower of the Bexar County jail as a magistration facility.
Police Chief William McManus said at the time the county had planned the annex without input from the SAPD. He refused to reroute his officers to the annex, arguing its configuration kept them away from their street patrols for too long. They continued dropping off detainees at the municipal court building.
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McManus stepped down as police chief last month after nearly two decades on the job. His interim replacement, Jesse Salame Jr., has toured the Toudouze building.
Salame could not be reached for comment on Salazar’s proposal. But the sheriff said he believes the building “checks all of SAPD’s boxes.”
One of its requirement is a large sallyport, which is the enclosed area where law enforcement officers transfer arrestees from their vehicles into the facility. Salazar said the Toudouze building’s parking lot, which is enclosed between two buildings, fits the bill — it can hold dozens of vehicles.
“There’s more than enough parking there to ensure we won’t have a bunch of cops stacked up and waiting to go back into service,” said Salazar, who served as an SAPD officer under McManus until he was elected sheriff in 2016.
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New use for the Toudouze
The sheriff’s office originally built the Toudouze building to be a work-release facility for low-risk inmates, who would’ve been allowed to leave to work outside jobs rather than remain in jail custody. But the COVID-19 pandemic put the program on hold before it could get off the ground, and the sheriff’s office never opened the facility for that purpose.
Salazar, who was ramping up hiring, decided to use the building for deputy training instead.
The Toudouze includes several large, open rooms. In one of them, about 20 trainees sat at folding tables Thursday and shouted commands, practicing with their instructors.
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Salazar, who was giving the San Antonio Express-News a tour of the building, said he envisions turning some of the rooms into separate spaces for booking suspects arrested for public intoxication and Class C misdemeanors.
He said SAPD had identified that feature as a necessary one — and one that’s missing from the jail annex.
Salazar said booking space wasn’t the department’s only concern. SAPD objected to the county annex’s lack of a property room, a designated space for storing arrestees’ personal items. Salazar has a room in mind for that purpose in the Toudouze building. He said it’s larger than the SAPD’s property room. Currently, the room holds a training dummy propped up against lockers, stacked chairs and filing cabinets.
For a booking facility to run efficiently, officers also need a dedicated space to write their reports. Salazar pointed to another Toudouze room as a solution. It’s already lined with desktop computers and is roughly four times the size of the room for report-writing in the south tower annex.
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In another room, a group of cadets — the “babies,” as Salazar calls them — practiced CPR on dummies laid out on the concrete floor. Nearby, metal bunk beds, remnants of the building’s original work-release design, hold boxes of folded uniforms. With the addition of doors, Salazar said, the beds could be used as isolation units.
Salazar estimates the building would accommodate about 200 hundred people at a time, eliminating the need for the city’s current booking facility.
He’s advocating to convert the south tower’s magistration annex into a medical unit for the jail.
But converting the Toudouze would take more than moving furniture around. Jail standards would require replacing its vinyl ceiling tiles with a more secure material, Salazar said.
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One of the building’s largest rooms currently can’t even be used for cadet classes. It holds toilets, still in their boxes, that will eventually be installed in the jail. Large sections of the room’s walls are bare drywall, the ceiling’s metal frame is exposed, and it has no air conditioning.
Salazar told the Express-News that Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai has designated him the “salesperson for the Toudouze.” His task is to convince city leaders of its potential to get rid of double magistration.
He’s inviting City Council member to come see the building and said the county commissioners, Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones and City Manager Erik Walsh have already taken the tour.
Councilwoman Teri Castillo told the Express-News she visited the Toudouze building several months ago — and that Salazar also proposed other potential uses for the space during her tour, including as mental health and medical units for arrestees.
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“I understand the need to explore the role the Toudouze building could play,” Castillo said. “If that direction is a potential magistration space, I would like to ensure that there is convening, consulting and co-creating with the city of San Antonio in retrofitting the building.”
But budget problems could derail the proposal, at least in the short-term. Both San Antonio and Bexar County leaders are bracing for steep drops in property tax revenue, warning that spending cuts in this year’s budgets will be significant.
County Manager David Smith told Commissioners Court in April that property tax projections were the worst he’d seen since the 2008 financial crisis. Just this week, the city’s budget writers proposed $90 million in cuts over the next two years and a property tax rate hike to eliminate a deficit of $158 million.
“The property tax stuff that we’re feeling in the city — the county is feeling it as well,” City Manager Erik Walsh said. “They’re going to have to prioritize.”
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One big catch is that no one has a clear idea how much it would cost to turn the Toudouze building into a magistration office. The sheriff’s office does not have a recent estimate for the cost of retrofitting the building.
Salazar cited $7 million as a “rough guestimate” from several years ago, but said he believes the final price would likely be higher because of rising construction costs.
“They’re going to have to repurpose money from somewhere” he said.
“I don’t think not doing it is an option, because the taxpayers are going to demand it,” he added.
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A path forward
If the county and city agree to move forward, the sheriff’s office estimates it would take about 18 months to make the building usable as a booking facility. But first, city and county officials would have to hire experts to create a plan for the building and ensure that it complies with Texas Commission on Jail Standards requirements.
January’s county leadership transition could provide the momentum the proposal needs.
Ron Nirenberg, who defeated Sakai in the March Democratic primary election for county judge, said eliminating double magistration will be “the top priority” if he is elected. He said he has toured the building twice — once about six months ago and again last month with Walsh and Salame.
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“Double magistration is something that is eminently solvable,” said Nirenberg, who’s considered the frontrunner in the November general election against the Republican nominee, conservative activist Patrick Von Dohlen. “Everybody wants to put this behind us for both public safety reasons and fiscal responsibility, and I’ve seen no other proposals that deal with the issue as comprehensively as what the sheriff’s put forward.”
Nirenberg said he would commit to negotiating a fair cost-sharing plan with city leaders.
“If we solve the problem upstream, we save money downstream,” he said. “The failure to solve these problems will only continue to bleed money away from the basic services that our departments are providing.”