Voting rights groups say San Antonio is on the cusp of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to increase participation in its historically sleepy City Council and mayoral elections, thanks to permission the Texas Legislature gave cities to move May municipal elections to November.

The move was so unexpected many didn’t even know it had happened, leaving local leaders now scrambling against a fast-approaching deadline to make it happen.

Senate Bill 1494 is one of 8,700 bills introduced in the last legislative session, brought forward by Dallas-area lawmakers who wanted to hold their own city’s elections in November, like Houston and Austin already do.

Research indicates that doing so would boost anemic turnout in local elections, even though they’ll still be held odd-numbered years instead of presidential cycles, because voters associate elections with November.

In a legislature better-known for restricting voting access than expanding it, the bill managed to both sail through a conservative-dominated Senate committee in March and go largely unnoticed by voting rights groups that monitor such legislation when Gov. Greg Abbott signed it in June.

“If the question is, who missed it? I think everybody did,” said state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer (D-San Antonio). “There’s never been an election bill that just comes out of [that Senate committee] with three witnesses for, two witnesses against, right? It just doesn’t really happen.”

That all changed when San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones said she stumbled across news coverage about Dallas’ plans just before Thanksgiving.

Jill Torbert, president of the League of Women Voters of San Antonio, speaks at a press conference on the steps of City Hall on Monday. Credit: Amber Esparza / San Antonio Report

“A couple of weeks ago I’m reading the news and I see that the Dallas City Council has decided passed a resolution to move their municipal election from May to November,” Jones told roughly 100 residents at a town hall on the issue at Central Library on Saturday morning. “I was like, ‘Huh. That’s a big deal.’”

Now Jones is asking the San Antonio City Council to follow Dallas’ lead, and rallying support from a who’s who of voting rights groups and former city leaders who say it’s critical San Antonio moves on the opportunity before the window closes on Dec. 31.

“We ask people to vote in between three and four elections every year, if you include the runoffs — that is a tremendous burden on people,” Jill Torbert, president of the League of Women Voters of San Antonio said at a press conference at City Hall on Monday. “We can ease that burden, and we can raise the turnout rate, by simply doing one simple act, and that is moving the elections to [November].”

Her group is joined by the Texas Organizing Project, League of United Latin American Citizens and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and others like former Mayor Ron Nirenberg in supporting moving San Antonio’s municipal elections.

The City Council will discuss the idea in more depth on Wednesday at 2 p.m., and Jones says she’s hoping for a vote on Dec. 18.

Former San Antonio Councilmember María Antonietta Berriozábal attends and speaks at a press conference on Monday urging current council members to support changing the municipal Election Day from May to November. Credit: Amber Esparza / San Antonio Report

It’s unclear how many council members support the idea at this point.

Just one, Councilman Edward Mungia (D4), attended Jones’ press conference Monday, but others are certain to face pressure from outside groups in the coming days.

“We’re about political participation. Our whole goal, since its conception, has increased the political participation of our communities,” said LULAC Texas State Director Gabriel Rosales, whose group was so focused on the mid-cycle redistricting effort it totally missed the Dallas bill this session. “Naturally, we support [this].”

School districts raise concerns

Other influential leaders say San Antonio’s situation is more complicated than Dallas.

Moving San Antonio’s municipal elections to November of odd-numbered years would align it with state constitutional amendment elections, in theory saving the city money from holding a separate election in May.

But unlike Dallas, which has just one major school district that’s also moving elections to November, Bexar County has 17 school districts, some of which would be forced to either move to November or find another partner to keep their elections in the spring.

Alamo Heights ISD, Northside ISD, Judson ISD, San Antonio ISD, Harlandale ISD, Southwest ISD, Medina Valley ISD, Comal ISD all elect part of their boards in May, and other districts sometimes partner with the city on May bond measures.

“For our voters, the key difference between San Antonio and Dallas is that we have more local school districts that would be impacted,” said Martinez Fischer. “And I think it would be important to get their perspective before a decision is made.”

School districts aren’t under a deadline to decide like the city, but Julia Grizzard, executive director of the Bexar County Education Coalition, said they’re working frantically to figure out what a change in San Antonio’s municipal election would mean for them, and how much it would cost to hold elections in May without the city.

“There is a different atmosphere around that [May] election,” said Grizzard, whose group lobbies on behalf of the districts. “The school districts that [vote] in May really want and have engagement with their constituents to vote purely on what’s going on in that particular school district.”

A hasty timeline

At the town hall meeting Saturday morning, Jones faced questions about putting this idea before the council on such a tight deadline.

“I reached out to our city staff and said, ‘Hey, this wasn’t one of the issues that you raised with us in the readout from the legislative session,’” Jones said. “This is a major change, something that affects the city. We should have known about this.”

Assistant City Manager Jeff Coyle said the bill wasn’t presented to the council as part of the city’s government affairs team’s regular legislative briefings because unlike Dallas, San Antonio didn’t seek to change its election date in last year’s charter review. The bill was also permissive, Coyle said, meaning it didn’t mandate that the city make any changes.

In an interview after Monday’s press conference, Nirenberg said there’s long been community interest in moving the elections to November, but up until now, the legislature had been signaling no appetite for such changes.

“They were actively trying to prevent us from having a say in how we managed and scheduled elections, so I can understand why this took everyone by surprise,” he said.

Now that the opportunity has presented itself, Nirenberg said San Antonio should take it.

“The status quo creates barriers, especially for young people, working families, first time voters, and for voters of color,” he said. “As a former mayor, I saw firsthand how turnout spikes when elections are aligned with bigger ballots.”