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HA new report off ers a comprehensive survey of mistakes law enforcement made during the mass shooting that killed 21 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. Among its major revelations: a Uvalde police offi cer reportedly asked a supervisor for permission to shoot the suspect before he entered the school, missing an opportunity to take him out.

HA San Antonio activist is heading to the White House this week to celebrate the passage of the fi rst major gun reform bill in the U.S. in decades. Bennie Price, who was incarcerated for murder at 18, opened Big Mama’s Safe House on the East Side last year to serve as a safe haven for people experiencing gun violence. He’ll join other activists and lawmakers at an event commemorating the signing of the bill.

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HGov. Greg Abbo last week said he’ll begin expelling migrants from Texas in violation of federal law. Abbo , who’s running for re-election this fall against Beto O’Rourke, ordered the Texas National Guard and the Department of Public Safety to return migrants who cross the border into the state illegally back to border checkpoints even though the federal government has jurisdiction over immigration ma ers. A federal lawsuit is likely forthcoming.

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into alleged civil rights violations commi ed as part of Gov. Greg Abbo ’s Operation Lone Star immigration crackdown. Scandal has plagued the $3 billion scheme since its inception — and the DOJ now is reportedly investigating whether agents illegally detained migrants based on their “perceived or actual race or national origin.” — Abe Asher

YOU SAID IT!

“Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Patrick are declaring open season on defenseless migrants and endangering millions of other Latinos and others who will be profi led along the way.”

— Rodolfo Rosales Jr.

Texas LULAC State Director

Throwing the “I” word around with Texas Republicans

Assclown Alert is a column of opinion, analysis and snark.

In the summer of 2019, days after a gunman motivated by racial hatred killed 23 people in an El Paso Walmart, Texas Gov. Greg Abbo opened a public safety roundtable by admi ing “mistakes were made” when his campaign sent out a le er full of anti-immigrant rhetoric a day before the mass shooting.

While not quite an apology, it was an acknowledgement by the Republican governor that the claims in his fundraising le er sounded awful close to the language of the shooter, who posted an online screed warning of a “Hispanic invasion” of the state.

Since then, the “I” word has crept into the day-to-day language of top Texas Republicans, including Abbo , who used it to justify an order last week allowing state authorities to expel undocumented migrants in likely violation of U.S. law.

Around the same time, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick invoked the “invasion” rhetoric on Fox News, claiming the U.S. is being “a acked just as we were on Pearl Harbor.” Further, he argued, Texas should “put hands on people” and force them back across the border.

Not to be outdone, U.S. Rep. Chip Roy also appeared on Fox News, arguing that by calling the surge in border crossings an “invasion” Texas can justify enforcing immigration law, something that falls under federal jurisdiction.

All three men know that words ma er. All three men know that words have consequences. Beyond holding political offi ce, Abbo and Roy are a orneys, while Patrick rose to prominence as a talk radio personality. And at least one of the three, Abbo , has publicly acknowledged the hatred and violence anti-immigrant rhetoric can inspire.

Even so, they and Texas Republicans have chosen to ignore those harms because they’re more concerned about pandering to the xenophobes, hatemongers and extremists in their own party. That may be how political calculus works in 2022, but it still makes them racist assclowns. — Sanford Nowlin

Wikimedia Commons / Ruperto Miller

news

Beto O’Rourke has narrowed Gov. Greg Abbo ’s lead in the gubernatorial race to six points, a new poll from the Texas Politics Project (TPP) at the University of Texas at Austin has found. Though Abbo has led in every public poll of the race so far, his favorability in the TPP poll is at its lowest point ever — with signifi cantly more voters disapproving than approving of his handling of gun violence and abortion.

A Texas state program will administer $180 million in grants to help the travel and tourism industries recover from the worst eff ects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using federal funds made available in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, the state began taking applications last week for one-time grants of up to $20,000 for businesses like restaurants and hotels that were forced to temporarily close or scale back during the global health crisis. The Tejano Music Awards are coming to San Antonio’s new Tech Port Center + Arena in November. The event’s organizers last week unveiled plans for the fi rst in-person edition of the awards since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In previous years, the awards were held at the Alamodome. — Abe Asher

Find more news coverage every day at sacurrent.com

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CITYSCRAPES

Ex-San Antonio City Manager Sheryl Sculley is pushing for another convention center expansion — this one in Austin

BY HEYWOOD SANDERS

Editor’s Note: The following is Current Events, a column of opinion and analysis.

For Current readers who wonder whatever became of former San Antonio City Manager Sheryl Sculley, she appears to be pleasantly ensconced in Austin, off ering advice.

Her name came up as nonprofi t news organization the Austin Monitor recently reported on a session organized by that city’s chapter of the Urban Land Institute, the national organization of developers and real estate types. The topic? A proposed expansion of the Austin Convention Center. This expansion isn’t a modest proposition either — it bears an estimated price tag between $1.2 and $1.5 billion and would involve literally tearing down and rebuilding the city’s existing venue. Bigger, of course.

Despite the challenges ahead, the ULI panelists were entirely upbeat and enthusiastic about the city’s prospects, the Austin Monitor reports. Tom Noonan, CEO of Visit Austin, argued that the city’s existing center ranked just 48th-largest in the nation, “pu ing it well behind facilities in smaller and less economically active cities.” And Noonan went on to contend that the resulting boom in hotel business and city hotel tax revenue would benefi t local arts groups and the larger community — a way “to fund the things Austinites love.”

For Sculley the promise of a far bigger convention center would go well beyond just more conventions and visitors, according to the report. During the session, she stressed the “public-private partnership” component of the expansion and its potential for substantial new private development downtown.

“If I can be brutally honest, I haven’t met a city that was great at retail, and so there would have to be experts that would assist the city in any kind of private-sector development associated with the project,” she said.

Sculley’s enthusiasm for big downtown projects, and perhaps her brutal honesty as well, are rooted in a long personal history. Well before she arrived in San Antonio, she built her reputation as a manager by heading up the eff ort to expand Phoenix’s convention center in the late 1990s. Her promises, in memo after memo, were grand.

City staff ers argued that the existing center only ranked 60th-largest in the county even though Phoenix was the sixth largest city. A consultant study promised that a larger venue would boost the city’s convention business by 50% to 75%. Over and over, Sculley stressed that the expansion would involve no new taxes. Instead, it could be paid for with existing visitor taxes and a potential $300 million commitment from the state.

Sculley did much of the pitching to the Arizona Legislature herself, armed with a 2002 presentation that stressed “There is No Status Quo!” At stake were “$32 million in annual state tax revenues” and “12,000 jobs,” according to her presentation. It proved enough to get the state government to commit $300 million to the project.

But a tripled-in-size convention center simply couldn’t stand alone. What Phoenix also needed, just like San Antonio, was a 1,000-room hotel next door.

The eff ort to get a private developer to build the big new “headquarters hotel” proved just as fruitless in Phoenix and as it did in San Antonio. So, Phoenix fi nanced and built the new

Sheraton-branded hotel itself with a city bond issue. Clearly, under Sculley’s guidance, the city was poised to emerge as the next great convention destination in the country.

Except that it didn’t.

A fi nal study from Ernst & Young in 2003 forecast that the grand new center would welcome 376,861 annual convention delegates, up from the 166,000 of 1996 and 193,000 in 1997. But the count of convention a endees was just 156,000 in fi scal 2011 and 233,000 the next year.

Without a boom in convention business, the new Sheraton — later dubbed the “Sherylton” by city hall staff ers in San Antonio — struggled to pay off its debt and required continuing tax revenue support from the city.

Finally, in 2017, Phoenix sold off the Sherylton to a private owner, taking a signifi cant fi nancial loss.

The Phoenix experience did li le to reshape public policy in San Antonio after Sculley’s arrival as city manager in 2005.

Armed with a bunch of consultant studies, Mayor Julián Castro’s push for the “Decade of Downtown” and the renewal of Hemisfair, San Antonio sold $550 million in bonds in 2012 to fund yet another expansion of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.

In other words, Sheryl Sculley’s enthusiasm for a $1.2 billion-plus convention center expansion in Austin isn’t surprising — it’s just par for the course.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have questions. Do city manager types learn from the success, or failure, of the projects they supported and promoted? Is there any way to hold them accountable for the grand promises — such as Phoenix’s 12,000 jobs — that aren’t realized?

And, ultimately, who do they really serve? Is it the broad community of city residents and taxpayers? Or is it a narrow constituency of developers, downtown property owners and hospitality industry boosters, all in search of the next grand public project?

Courtesy Photo City of San Antonio

Heywood Sanders is a professor of public policy at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Sanford Nowlin

Bargaining Baristas

Workers at San Antonio Starbucks are on the front line in a growing labor movement

MShift supervisor Sarah Wayment said her interest in organizing grew after she saw the union’s success in Buff alo, N.Y.

BY JAMES DOBBINS

It may seem odd that a labor movement is percolating in Texas right now.

After all, this a right-to-work state where corporate welfare takes precence over a security net for workers and all levers of power are controlled by a rapacious Republican Party indifferent to the working class. Indeed, it’s a state built on the bent backs of the working poor.

However, the pandemic changed the relationship between businesses and many of their employees. White-collar workers allowed to work from home found a new sense of freedom from the dead time of commutes. Essential workers — many in low-paying food service and medical jobs — were forced to risk their lives to stay afl oat. Along the way, many discovered that employers and state governments didn’t give a damn about them.

As part of that great rethinking, Starbucks coff ee slingers, who keep the nation caff einated, are lifting each other up in solidarity against a company they see as exploitative. Some labor experts now see those employees and the Starbucks Workers United union as lighting the way for a wider swath of workers to organize for be er pay and conditions congruent with 21st-century America.

The union maintains that more than 180 of Sea le-based Starbucks’ stores are organized, a fraction of the nearly 9,000 corporate-owned locations nationwide. In San Antonio, four locations have unionized since April, with more stores set to vote on joining in the coming weeks, employees told the Current.

San Antonio Starbucks worker CJ Craig, 26, has been with the company for four years. Craig, an actor who struggled to fi nd roles during the pandemic, said he never thought about organizing a union until the fi rst outlets in Buff alo made it a reality. A manager sent a le er to stores assuring staff ers a union wouldn’t dare come to San Antonio, let alone Craig’s store at Loop 410 and Vance Jackson Road.

“The le er made unionizing a real possibility,” Craig said. “The initial chats among the partners were, ‘It’s going to take off , it’s going to blow up into a national movement.’”

The partners at the 410 and Vance Jackson store made their intentions to unionize known in February, becoming the fi rst in the state. They quickly realized the best way to prepare for what now seemed like the inevitable — a union shop in Texas — was to strengthen their relationships with coworkers.

Craig helped organize game nights and social events after work. The coworkers’ growing bonds, the excitement of stores organizing across the country, and fi nally, the fi rst Starbucks in Austin unionizing early last month helped reach a tipping point.

“We realized we could pull it off ,” said Craig. “Let’s do it so other people can feel like they can.”

Craig’s store became the fi rst in San Antonio to unionize and the third in the state. Within a week, two more Starbucks locations announced an intention to join the union.

‘Battle for hearts and minds’

In April, billionaire Howard Schultz took over as Starbucks’ CEO for the third time. The reason for his return, he told the New York Times, was “to reinvent the role and responsibility of a public company at a time where there is a cultural and political change with regard to the crisis of capitalism — the needs, requirements of the employee in a company today.”

Or, as he explained further, to save Starbucks from its rapidly expanding union.

“We don’t believe that a third party should lead our people,” he said. “And, so, we are in a ba le for the hearts and minds of our people.”

Later, Schultz emphasized that Starbucks is not abusing its employees, whom the company calls “partners,” like the coal mining industry did 60 years ago.

Despite Schultz’s pledge to reinvent the public company’s role, organizers argue it’s resorted to union-busting eff orts straight out of last century’s playbook.

The National Labor Relations Board last month accused Starbucks of illegally intimidating workers in New York stores to keep them from unionizing. The petition, fi led at the U.S. District Court in Buff alo, argues the company fi red and disciplined union supporters, threatened workers and tried to bribe workers with benefi ts to vote against the union.

The federal regulators sought to reinstate seven employees Starbucks fi red for organizing. A spokesman for Starbucks said the accusations are false.

Almost 100% support

At the Starbucks on East Houston Street in downtown San Antonio, 30-year-old shift supervisor Sarah Wayment works part-time, about 20 hours weekly. She wants 25-35 hours, but her manager cut her back after the last holiday rush ended.

“I try to plan and work more to save,” said Wayment, an 11-year employee. “Our store closed for a long time during the pandemic. If you’re not salaried, you’re basically part-time. Only the manager is salaried.”

After Wayment returned to work last year as the pandemic waned and the Buff alo Starbucks organized, a union no longer seemed like a vague dream. She read books about labor movements and talked about possibilities with her co-workers on the morning shift.

“Some were like, ‘Oh, that’s great for them. That’s not going to happen for us,” she said.

Li le did she know another partner on the evening shift had the same idea. Soon, nearly all her co-workers were in favor of unionizing.

“We didn’t have union-busting at our store,” she said. “Our manager tried to talk us out of it. We kept it on the DL until we went public. Once we did that, it was clear we were almost 100% in favor.”

In February, Starbucks hired Parker Davis, a 20-year-old chemical engineering student, as a barista at its Blanco Road and Wurzbach Parkway store. Davis said it didn’t take him long to realize he and his co-workers needed a union to protect themselves from the brand of capitalism CEO Schultz defends.

In May, a shift supervisor was burned on the job. Davis described it as a workplace accident that left the partner with second-degree burns. Yet, the supervisor couldn’t leave the store without fi nding her replacement, which took more than 30 minutes, according to Davis.

“It was jarring,” he said. “Management was completely out of touch. The supervisor was denied workers comp. And then they had to prove they weren’t under the infl uence of drugs. We can all say they weren’t under the infl uence. After that day, I felt motivated to organize.”

Last year, Texas ranked as the thirdworst U.S. state for labor, according to an Oxfam analysis. Working 40 hours a week at minimum wage, a mere $7.25 per hour, only covers 24% of a living wage for a family of four.

What’s more, the state has provided no worker or union organizing protections beyond what’s necessary to comply with federal law. The average unemployment benefi ts cover about 12% of the required wages to live.

“The labor movement has deep roots in Texas, especially in San Antonio,” said Greg Casar, the Democratic nominee for the 35th Congressional district, and an advocate for a $15 minimum wage. “It wasn’t that long ago we had a lot more union activity and worker power in Texas.”

Indeed, the Republican Party, which has steadily eroded rights from power centers at the Supreme Court and in Austin, wants to eliminate the last few worker protections in Texas, worker advocates argue.

Sanford Nowlin

Empowered to do something

In its 2022 platform, the Texas Republican Party calls for the “Legislature to preempt local government eff orts to interfere with the State’s sovereignty over business, employees and property rights. This includes but is not limited to burdensome regulations on shortterm rentals, bags, sick leave, trees and employee criminal screening.”

In other words, the big-government Republicans want to forbid San Antonio and other blue-leaning cities to choose their own local, and higher, minimum wage, or pass laws off ering employed residents paid sick leave. In fact, Texas Republicans want to get rid of all minimum wage and mandatory sick leave laws.

The ba le Starbucks is waging for the hearts and minds of its workers is similar to confl icts between management and labor from earlier eras. Unions helped achieve the minimum wage and other signifi cant workplace benefi ts many now take for granted.

Yet, those rights may soon be taken away if laborers of all classes don’t fi ght to keep them, organizers warn. John L. Lewis, leader of the United Mine Workers union from 1920 to 1960, urged labor in all industries to organize the unorganized.

“With good organization, you have the aid of your fellow man,” Lewis said. “Without organization, you are a lone individual without infl uence and without recognition of any kind, and exploitation of you and your family when it pleases some industrialist to desire to make more money from your misery.”

That’s precisely what Starbucks employee Davis was doing when he reached out to the Starbucks United website for organizing help. Now, his store is set to vote in early August.

“It felt like an insurmountable task, but then I felt empowered to go forth and do something,” he said.

Sanford Nowlin

MTop: CJ Craig’s San Antonio store became the fi rst in the state to organize. Bottom: Parker Davis said a fellow worker’s on-the-job injury prompted his interest in the union

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