San Antonio mayor live election results: Gina Ortiz Jones leads
Gina Ortiz Jones is leading the race to be San Antonio's new mayor, edging out Rolando Pablos in early election results posted Saturday.
Why it matters: The mayoral election, the city's first in 16 years without an incumbent on the ballot, has evolved into an unusually partisan race for a nonpartisan seat, drawing money and influence from across the state and nation.
Neither Ortiz Jones nor Pablos have held elected office before, and San Antonio has not elected a mayor who hasn't served on the City Council since Phil Hardberger in 2005.
The latest: Early vote results as of 7pm Saturday showed Ortiz Jones with 52% of the vote, with 48% for Pablos.
State of play: Ortiz Jones served as an Air Force undersecretary in the Biden administration and was twice the Democratic nominee for the 23rd Congressional District. Pablos is a former Texas secretary of state who has served as a senior adviser to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
During the runoff campaign, both leaned on their families' immigrant backgrounds. Ortiz Jones spoke of being raised by a single mother who immigrated from the Philippines and Pablos of his family moving from Mexico to El Paso when he was 8 years old.
Follow the money: Pablos and his supporters appeared to both outraise and outspend Ortiz Jones in the runoff election, campaign finance reports show.
Pablos raised nearly $333,000 and spent more than $275,000 from late April through May 28. He got a big boost from the Texas Economic Fund, a political action committee run by Abbott's former political director, which raised $1.35 million and spent over $623,000 during that time.
Ortiz Jones raised nearly $249,000 and spent over $133,000 in the same period. She had help from Fields of Change, a national Democratic PAC, which spent more than $160,000 for her campaign.
The big picture: The new mayor will lead San Antonio at a pivotal time, as officials seek to gain public support for a new downtown Spurs arena that could be surrounded by a sports and entertainment district.
They will also lead the city through the remaining years of the Trump administration, under which San Antonio has lost millions of dollars in federal funding. The city is also expecting a budget deficit.
Catch up quick: Mayor Ron Nirenberg reached his term limits after eight years in office, making him the city's longest-serving mayor since Henry Cisneros in the 1980s.
San Antonio's next mayor will serve for four years after voters approved increasing term length from two years. They will work alongside several new City Council members.
Flashback: Nirenberg's departure left a rare opening that drew a crowded 27-candidate field to replace him. Four sitting City Council members struggled to break through the noise as traditional backers in local elections, like the police union, sat out the first round of voting.
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Trump officials are vowing to end school desegregation orders. Some parents say they're still needed
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They point to cases like Concordia, where the decades-old order was used to stop a charter school from favoring white students in admissions. 'Concordia is one where it's old, but a lot is happening there,' said Deuel Ross, deputy director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. 'That's true for a lot of these cases. They're not just sitting silently.' Last year, before President Donald Trump took office, Concordia Parish rejected a Justice Department plan that would have ended its case if the district combined several majority white and majority Blac k elementary and middle schools. At a town hall meeting, Vidalia residents vigorously opposed the plan, saying it would disrupt students' lives and expose their children to drugs and violence. An official from the Louisiana attorney general's office spoke against the proposal and said the Trump administration likely would change course on older orders. Accepting the plan would have been a 'death sentence' for the district, said Paul Nelson, a former Concordia superintendent. White families would have fled to private schools or other districts, said Nelson, who wants the court order removed. 'It's time to move on,' said Nelson, who left the district in 2016. 'Let's start looking to build for the future, not looking back to what our grandparents may have gone through.' At Ferriday High, athletic coach Derrick Davis supported combining schools in Ferriday and Vidalia. He said the district's disparities come into focus whenever his teams visit schools with newer sports facilities. 'It seems to me, if we'd all combine, we can all get what we need,' he said. Others oppose merging schools if it's done solely for the sake of achieving racial balance. 'Redistricting and going to different places they're not used to ... it would be a culture shock to some people," said Ferriday's school resource officer, Marcus Martin, who, like Derrick Davis, is Black. The district's current superintendent and school board did not respond to requests for comment. Concordia is among more than 120 districts across the South that remain under desegregation orders from the 1960s and '70s, including about a dozen in Louisiana. Calling the orders historical relics is 'unequivocally false,' said Shaheena Simons, who until April led the Justice Department section that oversees school desegregation cases. 'Segregation and inequality persist in our schools, and they persist in districts that are still under desegregation orders,' she said. With court orders in place, families facing discrimination can reach out directly to the Justice Department or seek relief from the court. Otherwise, the only recourse is a lawsuit, which many families can't afford, Simons said. In Concordia, the order played into a battle over a charter school that opened in 2013 on the former campus of an all-white private school. To protect the area's progress on racial integration, a judge ordered Delta Charter School to build a student body that reflected the district's racial demographics. But in its first year, the school was just 15% Black. After a court challenge, Delta was ordered to give priority to Black students. Today, about 40% of its students are Black. Desegregation orders have been invoked recently in other cases around the state. One led to an order to address disproportionately high rates of discipline for Black students, and in another a predominantly Black elementary school was relocated from a site close to a chemical plant. The Trump administration was able to close the Plaquemines case with little resistance because the original plaintiffs were no longer involved — the Justice Department was litigating the case alone. Concordia and an unknown number of other districts are in the same situation, making them vulnerable to quick dismissals. Concordia's case dates to 1965, when the area was strictly segregated and home to a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. When Black families in Ferriday sued for access to all-white schools, the federal government intervened. As the district integrated its schools, white families fled Ferriday. The district's schools came to reflect the demographics of their surrounding areas. Ferriday is mostly Black and low-income, while Vidalia is mostly white and takes in tax revenue from a hydroelectric plant. A third town in the district, Monterey, has a high school that's 95% white. At the December town hall, Vidalia resident Ronnie Blackwell said the area 'feels like a Mayberry, which is great,' referring to the fictional Southern town from 'The Andy Griffith Show.' The federal government, he said, has 'probably destroyed more communities and school systems than it ever helped.' Under its court order, Concordia must allow students in majority Black schools to transfer to majority white schools. It also files reports on teacher demographics and student discipline. After failing to negotiate a resolution with the Justice Department, Concordia is scheduled to make its case that the judge should dismiss the order, according to court documents. Meanwhile, amid a wave of resignations in the federal government, all but two of the Justice Department lawyers assigned to the case have left. Without court supervision, Brian Davis sees little hope for improvement. 'A lot of parents over here in Ferriday, they're stuck here because here they don't have the resources to move their kids from A to B," he said. 'You'll find schools like Ferriday — the term is, to me, slipping into darkness."
