San Antonio, TX Ballot: San Antonio City Attorney Andy Segovia announced Wednesday that progressive activists had submitted a sufficient number of valid signatures to place a wide-ranging charter reform amendment on the city’s May 6 ballot. The multi-pronged measure would forbid the police from enforcing laws that criminalize either abortion or “low-level marijuana possession.” Cops would also be barred from employing choke-holds and no-knock warrants, as well “using citations instead of arrests for low-level nonviolent crimes,” while an appointed justice director would ensure all of these policies are implemented.
Segovia, however, has warned that Texas law would prevent the bulk of the amendment from going into effect, except for the creation of a justice director and some smaller items. The measure’s proponents, who call their proposal the San Antonio Justice Charter, naturally see things differently, and they argue that a “yes” vote would still result in real changes. “The simple truth is that these policies will save lives by limiting unnecessary interactions with police that can lead to serious injury or even death―as we have seen recently with the shooting of Erik Cantu and death of Tyre Nichols,” said Ananda Tomas, the head of the progressive group ACT 4 SA.
Tomas said she also believes that the Justice Charter will have an impact despite the fact that the city council previously directed the police not to use public resources to investigate abortions last year, and department policy already bans both chokeholds and no-knock warrants. She told Axios last month that a victory at the ballot box would make it more difficult for elected officials to later reverse these policies and additionally emphasized that San Antonio would be the first city in the state to vote on decriminalizing abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Another progressive organizer, Mike Siegel, who was the Democratic nominee against Republican Rep. Michael McCaul in both 2018 and 2020, also insisted that Republican state officials wouldn’t be the obstacle that Segovia thinks they’ll be. “The state government does not provide special money to enforce marijuana laws or to enforce abortion laws, and every city makes decisions on how to allocate scarce resources,” Siegel told the San Antonio Express News.
Siegel noted that even though Austin voted last year to decriminalize possession of marijuana last May, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton has yet to file a suit to block the law. “We know that Ken Paxton loves to sue Austin, loves to make an example of Austin elected officials and has not done so,” said Siegel, who is himself a former assistant Austin city attorney. Segovia agrees that Paxton isn’t going to sue San Antonio, but only because the city wouldn’t allow the Justice Charter to go into force.
The measure’s foes, though, are not assuming that it’s automatically doomed. The San Antonio police union, which narrowly beat back a 2021 amendment that would have repealed its right to engage in collective bargaining, insists this new referendum is an extension of that fight. “It's dictating what officers can and cannot do,” said union president Danny Diaz, who also said that it wasn’t up to cities to make laws regarding abortion and marijuana. Diaz’s group had $300,000 on-hand on Jan. 25, and local observers anticipate an expensive contest.
The amendment will be on the same ballot as the city’s regularly scheduled contests for mayor and the 10-person city council. Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who usually backs Democrats even though he identifies as an independent, doesn’t have any serious opposition in sight in his campaign for a fourth and final two-year term, but both progressives and conservatives are hoping the Justice Charter battle will give their side a lift in important races for the city council. State law also forbids cities from changing their charters more than once every two years, and Segovia says that this rule would apply even if the Justice Charter won but could not be enforced.