City of San Antonio

We met with David McGowan, Jesus Garza, Richard who stood in for Patrick Howard, Betty Feldman, one of the city's architects and Laurence Doxsey.

The key phrase I heard at this meeting was "catalytic projects." there is a prevailing meme that if the city invests in a key development for a specific area, it will generate other investment from the development community.

David McGowan, who is with the economic development arm of the city believes this, and is working with the federal government for a new 3 Million federal courthouse. He is involved with new market tax credits and HUD financing as well.

Jesus' Garza is working with Geographic Information Systems in the city. The city of San Antonio is one of the largest military training cities in the country. There are many bases around the city that act as economic generators.

Some zoning problems arise with the military from time to time regarding extraterritorial zoning, as much of their development is beyond the city limits.

His focus is to find developers who will develop in the city, under the "Inner City Reinvestment Act", which waives most if not all city fees, a saving of around 3% for the typical project.

The biggest barrier too inner city development is in the nature of their local economy. They are a tourism driven industry, and as such, hotels have traditionally been the only companies that can afford to develop along the San Antonio river walk. The per square foot cost is usually to high for other businesses to pro-forma well.

His is working with local universities and he in the King William neighborhood, in which development was sparked by artists involvement. As the artists moved in, the area became more attractive to other residential projects.

By way of incentives, they offer
1) Waives all city fees for permits(3%)
2) a Landbank for accumulating land for redevelopment

He is looking to attract business into the downtown area, among which he mentioned,tourism, military, biomedical, market for urban residential and advanced manufacturing.

As with all the cities we met with, they expressed a concern about urban sprawl with the resultant congestion and rising costs of providing services.

Betty Feldman, the city architect, spoke about one of the sites we would later visit, 1221 Broadway street, a failed project with a long history of litigation. She expressed some satisfaction that Ed Cross is going to be finishing the development, which is located immediately off the river walk.

Richard spoke about community development management as the effect of student housing on the inner city can be large as it brings in large amounts of discretionary spending in some cases.

Laurence, mentioned Mayor Harbor, who passed a resolution to change some of the green ordinance. All city buildings will follow sustainability guidelines from this point forward. The Department of Defense and the Department of Education are on board with the cities green initiatives. he mentioned that a little known fact is that LEED was started through government involvement. He has a colorful history as he worked with these original codes before coming to San Antonio.

Before coming to San Antonio, he helped Austin gain its position as the "green city" that it is today. Many of those same programs and doubtless, many more are being implemented under his direction in San Antonio now. For instance, PACE- property assessed clean energy, Retro fit ramp-ups, Efficiency and block grants of $12.9m for solar panels, $8m for advanced lighting in buildings, a tree planting program, public transportation European style with bicycles available on loan,a Green Fleet program, with 91 hybrid sedans, 30 propane trucks,comressed natural gas for 30 garbage trucks and some weatherization work.

He expects to save around 771 Megawatt of energy over the next few years of these programs.