Looking at the District 5 and 6 candidate websites I only found 1 in District 5 for Elginio Rodriguez. As I stated in my original posting on this topic it find it surprising that sitting council members that are running for re-election would not stand a website up for their campaign. Lourdes Galvan currently does not have an electin website at the time of this posting. There is time to get one stood up but that window is closing to be effective. Regarding District 5 with the absence of some websites and the low rating of the one that exists voters are going to have to go elsewhere to get information on the candidates. District 6 has one candidate with a MySpace page who has done a great job laying it out. He probably could give the other candidates assistance on their sites. Read more…
In a story in Saturday’s San Antonio Express-News details were released about a proposal to sell Market Square to the Cortez family. The proposal, along with others, was presented by Councilwoman Mary Alice Cisneros. The property is a historic landmark in San Antonio, a city that treasures its history and culture. The proposal was presented before the city council and was rejected in what was reported as a heated executive session on Thursday. Apparently Cisneros has been fostering this deal for weeks prior to the presentation without alerting anyone else on council before the Thursday meeting. Read more…
rreagansa provided a great proposal within the open thread on the mayoral debate I want to explore with this group. The proposal was to post items from the candidate’s websites for discussion here since the candidate sites moderate the comments, possibly deleting the negative ones. I explored it a little more and want to see if there’s an easy way to manage it with WordPress. Trying to monitor the sites continuously will become more time consuming than I intended this site to become. So as a compromise until I find an easier technical solution here’s a compromise. I’m going to go through each of the candidate websites and pull off their issues for discussion.
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I’m providing an open thread for everyone to comment and discuss the mayoral debate as it’s broadcast on KLRN on Feb. 12th and on KSTX on Feb. 13th. Comments are open and do not need to be approved. I will be monitoring comments for those that may violate the Guidelines. Please feel free to discuss and comment on the debate. It will provide a good discussion board for the positions. Read more…
In reviewing the various websites of the city council candidates I’ve decided to break the analysis up by district since there’s a lot of information in the analysis. This first analysis will be for Districts 1 and 2 and will break the sites down in respective categories. I must say that the District 1 candidates have the best websites of all. After reviewing them the bar was set for the other sites which never really scored higher than around 15-17. Read more…
Last night I attended the taping of the mayoral debate sponsored by KLRN and the Alamo Asian American Chamber of Commerce. The debate will be aired on Thursday, February 12th at 8 p.m. on KLRN. TPR will air the audio of the debate on Friday, February 13th at 8 p.m. on the Newsmaker Hour. The debate was taped at the KLRN Studios before an invited audience of about 80. The debate panel consisted of Dr. Andre Hampton from St. Mary’s University, Jaime Castillo of the Express-News, and Sichan Siv, former ambassador to the UN. Read more…
Recently I discussed how effectively the mayoral candidates were leveraging the Internet and Web 2.0 in conjunction with a radio story on Texas Public Radio. Based on that review DeBerry-Mejia definitely had the advantage but Castro has been making inroads to improve his site to better leverage Web 2.0 concepts. Now that the city council races are starting to solidify I figured it would be a good time to review those sites to see how they fare in the post-Obama election period. From an initial scan it appears that these sites are all over the map in terms of how sophisticated they are. Unfortunately I will not have the results of that review ready for a couple of days because I really want to dig into this effort. Read more…
Yesterday a small crowd gathered at the former Stop ‘N Go located at 3003 Broadway across from Lions Field for the grand opening of Julian Castro’s campaign headquarters. I’ve never been good at crowd estimates but I would guess around 200 people attended the opening. While the offices have been open for the past week or so yesterday’s event signaled the true beginning of the grassroots effort to elect Castro mayor in May. At the end of the event volunteers were trained for blockwalking, phone banking and a variety of other campaign tasks critical to any successful grassroots effort. Read more…
The Burnt Orange Report and Off the Kuff posted about a recent poll conducted by Annise Parker’s mayoral campaign that listed her in the lead in the Houston mayoral race. In comments about the poll the subject of name recognition came up several times. An analysis memo provided by Rindy Miller Media claimed that the name recognition alone garnered Parker a one to two million dollar advantage over her challengers. While that may seem a little overstated it does beg the question about how much value name recognition plays in a campaign these days. Read more…
Tomorrow Texas Public Radio will run a story about how the candidates running for mayor of San Antonio are using the Internet and social media. It should be an interesting story in an election following one of the most successful campaigns to leverage these tools, the Obama campaign. Lessons to be learned from that campaign are that if a candidate can successfully use the tools offered they can stand to benefit from getting the message out and raising incredible amounts of money. The question is how much these campaigns understand that aspect and are willing to take the time to leverage it. Read more…
Trish DeBerry-Mejia has a new campaign ad airing on TV in San Antonio focusing on work/life balance. In it she speaks of her commitment to focusing on family issues within the workplace such as childcare. “Creating a family-friendly culture that enables employees to fulfill themselves career-wise, while also being the best mother or father they know how to be has always been a priority with my company,” said DeBerry-Mejia. She is also hosting a table at UTSA’s Great Conversation! focusing on the same topic. So apparently she feels strongly that this is a critical issue in San Antonio. But is it really? What are the issues that San Antonio will be facing that the next mayor will deal with. Read more…
In an address before about 900 people at the Marriott Rivercenter Mayor Phil Hardberger delivered his final State of the City address titled “Closing the Circle.” In it he highlighted some of the achievements accomplished over his four year term of office but more importantly addressed several initiatives and ventures to help sustain and grow the city of San Antonio. Of significance was the announcement of “Mission Verde”, a plan for providing a sustainable energy infrastructure focused on distributed, renewable energy. Hardberger also announced the creation of a multi-tech venture capital fund designed to help foster new technologies, new companies, and new jobs. Read more…
Dianne Cibrian officially entered the race for mayor of San Antonio Sunday in an announcement ceremony at the Tower of the Americas. While it has been no secret of her entry the announcement on Sunday served as a means to showcase her support base. In an article in the Express-News some of the supporters mentioned included longtime Democratic and civic activist Bill Sinkin, BJ “Red” McCombs, developer Marty Wender, and DPT Labs head John Feik. That list seems to confirm that Cibrian is the developer-friendly candidate as has been rumored. Read more…
Yesterday the San Antonio Police Officers Association endorsed mayoral candidate Julian Castro as their candidate for the 2009 mayoral race. The endorsement is one of the most coveted one’s in any city race and especially so in San Antonio. Who wouldn’t want to be the the police officer’s choice as a candidate and be viewed as the public safety choice in a race? Of course that endorsement set off the claims from the other candidates, some petty, some childish, some down right wrong. Read more…
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