The meeting convened at 1:06 p.m. on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, and adjourned at 4:26 p.m. City staff presented the debt management plan, the proposed 2027 bond program update, capital delivery performance, and the public works budget. Council members discussed options for bond size, tax rate flexibility, infrastructure needs, and equity.
Debt Management Plan (Troy Elliott, CFO):
Capital Delivery Department (Mike Shannon):
Public Works (Art Reinhardt):
Good afternoon. The time is now 106 p.m. on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026, and the City of San Antonio budget work session is called to order. Madam Clerk, please call roll. Councilmember Corps. Councilmember Mickey Rodriguez. Councilmember Via Grande. Councilmember Mungia. Councilmember Castillo. Councilmember Gavar. Here. Councilmember Allerete Gavito. Here. Councilmember Mesa Gonzalez. President. Councilmember Spears. Councilmember White. Mayor Jones. Here. Mayor, we have a quorum. Great. Thanks, Madam Clerk. So today we'll be reviewing the debt management plan, the uh proposed bond program update, uh, capital delivery department and capital budget, as well as public works. Eric, over to you. Yep, Mayor. Uh, so we'll start off with Troy and the debt management plan, then transition to uh Mike Shannon, and then uh and then wrap up with uh art. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council Troy Elliott, Chief Financial Officer. I have the honor of kicking off with the debt management plan. You know, first of all, I'd like to start with um kind of you know what is a debt management plan. You know, at a high level, debt management plan basically governs you know how we manage our debt, how much debt do we currently have, how much can we borrow, um, how we going to pay for that debt, then also how are we going to manage that over time. I think as we go through the debt management plan, a lot of these slides are gonna seem very familiar to you all. We saw them in January. Basically going through kind of the basic building blocks of what a debt management plan is. I think there's value going through that for the viewing public as to give them some context as how we come up with our capacity numbers and things of that nature. First of all, when we talk about the basic building blocks of a debt management plan, what type of debt do we do we actually issue? We've talked about these quite a bit here lately, the general obligation bonds, of course, which will support a 2027 bond program. These are voter authorized, they're backed by property taxes, and the full faith and credit of the city of San Antonio. We also have that are also ad valorant backed, we have our certificates of obligations and tack notes. Certificate of obligations are also backed by property taxes. They are not voter approved. They typically um require a 45-day notice requirement to the public before we can go through and actually issue though issue that debt. They typically have um maturities when 25 to 30 years. Tax notes have a different type of tool that we use in our debt management plan and usually have a shorter duration in terms of maturities. They are also backed by property taxes, they are also not voter-approved, and as I mentioned, they typically have up to a seven-year maturity. Revenue bonds are um backed and pledged by other sources to be, for example, like the airport, and we just issued over $800 million in airport bonds. Those are backed by the airline revenues and by the um revenues generated generated by the airport itself. They are not voter-approved typically, and they're backed by those other revenue sources. And we'll talk about kind of those revenue bonds that we have actually issued and what we have outstanding. When we talk about the the primary assumptions and components of debt management plan, there's really five major pieces of our debt plan. We've talked um quite a bit extensively about our targeted debt service rate of 21 cents.