As the morning sun shines on him, Mayor Ron Nirenberg leaves City Hall in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 3, 2023.
San Antonio Express-News
Molly Smith, Staff writer
Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s face loomed on a screen above President Joe Biden’s left shoulder last month as the president announced new measures to protect communities from extreme heat.
“Mr. Mayor, how are you doing, man?” Biden said. “I hope the air conditioning is working.”
From his City Hall office, Nirenberg launched into a roundup of San Antonio’s efforts to provide relief to residents from daily triple-digit temperatures and to combat climate change, such as ending CPS Energy’s use of coal to generate electricity within five years.
“And in large part, because of you, Mr. President, San Antonio will launch its first-ever advanced rapid transit line,” he added, referring to VIA Metropolitan Transit’s planned north-south line along San Pedro.
Later that day, the mayor hit the national media circuit, appearing on ABC News, followed by “Face the Nation,” CBS News’ Sunday public affairs program.
Nirenberg, who got his political start as a District 8 city councilman a decade earlier, is having a moment. Biden is paying attention to him, the president’s lieutenants are saying nice things about him and booking agents for TV news programs are calling. Barely two months into his fourth and final term as mayor, Nirenberg has never appeared closer to breaking into national Democratic politics.
Observers say his participation in Biden’s July 27 news conference is a sign that the administration sees him as a potential political appointee.
“When you see them really pushing Mayor Nirenberg out in the national news — that’s the clear indication to me that there is not mild but great interest in his future,” said Christian Archer, a onetime Democratic political consultant who ran Julián Castro’s winning campaign for mayor in 2009 and stayed on as an adviser.
Castro was the last San Antonio mayor to catapult to a president’s Cabinet, the group that runs the federal government.
The next test
The focus on Nirenberg has been building.
He appeared on CNN in late June to talk about the heat wave hitting Texas. Earlier that month, he was a keynote speaker at a Transportation Department summit. He talked about the city’s planned $2.5 billion expansion of San Antonio International Airport and other projects. In April, he and his wife, Erika Prosper, attended Biden’s glitzy state dinner for South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
“When the national press stories are putting him front and center, that is the next kind of big test — to be able to handle yourself in the national media and to be able to distinguish yourself,” Archer said.
Archer watched Castro undergo similar tests, though Castro’s were more demanding. He gave a keynote speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., where President Barack Obama formally accepted the party’s presidential nomination. Obama tapped Castro for Housing and Urban Development secretary in 2014, midway through the mayor’s third term.
Former Mayor Henry Cisneros — President Bill Clinton’s appointee for HUD secretary in 1992 — said the White House is watching Nirenberg, a declared Democrat.
“On the basis of how he performs in these instances, his stock will rise to the level of someone who could be appointed to a major position, I think, when there are vacancies, when there’s a position that matches,” said Cisneros, who stepped down as HUD secretary in 1997.
No San Antonio mayor in modern history has landed a high-level appointment in a Republican administration, which isn’t surprising. Though city offices are nonpartisan, mayors here are usually Democrats — because San Antonio and Bexar County have been party strongholds. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden won 58 percent of the vote in Bexar County to then-President Donald Trump’s 40 percent.
One thing Biden and his people may have picked up on: Nirenberg is not a natural-born politician.
He’s a cautious, methodical thinker who usually sticks to a script, at times coming across as robotic. He favors the technocratic jargon he picked up two decades ago at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he earned his master’s degree before working as a program director for its public policy center.
“I’ve always said this, that out of all of our mayors in modern history, this is a guy with an enormous frontal lobe. He tackles the big problems and never shies away from difficult conversations,” said Councilman Manny Peláez, who won Nirenberg’s North Side council seat after Nirenberg defeated Mayor Ivy Taylor in a bitter runoff election in 2017.
Nirenberg was a second-term councilman when he challenged Taylor.
What the mayor with a dry sense of humor lacks in charisma, the former bodybuilder makes up for in appearance. The 46-year-old is fit, clean-cut and well-dressed.
Nirenberg, whose last term as mayor expires in late spring 2025, said his focus is on San Antonio, not on what comes next.
“This is really about making sure we’re telling the San Antonio story and the good work that we’re doing,” he told the San Antonio Express-News on Thursday while en route to a City Council meeting. “The increased exposure that I have is exposure for the city of San Antonio and recognition of the great work that’s going on here.”
“Whether or not the pundits believe it, I remain 100 percent focused on the job that I’ve been given, which is to lead the city of San Antonio,” he said. “I’ve made a commitment to lead this city if given the opportunity to the end of my term, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”
Does he believe he’s being considered for an appointment in the Biden administration?
“Not to my knowledge,” Nirenberg said.
Biden likes mayors
Almost as soon as Biden won the 2020 presidential election, rumors began circulating around City Hall that Biden would soon tap Nirenberg for his administration — maybe as labor secretary.
The president has an affinity for naming current and former mayors to high-level roles.
At one time, four of his Cabinet secretaries were ex-mayors. That number dropped to three when Labor Secretary Marty Walsh resigned in March to run the National Hockey League Players’ Association as its executive director. Walsh is a former mayor of Boston.
HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge was the first Black mayor of Warrensville Heights, Ohio, as well as its first female mayor. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack once led Mount Pleasant, Iowa, while Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg got his start as mayor of South Bend, Ind.
Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti are the U.S. ambassadors to Japan and India, respectively.
Biden “wants to know how people feel on the ground,” White House senior adviser Mitch Landrieu told The Hill in 2022. “Mayors are the kind of people who have cut their teeth on exactly those kinds of problems.”
Landrieu would know. He was mayor of New Orleans from 2010 to 2018.
Cisneros believes Nirenberg would be a strong candidate for any of the high-level roles the onetime mayors hold in Biden’s White House.
“Ron Nirenberg is a person of substance, and he is a person with a good record, and he is the mayor of the seventh-largest city in America and he’s surrounded by a city government that is working,” Cisneros said. “All of that is the classic two plus two equals five. It has a little extra oomph, extra momentum.”
A pandemic ‘turning point’
Washington began watching Nirenberg in early 2020 as COVID-19 killed people, shut down schools and businesses, and threw millions out of work.
Over the course of 19 months, the mayor and then-Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff delivered level-headed evening briefings. Apart from running through grim numbers — of COVID deaths and hospitalizations — Nirenberg urged San Antonians to wear masks, maintain social distance and get vaccinated.
His and Wolff’s messages resonated with San Antonians, many of whom had made the televised briefings part of their evening routine.
“I think that was the turning point for him in developing into a good leader,” Wolff said. “He had a rough first term, and then when you have a crisis come along, it either defines you in a positive or a negative way, and I think this defined him in a very positive way. He communicated in a good, solid way.”
Nirenberg’s first term was marred by discord with the firefighters union over stalled contract negotiations, and progressives faulted him for making slow progress on the transportation and climate plans he had pitched to voters during his 2017 campaign.
In early 2019, as Nirenberg was running for a second term, City Council voted to bar Chick-fil-A from San Antonio International Airport because of contributions the company’s founder had made to Christian groups perceived to have anti-LGBTQ agendas. Then-District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño made the motion, and the mayor supported it. However, he eschewed the moral argument, saying the restaurant chain’s policy of remaining closed on Sunday would cut into revenue for the city.
The vote set off a storm of protest among religious conservatives and others who saw the move as ideologically driven government overreach.
Nirenberg’s main challenger in that spring’s city election, then-District 6 Councilman Greg Brockhouse, capitalized on the Chick-fil-A vote and forced the mayor into a runoff. Nirenberg barely survived.
But Nirenberg’s calming presence during the early pandemic buoyed his public approval. In the 2021 city election, Brockhouse was back as his main challenger, but Nirenberg won in a landslide, taking 62 percent of the vote.
His decisive victory helped solidify his standing in the Biden administration’s eyes, Archer said.
Landrieu singled out Nirenberg at a January 2022 U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting as he highlighted the city’s efforts to secure federal infrastructure dollars. Those efforts included Nirenberg’s creation of an “inter-agency task force” of local entities — including the county, VIA, CPS Energy and Joint Base San Antonio — to review and coordinate federal grant applications.
“Cities like San Antonio, that are getting organized the right way, are set up for success,” Landrieu told a crowd of 200 mayors.
A year ago, Walsh visited San Antonio to tour job training facilities connected to Ready to Work, the jobs skills program that’s voter-approved and backed by sales tax revenue.
Ready to Work has struggled to draw the number of participants that Nirenberg predicted ahead of the sales tax election in November 2020. Nevertheless, the labor secretary praised the mayor, telling reporters that “a program like Ready to Work should be replicated around the country.”
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro said he has “heard nothing but good things” about Nirenberg from colleagues in Washington, D.C.
“People have been impressed with the work that he’s doing on many issues — on workforce development, on combating climate change, responding to the pandemic,” said the San Antonio Democrat, the twin brother of Julián Castro. “I think they consider him a thoughtful, policy-oriented mayor.”
His presence at Biden’s media event on heat measures was “an indication of how highly the president thinks of Mayor Nirenberg,” Castro said. “He’s got a bright future.”
D.C. presence
Nirenberg has had a lot of face time with administration officials. He made seven trips to Washington in 2022 and has made four this year.
He’s visited the White House at least twice in as many years. At Biden’s invitation, Nirenberg attended the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn last year with his wife and son, Jonah, as well as the state dinner in April. The mayor paid for both trips with campaign funds, staying at the J.W. Marriott for the Easter trip and the Club Quarters Hotel in April.
He’s met with Biden’s transportation, housing and labor secretaries and deputy secretaries, as well as Landrieu and other senior advisers to discuss the airport expansion, VIA’s planned rapid bus lines and Ready to Work.
Nirenberg “always had the pedal to the metal when it comes to advocacy in D.C.,” said Peláez, who accompanied him on a handful of trips to Washington.
The mayor’s office touts the $62.7 million in federal grants the city has been awarded since 2022.
Nirenberg hasn’t traveled to the nation’s capital any more frequently in the last two years than he did in his first terms, Peláez said. But his visits have garnered much more attention lately.
Nirenberg’s willingness to speak on panels and to join Biden’s rollout of heat protections indicates that he may be interested in a future place in the administration, Archer said.
Archer is watching for an increase in bookings on national news programs. “The more national media hits there are, I would say the more imminent it is,” he said.
Some observers say Nirenberg would be well suited to lead the Transportation Department or HUD. But an appointment of any kind would depend on what comes open and when — and most likely the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. Presidential Cabinets traditionally see a lot of turnover in a president’s second term.
“I would think that — assuming Biden gets reelected — a number of those really big secretary-level positions will become open,” Archer said. “It would shock me if he didn’t get one of those.”