City of San Angelo
Stan Meador, Chair-Elect of the San Angelo Chamber of Commerce, sat down with San Angelo Mayor Tom Thompson and City Manager Daniel Valenzuela during the Chamber’s monthly luncheon at the McNease Convention Center to discuss the “State of the City” Tuesday.
The “State of the City” presentation is hosted by the Chamber of Commerce annually, and this year the Chamber used a more informal talk-show style with Meador serving as the moderator.
Key parts of the discussion are presented here as transcribed by The Concho Observer. They have been edited for clarity and length, but not for content.
Stan Meador
Thank you, guys, for joining us today and I’m excited about a different format, and I appreciate you all being here and agreeing to do this today.
I want to talk about … top priorities for [Mayor Thompson] coming into this new role over the next four years, and how you plan on aligning the city council and community stakeholders behind the objectives that you’ve set forward.
Tom Thompson
[Public safety] is first and foremost in any discussion … how do you protect citizens in your city?
I don’t care what anybody else says, that has to be the primary focus.
We just finished our budget…
My management style is, you let those people — you empower those people to do their job.
You take your budget, you give it to Brody, you give it to Brent; you say, ‘here’s your department: here’s what you have as far as finances. You decide what’s best for your department.
I don’t think my knowledge exceeds that of a police team, or a fire team, all right?
So, you give them their environment of funds and say, here’s what you go.
But with that, we do have issues as far as [personnel] retention, you know? How do you prioritize compensation? Do you prioritize headcount? I think those decisions lie in the hands of the police chief, and the fire team.
Infrastructure Ties Everything Together
I’ll go into infrastructure… We’re sitting on a water plant that’s 78 years old.
There are so many things — but I don’t think we’re alone in San Angelo; I think there are cities all over the state of Texas that are going through the same issues that we are.
We’re all hoping that maybe the federal government, or the state, will come up with some funds and keep it out of y’all’s pocket… They got a rainy-day fund that’s had a lot of money.
But the city of San Angelo would probably take a [$200,000,000] of that– Be ready to take a few more here in a couple years, [with] our wastewater plant.
The Need for Economic Development
How do we pay for this? And you have a goal of lowering the… tax rate, all right? You don’t want to go up, all right?
And some people go, ‘well, you don’t want those opportunities.’
Well, I get that, but you would love to have enough economic development, and increase in appraisals of new development, that you don’t have to go up on the tax rate.
And I’d say that’s a short-term goal, and a long-term objective, all the way through.
Stan Meador
Some of those other stories when it comes to, you know, the infrastructure, really all of those things you touched on. I mean, those are fundamental to who we are and where we live, so I’m sure we’ll hear more about each of those. Thank you for that.
Daniel, from a management perspective, you’ve announced you’ve got, you’ve set that one-year mark out there, so I guess we know what, what you put forth here is the real deal for you, right?
And so, how are you seeing that in terms of improved city services, efficiency and responsiveness, and other things that are on your priority list for this next year?
DANIEL VALENZUELA
First of all, one year, one year, I know its going to go by really quick, right? And then, so I actually did a to-do list, it was like 3 years long, and Suzanne, my wife, just told me you need to calm down and kind of, stop after one year’s worth.
There’s a lot to do this year, and I do understand that.
We had a really great workshop with city council members, with the city staff.
And we took a look at some of those challenges that we’re going to be facing, not just this year, but years down the way.
As the mayor said a while ago, economic development is going to be key for us and hopefully we get some of the business that comes in that really brings up the values and actually assists with some of the money that should be coming in.
Improving Our Operations and the Use of AI
But right now, really, we have to, from an operational standpoint, we have to take a closer look at our operations and ask ourselves, what can we do differently?
At this point, I know technology, data-driven, decision making, analytics, they’re all out there.
And we’ve looked at each department to see how we can implement that, and how that could actually help all of us.
I truly believe in using that technology.
AI, for instance, I know the mayor jokes about this all the time, about ChatGPT and how to use it.
Because a lot of stuff he said about, oh my goodness, this is really good stuff right here, and he’s like, oh, ChatGPT.
But regardless, I just want to make sure that we take full advantage of that technology.
This coming year directors and assistant directors and the supervisors will be training on AI, on that technology, on whether it’s ChatGPT or Perplexity.
I just want to make sure that we have a pretty good grasp of that and how we can incorporate that to make ourselves more efficient.
We use it, I do use it when it comes to, you know, working together a lot smarter.
So we started looking at planning and goal setting.
Yes, we work with directions, but also punch that information in into AI and say, hey, what else can, do we need to miss?
And it helps you pull more information.
So I want to make sure that we train properly and make sure that we, again, take advantage of that.
More on Operations
Because initially, and I’ll talk about this a little bit later, I know that those challenges are going to come in the form of revenue, and expenditures. When revenues go down, we have to look at how can we bring the expenditures down as well.
Again, through efficiencies, through looking at services, to determine our core services, and what’s most important to the city.
And we’ll always say, of course, public safety — number one — and infrastructure is always there, and the water. Water’s part of the infrastructure.
So we’ve got to protect that.
But if revenues are going down, we have to look at how do we decrease the expenditure.
It’s not just efficiency. We’re looking at services and saying, well, which services maybe have to be cut in the future if things don’t change.
So again, on our end, we always know that we budgeted very conservatively.
I’m looking at Tina, our finance director: We haven’t had a year yet, in the 13 years I’ve been here, we’ve been in the red.
We’ve always been in the black, and that’s always the one thing we shoot for. We’re also very conservative in the way that we do our budget, as well.
So I know that moving forward for this year, and even the council that we have are quite conservative as well. We’ll be looking for ways to manage our operations, provide the services that we need to be providing for our citizens at the lowest cost possible.
Stan Meador
Moving over to the economic development side, that’s already gotten a lot of headline coverage here.
Tom, what, in terms of San Angelo, you’ve got a lot of interest in particularly things like data centers being talked about, advanced manufacturing, logistics.
How do you see the city’s role in supporting these industries while balancing infrastructure and community needs?
Mayor on Economic Development and Staying in the Picture
It’s economic development, it’s funds, and it’s revenue. The fact that we’re talking to data centers is probably the worst kept secret. I mean, if there’s a clear bag, you know, if there’s a hush deal, we have a clear bag policy,
You can see that, but the revenue of just bringing one of, let’s say, a data center in general to any city has the potential to change its financial future in five years. If you brought two data centers, you change your six-year, seven-year plan. If you bring three, four, five, you totally change the progression of a city and what it offers for a community.
We change its, I think it’s probably the 20th, I think it’s the 20th largest city in Texas. You can totally change our structure and our appeal for the future.
You can literally change what people are coming here, what things we offer, and you make ourselves some of that has net touring, we have venues, we become a tourist town that provides revenue and generates, it’s great for your family, for kids.
So you look at that, and all of that’s great, but those things are still in the box.
And what I struggle with personally is sometimes we have to do business at the speed of somebody else.
So it’s hurry up and it’s wait, hurry up and it’s wait. And there’s negotiations and then there’s a second or third party involved
And when those do, you hope that we stand and the council has made, you know, suggestions in these discussions about what we need to do as far as planning and
I would say sub to our master plan is another plan of how we deal with the development of in specific areas for infrastructure.
Now, the second part of your question there was talking about logistics.
Ports-to-Plains is crucial not only for the development of the data centers or anything that comes through here, but keeping the city in flow on the map.
Two weeks ago, I was at the Ports-to-Plains conference in Lubbock and it was one of the most educational I’ve heard…
There are cities out there that would probably benefit if the Ports-to-Plains went west, or south of here instead of coming through, and San Angelo has always had a spot at the table arguing for our existence at that table.
I am in a situation like this on Ports-to-Plains — I don’t trust anyone except San Angelo on making sure San Angelo stays in the [picture].
Some people can pat you on the back and say, ‘Oh we’d never do that!’ — but you know those things you can’t risk.
You have to campaign for that. While we were there, they elected me as treasurer of the Ports-to-Plains Board, and so what that does is guarantee a a seat at the executive committee for at least the next four years. So, we will always have a safe spot and a voice at the table, so Ports-to-Plains is still important.
I know it’s hard to see it we’re working on the northern and the eastern bypass and I have given some initiatives to Lauren and other people about we need to go ahead and push that for to be shovel ready, but it was just how many months ago, a couple months ago, we did a resolution for three initiatives for a feasibility study.
But I see other towns have not done that, but those carry, those show skin and priority when we go to our elected officials and ask for money, priority and funding for San Angelo.
Stan Meador
Now in the longer term, I mean, we do have kind of a convergence of big things, but big things that take a long time. Talking about working on this rail project that I’m quite familiar with.
We’ve got the rail park now, the potential for that to grow more. We’ve got I-14, I-27, I mean, all of those things.
I think sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the day in and day out slog that is trying to move these things forward because they feel like they move inches at a time, and they kind of do.
But you’ve got to be looking way far out there for the type of planning, even from that infrastructure planning perspective.
Do y’all have any comments on that, about what’s going on a little bit behind the scenes?
Tom Thompson
We are reaping the benefits of the decisions that were made, you know, Dwain Morrison and Alvin New, Brenda Gunter. They’ve made decisions, and it’s hard to talk about something you can’t see.
People can’t envision that when you tell a story … what I want you to imagine — what it’s gonna be like.
Somebody had to do that four, eight, 12-years ago, and have enough foresight and vision…
We have to be in a position that, if that does become available, we can execute.
If you’re not in position to execute on that, the rail port I mean, you’ve got a whole backstory there — we fought for two or three hours on…
Just the success of what it comes through, but the casualties and the heartburn that we have trying to get past just small bumps in the road.
But in the end, there is going to be success. And it’s done because, maybe not because of the people that are sitting here today, it’s done because of those who are in front of you.
And Daniel, you’re going to have 14 years. You’ve been looking at this for 13 years … he’s been trying to keep us on the track to bring it forward, things that are important to us for our long-term success, not just short-term.
Daniel Valenzuela on Long-Term Planning
And it’s true, I think that sometimes we fail to realize how important that long-term planning really is.
When I, before I showed up here, one of the biggest issues we had was the waters and the drought.
And I was being called in Eagle Pass. What do you want to do with this? No, let me get there.
But the thing was that we had council members, administration, for years, 25 years before that, that had plans for that.
And thank goodness we did. Because we hadn’t gotten that rain right before I showed up. It was a lot of rain, but yeah, it was a beautiful thing to know that there was a plan in place and we weren’t going to be like a lot of cities in Texas.
I just don’t have a response to that, but a lot of that forward thinking that you have to make sure that you put out there, that you execute.
And that’s just what this council are pretty confident we’ll be doing moving forward.
So in a real way, we’re continuing and in some cases, you might say closing out some of those thoughts that were seeds that were planted 20, 40, 60 years ago, right?
But then we’re not planting those same seeds today, then we’re behind in 10, 20, 40, 60 years too.
And I think on that point, this stuff goes right into kind of the infrastructure and capital projects.
Stan Meador
Are there a couple of things you could list that, you know, kind of 2024 successes, let’s say a recent one, 25, whatever, last year or so, that kind of speak to those two concepts of finishing out things from earlier on and then carry forward?
Daniel Valenzuela
I mentioned rain awhile ago water. College Hills Boulevard.
My goodness, when I got here too, I got a call. I was on a daily basis getting e-mail.
Hate mail sometimes.
But that was a project, quite frankly, that we did a lot of work on. We go in there and we plan for all the work.
It’s not just the roadway we’re gonna do. We’ve got to sit here with water, sewer, sidewalks, intersections, you name it, all that drainage. All that work you have to go in, right?
So this past year, just that, the roadway alone, all that additional work, you’re looking about $32 million that went into that project.
But you drive the roadway now, and that’s different, you know.
So that is one of the areas, quite frankly, one of the infrastructure projects that I’m quite proud of that we completed.
Again, addressing all the other underlying, one of the other infrastructure needs.
From a roadway perspective as well, I mean, moving forward in 2025, we’re having more reconstruction and construction that has to be done.
We looked at, we looked at Edmonds and 29th Street, Sunset Boulevard. There’s going to be a lot of work still that we’ve done this year that we’re planning for.
So there’s a lot that happened there.
Another key project that we’ve completed this past year was sewer main across Lake Nasworthy.
For the longest time, we were limited in development out there at the lake. We had about a capacity of about a half a million gallons per day of sewage.
We actually multiplied that by five. We’re up to two and a half million gallons per day.
And what that does for us in the future is development out there at the lake.
We always had interest of developers that wanted to go out there, new business that wanted to go out there. We just didn’t have the capacity.
So we’re working toward all that to make sure that we address that water issue that out there as well to make sure that we get that addressed.
But those are two name ones, three name ones that I really, really was quite proud of.
Stan Meador
Thank you very much.
Mayor, shifting kind of our focus over to Goodfellow and military relations, you know.
Recent numbers that we’ve been seeing are a $3.1 billion economic impact on the city of San Angelo.
And so, you know, kind of about your thoughts and plans on strengthening the partnership between the city and the base to ensure the mission and growth out there continues to move in a very positive direction.
Tom Thompson
So we’ll start in May. They had a change of command, we had a change in the council, so those things kind of married up at the same time, which is cool because both of us are kind of holding their hands and learning what are our obligations.
And I would say for San Angelo and Goodfellow, in my opinion, it’s a marriage, okay?
We have obligations and balance with each other to make sure we stay together.
While some people bring up practice, it’s never going to be an issue for a Good ellow with our responsibilities and our training.
To me, that’s always there in the back of your mind. If somebody, the wrong person, looks at it one day and says, That’s not going the way it should, Is there somewhere else we can move it?
I think there’s thousands of communities that will raise their hands and say, we love to have Goodfellow or that intel training and firefighting with us.
So I’ve worked with Colonel Norton and some of the crew out there and say, what’s your priorities for your focus?
What I like to see is I think they have their job and their responsibility for every other time.
But when you look at the families, and you look at who gets off the plane and who’s here, do those people really know how to interact and engage with San Angelo
Are the families, are the students getting what they need?
And I’ll put this on the Chamber. The Chamber just started basically a military affairs council of how we’re going to have a relationship with Goodfellow.
And there’s some really key players in the room. And under one of the things I didn’t know about, SAISD was already working with Goodfellow.
I mean, I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but it’s good to know that we’re here.
I have a wife that’s a dyslexia specialist, and I’m like, how do we help identify that?
But let us do is, I think the military has their job and their position.
We have our stance on what we need to do to make sure we’re welcoming for that community.
And as we move forward in that community, you listen, it’s not our job to tell Goodfellow what they need.
It’s kind of, we should ask questions and see what they need.
And in that, the number one thing that comes across Colonel Horton is housing, adequate housing for a lot of parents. It’s huge.
We have some property. I don’t know the whole story with you, but I’m sure Matt knows where we donated some property.
A fund, it came back and we had a lot of property, which we had up there that we could develop and put in some housing that would help there.
And I think a family that’s here for seven years, six, seven months if a family of work comes here, they have to live in about 700 square foot apartment.
You probably have a sheet lots of business, bigger than that Stan but I look at that and I went out there the last time and I got JR everybody ran and I’m like, okay, let’s see it.
What can we do? But we have to get off the couch.
Norton’s got some funds to go down that path. I think we have some ways to follow. We’ve got some private public partnerships to go.
I’ve talked with Chris Evans and Casey Barrett just about if some things were able to come. Y’all did some other houses earlier.
Is the funding there to make this happen? And it is. But we need to get off the couch moving forward.
Stan Meador
Yeah, I know Steve’s been working hard and others at the Chamber to really get that military affairs committee much more active and center stage and fostering that relationship.
Tom Thompson
I think we’re all doing good things.
I think we need to actually see what I’m hearing, but these are things that we can do often.
And I don’t know what I don’t know, but he’s like, you need to put a focus here and we’re doing that.
So I want to give actually to the Chamber for pulling that off.
Stan Meador
We’re talking about water supply, but I don’t know that we can ever talk too much about that.
I mean, harken back to your early days and phone calls before you even were here, right?
But, you know, just a kind of an overview of kind of how things are going on that in terms of, you know, the future you referenced, there’s other projects that continue to secure long-term supply.
But I’m going to throw that on that, and I’m going to also, you know, the data center got mentioned earlier as kind of one potential of the economic development that’s being worked on in the community.
And what’s your understanding of kind of how we fit into that?
Daniel Valenzuela
In that conversation with water with data centers.
From an economic development standpoint, we’ve had projects that have come to the city council that we’ve taken a look at, and quite frankly, it would require too much water from our community.
We work way too hard to secure water for our citizens, and to give it away,
And later on, we may be in trouble because sure we have benefited from that entity coming in, but later on, we’re going to not have enough water for our community.
So we took a look at that as well.
The data center, we’re making sure that the data centers come in, when they come in, they have a closed water system. And basically, that allows for us to infuse water initially into the system.
Right now, what we looked at, it may be 1 million or 2 million gallons of water that’s infused initially. But that water circulates to cool the equipment. It circulates and they use that same water for about five years before we have to replace that.
And so in our end, the initial infusion of one or two million gallons per panel the size of the data center is what it’s going to cost us, right?
So we are okay with that, especially because there is a huge impact that it’s going to have on our community.
Right now, as far as the water that we consume at around 11 to 12 million gallons per day. So that one million is just a one-time infusion for a five-year circulation film.
It really is, as far as I’m concerned.
When we look at water in our community, we have about 44 months worth of water available, which is pretty darn good for the financial world.
And basically that means that each of this water plus maybe 2 million gallons a day out of use from the Hickory Aquifer will give us about 44 months of water supply. That’s pretty solid.
In the aquifer, we’ve done work to add an additional five wells, and we’ve got up to 20 wells.
And we’ve done other work to our treatment facility, clear wells, and other improvements to up the number, as far as the gallons per day that we can produce from 8 million to 12 million gallons per day.
So that’s going to be a huge impact for us.
We’re also looking at the, a water project that allows us to, we call it the Concho River Water Project, where we put water back into the Concho River, it goes down to about 8 miles and we retrieve it.
That’s right, the amount we put in, nothing more than that. We retrieve that water right now, about 7 and a half million gallons per day that we can produce.
We retrieve that much and we treat it to drinkability.
As we’re at, we’re cleaner than what’s in the river right now. So that’s another project that we’ve been working on.
And of course, the West Texas Water Partnership between Midland, Abilene, and San Angelo is still an ongoing venture.
I’ve been here 13 years. We’ve been working on that project about 14 years.
In that time frame, I’ve worked with three district city managers with both cities,different mayors, and the continuity is there.
We want to continue moving forward, and we are moving forward. So from that, we can secure about 5,000 acre feet of water.
So really, we look at the future of San Angelo way down the way, we are planning for that. The goal was always, forget 50 years down the way. We got to get to 75 years down the way.
And so that’s part of the forward thinking, making sure that we’re securing that water.
And right now, on paper, we’re in a pretty big shake.
It’s just a matter of getting these projects up and growing up.
Stan Meador
Very good. Thanks for that update.
Mayor we talked about you referenced quality of life and just kind of a quick thought we’re going to kind of start moving into just to wrap up a couple more questions more quickly here what steps you take to improve the quality of life such as housing recreation cultural amenities while managing responsible growth and we all know people want to raise
live in everybody’s families in a place it’s got good education it’s got you know parks and other things that make a lot well-rounded what what what are some other things you’re working on?
Tom Thompson
Some of those fill our life so let’s take the river stage I mean it’s something that’s downtown it helps it’s got a good meeting to fit to it we’ve invested a lot into the river stage we’re going to invest more into it that will make that a meeting that will, it will expand its season and the capability of what it can bring in.
I know one that’s going to surprise the crowd but I’ll go to the coliseum renovations. I can’t believe that one comes out but that one is going to change a lot of what we do here I mean that one will actually be able to entertain, you know, 10,000 people at any one time.
So it’s not just a rodeo okay? You can do some conventions in there. There’s some single day events, there’s some concerts.
I mean, when you look at how many people would pay $200 a ticket and take about 9,000 of those, it’s amazing what kind of entertainment you can bring in here.
But we looked at how we developed that, and a lot of those things already work.
Sports, youth sports.
I don’t know how many of you all in here have gone through what you would pay for your kid to have him kind of better than you did.
I’ve been there.
I’ve done that.
I’ve heard people talk about how much they pay for baseball bags and things, but, you know, 29th Street, the complex over there.
One splash pad, and thanks to all Texas team opinion, we’ve got splash pads in there.
So I think these things have all shown that we listen to, you know, our constituents.
You try to grab, the first thing that happens, and I hate to say I sound like Gina, but how much does that cost?
All right, so how much money do we need for that? Is there a way to put that that’s not in my neighbor’s pocket?
And that was a way to look at it, but we’ll go from there.
I don’t know if anybody caught the COSADC meeting. It was four hours long, but they just released the housing study.
And there was a lot of good food in that housing study. Here’s the next step.
I think we need not 100, probably 200, homes right. We need to be able to accommodate these people. And I think we have a, to me, we have a higher housing shortage, all right?
And so if you look at where can you go with property, a person came into my office recently and said, I’ve got some acreage here do you thinks somebody would be interested.
In fact, I had about 50 that would be interested.
So we have to make sure but we also have to have the housing.
You want a good, you want a good balance.
I mean, it needs to sit on three or four legs and then one of those needs to be something that’s compatible for our people here.
Stan Meador
I’m going to wrap up with the last question on public safety.
That’s where we started.
You know, both mentioned that as top priorities.
And I’ll ask you, Dan, just kind of from that public safety key priorities of the city and share some of the improvements that were made over the last year and kind of what we do today.
I want to talk about the fire department first.
The fire department alone last year had 18,000 calls for service. About 74% of those were for motor vehicle accidents
You know, so this past year we actually, you know, with the flooding that’s freshen up, of course, we launched a, a rescue team, a swift water rescue team that we had really wanted for a while, you know, 500 grant to the boats, and that’s something that we were very blessed that we could see.
We’ve also purchased a wildland fire trust in preparation for, God forbid, that we have a wild park in this area.
But we have really been looking at public safety in ways that, that we plan for the future, one thing that we get last year is secured land for the fire station, number nine, that’s one that will protect in the southwest area of San Angelo, and it’s also one that we need to maintain our ISO rating, our one rating, and basically with that one rating, we get lower insurance costs for our homes and for our businesses, so that was very key for us, so again, planning forward, we secured that land, as a matter of financing and view of our department.
So does that impact the homeowner’s insurance rates and stuff? So it actually flowed all the way down to local ratepayers in that way.
Daniel Valenzuela
It does.
The best you can do is a one rate. We achieved that back when Chief Dunn was here several years back.
And that was refunded again a couple years back.
We are a high so rated one, but we want to make sure we keep that.
Moving on to the police department past year.
And I’ve got to say this, and I saw the Chief here earlier.
The guy (Chief Griffith) doesn’t slow down.
He got me thinking he’s looking at technology and looking at how he can man this department, right?
Because initially, I know when he showed up, there was a pretty good shortage there.
I can tell you that he’s got eight new candidates right now that are in training, he’s had 11 level transfers from other areas of the communities.
And he also had two police officers that are reinstated each year and now they’re back.
And with that, I mean, his staffing is pretty close to fully staffed with the FTE to allow for the department.
He’s done a lot of the technology as well.
You may have heard that in the City Council using the automatic license plate readers, they’re installing those in their vehicles in certain right of ways where the technology reads your license plate.
So if there is, let’s say a car that was stolen, it has to find one of these readers, it instantly provides information to the police department and dispatches to let the other thing know that the car report stolen just went by so they can respond very quickly.
They look at technology like the drone system, right?
Right now they have the drone first response program that they’re implementing as well.
But again, a lot of forward thinking that truly address the needs that they have as far as the number of police officers.
Chief Griffith, I’m looking at him right now, he’s looking at me and I know he would like to have more police officers, but right now he’s looking at how can we really leverage.
We have a certain number of police officers right now in the future.
I’m sure that number will grow, but for now we’re going to use technology for efficiency to make sure that we can address more areas of the city with fewer staff.
Stan Meador
We could go one for another hour or two I’m sure but I know everybody’s got to work. We really do appreciate you two gentlemen taking time to come and share your thoughts and your vision and plans for the future of San Angelo and thanks again for being here. We appreciate you.
