Housing Affordability

The cost of living has risen across the city, with housing costs rising the fastest for most residents’ budgets. If we want to bring down housing costs for every family, our City must work to preserve our current housing supply while also expanding new affordable housing opportunities for families. This way, all of our working families, including our young people and seniors, can afford to live in our city for generations to come.

As your councilman, Ric will continue supporting our City's efforts, with our affordable housing partners, to directly expand affordable housing opportunities for working families and seniors to have a safe, decent, and affordable place to call home in our city.
As your councilman, Ric will work to expand our City’s home repair program, CPS Energy’s Casa Verde program, and SAWS’s home conservation programs for more working families, seniors, and veterans to keep their homes healthy, affordable, and maintained. in doing so, we can ensure that our longtime homeowners and renters alike can live in dignity in our city and have their energy costs come down.
Similarly, Ric will work to hold large landlords accountable by expanding our City’s Proactive Apartment Inspections Team to ensure that our renters too have a well-maintained, healthy, and affordable place to call home in our city.

Growth & Sustainability

San Antonio has grown faster than any other city in the country, and District 6 has taken on a lot of that growth. With every new family or young person growing up in our city, that’s another car on the road, more electricity and water to produce, and more housing that’s needed. To accommodate our city’s and district’s rapid growth, it is critical that our city invests back in its long time communities with safe streets, infill development, and through nurturing our natural environment.

As your councilman, Ric will work to close our sidewalk gaps, create protected bike lanes and well-placed crosswalks, and work with VIA to bring their frequent and well-connected bus routes to our growing areas. By investing in these critical infrastructure pieces, we can ensure that no matter where you live in our City, no matter your ability or age, every resident can get where they need to go safely and with ease.
As your councilman, Ric will work to focus new affordable housing and affordable commercial spaces along our major corridors. This way, residents and small businesses alike have affordable places to start a family or start a new business all throughout our city.
As your councilman, Ric will work with our City’s Public Works, Parks and Rec, Workforce Development, and Sustainability Departments to address issues of flooding, urban heat islands, and lack of green spaces in our communities. Through a combined effort, Ric will work to weatherize and create new trails and parks that use native absorbent plants to reduce flooding; plant more trees in our neighborhoods and along our commercial corridors; and create new City jobs that help construct and maintain our expanded public parks, public pools, trails, natural drainage infrastructure, community gardens and food forests, and urban tree canopy. This way, we can reduce flooding and urban noise, while expanding access to shade, green space, and good paying City jobs.
As your councilman, Ric will work to reduce illegal dumping and other public nuisances in our communities that often take place on vacant lots. By working with our Parks and Rec Department, Development Services Department, Neighborhood Housing Services Department, and our nonprofit partners, our City can work at either holding the property owner responsible for nuisance activity and keep these lots secured and cleaned, or activate these lots with community benefits such as pocket parks, community gardens or food forests, or new housing.

Community Health & Community Safety

Currently, residents across District 6 have serious concerns of public safety. Whether it’s issues of gun violence, domestic violence, or crime, it is critical to support our first responders by investing in a holistic public safety system. Through this, cycles of violence and crime in our communities can be addressed in the long term, so that our first responders can continue to focus on responding to emergencies.

As your councilman, in order to ensure our residents' public safety concerns are addressed in the long term and at the root, Ric will work to fund and expand our public safety resources including our Animal Care Services Department, SA CORE team, Mobile Integrated Healthcare Units, and Stand Up SA teams. This way, our public safety system is capable of proactively addressing and effectively responding to issues of dangerous animals, property crime, domestic violence, and gun violence in our communities.
As your councilman, Ric is committed to scaling up our public physical and mental healthcare systems, and working with our Bexar County Sherriff's Office to develop our City and County’s first mental health diversion center. This way, residents who threaten our public safety due to mental health or addiction issues can receive the long term, holistic services they need to become healthy, productive members of our communities.
By having these services available – from public mental healthcare services and outreach workers, to violence interrupter services, to permanent supportive housing, and effective workforce programs – our first responders can focus on quickly and effectively handling emergencies, while our other public safety teams can help break the cycles of crime and violence in our communities at their roots.

Supporting Small Businesses

In San Antonio, our local small businesses strengthen our local economy by investing directly in our residents and keeping local dollars in our city. From our barber shops, to our taquerias, to our dry cleaners, our small businesses make our city prosper. Our city government must support local businesses by reducing the barriers to start a business, reducing barriers to afford a space for the business, and by ensuring residents can easily reach small businesses by foot, by car, by bike, and by bus.

As your councilman, Ric believes that our city must expand our financial services to provide locally owned small businesses with secure grants and low interest or forgivable loans to start, renovate, and/or expand their businesses. Furthermore, these financial services can support methods of creating and maintaining affordable commercial spaces along our commercial corridors for local small businesses to operate out of and continue serving our neighborhoods.
As your councilman, Ric will work to have our City invest in well connected and frequent public transit, protected bike lanes, and expanded sidewalks and trails so that small businesses can experience more direct foot traffic into their stores while reducing their costs of large underused parking lots.
As our City, VIA, SAWS, and CPS Energy work to improve our infrastructure, as councilman Ric will work to ensure that all entities work directly and proactively with small business owners affected by new infrastructure improvements in creating flexible business operating plans throughout the construction timeline. These plans would be on a case by case basis and include traffic management, advertisement and entrance access support, and other needs to ensure that our small businesses are able to continue operating with ease throughout and beyond construction.

Uplifting Workers with Good Paying Union Jobs

It is no secret that San Antonio continues to struggle to expand economic opportunities to all of its residents, largely due to low paying jobs. No person working full time should have to struggle to pay their bills, put food on the table, or support their family. To ensure every worker in San Antonio earns a good wage to afford the rising cost of living, our city government must lead the way in uplifting our workers by providing good paying public jobs, mandating that companies receiving City contracts and incentives pay their workers a living wage, and by supporting the expansion of our local labor unions in their advocacy for the pay and benefits our workers deserve.

As your councilman, Ric will work to ensure that our City management works in partnership with our civilian city employees union -- just as they do with our police and fire associations -- so that all of our City employees that keep our city safe and clean, maintain our parks and libraries, and more can collectively advocate for the pay and benefits they deserve. Moreover, for the other public entities that our City has an influence over, such as VIA, CPS Energy and SAWS, the City Council must ensure that our influence includes supporting their workers as they advocate for the pay and benefits they deserve to keep our city moving, keep our lights on, and keep our water running.
As your councilman, Ric believes in order to address economic disparities in our city, it is crucial that our Ready to Work program is renewed and adjusted to employ any San Antonio resident that applies with a quality public job with our City. This way, our City can directly provide our residents with good paying unionized jobs that pay the bills, provide meaningful work experience for their future careers, and provide more robust public services across San Antonio with these new jobs. From constructing sidewalks, to staffing our senior and community centers, to nurturing community gardens and food forests, these good paying public jobs can help end poverty in our city while providing quality public services in each of our neighborhoods at the same time.
As your councilman, Ric believes our City must expand our City's Ambassador program and connect it to our Ready to Work program so that all of our high school and our college students have the opportunity to participate in union apprenticeships and city service jobs. This way, our City can directly support our students gain meaningful work experience for future careers, a direct pathway into good paying union jobs, and help support our City in providing robust public services to all of our neighborhoods.
As your councilman, Ric will work to make it City policy that when our tax dollars go towards construction firms, large corporations, and other industries through City contracts and incentives, our City must require that those companies pay our workers a living wage, provide apprenticeship opportunities, provide first chance and local hiring opportunities, keep our workers safe, and must not interfere with unionization efforts at their jobsite. This way none of our City tax dollars subsidize companies that don’t uplift our workers.

Strengthening Our Public Schools

As a proud product of public schools from kinder to college, Ric is committed to ensuring San Antonio has a world-class public school system. Ric comes from a family of public school educators who have worked and taught at elementary and high schools throughout District 6. It was always Ric's goal to become a history teacher back at his alma mater, Holmes High School. However, as Ric began advocating locally and at the state legislature for better public school funding, and for raising our teacher, school personnel, and retired educators pay, Ric committed himself to strengthening our public education system through policy that supports our public school teachers and staff, as well as our students and families.

While City Council does not have direct oversight of public school operations or funding, Ric believes that San Antonio City Council must actively work with our ISDs, state leaders, and our public school educators and families in order to keep our public schools public and fully funded, so that every student in San Antonio can receive a world-class public education. As your councilman, Ric will work with our public school unions, PTAs, neighborhood associations, and civic organizations to support our public schools in both Northside ISD and Edgewood ISD. This way, our City Council office can be a partner in strengthening our public school system every step of the way.
As your councilman, Ric will be a champion of universal early childhood education and universal college education. Ric believes that in order for our city to grow economically and break cycles of poverty, our city must invest in our young people from early childhood to college. Ric will proudly support our City’s PreK 4 SA program's coordination with our public school districts and other early childhood education providers in its efforts to provide all of our children a high quality education as early as possible. Similarly, Ric will work diligently with our Alamo Colleges District to continue expanding its Alamo Promise program to ensure that each Bexar County resident, whether they graduated high school in 2024, 1984, or are getting their GED today, faces no barriers affording a public college education in our city.
As your councilman, Ric will work to connect our City’s Ambassador program to the Ready To Work program so that our City can expand both programs to all San Antonio students in high school and college. Through this, both programs can work with local unions, our school districts, and the Alamo Colleges to provide apprenticeship opportunities to our students. This way, our students gain meaningful work experience for future careers, a direct pathway into good paying union jobs, and help support our City in providing robust public services to all of our neighborhoods.

Responsive Local Government

Our local government's job is to serve our residents with effective and reliable service. When residents have a concern with our City, a question, or a suggestion, our 311 services and our City Council constituent services must be efficient and responsive to our residents' needs – without our residents having to call every City number in the phone book. And when our local government is embarking on transformative projects, whether citywide or at the neighborhood-level, our residents deserve the opportunity to provide meaningful input at the start of such conversations. It’s our City’s job to handle these issues, let’s make it work for our taxpayers.

As your councilman, Ric is committed to fully staffed and responsive constituent services in both of the City Council District 6 Field Offices. With the opening of the District's second field office, it is critical for each council office to be well staffed and responsive to our residents' needs in person, by phone, and through email. Further, Ric is committed to having one council office staff member designated to each registered neighborhood and homeowner association within the district, so that our neighborhoods have a direct contact to reach out to for support within our office. Finally, Ric is committed to having the District 6 Council office provide regular newsletters to our constituents by mail and email, as well as frequent public facing events, so our residents can stay up to date with what their local government is working on and connect with their council office.
As your councilman, Ric is committed to scaling up our 311 services to be available 24/7 for residents to reach, and provide more detailed case tracking information available publicly by phone, text, and online throughout the entire process that cases are collected and worked on.
As your councilman, Ric is committed to creating robust public engagement processes for City projects in the district and large-scale citywide projects through public digital and print surveys on the city budget, public facility namings in the district, and other issues; public visioning meetings for the development of new parks, traffic calming infrastructure, large vacant lot activation, and new city facilities coming to the district; and public visioning meetings and surveys on large scale redevelopment efforts in the district (especially the redevelopment of the Wolff Stadium).

Securing Our Public Utilities

San Antonio is unique in that our water and electric utility providers are owned and operated by our public tax dollars — with oversight from our elected City Council Members. As our utilities adapt to our growing population, it is imperative that our City Council ensures residents are well supported throughout this work. To do this, our utilities cannot pass on the need to invest in and maintain our water and energy infrastructure any longer. SAWS must continue its efforts reducing wasteful water usage, protecting and enhancing our local water resources, and exploring innovative ways to reuse and recapture our water runoff. CPS Energy must expand our local clean power generation, secure and weatherize our power lines and homes, and reduce wasteful energy usage throughout our City. Throughout both of these processes, both of our utilities must put the cost burden of these infrastructure improvements on our highest users of electricity and water through an equitable rate system, secure federal and state infrastructure dollars, and no longer subsidize the cost of new sprawling or high usage developments that further strain our utility resources.

As your councilman, Ric will not be a rubber stamp to our utilities’ requests to raise our residents’ utility bills. Ric firmly believes that in order to keep our energy and water service affordable and reliable, CPS Energy and SAWS must have more oversight by City Council, not be shielded by unelected board members. Further, in order to guarantee that our working families and small businesses aren't put on the hook for the cost of improving our energy infrastructure, Ric will work to have CPS Energy implement an equitable rate structure, just as SAWS has.
As your councilman, Ric will make a full press to eliminate CPS Energy's subsidies for costly and energy intensive developments, especially in undeveloped areas of our city and county. Ric fully believes that development that further strains our city and state's electric grid and/or harms our environment should not be subsidized by our public tax dollars. If our City is to accommodate our rapid growth, nurture our natural environment and wildlife, and ensure that our residents have reliable and affordable energy and water resources for generations to come, our City Council must ensure that CPS Energy follows the lead of SAWS and eliminates the subsidies on costly and energy intensive development.
As your councilman, Ric will work to expand our City’s home repair program, CPS Energy’s Casa Verde/ STEP programs, and SAWS’s home conservation programs for more working families, seniors, and veterans to utilize and effectively and safely reduce their utility bills.

Standing with Our Active Service Members & Veterans

District 6 is home to the largest number of active military residents and veterans in San Antonio. No one who serves or has served our country should ever have to struggle to afford housing, access healthcare and education, or live in poverty. As Military City USA, it is our duty as a city government to ensure our city’s housing, healthcare, education, and economic systems are well structured so that they can serve and support our active military residents and our veterans, just as they once served our country.

As your city councilman, Ric will work directly with our federal and state leaders to ensure no active service member or veteran struggles to afford housing, faces barriers at the VA, or struggles to receive the benefits they have earned.
As your city councilman, Ric will work diligently to ensure our City's investments in housing, healthcare, education, and employment opportunities support our active military residents, veterans, and their families as they call San Antonio home -- especially in the transition to civilian life.

Issue Priorities