San Antonio's open 2025 mayoral race draws field of early birds

Ron Nirenberg has another 16 months left in his final term as mayor, but political jockeying to succeed him is already ramping up among members of the City Council and bleeding over into the council’s daily operations. So far four sitting council members — Adriana Rocha Garcia (D4), Melissa Cabello Havrda (D6), Manny Pelaez (D8) and John Courage (D9) — have signaled interest in the May 2025 race. By the end of the week, at least two of them will have publicly declared intentions to run, while a third is still reeling from a profile-raising policy endeavor gone awry. “If you say that you’re running, you get a certain level of attention from lobbyists and interest groups,” said Rocha Garcia, who is not among those racing to start a mayoral campaign. She has one more term of eligibility representing her Southside district and plans to make a decision on entering the mayor’s race sometime this summer.

“I’m trying not to be distracted by it because we’re still about a year out, and there are so many things that we have to focus on,” she said. On Thursday, Courage plans to formally launch his mayoral campaign on the City Hall steps after the council’s meeting. The longtime Democratic activist was reelected to his fourth and final term in one of the city’s most conservative Northside districts with 63% of the vote in May. Last Friday Cabello Havrda, in her third term representing the West Side, told an audience at a Dream Week event that she is angling to make history in a city that hasn’t yet elected a Hispanic woman as its leader. “They told me Westside girls don’t become lawyers … but I proved them wrong. They told me it’s too late in life to get an MBA, it’s too late in life to start a business, but I proved them wrong,” Cabello Havrda said at the event. “… They’re also telling me there has never been a Latina mayor, but I am determined to prove them wrong.” Those moves come as Pelaez, who is term-limited from seeking reelection in his Northwest district, spent the past month rolling out and then walking back support for a City Council resolution calling for a cease-fire in Israel’s war with the Palestinian militant group Hamas.