SAN ANTONIO — UTSA's Center for Public Opinion Research released the results of its first poll, suggesting dim hopes for two charter amendments, one of which would give San Antonio City Council members a pay raise. The other seeks to remove the cap on tenure length and pay for the city manager position.
While 692 residents of Bexar County were surveyed elsewhere in the poll, only the 620 residents who also live in San Antonio were asked their opinion on the charter amendments, which voters will reject or approve in November.
"We want roughly 76% of our sample to look like to be registered voters who always vote, and we want a smaller percentage to be people who are registered to vote but don't typically about skip elections," said Dr. Bryan Gervais, director of the Center for Public Opinion Research, which launched this year. "Then we want 15% to 20% to be newly registered folks as well, because we see, typically, one in five voters are people who are newly registered."
According to the poll, 80% of those surveyed had not even heard about the potential changes to the charter.
"Nonetheless, we asked voters how they would vote for each of these amendments, and we tried to balance our questions so that we're informing voters about what the amendments actually say," Gervais said. "So it looks a little bit like what they would see when they go to cast a ballot in November without making these questions overly long and difficult either."
Of the amendments, Gervais pointed to Proposition C, which removes caps for the city manager, and Proposition E, which raises salaries for both the council and the mayor. According to the survey, voters were likely to vote "no" on both propositions C and E come Election Day.
"Both of those appear to be under water this time and in danger of not passing in November," Gervais said. "We see a little bit more support for the three other proposals are proposed amendments."
However, Kelton Morgan, strategist for Renew San Antonio, doesn't believe the results are accurate and criticized the methodology of the UTSA poll.
"I have two issues with their methodology," Morgan said. "One of them is that they're polling registered voters as opposed to likely voters. Now, only best case in this election, 70% of registered voters are going to show up. So 30% of your sample is fundamentally flawed at the outset. The bigger issue I have with what they did was not polling the actual ballot language, what people were actually going to vote on."
Renew San Antonio conducted its survey regarding the charter amendments, polling 601 likely voters in San Antonio and using language from the ballot. The difference in results are drastic, with Renew San Antonio's poll showing 56% of respondents in favor of pay raises for city leaders compared to 27% in UTSA's poll.
"Our polling, which, again, I would argue is significantly more accurate, (is) a better reflection of voter sentiment than the UTSA poll," Morgan said. "All of these are viewed favorably. All of them have a clear pathway to victory to pass."
Morgan however, does admit that Renew San Antonio itself has to do more education before the November election.
"That is one of the hills that we have to climb, is just letting people know that these are on the ballot," Morgan said. "These all came from citizen input. There is a Charter Review Commission (that) held public hearings, held public meetings. There was a lot of citizen input that drove these six charter reforms to be on the ballot. This is what the public has asked for. And now (it's a matter of) just making sure that they know that these are on the ballot in November, pushed through to the end, finished the ballot strong, and these reforms become part of the city charter."