Last night the Sandy Oaks City Council voted in favor of of a resolution thanking the Committee to Incorporate Sandy Oaks (CISO), the group that pushed for the creation of the new city.
On the issue of creating the city, Mayor Jim Clement stated “We worked hard to get this done. Its called perseverance!”
But many members of the audience expressed outraged over incorporation and the way it was handled.
Alderman David Tremblay stated he believed the city should work to make the best of the situation, but said “I don’t agree with the way [incorporation] was done.”
Aldermen Micki Ball and David Tremblay were both in favor of tabling the decision and waiting a year to see how the city works out. They suggested revisiting the topic when the city had accomplished something and had something substantial to thank CISO for.
Lack of Involvement With Community
A large amount of frustration within the community is that people feel as if CISO didn’t do a good enough job communicating the vote for incorporation.
Alderman Earnest Gay said he knew about the vote for incorporation because he had read it in the newspapers. He said he couldn’t understand how people didn’t know about the vote, but added that he didn’t know about the petition drive that CISO conducted to get signatures for the election.
The amount of signatures that CISO needed to get Bexar County to create the election was 50 people, less than 1.3% of the population of the proposed area of the City of Sandy Oaks.
To confuse matters, CISO chose the name “Sandy Oaks”, the same name of a community 2.5 miles away from the area of the new city. All announcements for the election were for “Sandy Oaks” inside a community called “Waterwood.”
CISO Leaders Believed City Was A Bad Idea
In the audience, John Martinez motioned to Art Martinez de Vara, the adviser to CISO and now City Attorney, and asked “Didn’t he say in the Express News that the city would fail?”
In actuality, Art Martinez de Vara told Texas Public Radio that to incorporate at 2.4 square miles would make property taxes “astronomically high.”
Pedro Orduno, Chair of CISO, told Express News that CISO wouldn’t seek incorporation because there wasn’t enough commercial revenue.
Jim Clement, Vice-Chair of CISO, told Express News that the city wouldn’t survive at 2.4 square miles.
When all of these quotes were brought up at the City Council meeting, Orduno claimed they were taken out of context.
Martinez de Vara also spoke up, saying that before submitting paperwork for the incorporation election, a tax analysis of the area was done and stated that revenues would be higher than originally anticipated.
CISO has never shown that analysis to the public.
SOPAC Voted To Thank CISO
The Council voted against tabling the vote and waiting the year. Instead, they voted on the resolution and passed it 3-2.
The Aldermen who voted in favor of the resolution were Joel Ortega, Earnest Gay, and Douglas Tomasini. All 3 are members of the Sandy Oaks Political Action Committee, a PAC created by and used by CISO.
The resolution thanking CISO didn’t thank many people. When asked who CISO included, Clement stated that CISO started out with about 15 people and ended with 3 or 4 people.
Those 4 include himself, Pedro Orduno, Charlotte Rabe, and, as an adviser, Art Martinez de Vara.
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