SAN ANTONIO – San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones joined us Thursday morning to discuss key city issues.

She expressed gratitude for the arrest of a person who threatened her, highlighting the importance of online surveillance.

“I’m on the CPS board, and CPS has a contract to surveil for any of those kinds of threats online against any of the board members. So once they flagged it, they shared it with SAPD, and SAPD then was able to apprehend the person,” explained Mayor Ortiz Jones. “So I’m thankful that that person has been arrested.”

Now the mayor wants to expand the surveillance program.

RELATED | Power struggle erupts at city hall over council consideration requests

“What I have done is ask Eric Walsh, our city manager, to quickly implement that capability, not only for myself, but also for the for the other council members. I think it’s really important in this time, that everybody feels safe, and frankly, we have adequate resources dedicated to surveilling against those kinds of threats. There’s crazy people on all sides, and we’ve just got to make sure that we’re investing in the capability to catch those things.”

Jones emphasized the need for an independent economic analysis of the proposed Spurs arena.

“I’ve been very clear. I think we need an independent economic analysis to help us understand the costs and benefits, not only of the arena, because, as you see there in the drawings, it’s not just the arena, right? There’s a whole downtown development that’s going to come with several bills, and we have to be clear eyed about that,” said Jones.

The mayor cited Philadelphia’s rigorous evaluation.

RELATED | ‘We need to k*ll the mayor’: Suspect accused of posting threats against San Antonio mayor

“I think it is so important that we do our due diligence. Philadelphia, right? The sixth largest city in the country. They just went through this exercise. They went through the thought process of debating whether they should build another arena for their 76ers. CSL, the company that did our economic analysis report, when they did that for the 76ers, let’s just say that product was a ‘calculus level’ product. What we got was like fingerprint painting.”

“So the CSL report that we received – it did not cite their data sources. It did not cite their assumptions. I have a Masters in economics. I understand what we should be looking for at the very least. And when I see a report that was provided to the sixth largest city in the country that is very similar in context to what we’re trying to do with the Spurs arena, and they had information about local market conditions, they had information about impact to the tax revenue for the city, for their school district, for their state. They also had just the basic question of, ‘Hey, can we support two arenas?’ The people of San Antonio deserve that same level of intellectual rigor, so we can have a thoughtful discussion about this project. So these hundreds of millions of dollars, we should be thoughtful. We should not rush into anything.”

So is Mayor Jones afraid of alienating the Spurs and then ultimately watching them walk out of town?

“I think what’s important is we’re not operating from a place of fear. I actually talked to Mayor Holt, who was the mayor of Oklahoma City, to get their understanding of how they would approach that deal. Oklahoma City was in a very different position than we are. When you look at their size, there are many, many more cities above them that, frankly, would be more competitive for that. So they didn’t have a lot of leverage. They really felt like, frankly, if we don’t do this, they will leave. They didn’t have a lot of leverage. I think we as a community can make sure, again, we should not be operating from a place of fear. We owe it to ourselves.”

RELATED | Mayor calls for pause on Project Marvel as the hospitality industry rallies its support

So what keep the mayor up at night?

“There is $150 million gap in the 2027, budget. We’ve got to close that. If we don’t do anything, the gap grows to $220 in 2030. That keeps me up.”

The mayor will be joining us every Thursday morning on News 4, so we can ask her the big questions about what’s going on in our city. So if you have a question you want answered, let us know.

CLICK HERE to head to our Facebook page