FutureFirst SA: Creating the City of Tomorrow, Today.
Friends,
San Antonians will elect their new mayor next year. Indeed, 2025 will be a milestone election year considering that it will be the first open-seat mayoral election in over 15 years. Open seat elections, where the current mayor is not running for re-election, offer several key advantages that can positively influence municipal governance: the most important being leadership with a fresh perspective.
This next mayoral election offers us both a rare and unique opportunity to reassess and redefine our expectations of our next mayor and city government. It is also a chance to define the top policy priorities that our community believes the next mayor ought to champion. Applying higher scrutiny to both the qualification of mayoral candidates and the refinement of our city’s conventional policy agenda is not just a good idea but a necessity.
This is why I have asked my family and friends to help me launch and fund our new organization, FutureFirst SA. As a concerned San Antonian, I believe it is important to convene a public policy research and advocacy organization whose major objectives are to ensure that all candidates for the office of Mayor of San Antonio possess the acumen and wherewithal to govern effectively, and to develop and advocate for commonsense policy recommendations and solutions. We are proposing for research the following five (5) areas of focus we have determined should be the most pressing issues for San Antonians:
Human Safety & Security
Governance
Infrastructure
Economic Development & Diversification
Education
We will try in earnest to fully understand what qualities San Antonians value in their next mayor and what city issues they care about the most. As a community, we’ve never established broad guidelines for objectively evaluating our mayor of the future and prioritizing those issues the whole of the community deems to be vital.
Our policy research will be conducted by an ideologically balanced team of policy and subject matter experts. All our research will be certifiably nonpartisan and fully inclusive. Our research activities will be designed under an open-source model, meaning that our research methodology and findings will be published for the public and media to review.
The three (3) main areas of research will be:
Identify the key traits that San Antonians believe our next mayor must embody to effectively lead and govern our community.
Identify the most significant challenges our next mayor will confront, and develop practical solutions to address them properly.
Plan for the most significant economic, social, and cultural opportunities that our next mayor must embrace to ensure we capture as many of them as possible.
We realize that we have before us an unprecedented opportunity to fundamentally enhance the trajectory of our city by taking a disciplined approach to future-proofing San Antonio through leadership and policy focus. This moment is not just about embracing change—it’s about leading our city to its brightest future. Our collective action now will determine the prosperity and vibrancy of our City for generations to come.
Your engagement will catalyze the critical initiatives necessary to propel San Antonio forward. By leveraging our unique strengths—our diverse heritage, our resilient spirit, and our shared aspirations—we can rejuvenate and redefine what it means to live and work in San Antonio.
We have the power to shape our destiny and transform our city into a model of urban progress and inclusivity.
To learn more, please go to our website: FutureFirstSA.org. Please take a look and reach out to me directly at [email protected] if you would like to get involved. Together, we can ignite a transformation that will ensure San Antonio remains a beacon of hope, opportunity, and innovation. Let us embrace this rare chance to make a profound lasting difference in the city we call home.
Thank you for your consideration, and let’s keep San Antonio humming.
Sincerely,
Rolando Pablos, Founder, FutureFirst SA
Objective #1: Sound Leadership
In order to achieve the level of success we seek for our city; we first need to ensure that we have the right and proper leadership in place at City Hall. Considering the rising complexity of the job of mayor specifically, and municipal government in general, we need to establish our own objective guidelines for qualifying mayoral candidates.
This will allow us to identify with those future candidates who ultimately show themselves to be objectively qualified for the job. Our belief is that any mayoral candidate would embrace this approach given that it will provide the certainty to San Antonio voters need about their candidates by ensuring they possess the acumen and wherewithal to govern effectively under any circumstance that might present itself to the next mayor of the 7th largest city in the US.
Objective #2: Unified Policy Development
Just as important as having the properly qualified leadership in place, policy development stands out simply because San Antonio needs a unified plan of policy priorities going into the future. We need to understand what matters the most to our community and what doesn’t matter right now when establishing and prioritizing our priorities as a city.
We convene experts to help guide the research and analysis of policy priorities. The obligation of future-proofing San Antonio for posterity rests on us. It is the obligation of our entire community to define a unified path forward and settle on top policy priorities to champion together. Our entire community is responsible for laying out the vision and priorities for our city, not the individual candidates through their paid consultants and slick polling.
Dr. Varun Rai is a distinguished public policy expert who is leading the organization’s policy research and guiding FutureFirst SA’s mission of driving impactful public policy initiatives for San Antonio. Dr. Rai brings a wealth of experience from his ongoing faculty role at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has held several prestigious roles including Associate Dean for Research at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Director of the University of Texas Energy Institute. Dr. Rai holds a Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and has been deeply involved in extensive research on energy innovation and climate policy.
In his role, Dr. Rai also helps to lead initiatives aimed at developing sustainable energy policies that not only address today’s environmental issues but also prepare CPS Energy for future challenges. His work particularly focuses on leveraging his vast knowledge in solar energy advancements and storage technology adoption to foster sustainable growth and innovation for San Antonio’s city owned electric utility.
