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Eight out of ten San Antonio fire calls are not fires. That is the first surprise in the biggest slice of your city budget.
Police and fire together are the largest single expense the City of San Antonio has, and most people have never seen what is inside it. In this episode of The Transparency Tour, Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito and I sit down with San Antonio Police Chief Jesse Salame and San Antonio Fire Deputy Chief Ramon Casanova to open the books in plain English. This conversation was recorded in August 2026, when Chief Salame was serving as acting chief; City Council confirmed him as chief on September 10.
The Transparency Tour is a mini series made in partnership with the office of Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito, District 7.
In this episode we go deep into:
- Why the fire department runs ambulances all day and fires are the smaller part of the job
- What is actually inside a police budget beyond salaries: vehicles, fuel, cloud evidence storage, lab contracts
- The collective bargaining agreement explained in plain English, and why the timing of it lands inside this budget
- Why San Antonio does not have the recruiting problem other big city departments have
- What SAFFE officers are, and why a neighborhood officer who knows the block changes the call
- SA CORE: what happens when a police officer, a paramedic, and a mental health clinician show up together
- How San Antonio stacks up against Houston, Dallas, and Austin
- The technology in the dispatch center that most residents have never heard of
This is the fourth stop on the Transparency Tour, our walk through the City of San Antonio budget in language people actually understand. Send this to the person in your life who is sure they already know where their tax money goes.
If this episode helped you see San Antonio a little differently, subscribe to the channel. It genuinely helps. And if you want to go deeper, join me on Patreon for first look at upcoming guests and to support the show directly: https://www.patreon.com/LorenzoGomezIII
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