What San Antonio’s Bond Ledger Records

This page reads that ledger the way the rest of these tools read a public record. It publishes what the City reports, the share of projects each money column is actually filled in on, and the questions the record cannot answer at all. Nothing here is estimated.

It also maps them. Every project the City records a place for is on the map below, drawn as the City’s own alignment where it publishes one. The citywide programs are not, because a program spread across the whole city has no single location, and the coordinates the record gives them are a downtown cluster rather than places where work happens. They are listed instead, so nothing goes missing.

One claim on an earlier version of this page was wrong and is corrected below. It said the City publishes no contract or vendor data at all. The search behind that looked at the names of datasets, and a vendor name is a column inside one: the City does name consultants and contractors on bond projects, unevenly, and in older files published beside the current list.

What voters approved, and what has been spent

Which money fields are actually filled in

Four money columns exist. Two of them are usable and two are not, and nothing in the record marks which is which. This is the table that decides every figure above.

Not one value in this table is blank, and that matters. A blank column would say nobody recorded a figure. A zero says the City wrote zero, and the record does not say whether that means the project has no separate total budget or that nobody entered one. Those are different facts and this page cannot tell them apart, so it says "recorded as zero" throughout and never "missing".

A rate is only ever computed inside one pair. Four divisions are refused here: recorded spending by Total Budget, bond spending by Total Budget, recorded spending by Bond Budget, and any of those added up citywide before dividing. The record does not document what separates the Total pair from the Bond pair, and unlike the building permits dataset this one publishes no data dictionary, so the difference is not guessed at.

By proposition

Ordered by how many projects each covers, never by money. A proposition with more dollars is not better funded relative to need: they buy different kinds of thing, and a library is not a drainage tunnel.

By council district, and the money that has no single district

Only 75.0% of the approved money sits in one named council district. The rest belongs to projects that span several, or that the City recorded as citywide. It is shown below as its own rows and is never divided between districts, because the record does not say how it divides and inventing a split would make the number ours rather than the City’s.

These districts are not ranked and should not be. A district with more bond money recorded against it is not better served. Propositions fund particular kinds of asset, and parks, drainage and streets are not spread evenly across a city.

The record carries three council district columns and they do not agree. The column named Council District matches the one named CD on 329 of 370 projects, and CD matches CD2 on 347. This page reads Council District throughout. There is nothing in the record that makes one of the three authoritative, and switching between them would move money between districts, so the disagreement is published rather than quietly resolved.

Where the projects are

Every project the City records a location for, drawn on the City's own council district geography. Where the City publishes a real alignment for a project, that line is drawn instead of a point.

Show the map

Nothing external is contacted until you press this: not the map library, not the background tiles, and not the project locations.

The citywide programs, which are not on the map

$205.2M, 10.0% of the ledger, recorded against no council district and no single place.

On schedule, according to the City

Cancelled

A cancelled project that records money spent is not necessarily money wasted. Design and study work happens before a decision to cancel, and the record does not say what was bought.

Who the City hired, where it says so

This page used to say the City publishes no contract or vendor data anywhere in its open data catalog. That was wrong. The search behind it looked at the names of datasets, and a vendor name is a column inside one. The City names consultants and contractors on bond projects, in older files published alongside the current list.

The coverage runs backwards in time. It is close to complete on the 2012 program, partial on 2017, and absent from the current master list, so a project with nobody named against it here is one the record does not name anybody for, not one that was built without a contractor. 57 of the 370 projects on this page can be matched to a named consultant or contractor, using the City's own project number rather than the project name, which is spelled differently between the files.

A firm named here was recorded against that project by the City. It is not a statement about how the work was done, and these are not all the firms the City hired; they are the ones the record names.

The same files describe what 134 of these projects were meant to do, and give a design start and end alongside the construction ones. None of that is in the list this page is built on. It is in the JSON API and the CSV.

A third bond program, which this ledger does not contain

The list this page is built on holds two programs. The City separately publishes a third, the 2012 bond, and it is almost entirely finished: 138 projects, $738.1M recorded as budget and $653.5M as spent.

The oldest program is the best documented one. The City names a consultant on 131 of these 138 projects and a contractor on 119, against a minority of the 2017 projects and none at all in the current list. Whatever changed between then and now, it was not that the City stopped hiring anyone.

The 25 largest by recorded budget. All 138 are in the JSON API.

What this record cannot tell you

Source: City of San Antonio bond project master list, which the City states is updated monthly, retrieved 2026-08-30. This is a different record from the building permit file: a permit is permission for someone to build, and a bond project is work the City committed voters’ money to. There is no key between them and this page never joins them. Machine readable copies: JSON API and CSV.