Opinion: Pre-pandemic, downtown was all about placemaking. Now it’s about redefinition. Can Centro San Antonio’s Trish DeBerry meet the moment?
to replace him initially had me thinking she must have accepted the interim appointment to the board in a Texas two-step engineered by the board, which she previously chaired in 2018 and 2019 when she was the principal and CEO of her public relations firm, The DeBerry Group.
Brown, recruited here from Santa Fe, New Mexico, always struck me as someone a bit too hip and New Age for the Centro position, whose leader has to speak the same language as downtown developers, River Walk business operators and senior city staff members. Brown, in my estimation, was an arts and culture devotee more interested in placemaking.
DeBerry’s record in pursuit of elected office does not mean she can’t succeed as Centro’s new CEO, but how well-suited she is to advocate and help lead a downtown revival remains to be seen. She won the job without anyone else being seriously considered, board members confirmed last week. The DeBerry I know is warm and personable with a sharp sense of humor in private among friends and colleagues, but she appeared far less friendly in her short tenure as county commissioner, routinely using her seat on the dais to target Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar, a Democrat, who might have the most challenging job in the county: administering the overcrowded county jail and a corps of underpaid deputies.
Good luck on both objectives. The broader downtown community, if we draw a circle around those 60,000 residents in surrounding neighborhoods, is an area beyond the tourist zone, with many streets unsafe for cyclists and pedestrians and tarnished by litter. It will take a much larger army of Centro ambassadors to expand its reach and a major culture change at City Hall to convince engineers to make surface streets safer for those of us who prefer to travel on foot or by bike.
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