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Susan Strawn
From Ballotpedia
This page was current at the end of the individual's last campaign covered by Ballotpedia. Please contact us with any updates.
Susan Strawn ran for election to the San Antonio City Council to represent District 1 in Texas. She lost in the general election on May 3, 2025.
Strawn completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2025. Click here to read the survey answers.
Elections
2025
See also: City elections in San Antonio, Texas (2025)
General runoff election
General runoff election for San Antonio City Council District 1
Incumbent Sukh Kaur defeated Patricia Gibbons in the general runoff election for San Antonio City Council District 1 on June 7, 2025.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Sukh Kaur (Nonpartisan) | 65.0 | 10,813 | |
 | Patricia Gibbons (Nonpartisan) | 35.0 | 5,822 | |
| Total votes: 16,635 | |||
 = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
General election
General election for San Antonio City Council District 1
The following candidates ran in the general election for San Antonio City Council District 1 on May 3, 2025.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Sukh Kaur (Nonpartisan) | 48.9 | 5,972 | |
| ✔ | | Patricia Gibbons (Nonpartisan) | 17.8 | 2,170 |
 | Susan Strawn (Nonpartisan) | 13.2 | 1,615 | |
 | Julisa Medrano-Guerra (Nonpartisan) | 6.1 | 744 | |
| Ramiro Gonzales (Nonpartisan) | 6.1 | 742 | ||
 | Anita Kegley (Nonpartisan) | 2.6 | 314 | |
 | Maureen Galindo (Nonpartisan) | 2.5 | 307 | |
| Matthew Gauna (Nonpartisan) | 1.3 | 160 | ||
 | Arnulfo Ortiz (Nonpartisan) | 1.0 | 120 | |
| Dominque Littwitz (Nonpartisan) | 0.5 | 63 | ||
| Total votes: 12,207 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Endorsements
Ballotpedia did not identify endorsements for Strawn in this election.
Campaign themes
2025
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Susan Strawn completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2025. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Strawn's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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A Houston native, I moved to San Antonio in 2012. Charmed by the city’s history and culture, I settled into the River Road Neighborhood. I have twice been elected to the neighborhood board, including as Vice-Chair. I also serve on the Brackenridge Park Stakeholders Committee and the University of Texas Law School San Antonio Steering Committee. Professionally, I served as a Department of Justice prosecutor for 26 years, including seven years in the San Antonio U.S. Attorney’s Office, fighting waste, fraud and abuse in government procurement, contracting and programs. Most recently, I served as the National Coordinator for civil fraud enforcement and healthcare fraud, where I worked on policy and legislation and oversaw a $135M nationwide program to counter fraud on the government. I also served on the inter-agency Covid Fraud Enforcement Task Force and the Opioid Epidemic Civil Litigation Task Force. I was also CEO of an anti-fraud whistleblower organization, and worked for several years in post-war Kosovo and West Africa on anti-corruption and financial crimes enforcement. In 2008, I was the Democratic nominee for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. I have a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and an undergraduate degree in history from Princeton.
- Improve Public Engagement. I'm calling for transparent, inclusive, and meaningful community engagement in local government. We are facing a culture of top-down governance. Major spending projects are being announced fully-formed, leaving residents feeling blindsided, unheard, and often angry. We need real, authentic engagement from a project's concept stage, not a sales pitch after decisions are already made. When the public is involved early, City planners gain a fuller picture—additional facts, diverse perspectives, and community values—that lead to more informed, effective and efficient choices. We need an enforceable policy with mandatory procedures to ensure public engagement is timely, inclusive and allows meaningful input.
- Accountability. Despite significant spending, results for City projects - from sidewalks to major capital projects - are lacking. Endless projects lead to too many shuttered businesses. Exhausted budgets and construction-weary citizens allow planned streetscapes and parks to go unfinished, lacking many of the promised improvements. Simple, non-controversial projects such as crosswalks take years to install, while other projects are poorly executed and begin to crumble far too soon. We can do better. I’ll push for an external audit to identify why projects are failing, and push for reforms. We need to improve planning, contracting, and oversight to ensure that our spending delivers on-time and as promised.
- Full Time Commitment. The City, and District 1 specifically, is facing a critical four years. The national political scene is chaotic and unpredictable; the City must prepare to assume responsibility for critical services in the face of as yet uncertain funding cuts. This budget and economic uncertainty is suddenly the backdrop for the City's massive $4.5B plan to remake downtown and to construct a $600M rapid transit bus line through the heart of the District. Managing these changes demands a full-time, experienced, Council Member. I will work to mitigate the impact of these changes on constituents, subject projects to real cost/benefit and risk analyses, and ensure effective representation for citizens at the negotiating table.
I am passionate about clean and effective government. As a federal prosecutor who practiced, and then oversaw, civil fraud enforcement, I worked to investigate fraud and waste in federal contracting and programs. I worked closely with staff from federal agency inspectors general offices and greatly admire their work. One part of that work is investigations, but just as or more important is their audit function. These audits help to improve programs and processes, and ensure that the programs are working to achieve the intended results. I want to bring that experience to San Antonio and work to bolster the City's audit and oversight capacity in order to improve the efficacy of our programs and project results.
San Antonio has a strong City Manager/weak Mayor and Council system of government. This means that the unelected City Manager and staff run the city and make important decisions without direct accountability to the voters. The City Council provides the only real oversight. It is critical that the Council members exercise this oversight authority vigorously, asking hard questions and demanding answers, as well as doing homework to ensure that the answers received hold up to scrutiny. The ability to provide this oversight requires experience and full-time devotion to becoming informed on complex issues.
No, but I always recommend "Tombstone."
1. Oversight of City government. 2. Public engagement to ensure that citizens are aware of and have meaningful input into City projects that impact their lives. 3. Representing and advocating for constituents at City Hall, and with City agencies including SAPD. 4. Ensuring that the City budget and revenues are properly and equitably used to serve constituent needs.
San Antonio is an economically poor city with a rich culture and history. I would like to help it find a way forward to advance the lives of residents without damaging its soul and character that make it unique.
See above. In addition, it is essential that a Council Member understand and is transparent about revenue sources utilized by the City and their impact on taxes and services. Too often, City leaders muddy the waters and sell projects by insinuating that taxpayers are not paying the bill. For example, suggesting that bonds won't raise "tax rates" is disingenuous, when payment of the debt requires increases in taxes overall, usually through increasing property appraisal values, which results in higher taxes even at the same "tax rate." Likewise, claims that money from Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones is not from property taxes is misleading since the money is property taxes diverted from the General Fund. Money is fungible. Spending must be subject to real cost/benefit analysis, always asking not just whether we can fund a project through creative financing, but what better uses could these funds support - parks, streets, police?
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2025 Elections
External links
Footnotes
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