Patrick Von Dohlen ran unsuccessfully for San Antonio City Council three times. Now he’s set his sights on county leadership.
SAN ANTONIO — Now that Ron Nirenberg has secured his party’s nomination in his bid to become the next Bexar County judge, a David vs. Goliath race is starting to take shape ahead of November.
On the Democratic side is Nirenberg, who after Tuesday night is essentially unbeaten in his political career going back to when he first ran for San Antonio City Council in 2013 and, later, San Antonio mayor.
On the Republican side is Patrick Von Dohlen, who lost each of his three City Council bids for District 9, the most recent campaign coming in 2021. He ran unopposed in his party’s primary for the county judge seat, which isn’t actually a judicial position but rather the head of the five-member Bexar County Commissioners Court, the county’s governing body.
Five years after his last council race, Dohlen – a Goliad native, father of nine and the son of a longtime Texas state representative – argues he brings the right kind of background for the seat. While Nirenberg has said he wants to be a leader who seizes opportunities as they present themselves, Dohlen wants to leverage his 28 years as a financial advisor in order to help stabilize the budget.
County leaders said last year that they anticipate a $20 million shortfall come 2028.
“Bexar County is in a state right now where we can either go off the deep end or we can turn the Titanic and save Bexar County,” Von Dohlen told KENS 5.
The strategy he wants to employ: “results-based budgeting.” He said that involves taking steps to ensure the intention behind every dollar spent or allocated has been clearly defined.
Von Dohlen also criticized County Judge Peter Sakai and the Commissioners Court for spending money on what he called “pet projects,” saying leaders have waited to take action to prevent future deaths from flash flooding after more than a dozen San Antonians died last June.
Reminded about the NextGen Flood Warning System the county unanimously approved allocating $21 million for a couple months after the tragedy, Von Dohlen called it “a good first step.”
“We’re gonna have to reexamine some things because there’s been mismanagement, there’s been oversight,” Von Dohlen said. “Whether you’re asleep at the wheel or neglecting it for whatever reason, we have to take that into account and reexamine everything in every department.”
Asked about other challenges facing the county that he wants to address, the Republican cited recent trends of inmate deaths at the county jail. Since the start of 2024, 26 people have died while in custody at the downtown detention center.
He said he supports the idea of an “interim facility” better equipped to help those with mental health challenges, similar to the diversion and recovery center that has been proposed at the city level by Councilwoman Teri Castillo.
“We need to build one,” Von Dohlen said. “There are people that belong in the jail and there are people that belong in the hospital and there are people in-between that really don’t belong in either place in their capacity, their situation.”
He has also been part of lawsuits filed against the City of San Antonio, including a 2023 suit targeting the city’s $500,000 Reproductive Justice Fund and a 2019 suit related to the then-City Council’s efforts to exclude Chick-fil-A from an agreement with the airport.
Asked about what he’d like to see happen at the rodeo grounds and Freeman Coliseum after voters in Novembers approved financial frameworks to move the Spurs downtown, Von Dohlen against points to his financial background.
“The voters of Bexar County need to know that they have somebody that knows numbers to go in there and make sure it’s good for both parties, good for the Spurs, good for the people paying the bill.”
Von Dohlen faces an uphill battle this summer and fall: He doesn’t wield the same level of name recognition as Nirenberg, and voters haven’t elected a Republican to be Bexar County judge since Cyndi Taylor Krier, who served from 1993 to 2001. In 2022, when Sakai won the county judge seat, Republican Trish DeBerry managed just 39.6%.
But he pointed to his steadily growing popularity in those three City Council losses, each of which John Courage won. Von Dohlen went from finishing third with 19.2% of the vote in 2017 to second with 40.7% in 2019, and in 2021 he took Courage to a runoff and collected 46.1% of the district’s support.
It’s his hope that he’s able to extrapolate that familiarity in District 9 to the whole county over the coming months. He’s starting by painting himself as an everyman driven by service and criticizing Nirenberg for “bad fiscal management” during his time as mayor from 2017 to 2025.
“I still don’t consider myself a politician,” Von Dohlen said. “I’m very much a business owner, a family man, that has financial knowledge that I can apply to the job.”
Election Day is Nov. 4.
>>Watch our full interview with Patrick Von Dohlen below: