Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones has hired San Antonio realtor MarkAnthony Ball to join her communications team, a staffing move aimed at helping her office control its message as criticism around the mayor keeps building. Ball disclosed the job on LinkedIn on Monday and said he would focus on how the mayor’s office communicates with residents, partners and the broader public.
The hire matters now because Jones’ office has spent recent weeks trying to steady itself after a run of departures and political scrapes. Ball wrote that stepping into the role feels less like a pivot than a convergence of everything he has been building toward, and his addition gives Jones another voice inside a communications operation that has been under pressure to explain itself.
Ball is a U.S. Army veteran with a public profile of his own, including 10,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 5,000 on TikTok. Jones has been looking for help not just on messaging but on damage control and public image, after last month her chief of staff and deputy chief of staff resigned within a week of one another. Before those departures, seven aides had already left positions in her office since she was elected last summer.
The staffing change lands while Jones is still dealing with the fallout from several other controversies. She accused District 7 Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito’s chief of staff of leaking information about the mayor’s security detail to the press, and the lawyer for that aide called the accusation character assassination. Alderete Gavito then urged Jones to stop manufacturing conflicts that serve no public purpose, a line that captured how sour relations have become between the mayor and some of her council colleagues.
Jones is also under scrutiny for a different episode that has kept attention on her office. Cameras captured her attending Game 6 of the NBA Western Conference Finals after interim chief of staff Andrew Fuentes said the mayor had declined an offer for free Spurs tickets, and her office still has not said how she got them. That unresolved question has only added to the sense that the mayor’s team is trying to manage one controversy while another arrives.
For Jones, the immediate test is whether Ball can help restore a clearer message at a moment when she needs more than cleaner wording. She is also facing an uphill battle in persuading council colleagues to back a San Antonio Water System rate hike, which makes every misstep in her public operation more costly than it would be otherwise. What Ball will actually control inside the communications team — and how much authority he will have — remains the open question.
