San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones has brought realtor and U.S. Army veteran MarkAnthony Ball onto her communications team, a move that puts a social-media-savvy local figure inside an office still trying to steady itself after weeks of political blowback. Ball said Monday on LinkedIn that stepping into the role felt like “a convergence of everything I’ve been building toward.”
Ball said his work will center on how the mayor’s office communicates “with residents, with partners, and with the broader public.” He has built a sizable online audience, with 10,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 5,000 on TikTok, giving Jones a communicator who already knows how to speak in the language of short-form public attention. For a mayor facing down a noisy public calendar, that matters now because the office is trying to reset its voice while criticism keeps piling up.
Jones has spent recent weeks under pressure from multiple directions. Last month, her chief of staff and deputy chief of staff resigned within a week of one another, and seven aides had already left positions in the office since she was elected last summer. The hiring of Ball suggests an effort to sharpen the message after that churn, especially as Jones looks for a cleaner channel to residents and council colleagues alike.
The problem is that the message around her office has not been controlled by the mayor. Jones accused District 7 Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito’s chief of staff of leaking information about her security detail to the press, and the attorney for Gavito’s chief of staff called that accusation “character assassination.” Alderete Gavito then urged Jones to stop “manufacturing conflicts that serve no public purpose.” That fight sat alongside another unresolved mess: cameras captured Jones attending Game 6 of the NBA Western Conference Finals last week after interim chief of staff Andrew Fuentes said she had declined free Spurs tickets, yet the mayor’s office still has not disclosed how she got them.
Ball’s arrival may help Jones speak more clearly, but it does not erase the questions now hanging over her administration. She is still trying to persuade council colleagues to back a San Antonio Water System rate hike, and every fresh controversy makes that harder. The real test of Ball’s role will not be whether he can post more effectively. It will be whether Jones gives him enough authority to change how the office talks, or whether he is just the latest hire in a mayor’s office still trying to stop the leaks.
