San Angelo Mayor Gunter: The Interview Part 2 "Entrepreneurial Spirit of San Angelo"

SAN ANGELO, TX — Mayor Brenda Gunter said doing business with the City of San Angelo is easier since four years ago when she took office promising to cut the red tape. Her primary measure of how well the city has performed in reducing the red tape, especially with building construction and development, is the number of new housing developments and residential building permits issued in 2020 versus 2019. She said San Angelo has become very business-friendly in 2021 versus where the City was 10 years ago.

The most interesting part of this interview was Mayor Gunter’s defense of redeveloping downtown San Angelo, an issue that has attracted her detractors. When asked about what the spark was for her to become highly involved in downtown’s redevelopment, she retraces the motivations of her husband, the late Ken Gunter, who originally invested in buying 12 decaying old buildings downtown in the 1970s and helped preserve and then provide the nucleus for downtown’s resurgence in the 2000s.

“Downtown allows for an entrepreneurial creative spirit to come alive,” Gunter said.

In the interview above, Mayor Gunter discusses economic development and shares her vision of how well businesses can do in San Angelo, Texas. Watch the video above.

This is part 2 of a 3-part interview series. Here are the other parts:

• Mayor Brenda Gunter Interview Part 1 "Responding to Calamity" 
• Mayor Brenda Gunter Interview Part 2 "The Entrepreneurial Spirit of San Angelo" (You are here)
• Mayor Brenda Gunter Interview Part 3 "Infrastructure!"