It used to be easy to get San Antonians to the polls for municipal elections.

In 1981, 43 percent of registered local voters turned out to make Henry Cisneros the first Latino mayor of a major city in the United States.

This year, with a tight, competitive mayoral race involving two former state legislators, a former county commissioner and the city's first African-American mayor, less than 12 percent showed up.

This degree of indifference did not happen overnight and it’s not unique to San Antonio. In Austin, turnout in municipal elections fell from a whopping 57 percent in 1971 to 7 percent in 2011, a slide so steep and depressing it’s hard to fully process.

In the face of such drastic disengagement, Austin took drastic measures, approving two propositions that moved its city elections from May of odd-numbered years to November of even-numbered years, where city races would share ballot space with high-profile federal and state contests.

On Monday, Councilman Ron Nirenberg rolled out a similar proposal for San Antonio.

Before considering the merits of the plan, we have to concede an unpleasant reality: under the current schedule, municipal elections will never again approach their old turnout levels — in the same way that “The Tonight Show” will never again attract the 20 million nightly viewers Johnny Carson reached at his peak.

Nirenberg — an optimist on the issue of civic engagement — would never put it this way, but the proposed switch to November is an acknowledgment that voter apathy is deeply entrenched and difficult to reverse.

Instead of hoping we can bring voters to our city elections, we would bring our city elections to them — drawing turnout numbers from captive audiences by piggybacking on top-of-the-ballot campaigns.

Without a doubt, the plan would radically boost voter turnout in city races.

In 2012, more than 56 percent of Bexar County registered voters turned out for the general election. If a municipal election had been on that same ballot, the turnout for mayoral and council races would have been more than eight times what we saw six months later for the May 2013 city election.

The question is, do we want our municipal elections to continue being the big stars in a failing show or play a small, supporting role in a huge hit? If you ask Jacque Callanen, Bexar County’s elections administrator, she’ll instantly choose the latter option.

“We would love to see them (the city) move their elections to November,” Callanen said, adding that she’s endlessly frustrated by the anemic turnout numbers every other May.

Democratic political consultant Colin Strother sees problems with Nirenberg’s proposal. Strother contends that municipal races would get buried by all the attention focused on federal and state campaigns.

He also suggests that a ballot mingling nonpartisan City Council races with hyper-partisan contests would get messy and complicated, particularly because many people are inclined to do straight-ticket voting.

“The goal would be to have more informed people vote, and this would have more less-informed people vote,” Strother said. “It would probably bury the council members’ message, comparable to what it does to down-ballot judicial candidates.”

Nirenberg is widely viewed at City Hall as someone plotting a future mayoral run, which might explain why Mayor Ivy Taylor — a possible future election rival — reacted to his plan with something less than enthusiasm. In a Monday statement, Taylor pointed out that the Charter Review Commission she created last year “did not recommend a change to our local election cycle.”

Under the best-case scenario, the state would approve legislation allowing the city to make the scheduling change (the Texas election code currently prohibits any such changes after December 31, 2012) and the item would appear as a local charter amendment in 2017. That means it wouldn’t come into play until November 2018, at the earliest.

“We have to vet the idea and come up with the language for the resolution and then we have to debate,” Nirenberg said. “This is just to start the conversation.”

Those conversations will include nervous council members worried about how this idea will affect them, but not wanting to look like they’re opposed to increased voter participation.

ggarcia@express-news.net