The run-off for County Judge, between Ruben Becerra and Michelle Gutierrez Cohen, has blown up. It’s gotten real ugly.
Full disclosure: I switched my vote from Becerra to Cohen. This is not my wheelhouse! I do not watch county commission meetings! Basically, I trusted what other people are telling me.
Two speakers: Mission Able fixed our leaking roofs, and we’re very grateful. Great organization. (That is in lieu of this, last month.)
One speaker: The Land Development Code conversation took two hours last time. Maybe some of those comments could have been submitted ahead of time? Many of the comments were about data centers. People hate them! On a different topic, Flock Cameras helped Austin PD catch the shooter recently.
One speaker: the downtown proposal for the new City Hall is terrible! They want to purchase the land and lease it back to the city? Are we just going to rent from them for 40 years?
San Marcos Civics Club has been asking and filing requests for council minutes going back to May 2022. Legally, the city is required to provide them, but they’ve filed for an extension.
Finally, five speakers talk about Gerardo Reyes Gonzalez.
Who is Gerardo Reyes Gonzalez? On March 14th, SMPD stopped a son and father for a traffic stop, and ended up arresting them for “interference with public duties”. The son was later released, but the father (Gerardo) was handed over to ICE.
The investigation found that Cortina violated the following department protocols:
an inaccurate statement on the probable cause affidavit, a failure to articulate the basis for detention, and failure to verify the juvenile subject’s location prior to making the arrest.
Of course, none of this ever comes to light unless there is video footage. (The officer got a light consequence.)
Anyway: this is a crisis because the dad is still in ICE custody, two months later, up in Hutto. The mom is disabled and the dad is the breadwinner, and a judge denied his release, so he could be facing deportation.
The speakers on Tuesday are calling on Council to release a public statement calling for the release of the dad and meaningful consequences for the officer.
La Cima was first approved in 2013. It was about 1400 acres big, originally. (For the life of me, I can’t find a map of it.)
In 2014, it grows to 2,2029 acres, and it looks like this:
In 2018, it grows again:
In 2020, it grows again:
Next up, in 2022:
It jumped clear across Ranch Roach 12! They also got approved for a movie studio along the way, La Cinema. (Unofficial name, sadly.)
La Cima has sometimes been controversial, because it’s a massive build over the aquifer. Everything there will go directly into the underground water that feeds the river. If you want your river to stay clear, you don’t want to develop the land that feeds into it.
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So what now?
On Tuesday, there was some minor tinkering with how La Cima pays for roads and sidewalks and things like that. It’s not a big deal.
Mostly a lot of acronyms:
Everyone on Council says yes: 7-0.
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Sidebar: In my heart-of-hearts, I disapprove of PIDs. It’s like 500th in the list of things I don’t like, but it’s there.
Here’s the problem: a PID is an extra tax on the residents of La Cima. But it only helps the residents of La Cima.
Residents there are paying more in taxes! They pay an extra $1600-$2700 per year. If they think taxes are too high, they’re going to support candidates who want to cut taxes. When you cut taxes, you cut services. But the services that get slashed are for the most vulnerable, not for La Cima. La Cima funding (about $86 million) is locked down safely for 30 years, via the PID.
If there was no such thing as PIDs, the extra tax would be rolled into the cost of the house. It wouldn’t actually change costs for the buyer, but it would make the houses look more expensive up front. Developers prefer to keep housing prices looking low.
End of rant!
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Item 16: The New HEB sign
If you’ve driven by I35 and McCarty recently, you’ve probably seen the construction on our exciting new south HEB.
Trusted sources tell me it’s going to be nicknamed “HEBeast”, to distinguish it from Little HEB and Big HEB. (I report, you decide.)
The HEBeast is part of a larger development called McCarty Commons. In the development agreement, the developer agreed to specific rules about sign heights:
But what if, instead, their sign was AWESOME?
Like this?
You know, a real HEBeast of a sign. Way bigger than those other measly signs:
The new design would be 60 feet tall, instead of 42 ft like we were expecting.
So how tall is 60 ft exactly?
Taller than Wendy’s or Taco Bell. But slightly shorter than the Premium Outlets sign.
Much taller than all of these.
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What does Council say?
Here’s everyone’s reaction:
They’re pretty stoked.
Lorenzo: Can they design our next gateway sign?
Josh: For the record, I like our new gateway signs.
Jane: Since I-35 is elevated there, this really just lifts their sign up to regular height.
The vote: 7-0. Everyone’s all in.
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The actual meeting rang in at under an hour! The workshops were meatier.
Max Baker, organizer of the San Marcos Civics Club: We’ve been trying to put people on boards and commissions. But the city website has a lot of problems, like: – HSAB still says they meet Thursdays, 2 months out of the year. They actually meet Wednesdays for longer than 2 months. – the online calendar is out of date on library meetings – etc SMCC told the city about these details back in 2023, and they’re all still problems.
(Max is definitely a details guy.)
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Workshop 1: Budget Update
Next year’s budget it chugging along! It takes 9 months to birth a budget:
Our little budget fetus is about 15 weeks old. It’s the size of an avocado.
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So how does it look?
First off, San Marcos is growing:
Our budget has not been keeping up.
This is city spending, per resident:
So we’ve had a balanced budget, but we’re stretched more thin than we were a few years ago.
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What’s the revenue look like next year?
We get two kinds of revenue:
Sales tax
Property tax
First, sales tax:
We’re up from last year.
Last year, we pulled in $ 22,567,986 by this point in the year.
This year, we’re at $23,442,368 so far.
That’s great! It’s also good because we had about 1.5 years of declining sales tax, so it’s good that we’ve finally turned that around.
I am just including this slide because I was entertained by how incomprehensible it is.
It’s labeled as though it’s giving you the revenue from sales tax, smoothed out using a 12-month average. But that’s not at all what the graph is showing! The graph is showing the rate of change of the rolling average.
[Confidential to staff: Yes, yes, you’re very smart. But listen: no one wants to wrestle with the graph of the first derivative! Put the calculus away, and just show the actual rolling 12-month average sales tax graph.]
On to property tax:
Property tax value also went up! But in an uneven way.
First, home values went down a little:
But there were new builds, as well:
About 2/3 of the new value comes from residential, and the other 1/3 comes from commercial.
So the total of all property value in San Marcos went up a little bit. Not a ton, but a bit.
So we’re also expecting a little more in property taxes.
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Overall, we think we’ll have a little more breathing room than we thought we would.
Here’s where we thought we were at, back in February:
And here’s how the revenues and expenses have changed since then:
and here are the main budget cuts that we have made:
And there are still a lot of unfunded needs:
As they say, nothing is more expensive than deferred maintenance.
But nevertheless, all of that taken together probably gets us to a balanced budget this year:
This is great!
Now, there’s still a looming $7.5 million budget hole in 2028. But we’d be okay in 2027.
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Amanda: Our fees increase incrementally every year, so that no one ever gets walloped with a giant increase. Have we applied that philosophy to property taxes? A very small, regular increase, to prevent a giant shock? Answer: No one answers this.
Although no one said so at the meeting, the answer is definitely “yes, we should”.
Tax hikes are unpopular! People are broke. Better not to shock everyone’s budget, but still show fiscal responsibility.
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Also in the first workshop, two small unrelated items:
Announcement #1: Community Benefit Charge:
If you’re getting a city utility bill, there’s going to be a new line, called the “Community Benefit” fee:
You’re not paying any extra money, though. It used to be rolled into the other charges, and now they’re itemizing it.
Then when you go to look at the details, you can see exactly what’s getting covered in the Community Benefit charge:
Council is worried about how to explain this on a large scale so that no one freaks out. How about a mailer inside of all the envelopes?
Josh: How about a QR code right on the bill? Answer: Maybe!
Announcement #2: Destination services:
The Convention and Visitor Bureau wants to rebrand itself as “Visit San Marcos!”
Great. Done.
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Workshop 2: Utility assistance program
This has been going on a LONG time:
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Basically, we had a pretty big utility assistance program, but people kept getting disconnected anyway. And we had $45K in customer donations, but it never got spent helping people.
This is mostly because we were giving the money to Community Action. Community Action is a great organization! But not a good fit for utility assistance.
The problem is that Community Action gets federal money, which means they require a massive amount of paperwork from anyone who needs assistance. They can get you help in six weeks, but by then, your power might have gotten shut off a month ago.
Alyssa was really the driving force in reforming this. She kept drilling down into the details over and over again, until the program finally started to work.
So here are some of the changes:
In 2025, council decided to give money to three more groups for utility assistance:
This is great! Those other three organizations can hand out money on a quick turnaround.
A bunch more improvements:
Great.
Here’s some nitty-gritty on how it gets administered:
Basically everyone who needs help gets sent somewhere.
When they do have to disconnect utilities, they avoid certain situations:
So they’re not going to disconnect you in extreme heat, cold, or right before a weekend.
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How many people are we helping?
So people are still getting disconnected, even with utility assistance.
and here’s how many people are getting assistance:
Here’s a snapshot of the demographics of who gets assistance:
Seniors are struggling more, recently.
Communities in Schools connects directly with students. One problem is that some SMCISD students live outside of city boundaries, and so their families aren’t eligible for this money.
(Community Action and Salvation Army have other sources of funding to help these families, but it may come with more paperwork.)
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Here’s the biggest problem:
They’re blowing through their money.
At the start of FY2026:
BCL gave out all their money, $21K, in 28 days. They got an extra $11K in March, and gave it out in 18 days.
Salvation Army gave out $45K in 4 months.
Communities in Schools can only assist students that are enrolled in their program, and can’t help in the summer.
Community Action is SUPER slow, because of the whole Federal paperwork deal.
On the one hand, you WANT agencies to give out the money. You don’t want agencies to hoard funds like a dragon. But there’s also nowhere to go for help right now, and it’s about to be summer.
Fundamentally, we probably need to quadruple the funding in this program.
Listen: La Cima has an $86.7 million bond. Their city services are locked down and guaranteed for 30 years. Kissing Tree gets $1.8 million every year, and they are entirely gated off! They could be spending that money on Day-Glo lights for golf carts, and we wouldn’t know.
If it takes $400K to keep the lights on for all residents, doesn’t that seem do-able?
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Since that’s not on the table, Staff had a few suggestions to try to stretch the money a little further.
Discussion item 1: How often can people get assistance?
Right now, they help you with back payments and the current bill, so you can get help on 3 months worth of bills. You can also come back four times a year.
Council settles on saying that if you get help with back payments on your, it uses up two of your instances. Soevery year, you can come in four times if you just need help with 1 month payment, or you can come in twice a year with a big backlog.
Discussion item 2: What counts as hardship?
They’re looking at this slide:
Jane doesn’t like the “children under 5” category. Specifically, if you’re not low income, why should you get assistance just because you have small children?
Everyone explains that it’s about childcare costs. You may have a pretty good job, but if you’re paying for daycare on two kids, you still can’t make ends meet.
Jane says she understands, but what about actually wealthy people with babies cashing in on this?
Everyone: That’s not a thing. That just never happens. Wealthy people with small children do not spend half a day at the Salvation Army to get help with their electric bill.
Jane wants more time to think about this one.
Discussion item 3: Reconnection fees and late fees
Right now, the utility assistance covers reconnection fees and late fees. However, this money is going in a circle: the city is giving money to the utility assistance program, to pay for the city reconnection fees and late fees.
Can the city just waive these fees altogether, in these cases? It would help the utility assistance dollars stretch further.
Everyone likes this.
Discussion item 4: Do we want to split the pot of money into four chunks for each season?
That way the agencies would have a little money available at the start of each season, instead of running out for the whole year.
I think council was interested, but wanted more info.
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Basically, this will all come around for an official vote in a future meeting.
Lots of stuff this week: selling water to Kyle, food trucks, community gardens, parking lots, lawsuits, the Edward’s Aquifer, the murals around town, and so much more.
Much to discuss!
Hours 0:00 – 5:15: Some small rezonings, selling water to Kyle, a trail to New Braunfels, and an enormous amount of Land Development Code details.
Bonus! 3 pm workshops: the Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan, some impact fees, and the public art policy.
Ten speakers. The two biggest topics are whether San Marcos should sell water to Kyle or not, and the Land Development Code.
Water to Kyle:
We shouldn’t be giving water to Kyle.
Only sell water to Kyle on the condition that they don’t then allow data centers
Don’t give water to Kyle, we don’t know how long this drought will go on.
We’ll get to this in Items 4 and 5.
Land Development Code comments:
Limit power plants to Heavy Industrial
Create a distinction between large load back up generators that data centers use, vs ordinary small scale back up generators, in terms of which require CUP.
100 ft is too far for bar clean up radius.
Virginia Parker, director of SMRF: – Keep the Qualified Water Protection Plan presentation at P&Z, to allow for review by the public. – Fee-in-lieu for parkland should be restricted to purchasing new parkland, not maintenance – Fix the wording on impervious cover item
We’ll get to all these in Item 22.
Other comments:
The Uhland Bridge over the Blanco River has not been cleaned since the last flood. It’s full of debris and could be very dangerous if it floods again.
The Downtown Association of San Marcos is in favor of giving SMPD these four parking spots on weekend nights
We need to coordinate with Texas State, be business-friendly in the LDC, and be wise when we give tax breaks.
We need more accountability.
The city UniverCity course was great, and it’s too bad it’s being discontinued. You should put slides online.
A large portion of my land is being purchased by the city, please talk to the liason company so we can move forward.
Onto the meeting!
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Itsme 17-18: Crestwood retail center
This is the Crestwood shopping center, out on Old RR 12:
Back in 2022, it came up that their septic tank was old and degraded and leaking nasty sewage onto a driveway nearby. Gross! Council mentioned back then that the county hadn’t dealt with the septic system for four years already.
Now it’s been another four years, and the septic system is still a problem! Basically they need to get on the city sewer.
That’s what they’re here for, finally. Crestwood is getting annexed and zoned into the city. Great.
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Item 19: A little rezoning
There’s a little piece of property tucked away in this neighborhood:
Right now, it’s a pair of boarded up houses and an empty lot:
They’re going to redevelop it into four houses.
Note: people get really nervous about the word “infill”. The fear is that it’s a Trojan horse, and that if you allow “infill”, you’ll end up with a giant apartment complex in the middle of neighborhoods. (And sometimes that has happened! Developers can be jerks!)
But there’s also a good kind of infill: replacing two abandoned houses with four houses that families can live in. This is what we’re trying to encourage. This is good!
The vote: 7-0. Great.
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Items 4-5: Selling water to Kyle
This sounds really bad! It’s not quite as bad as it sounds. But against a background of severe drought and data centers and reckless development, anything water-related deserves some scrutiny.
So let’s scrutinize! What’s going on?
It’s two slightly different things:
Item 4: Kyle uses San Marcos water in an emergency. In other words, if a water main breaks, or if they’ve got fire hoses on full blast to put out a fire, they tap our water so that they can maintain water pressure for their residents.
It’s an emergency back up, basically. We’ve had an agreement like this for the past ten years, but it expired in November 2025.
Details:
They pay $6.42 per 1000 gallons, which is our current wholesale rate.
This would last 10 years, with two 5 year extensions.
It gets used a few days each season, which works out to about $150K/year
Texas sets the rules for what constitutes an emergency.
In the past six months, they’ve used emergency water once.
Item 5: Kyle buys regular old everyday water from San Marcos, because they don’t have enough infrastructure yet to get enough water to their residents. The way it works is that we are allocated a certain amount of water from Edward’s Aquifer. We generally don’t use it all, so we sell them our unused Edward’s Aquifer water rights.
We sold them water back in 2023, and then again in 2024. (We might have done it earlier than 2023, but I wasn’t blogging yet.)
Kyle knows they’ll go over their allotted amount of Edward’s water rights, but they don’t yet have infrastructure to get enough water to the parts of the city that need it. Supposedly the infrastructure will be finished in 2028.
(For the record: back in 2023, they were sure the infrastructure would be finished in 2025. Just saying.)
So they need to buy Edward’s Aquifer water from someone. We generally go under our allotted water, so we sell the water rights to them.
Details:
We automatically get $732K from them, even if they don’t use any of our water
We get up to $1.5 million if they do.
Here is the big question: why is this happening? Is Kyle being irresponsible and allowing development that it can’t supply with water? Does Kyle allow its residents to be irresponsible with water? (Are we the most virtuous neighbors ever?)
Answer: We can’t really answer any of those questions satisfactorily.
Here’s what we can say: There’s a clause in both contracts that Kyle’s drought restrictions must match or exceed our drought restrictions.
That doesn’t entirely solve the problem, of course. Drought policies say things like, “Residents can’t fill their pools or water their lawns on Thursdays.” They don’t say things like, “Council should not approve a new development here, because the city lacks the water.”
Also, the two drought ordinances are tricky to compare, though. They don’t line up as neatly as you’d like. Also, Kyle is planning on revising their Water Conservation and Drought policy in the next month or two.
Bottom line: We agree to one year of emergency water, and postpone the Edwards Aquifer rights, until Kyle revises their drought policy, so that we can compare apples to apples, and decide how virtuous they are.
This should come back over the summer.
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Item 21: Four police parking spots downtown
Last year, things on the square got disturbingly violent:
In response, SMPD is trying to ramp up its presence downtown. Texas State also kicked in some money to help cover the extra police time.
So officers have been parking in these four spots:
Starting in December, we reserved those parking spots for police cars only, so that cops can park there while monitoring the bar scene.
However, we also don’t want to take away daytime downtown parking spots! So they’re trying to thread the needle: these spots are public parking during the day, and then at night it becomes SMPD parking. (It’s like the Hannah Montana of parking spaces.)
The tricky part is trying to explain that in the parking signs. Here’s an example, the one on Hopkins:
Great. By day, you’ve got the two green signs. By night, you’ve got the red. (Not pictured: an extra sign with an SMPD number to call if you get towed.)
The downtown businesses are very happy with this! They like having the police presence downtown.
This has been a trial run. Does Council want to make these spots permanently designated?
What does council say?
Lorenzo: This is a mess. It’s too complicated. Why not just dedicate the spots to SMPD, day and night?
Amanda: I don’t want to remove them during the day, because of parking shortages.
Jane: What if we stripe them?
Josh: People will learn the hard way.
Alyssa: Are people learning? How many people have been penalized? Answer: In the past three months, there have been 3 citations, 1 warning, and 10 cars towed.
Also SMPD says: We actually tow a ton of cars downtown. Ten cars towed is barely a drop in the bucket!
The vote: 7-0.
Spots will now be permanent! From now on, it’s green-by-day, red-by-night.
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Item 22: Back to the Land Development Code
We last discussed this here and here. Last time, Council got about halfway through their amendments. Now we’re going to wade through the rest of them.
This item is super long. Sorry! Buckle up.
New Amendments:
1. Clean sidewalks
How far out should restaurants have to keep their sidewalk clean? 50 ft or 100 ft? Answer: Council goes with 50 ft.
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2. Food trucks downtown.
This is actually two different issues.
First food-truck issue: San Marcos only allows 14 bars downtown. Each bar has an alcohol permit. Everyone else who serves alcohol downtown is technically a restaurant, and they have a different alcohol permit that requires them to serve food.
This is one of the (many) reasons that the Rooftop got in trouble last year. They weren’t serving any food last summer. After they got in trouble for this, they added a food truck.
The question: Is a food truck enough to make a bar feel like a restaurant, for purposes of the alcohol permit?
Amanda: Yes. Look at Zelick’s – it feels like a restaurant, because people are sitting at tables and eating.
Jane: What if the food truck operator gets sick and they don’t show up one weekend? Lorenzo: Then the business would be out of compliance if they tried to serve alcohol. Jane: That is naive!
The vote: Should food trucks count as restaurants for purposes of establishments that need to sell food because they have a restaurant-alcohol permit?
Yes: everyone No: No one.
(Later on, Jane spends a LONG time being mixed up on what exactly they voted on. She and Matthew might have actually intended to vote “no”. But they don’t re-open the vote.)
Food Truck Issue #2: What if you have a food truck that just sells alcohol and no food? Like a margarita truck or a beer truck? These exist – we have one at the outlet mall. Are these allowed downtown?
Lorenzo: Every bar permit has a fixed address. So a bar truck would need to get an alcohol permit and could only sell alcohol at a fixed address, right? Answer: yes.
The vote: Should Bar Trucks be banned downtown?
So bar trucks are not allowed downtown.
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3. Data Centers: Last time they didn’t quite nail down the definition.
Staff came back with this suggestion:
This passes.
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4. The Waiting Period Loophole: Amanda wants to close this.
Backstory: Say you want to build a development, and you apply to get the land rezoned. Council votes you down. How long do you have to wait before you can try again? It depends!
Here’s how the loophole currently works:
Situation 1: A vote to approve your rezoning fails. Situation 2: A vote to deny your rezoning succeeds.
These sound like the same thing, but they aren’t the same. Situation 1 means no waiting period. The developer can zip right back to the city office and reapply. Situation 2 means the developer must wait a year before they can reapply.
This is super misleading! Council deliberately uses this when a project is unpopular, but Council still wants to pass it. They’ll vote it down, but then give developers a backdoor to reapply.
(This is what happened last August with the data center. Predictably, everyone got super mad and confused when there was no waiting period.)
Amanda makes a motion to close the loophole. Both Situation 1 and Situation 2 would require a waiting period of one year.
Jane: Council uses the loophole! Sometimes we want something to come back!
Nobody ever seconded Amanda’s motion, so it doesn’t come to a vote.
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5: Gardens and farms
Amanda: Allow community gardens, urban farms, and plant nurseries all over San Marcos.
Specifically:
Community gardens in all zoning districts
Urban farms in High Industrial and Business Park
Plant nurseries: limited/conditional in the kinds of dense, walkable neighborhoods that have businesses in them.
Matthew has opinions: “I am going to vote yes, but I want to go on the record for being against community gardens in single family neighborhoods! I have seen the damage they can do!”
Matthew has seen community gardens:
and he watched some rotten shit go down.
(“Rotten shit” is basically the point of a compost pile, so maybe he just misunderstood.)
Anyway, the vote: 7-0. Great!
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6. Four and five bedroom apartments.
Right now, there’s a rule that you can’t have an apartment with more than three bedrooms. You can have a house with four bedrooms, but not an apartment.
Why is this? What’s the problem with a four-bedroom apartment?
This was the argument: “We have to get rid of four-bedroom apartments, because landlords use them for rent-by-the-bedroom. We’ll only allow with a special permit, in purpose-built-student-housing.”
This has always been insane. Lots of people besides college students need four bedroom apartments! What if you have a family with three kids? What if the family has two kids, and a grandparent, all living together? What about coop living? What about people, generally, trying to share expenses and live together to save money?
Furthermore: wealthy people get to buy 4- and 5-bedroom houses! Why would no one else need this?
Historically, powerful people in San Marcos have cared a lot more about micromanaging students than about the unintentional consequences on poor people.
So this is Amanda’s amendment: let’s fix this.
The vote: should developers be allowed to put 4 bedrooms in a small multifamily, courtyard housing, or multifamily?
Jane opposes it because of parking. She’s worried that if you allow 4 bedroom apartments, you won’t have enough parking spaces for everyone.
However, parking is actually based on the number of bedrooms unless you’re downtown, and downtown is the one place that already has 4-bedroom units. So her argument does not hold water.
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7. Professional Office Space
Right now we’ve got some super weird rules about these:
Got that? No upstairs offices, ya dirty crooks! And don’t you dare try to be mid-block, away from an intersection. You think we were born yesterday?
Amanda proposes that we nix all of these. Staff agrees – they meant to get rid of these, because they’re weird and restrictive, but missed this instance.
Alyssa: I’m a night owl. Can we scrap the 6am-11pm part, too?
The vote: 7-0.
(They did not yet scrap the 6am-11pm part.)
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8. Maximum parking.
Let’s talk about parking lots. Basically too many parking spots and too few parking spots are both problems.
Too few parking spots mean that it’s hard for customers to find places to park. Too many means that your parking lot is huge. You’re paving too much of your city. It’s bad for flooding and walkability.
So if a business really wants an extra large parking lot, they’re required to do some mitigation:
Use permeable pavers on the extra spots, so water can soak through instead of running off.
Provide shade trees and keep existing trees
Shade at least half the extra spaces with solar panels.
Wouldn’t that make a big difference at Target or Walmart?
The question is: when does this kick in? How much wiggle room should we give you to provide extra parking?
Amanda’s amendment: “Extra Parking” means 30% above what’s required. If you’re required to provide 100 spots, and you provide 130, then you have to think about shade and solar panels and permeable pavers.
The vote:
Matthew voted no, because he speaks for the trees the floods. When no one else has the courage, he speaks for the water and the mud that just want to be inside people’s houses.
Matthew speaks for the hot asphalt! for the smelly melting tar! In this busy modern life, Matthew remembers.
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That’s everything that got voted on, officially.
Other discussions – no vote
Most of these will be formalized and voted on in June:
Major utilities, power plants, and large scale back up generators should require a permit from Council, and only be allowed in Heavy Industrial.
This is mostly about data centers, but not entirely.
Public notices for zoning and permit hearings.
Should city staff put the signs up, or should the applicant put the signs up?
Supermajority vs. regular majority to overturn P&Z decisions.
Right now, it takes a supermajority to overturn P&Z. Sometimes when P&Z does something especially stupid (like ban live music at Tantra) it seems dangerous to give them so much power.
Should Council be able to overturn P&Z decisions with a regular majority, instead of a super majority?
My $0.02: This has come up before, in 2022. I was opposed to weakening P&Z then, and I still am. It’s a dangerous sign when a governing body weakens the checks-and-balances that are supposed to put some friction and dissonance in the system.
If P&Z can be overruled with a simple majority, then P&Z does not actually hold any power. They just make recommendations. And I’ve been around long enough to have seen it swing the other way – a wiser P&Z and a more foolish rogue City Council.
P&Z may occasionally make some dumb-ass decisions, but I generally think the principle of checks and balances is wise, and should not be weakened.
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Qualified Watershed Protection Plans:
Right now, developers have to submit environmental studies, to make sure they’re not going to cause a lot of flooding or poison the river, or something. Part of that is a Qualified Watershed Protection Plan. This gets presented to P&Z. This gives other groups – like the San Marcos River Foundation – a chance to listen and make comments, in case there’s a concern.
However, apparently it makes the whole development process stall out for 6 weeks, while they wait to get on P&Z’s calendar. This costs developers a lot of money, which drives up everyone’s costs.
The question: can we find a way to make the study available to the public, without wasting 6 weeks of everyone’s time?
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The Business Park Zoning is not complete.
This zoning is not very walkable nor part of a “complete streets” dream where everyone can get their basic needs met without driving.
Some zoning tinkering to put language in about neighborhood commerce and encouraging affordable ownership and ownership alternatives.
Permits for special events right now are phrased as “indoor AND outdoor space”. We should switch it to “Indoor OR outdoor space”.
Discussions that will be continued, but not as Land Development Code amendments
Fiscal Impact studies. If a developer wants to build something in the middle of nowhere, will it cost the city more to maintain roads, utilities, and public safety than the neighborhood will contribute in tax revenue? It would be nice to know this! Right now it’s a big ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Single stair apartment buildings: small scale apartment complexes are a sweet spot for places like San Marcos. They’re low profile, can house 8 units or so, and provide affordable housing in neighborhoods. They don’t get built often for big complicated reasons. But one reason is that the building codes for giant buildings often apply to them. One major one is needed two staircases. This is a thing that gets fixed in places like Austin. Can we fix it here?
Can we mandate water reuse systems for sufficiently gigantic businesses?
I hope these don’t get shelved. They’re very important
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THAT’S THE WHOLE THING!
They vote: 7-0.
This was just a first reading. This will come back for a final vote in June!
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Item 23: Housing Finance Corporations
HFC stands for Housing Finance Corporations. These started off as legitimate attempts to create affordable housing, which then got hijacked by scammers.
It’s supposed to work like this: San Marcos or Hays County partners with a nonprofit. The nonprofit gets a tax waiver in exchange for building affordable housing.
The problem is something called “travelling HFCs”. Can a city 200 miles away partner with a nonprofit, and they build housing in San Marcos? So San Marcos doesn’t get the tax money, but they never agreed to anything? The housing may not even end up being affordable.
So here’s what happened to us: Pecos is a city here:
The city of Pecos partnered with the Pecos HFC, and built (or bought) The Grand at Stone Creek. This is the apartment complex between Academy and Crunch Fitness, near Target. They also had complexes in Kyle and Hays County (and a ton of others throughout Texas).
This was costing us about $200K in property taxes. We don’t know if they actually offered affordable housing or anything.
Anyway, we won! Or we settled. But we got the outcome we wanted, which is the tax money, plus a little extra in legal fees.
There’s 1-2 more HFCs that are still tied up in lawsuits, which will hopefully also tip our way.
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Item 24: We’re building a trail to New Braunfels!
Or rather, we’re applying for Federal land along Hunter Road to build a trail.
The goal is to put a hike-and-bike trail here:
So that’s cool! It sounds like it’s supposed to tie in to a much bigger thing, here:
Stop putting up Native American creation imagery because it’s hostile to Catholics.
Virginia Parker, director of the San Marcos River Foundation: yay EAHCP! They put in Dog Beach, Rio Vista, Ramon Lucio stepped entries into our park.
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Workshop 1: Incidental Take Permits
Here is the Edward’s Aquifer:
The green part catches all the rainfall. The light blue part is all the porous caves and springs, where the aquifer is right at the surface. The dark blue part is the storage tank of the aquifer.
The water only pops up in two places: the San Marcos and Comal rivers.
In 1991, the Sierra Club sued the US Fish and Wildlife Service, for not protecting the endangered species in these rivers. They won the lawsuit, and the Edwards Aquifer Authority was created with legal status to protect the flow of these two rivers. (Here is all the history you might ever want to know, and then some.)
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So the Edwards Aquifer Authority’s job is to keep the rivers flowing. They are required to have a plan, and the plan has to get approved by the US Fish and Wildlife department.
The old plan is going to expire in 2028, and so we’re working on the new one:
“EAHCP” stands for Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan.
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A big part of the new plan is the Incidental Take Permit:
Incidental Take Permit means “you’re going to disturb the endangered plants and fishies, so let’s plan to do it legally”. Otherwise you could get sued.
Here’s the things you might do that would be bad for endangered species:
swimming and playing in the river
Pumping water out of the Edwards Aquifer
Construction things that happen alongside the river
The biggest thing is pumping water out of the aquifer.
Here’s who gets permits to pump water:
Edwards Aquifer Authority – Total water available is about 500,000 acre-feet of water.
San Antonio Water System – gets allotted about 235,000 acre-feet of water/year
City of San Marcos – gets about 5000
City of New Braunfels – about 9000
Texas State University – about 2000
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Next up on the ITP: making sure recreation on the San Marcos River doesn’t hurt the protected species.
Here are the specific activities we want to allow, in the EAHCP:
Here’s the type of thing EAHCP has done, so that people can swim without destroying the river:
They built the steps on the left, and fence off the stuff in the middle.
So we used to have a barren bank, very bad for the river, on the left here:
and now we have nice steps and a protected, healthy river bank. Hooray!
San Marcos is expected to also do some work:
Basically:
Keep people from swimming and messing with protected parts of the river, and help people have fun in designated areas.
Pick up a lot of litter.
When the river gets super low, we have to keep the habitat from getting hammered, by limiting how much people are going in the water.
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The plan lays out how to measure whether or not the river is healthy enough for the species to survive.
They have to measure a bunch of things:
For example, here’s some of the goals for springflow:
Average flow of the San Marcos river is 175 cfs (cubic feet per second). Right now it’s about 90 cfs. It’s been about 90 cfs for the past few years.
The absolute lowest that’s okay is 45 cfs, and only if it doesn’t stay that low for very long. I can’t imagine the river only having half as much water as it does right now.
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What’s the plan when the river gets low?
The Edwards Aquifer makes everyone cut back on pumping during a drought:
So San Marcos normally gets 5433 acre-feet per year. But if we were in a Stage 5 drought, we’d only be allowed to use 3042 acre-feet.
So that’s the blue line at the bottom of this chart: the amount of water that we’ll always be guaranteed to get from the Edwards Aquifer.
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I might have misunderstood this next part. I think the Edward’s Aquifer Authority is going to buy back 100K acre-feet of water, and then use that to protect the river when it gets low.
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Here’s another goal for the river:
they measure the amount of endangered plants, and plant more good plants, and remove more bad plants.
So we also have to take care of the plants:
They measure the animals:
Listen: if I hadn’t been listening to the presentation, I might have been freaked out by the photo on the top right. Doesn’t that guy look a little spooky, laying facedown like that?
They also raise the endangered species outside of the river:
in case of some natural disaster.
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In total, here are all the conservation measures that San Marcos and Texas State University are supposed to implement:
It’s mostly things we’ve already been doing, under the old plan. They help us fund these, too.
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So how much does this all cost?? It is expensive! About $28-30 million/year.
Cost of water rights will probably go up over the next 30 years, to pay for all this.
What does Council say?
Josh: How much does it cost to put this plan together? Answer: Mostly staff time. About $2 million in grant money.
Amanda: Is the city already able to hold up our end of the bargain? Answer: Yes, we contract out a lot of the conservation measures. It’s a lot of continuation of what we’ve been doing.
Jane: You say that we need to controlling access during extremely low flow events. What do you think this will look like? Answer: There are a lot of unknowns. Could be paid access, parking access, might depend on what locations have been degraded. River hasn’t been at 45 cfs since the 1950s.
Jane: Are the fences along the banks less ugly? Answer: Yes, they’ve been replaced with more aesthetically pleasing black fences.
Jane: We’re trying to stop promoting the river to tourists. Like the TxDot sign on 35 advertising river recreation. Answer: It’s hard to get them to take their signs down.
Conclusion: We’re going to have a future conversation about how to downplay the river to tourists. Especially since water is such a big topic these days.
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Workshop #2: Water and wastewater fees
We’re going to be raising impact fees later this summer. This presentation is mostly informational.
What’s an impact fee?
Great. This presentation is specifically about water and wastewater fees.
Developers only pay impact fees new developments. Nothing existing is going to have to pay any of these fees.
Here’s the past history:
Great.
There are rules for impact fees:
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You can only charge an impact fee in your service area. So here’s where we can charge impact fees:
and here’s where we think people are going to build:
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In order to compute impact fee rates, they need to know two things:
What’s the total cost of projects that need to be paid for by impact fees?
How many developers are going to be sharing those costs?
Let’s take those one at a time.
First: total cost of projects:
So they know where the growth is expected to happen, and so they can map out what kinds of water and wastewater projects will need to be completed so that all the new homes and buildings can get water impact.
Second: how many developers will be sharing the costs?
You want to charge them different amounts, according to how big the development is. So we go according to meter size.
Here’s how we translate meter size into number of homes:
In other words, we assume a 10-inch meter is equivalent to 350 homes.
After doing all that conversion, here’s the total number of “homes” that we’re providing water to:
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So that would give the city what they need to compute the new impact fee rates:
Actual proposed rate hikes will come in June and July.
Council questions:
Josh: How do we compare to neighboring cities? Are we scaring off developers? Answer: We benchmark with neighboring cities. We’re in line. It basically depends on how recently they’ve updated their impact fees. If they’re still going on 2015 rates, we’re higher.
Amanda: Do we incentivize reducing impact? Do we have reward programs for water re-use? Answer: We’ll take this input and get back to you.
The city has a big reclaimed water facility. It doesn’t produce drinking water, but you can use it for cooling and irrigation. We run “purple pipe” to a bunch of places, like the Kissing Tree golf course, the power plant, the downtown plants, and some parts of the university.
Shane: What if they use reclaimed water. Does the purple pipe give a discount or anything? Answer: No, it’s an entirely separate thing. This is only clean drinking water. It means they use less water, though, so that reduces their costs.
Lorenzo: Does the university pay impact fees? Answer: Yep.
This is important, because the university skips a lot of local taxes, in general.
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Workshop 3: Public Art Policy
In the last 20 years, we’ve put up way more public art!
There are a lot of decisions about what gets funded and where it’s located. How should we be transparent with the public on how these decisions are made? We need a Public Arts Policy.
Here’s the program that commissions and maintains these public art pieces:
So we’re trying to lock down some details and create a more formal Arts Policy. It’s going to cover things like: how do we maintain art? How do we approve things? How do we ensure these things sustain after we’re gone?
This is the planning stage.
Council questions:
Amanda: If we’re collaborating with a private organization, how are they consulted? Shane: What about the public? Answer: We hold lots of meetings with the collaborators, and at least one public meeting, unless it’s a super small project.
Alyssa: It’s great that we’re getting a reputation as a creative community.
Shane: What happens if someone tags a mural? Answer: Murals actually prevent graffiti. People are less likely to tag murals. When it happens, we remove it or work with original artist to repair the mural.
Jane: What about murals on private buildings? Answer: We go in halvsies. They have to keep it up for at least five years.
Then we get to The Big Conversation:
Jane: For major art, I want it to come to Council. I’m so embarrassed that we omitted the rattlesnake on the big mural, but we have a bobcat.
You see this mural as you’re driving on LBJ from I-35 towards downtown.
It makes Jane lose her mind every time, because there is a bobcat:
which obviously represents Texas State, but there is no rattlesnake in the mural, to represent SMCISD.
Jane is so upset about this mural that she wants a line-item veto on every major art piece that comes through San Marcos, because if she’d seen this design, she’d have asked, “Where’s the rattlesnake?”
I happen to totally agree with her – that mural needs a rattlesnake. However! Council should not have a line-item veto on artwork.
Listen: Edge cases make bad policy. If you have a single unusual bad situation, it’s going to have a lot of unique aspects, and you should not write general public policy with that case in mind. (And in fact, the very next time a mural came around, Jane tried to apply the lessons of the bobcat mural standard. She tried to ban a cactus painting for being prickly. It was a total mess.)
Staff: Best practices is that council and community provide the prompt up front, and give them what to go by. Jane: That wouldn’t have saved the rattler problem. I want to see the art before it’s too expensive or too hard to change.
Shane, Matthew: YES!
Josh: We could make a list of ten principles! Artists could be required include three of ten!
(Note: oh god, this is how you end up with bland mush.)
Jane: Nope. I want to see the art and proofread it to make sure there’s a rattlesnake in it.
Amanda: Art is super subjective. We don’t want to tie the hands of the artists.
Josh: I don’t want to weigh in on art.
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So what went wrong with that mural? Here’s the process of how murals are designed:
The arts commission talks with the building owner
Hold public meetings, get community direction and input
Call for qualifications to get a style
Pay 2-3 artists a stipend to get designs
Arts commission votes on 2-3 designs. Makes minor changes.
With that mural, the artist included every single thing that was mentioned in the community meeting.
City staff: And actually, it was not a Texas State bobcat. It was an actual bobcat, like a wildlife thing.
(Note: the bobcat is literally standing in front of Old Main, so I’m pretty sure it’s a Texas State bobcat.)
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Alyssa: No. I don’t trust our judgement. Don’t you all remember our insane Gateway Sign discussions? We have terrible instincts. Leave it to the experts on the Arts Commission.
Josh: does the arts commission weigh in on highway signs? Answer: No, that’s graphic design. It’s art but also functional.
(Apparently all the council members have gotten a lot of phone calls from community members who hate the gateway signs.)
Jane: Do you all know WHY we even have an arts commission? Amanda: I don’t. Jane: It was my idea! Shane: in 1821. Jane: it was 1998. I was on CDB, we were asked to do a lot of art design, and I was like, “I’m not qualified. We should have a commission.” Boom, you’re welcome.
Bottom line: they’re going to probably get to micromanage the art. We’ll see what the next draft of the Arts Policy looks like.
Hidey ho, Neighborino! We’re back. Will Council regulate data centers? Will this grandmother in Dunbar get her home repair nightmare resolved? (Seriously, her story is awful.) Get your zesty details here!
Let’s go:
Hours 0:00 – 5:07: Forming our policy on Data Centers, annexing Five Mile Dam parks, loopholes for downtown restaurants, and a total home repair horror story in Dunbar.
Bonus! 3 pm workshops: the yearly homeless Point in Time count, and the Homeless Action Plan that has been implemented by Southside over the past two years.
22 more at the public hearings, mostly for the Land Development Code.
(I just pooled them all together here.)
The biggest theme of the night: Data Centers in the Land Development Code. (5 speakers during Citizen Comment, and another 19 at the public hearing.)
Roughly speaking, everyone said: “When you revise the land development code, either ban data centers altogether, or at least regulate them tightly. They’re terrible and we hate them.”
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Side note: several speakers had spent their morning at the Guadalupe Commissioners Court. Guadalupe County approved a whole package of tax breaks for a Cloudburst Data Center on 123, despite listening to four hours of public comment about how much everyone hates them.
To put it mildly, this smells corrupt. The only argument in favor of a data center is the money. There is zero upside to giving a data center tax breaks.
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Back to citizen comment. Non-Data-Center thoughts on the Land Development Code:
Don’t require bars to clean 100 feet from their door. 50 ft is plenty.
Serving food at all hours is fine, but don’t inadvertently ban food trucks downtown.
Most of the proposed amendments on housing density look good. But be careful with permeable pavers – they can stop working if you get the wrong kind.
Keep the watershed quality protection program presentation in P&Z. Even if they don’t vote on it, it’s important to cast sunlight on these things. (I strongly agree.)
Don’t remove the tree requirement for situations where there aren’t previous trees. The east side was farmland, and so what looks like “no trees” was actually cleared by people.
Mandate rainwater capture and gray water re-use
Targeted stormwater fee with offsets for water innovation
No potable water for any cooling
Note to Council: I strongly agree with keeping tree requirements. Developments without trees age really badly. We are talking about farmland, east of 35, which is also the more economically vulnerable side of town. If you allow developers to skip the trees, then the residents’ homes will not gain as much value over the years, the way it would on the west side.
We need a tree canopy in Texas to make the summer tolerable. You absolutely must require tree planting, unless the developer is putting in actual xeriscapes. (I’m okay with a xeriscape exception.)
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Other comment topics, unrelated to the Land Development Code:
We need to fight for immigrants and their safety. For example, AI entrenches a systematic bias in our health care.
We need to bring industries to bring in tax dollars
The city needs to stop rewarding incompetence
We need more public and affordable housing. Also this would ease homelessness.
Onto the meeting!
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Item 9: Five Mile Dam Park
Back in November 2024, the city bought Five Mile Dam parks from the county. This is where the youth soccer leagues have all their games:
The idea was that we didn’t want the county to privatize the soccer fields, and the county would only let us buy the soccer fields if we also took these two Blanco River parks:
This is the Blanco River, but the river runs underground and so the river bed often looks dry.
The county charged us $0, because they REALLY did not want those parks any more. (Presumably because of upkeep and liability.)
Readers, meet Dudley Johnson:
and Randall Wade Vetter:
Dudley Johnson, Randall Wade Vetter: meet my readers. Go say hi. You’ll get along beautifully.
Anyway, Dudley Johnson Park and Randall Wade Vetter Park now belong to the city, and so at Tuesday’s meeting, we formally annexed them into city limits.
Note: According to the deed, the land will stay parkland forever. Go enjoy it.
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Item 11: Amending the Land Development Code
We update the Land Development Code every few years. This means we’ve accumulated 300+ things to address – some big, some small.
We saw this briefly back in March, when Council was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of 300+ changes. They postponed it till this week, to give the public and themselves time to wade through it.
The biggest issue is data centers. They’re so new that they’re not yet in the development code, so we need to build those policies from scratch. But there are also a lot of more minor topic.
Note: this is only the first half of the first reading. They paused because it was getting so late. There will be at least two more meetings where they can hash out the details.
Data Centers
Let’s start here. What do we want our data center policy to be?
Five people spoke during Citizen Comment and 19 more during the public hearing. Everyone hates data centers!
Issue #1: Zones and Permits. Should data centers be allowed in just Heavy Industrial? Should they be allowed in other zones? Should they require a special permit?
Jane and Amanda each propose an amendment, so we have dueling amendments.
Jane’s proposal: all data centers should need a special Council-approved permit, regardless of zone.
Amanda’s proposal: no data centers anywhere, at all, in any zone.
The conversation kind of overlaps on these, but they each get their own vote.
The votes:
Jane’s amendment: Should every data center require a special Council-approved permit?
Data centers will all be required to get a specific Conditional Use Permit from Council.
2. Amanda’s amendment: Should data centers be banned altogether in city limits?
So Data Centers will not be banned altogether.
My $0.02: This is the right outcome. I’m a techno-optimist. There is a version of data centers, somewhere over the rainbow, where they run on reclaimed water and renewable energy.
I don’t want to ban data centers – I want them to be well-regulated. So I’m glad Amanda’s amendment did not pass.
(Also Shane’s votes don’t really make sense. He wants data centers banned or unregulated, but nothing in between?)
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Issue #2: What counts as a Data Center?
Here’s what Staff proposes as a definition:
Amanda proposes: Add “Cryptocurrency mining and facilities”.
This vote passes. The definition has now been modified to include that use.
Josh: Data centers have been around forever on a small scale. Do old school data centers fall under this definition? Or just these giant new AI data centers?
Jane: What if a big business has a room full of servers, but it’s not their primary function as a business? Do they count as a data center?
Everyone agrees that this is incomplete. You want to regulate a building of computers if it’s hoovering up lots of electricity and water and spewing pollution. You don’t want to micromanage a small architecture firm who has their own servers for running CAD. We need some notions of scale and purpose.
Everyone’s going to look into this and bring back suggestions for the next meeting.
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Issue #3: Potable water for data centers:
Amanda proposes: No data center may use a potable water source for cooling purposes.
In other words, data centers must either use reclaimed water, or find an alternative cooling technology. But no wasting massive amounts of drinking water.
My $0.02: this is great!! This is what I mean when I say I am a techo-optimist! Renewable energy is cheap and available, if Texas wants it. If data centers decide to invest in non-potable water cooling, then we can solve two of the major environmental problems.
We can imagine a world where we don’t sacrifice the environment to data centers, and in turn, big tech executives accept regulations.
This passes 7-0.
This is probably my favorite amendment of the night.
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Smaller Data Center Proposals:
Amanda: Increase setbacks to 1000 ft near residential zones, hospitals, hotels, agricultural, schools, and daycares.
Amanda: Extra permit required for on-site generators
Jane: On-site generators must meet Tier 4 emissions standards
Amanda: Noise limit of 60 dB at property line
All of those pass.
Matthew floats the idea of requiring a supermajority to approve a data center, but says he’ll bring something back at the next meeting.
Matthew has generally been very quietly pro-data centers for the past two years, so I don’t think he’s serious here.
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Non-Data Center LDC Amendments:
Waiting Periods:
Suppose a developer wants to build some apartments, but they get turned down when they apply to re-zoning the land. How long do they have to wait until they can re-apply and try again? The answer is “it’s complicated”.
Here is the technical answer: it depends on how the motion was phrased. This is the hair that is getting split:
Situation 1: The motion is, “A vote to approve a new zoning,” and the vote fails.
Situation 2: The motion is, “A vote to deny the new zoning,” and the vote passes.
Situation 1 does NOT trigger a waiting period, and Situation 2 DOES trigger a waiting period of one year. It’s very subtle!
Council uses this power carefully. If Council likes a project, but the public hates it, they’re going to use Situation 1. The public feels like they got a win, and Council buys themselves some time to thread the needle. The developer jumps right back into the game.
If Council does not like the project at all, they’re going to use Situation 2, and put some nails in the coffin.
This is exactly what happened with the data center
In March 2025, P&Z denied the Mayberry Data Center. Maberry appealed the decision to Council. In August, Council voted on the appeal.
Appeals require a supermajority, so Maberry needed 6 votes. But the vote to overturn went 5-2.
The key detail: the vote was phrased as Situation 1, not Situation 2. They failed to approve the rezoning. But they did NOT deny it.
There is no waiting period. They can waltz in tomorrow.
So there you have it.
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Bottom line: This application is dead. But Council left a trail of bread crumbs for the applicant to re-apply to P&Z and get a better outcome.
That was Council using the loophole. Unsurprisingly, it made the public confused and angry.
And rightfully so! What do you mean, “not approve” is different from “deny”? Get outta here. Why are you playing word games with everyone?
A lot of community members thought the waiting period was being violated, and were angry that they were being jerked around.
Which brings us to tonight
Again, both Amanda and Jane have proposed amendments to fix this confusion:
Jane’s amendment: Keep the loophole, but make it EXTRA clear.
Amanda’s amendment: Eliminate the loophole. Situations 1 and 2 would both lead to a one year waiting period.
Jane’s argument: Council likes the loophole! Sometimes we want to give the developer another attempt, without making them wait a year. (She did not say, “For example, with Maberry last August with the data center!” but listen: yes, they did that intentionally.)
At any rate, they only vote on Jane’s proposal:
So there you have it. Loopholes 4-evah.
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Bars Serving Food
There has always been tension in San Marcos between the Serious Grown Ups and the College Party Kids. (We all agree to ignore how the Serious Grown Ups often used to be College Party Kids.)
Decades ago, the Serious Grown Ups got mad about the number of bars on the square. So they capped the number of alcohol permits.
Then the Serious Grown Ups got mad because they wanted to have a beer at a restaurant downtown. So they added in Restaurant alcohol permits.
What are these caps? As of 2026, you can only have 14 bars and 25 restaurants downtown that serve alcohol. (There are an unlimited number of permits available for the rest of the city. It’s only capped downtown. It’s almost as if we want you to drive after a few drinks.)
What do you do if you want to open the 15th bar downtown? All the bar permits are taken. So you try to get a restaurant alcohol permit, and sell as little food as possible. This is part of why the Rooftop got shut down.
The city then plays cat-and-mouse games trying to figure out if you’re a real restaurant, or just a fake-out-secret-bar-restaurant. At one point, the city would track sales, and they wanted a certain percent of sales to come from food. Then they switched to saying “you must serve food for two meals, each of which lasts four hours”. But what if the restaurant is only open from 12-5 on Sundays? Etc.
Jane proposes an amendment: If you’re a restaurant, you must always serve meals, any time the business is open.
Amanda: What if the kitchen closes at midnight?
Jane: This will be EASIER for restaurants! I’m helping.
Alyssa: Yes, but most of these downtown restaurants close their kitchen down early.
Lorenzo: It’s a loophole. If you want a restaurant permit, then be a restaurant and sell food. If we think this is a dumb loophole, we should offer more bar alcohol permits. But until we fix the loophole, we should make them follow the rules. If you have a restaurant permit, you have to sell food.
The vote:
Interesting!
I probably would have voted “no”. Who cares if a restaurant shuts their kitchen down early and just becomes a bar after 11 pm?
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In the end, they postpone the rest of the LDC amendments, because it’s getting late. They have not discussed:
Valid Petition procedures
Qualified Watershed Protection Plans
Parkland dedication
Housing density and landscaping
Lorenzo and Amanda both have a bunch more amendments
Increasing PSA waiting period from 6 to 12 months
I thought this was funny. They voted on the postponement of this item:
and very quietly, Jane mutters, “What is wrong with y’all?”
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Item 6 – reallocating the last bits of ARPA funds
All remaining Covid money has to be spent by December 2026. We’ve got a little bit freed up, to give to other projects. (Discussed here.)
However! This plan is getting derailed because of a home repair nightmare, which has been unfolding behind the scenes at Mission Able. It’s horrifying!
Here’s the scoop: the home owner lives in Dunbar, in a home that has been in her family since 1900. She keeps it immaculate and organized, but it needed foundation repair.
Mission Able supplied a contractor, who pulled in some foundation workers with no equipment. They start jockeying around with the house. The floor buckles and splits – literally, while she’s sitting in her living room. They wedge it up on cinder blocks and bricks. Some pipes burst and some walls split. They take off.
The home owner chased down their insurance, only to find out that they’re uninsured. (She even asked the contractor if they were insured, ahead of time, because the vibes were off.)
It is true that houses will shift and you will get cracks, when you re-level a foundation. But this is not that. This is honest-to-god 6″ gaps where snakes and critters can wander in. Her own granddaughter is too scared to spend the night, because of the gaps in the walls.
It’s been like this since last summer, and sounds like a nightmare. I believe there is now a second contractor working there, trying to remedy the situation?
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Council tries to figure out what went wrong. Should the city be requiring more outcomes and metrics from the grant recipients? Is the standard city oversight broken in? Is the operational structure of Mission Able broken?
Everyone sort of protests. The city oversight mechanisms were not triggered, because the first contractor didn’t pull any permits. The second contractor has pulled permits, but the actual oversight occurs when the inspection happens, and they’re not there yet.
Mission Able protests – we want to learn from this disaster and become better at what we do! We’ve done 149 projects last year, and this is the only bad one.
The plan: the city is going to meet separately with Mission Able and with the homeowner, and do a courtesy inspection to get a full sense of what needs to be done, and report back. No decision on the $100K for Mission Able tonight.
(In the meantime, we did fund the other $100K to Operation Triage.)
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Items 12-17: Some very big dollar amounts:
“CIP” stands for Capital Improvement Projects, which are the giant multi-year projects like redoing all the drainage in a neighborhood. You pay for these with grants and bonds.
If you want to see some big numbers, check these out:
yessir, those are some enormous sums of money!
I didn’t listen terribly closely to the details, but everything sounded kosher.
“PIT” stands for “Point in Time”. The PIT Count is a fixed day in January, where cities nationwide try to actually figure how many people are homeless in their communities. Each city assembles a team of people who go out into the community and try to actually count and talk to as many homeless people as they can find on that day. (PIT count 2024, PIT count 2025)
The rules are set by the Housing and Urban Development agency, (HUD). If you complete a PIT count, it helps you apply for federal funding.
For unsheltered, think people in cars, and people outside.
For sheltered, think Hays County Women’s Shelter, Southside, Marla’s Place, but not people in hotels or motels.
The PIT count is not perfect. But it gives us useful information.
The blue column is people that they saw, but didn’t get to talk to. The blue is included in the orange group.
The gray column – Sheltered – is much smaller in 2026 than in 2025. This is because in 2025, the PIT count day ended up being a “cold weather night”, where Southside was open to everyone.
(I’m not sure why the chart has those weird gaps.)
Ages of people they were able to talk to:
and gender:
and race:
Generally homeless people have significant obstacles in their lives:
Almost all the homeless people in Hays County are in San Marcos:
They drove out to Wimberley and Dripping Springs, but did not see any people there. In Wimberly, they saw evidence of encampments, but didn’t actually see any homeless people.
Here’s where we’ve landed over the past six years:
Again, PIT counts aren’t perfect. You have to be careful when you’re looking at data like this. You can’t conclude that we’re solving homelessness – it could be that people are hiding, because they’re worried about ICE.
One presenter says that whenever ICE rumors pop up on social media, the line at the Food Bank gets cut in half. (That is so deeply depressing on so many levels.)
…
We also have a second source for homeless data: the public schools.
All the school districts collect this data at the beginning of the school year:
This year’s data:
So SMCISD has an estimated 105 K-12 students who are housing insecure. This doesn’t include their parents or any baby siblings who aren’t yet in school.
One offhand comment by the presenter: Statistically, apparently babies are the age group most likely to be evicted, and children aged 2-5 are the next most likely to be evicted.
Pretty grim commentary on our society!
…
At last year’s presentation, they said there was an urgent need to include homeless people in emergency action plans. For example, if we have a winter storm, how do we keep homeless people safe? How do we prevent families from freezing in their cars?
This year: progress! Relevant groups have come together and are working on this.
This year’s ask: the Homeless Management Information System. (HMIS)
It’s extremely difficult for case managers to keep track of details of homeless people. Which doctors has this person seen? What medications are they on? Do we need to locate their birth certificate or social security card? Etc.
HMIS is the system run by the Texas Homeless Network, so that everyone can pool their data and coordinate care. It costs $450 per user.
Can San Marcos help pay for this?
Answer: You bet! We’re planning on putting $9000 towards this at the May Homeless Coalition meeting.
They focused on families primarily. Like we saw a moment ago, there are at least 105 kids in SMCISD who are housing-insecure.
(But not exclusively – they did also help individuals.)
There are three main tentpoles to their plan:
The presentation walked through each of the tentpoles individually.
So first, Emergency Assistance:
Think: car repair so someone can get to their job, or covering a two-week gap in pay when they get a new job, or covering part of a high electric bill, etc. You don’t want a small emergency to snowball into a big emergency.
Next: Eviction Prevention
Both of those categories are where you see the most bang for the buck.
Being evicted is expensive, destabilizing, and sends families down a cascade of trauma. But preventing eviction can be quick, cheap, and help get someone through an isolated hard time. Win-win.
….
This last category morphed over time. This is for families who have lost their housing.
They started with Rapid Rehousing:
What they said was that San Marcos doesn’t yet have the infrastructure to carry out this kind of program. Also, HUD used to fund this kind of program under Biden, but of course now everything is a dumpster fire.
It was leading to staff burnout and having to turn away lots of families, and generally awful for everyone involved.
So for Phase II, they switched to Transitional Housing:
Basically, they’d have 20 families stay for 60 days at Southside, all together as a cohort. They’d work with these families really closely, bring in a ton of community partners, and try to transition them to permanent housing.
Here’s a bunch of partners they collaborate with:
So that’s an outline of the main programs they implemented.
….
But wait! There’s more! With the $800K, they also spruced up Southside:
which is good.
Some budget details:
This shows how expensive the Rapid Rehousing was in Phase 1, and how many more families they were able to serve with the second model.
And here’s some general financial breakdown:
and some general takeaways:
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What does Council say?
The million dollar question is: what happens when the Covid money runs out? Can we keep all this going?
They are working on it! They have enough money to keep it going through January 2027, and they are pursuing grants and stuff to keep these programs going.
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Listen, let me be a moral scold for a sec:
We know how to solve homelessness. There is no mystery. We just aren’t willing to pay for it.
Nationally, it would cost under $10 billion to end homelessness. But homeless people cost over $11 billion each year, as is! Think ER visits, untreated mental illness and addictions, and jails.
It’s more expensive to be cruel to people! Isn’t that wild?
Again, there’s no mystery here. Republicans slash funding for homelessness programs, over and over again, and here we are.
The San Marxist 