Month: November 2021

Holy calendar discussion, batman! That was tedious. They considered a half dozen different ideas and eventually decided to preserve the status quo, plus some extra.

• Shane Scott would like to bring back packet meetings. No one else wants to.
• Mayor Hughson would like the work sessions moved to a different day, instead of being at 3 pm before 6 pm council meetings. I am extremely sympathetic to her. Being in session from 3 pm to midnight sounds miserable. But no one else wanted to.
• They eventually added Citizen Comment and Q&A from the press and public to the work sessions, before and after respectively.

Baker threw his second major grenade of the night, when he accused the Mayor and the City Manager of keeping the agenda short leading up to an election in order to keep encumbents from having to make difficult votes.

Hughson and Lumbreras were both furious and did not mince words about it. Hugh/son called it baloney, and said the only things postponed were things that Council voted to postpone. Lumbreras told Baker to file an allegation if he thought there was wrong-doing, but not to just show up and sling rumors around. Both were spitting nails.

Here’s the thing: it really could be either way. I believe Bker when he says that every year, agendas tend to be much shorter leading up to an election. They have in fact been shorter lately.

From what I know of Hughson and Lumbreras, I doubt they’re deliberately postponing agenda items. There could however be a city-wide soft position that things should be slow-played until the new council is seated, out of general path-of-least-resistance tendencies.

This is what I mean by a grenade. Baker wasted a lot of political capital with that accusation. He’s surely correct that agendas are shorter during campaign season, but this was an insanely inflammatory way to go about addressing it.

A city does need someone willing to overstate things, drum up outrage, and shift the Overton Window towards progressive ideas. A Jordan Buckley, for example. On city council, we need Baker to help draft policy and implement these ideas. I don’t know how I feel about him drumming up outrage at the expense of actually getting good ideas implemented.

We’re in a much more precarious position with the current council, and it’s really bumming me out.

Citizen comment periods:

• A woman from the animal shelter came back to angrily describe how shitty a job the social media director is doing. Apparently it use to be the purview of a shelter employee, and now it’s just a random city employee. She read a few descriptions of the animals that were posted online. Essentially, “This dog snapped at a police officer and was unruly during transfer to the shelter.” It was pretty ridiculously hostile to the animals and unlikely to make anyone think, “Oooh! this biter is the dog for me!”

• Jordan Buckley talked about the anti-hate/pro-diversity statement that’s on the agenda in Hour 2. Basically, we approved a statement like this in 2017. Since then, we’ve been doused with anti-semitism, hate speech, the Trump train harassment of the Biden bus, and the recent reports about how the 911 officers and Chief Stapp laughed and mocked the panicked 911 callers, and never sent out any response. San Marcos has been one of the biggest lightening rods for this kind of racial hate across the nation, and yet the council hasn’t wanted to antagonize anyone by timidly peeping about the problem. Buckley’s point is that an empty statement that you never act on is pretty cowardly and lame. Stay tuned for Hour 2.

The rest of the hour was uneventful. There’s going to eventually be a Film/Television studio out by La Cima. Fine. I’m always vaguely annoyed by any development on the river watershed, but it was already zoned Community Commercial, so it wasn’t going to stay undeveloped anyway.