What happened here?
- The anti-bigotry affirmation went off the rails. In fact, the theme of the night might be “Commissioner Baker is correct but hella undiplomatic about it.” Baker tied together a whole lot of different points in a long, passionate statement against racist cops, the student at Texas State who recently set synagogues on fire, the anti-semitic flyers, the Trump Train, Chief Stapp’s commets, the 911 responder’s comments, and a bunch of other things. He opened by asking if the Mayor would support holding police officers accountable for racist comments on social media. Mayor Hughson plainly interpreted this as an attack.
The problem is that Baker and Hughson were having entirely separate conversations. I believe Mayor Hughson felt like it was time to update and re-affirm the anti-bigotry statement as a matter of housekeeping. Baker is furious about police brutality, the treatment of the Biden Bus, and in general, San Marcos is a lightning rod for white supremacists to try to drum up conflict.
Baker is correct when he says that council stays quiet on these issues because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. He’s correct about all of this stuff. He also comes in with guns blazing.
Commissioner Scott made the dumbest comment of the Anight, when he said something like, “We all disapprove of this stuff, but I think the more we talk about it, the more of it there is.”
In the end, Commissioner Garza moved to postpone until after the federal case against the city for the Biden Bus incident is resolved. That passed.
- City Council voted on a ton of open committee assignments. I certainly got the impression that committee members were angry at Baker and not going to vote for him for anything. And that is how we got Jude Prather, “tough on crime”, on the homelessness committee, and Shane Scott on the sustainability committee.
The thing is: we no longer have a progressive coalition on council. There used to be three mostly reliable progressive votes. Hughson and Gonzalez have always been centrist. Now there are two progressive votes and three reliably conservative votes. Baker will kneecap himself if he continues to be a bomb-thrower, I fear.
- One other thing: archaelogical surveys. The city has a robust procedure for handling discovery of artifacts in the course of development. Private developers have zero requirements. Commissioner Baker spoke diplomatically here about the need to find some way to have our history preserved, and city staff offered up San Antonio as an example of a city that does in fact put some responsibility on private developers. Mayor Hughson and others were in favor of having city staff look into possible policies here and to bring it back.
The San Marxist 