Citizen Comment: Spearkers from SMRF, landlords want to end the 90 day eviction delay, and people worked hard to properly get community input on the proposed new rec center name, “The Paulina Espinoza Community Hall”.
Whisper PDD
The Whisper PDD is an absolutely gigantic development that’s going in on the northeast side of 35, sort of across from Blanco Vista and Five Mile Dam. My take is that no one paid any attention to it when it was passed, maybe circa 2015. It was a long way from town, a long way in the future, and generally felt a little fuzzy and distant.
Max Baker hates it. I don’t know enough about whether or not to hate it, but I will say this: when it comes to developers, we act like we’re terribly lucky if a developer would deign to build here. In reality, the city holds all the power, and developers need us more than we need them. Developers are a dime a dozen, and we don’t owe anything to a random out-of-town developer. (Occasionally we have a local developer. I think Trace is local. Local developers do seem to care a little more, presumably in a don’t-shit-where-you-eat kind of way.)
Max Baker goes off-topic to make a point about lobbying – he asks the developer which councilmembers he’s talked to, and the developer demurs (which does feel shady), and then Max accuses various councilmembers of having been the recipient. It’s aggressive and feels like it comes out of nowhere. This was the first time of the evening that I thought, “Max, what are you doing?” But given the topic, I assume Max was still angry from the lobbying workshop a few hours earlier.
(What was the actual issue at hand? The developer wants to rezone part of the property Light Industrial. He was denied at P&Z because the tract ran adjacent to Saddlebrook, a mobile home community up that way. He’s proposing to cut the area back so that it’s not adjacent any more.)
In the end, this detail gets kicked to committee and back to P&Z.
The San Marxist 