May 3rd City Council Meeting

Ugh. Listen: Gabrielle Moore lost by 15 votes, in the school board election last night. Just 15 votes. And the opponent is a disengaged random walk-on who has never voted in a school board election in something like 20 years, but conservative voters went for him.  And Gaby would have been great.  

It is a pretty brutal slog to run for office. I personally loathe small talk and glad-handing, and can’t imagine anything worse than having to convince people to vote for me. But I’m so grateful that people do run for office. And then to come so excruciatingly close! It sucks and I’m sorry.

But on to City Council:

Hour 1:

In which LMC fights for her trees, and wins

Hour 2:

In which we have some zoning cases.

Hour 3:

In which we dabble in some light Economic Development Policy

Hour 4:

In which we relish the sentence, “Nothing would give me more pleasure than to sue him.”

All of these are actually pretty short. 

A few other notes

Apparently Half-Price books is leaving San Marcos, and I’m super bummed about it.  They posted a letter saying they were priced out of rent, and unable to find anything else affordable.

We have a glut of empty store fronts, and yet the vacant store fronts are priced unaffordably for local businesses, and landlords are raising rent on existing buildings and forcing tenants out. Couldn’t GSMP do something here? I generally don’t see eye-to-eye with the business community, but this is their wheelhouse. Could they shake some sense into commercial real estate landlords and get them to stop sabotaging San Marcos? In other words, set rates that are appropriate for San Marcos retail, not Austin retail.  I already miss Half-Price Books.

Lastly:

I’m halfway through the city council workshop from Tuesday afternoon, and finding it fascinating. There was an excellent presentation on homelessness in San Marcos, and on an ordinance to hold landlords accountable for unsafe or subpar rental properties. Both are extremely complicated topics.