Citizen comment: A ton of people turned out from Pick-a-Pet to fight the puppy mill ordinance. Mostly customers, with one or two employees. Their main talking points were:
- We love our pet so much!
- The employees love animals so much, and the atmosphere is so nice and caring there!
- Sometimes you just want a pure-breed, right?
- Why do you want to close down this nice store?
These people seemed earnest, but the arguments above are all bunk. You can have really loving, sweet employees and still buy your puppies in bulk from Minnesota farms with 3000 puppies and atrocious conditions for the breeding dogs. None of these things are dispositive.
Also, under the proposal, you can still buy your favorite pure-bred dog from a small scale breeder, where you can tour the facilities and admire the happy, handsome parents of your new doggo. And this nice store with loving employees can pivot to selling pet supplies and offering pet adoptions, like PetSmart does.
Another talking point is:
- We’ve been open a year, and none of our pets have ended up at the shelter, so we’re not making the stray animal problem worse!
This is also not really the point. The point is the puppy mills.
The speakers were pretty over-the-top with the mushiness. Their pups have transformed their families from bleak grayness to shimmers and sequins, and brought happiness to their little girls for the first time in their Dickensian existences. Only pure breeds from pet stores can bring little girls that kind of feels.
Stay tuned – we will hash out this ordinance thoroughly in Hours 4:00-5:08!
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Item 16: About 40 acres near 5 mile dam:
It’s going to be apartment complexes. It had been zoned General Commercial, and now it’s CD-4, which can mean a lot of things. But they openly admitted that it’s going to be apartment complexes.
Should we apply our favorite criteria?
Housing stock: How long will it take to build? How much housing will it provide? What is the forecasted housing deficit at that point? Is it targeting a price-point that serves what San Marcos needs?
- Pester the Planning Department directors to start providing an ongoing, updated needs assessment. We need to know this.
Environment: Is it on the aquifer? Is it in a flood zone? Will it create run-off into the river?Are we looking at sprawl? Is it uniformly single-family homes?
- Not on the aquifer. Not in a flood zone.
- A teeny bit of sprawl, insofar as Blanco Vista is already isolated and sprawly. But it’s not making Blanco Vista any more sprawling. It shouldn’t require much in the way of utility extensions.
- Apartment complexes are pretty environmentally friendly, because they’re efficient.
Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?
- Not meaningfully mixed income. That’s my biggest gripe about big apartment complexes – it’s not good for a community to be economically segregated.
- On the schools: Blanco Vista got a special carve out to be part of Hays CISD instead of SMCISD, even though they live in San Marcos. This kind of chafes, for a few reasons. First, because people disparage SMCISD for racist and/or classist reasons, and so Blanco Vista deserves a bit of side-eye for wriggling themselves out of district. (And whoever was on city council back then, too.)
Second, SMCISD is always weirdly close to getting forced to send money back to the state under the Robin Hood law, which is supposed to even out rich school districts and poor school districts throughout Texas. I’m not totally clear on the details, but it’s something like SMCISD needs families to balance out the university/outlet malls/non-family parts of San Marcos. So SMCISD particularly gets screwed when neighborhoods like Blanco Vista and Whisper Tract are in San Marcos but not in SMCISD.
That die is already cast, though. This particular apartment complex is in Hays CISD.
The San Marxist Special: Is it a mixed-income blend of single family houses, four-plexes, and eight-plexes, all mixed together? With schools, shops, restaurants, and public community space sprinkled throughout?
- Nope, not that at all.
So is this good or bad? It’s mixed. More affordable housing is good. General Commercial would have been good as well, except developers seem to be too timid to build the retail that people need to have near their homes.
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Item 17: I listened to this when it came through P&Z on October 11th. This one is fascinating.
The 2015 floods destroyed a lot of homes. Three years later, 12 of those families were awarded CBDG grants to build new houses. Of those, 9 families are now in new homes. The CBDG program either built new homes for them on new lots somewhere in San Marcos, or they owned the land and had their old homes torn down and built new ones, raised above the flood plain.
We’re down to the last three families. They are still in the houses that were flooded, all trailer homes. The homes are becoming quite dangerous – a kid fell through the rotten floor, two of the couples are aging and there are damaged stairs, there’s mold, and on and on. A family of six has no heat in the winter. And so on. They are still trapped in a nightmare that’s been going on for seven years.
These three families don’t own their land, and it’s in the floodway, so they have to be moved to new lots. The city has a few lots available, but they’re not ideal – over by Texas State, away from schools/family/community, etc.
So along comes this lot, in Sunset Acres, down the street from Mendez Elementary, where an old firestation used to be. It’s large enough to be redeveloped into three houses. It seems ideal.
However! At the P&Z meeting, about a dozen members of the neighborhood showed up. They are dealing with horrendous conditions on their street. Basically, raw sewage is frequently backing up into their bathrooms and up through their drains. It sounds like a nightmare. And several of them have regular flooding, as well. This has been going on for years and years.
They weren’t opposed to the houses being built eventually, but they absolutely did not want anything increasing the quantity of waste in those pipes until the sewage problems were fixed.
The city staff explained the plan to fix the sewage: TxDot is putting a larger sewage pipe under I-35, which should be done by 2025. Then the city will start the Sunset Acres drainage and wastewater project in this neighborhood. It’s a two phase project. Fingers crossed, everything will be done by 2029!
P&Z members basically gawked at City Staff and said, “Why have you handed us this utter shit sandwich?!”
It seemed like such a disaster – these three families are so desperate, and these other people are desperate in different ways, and we’re supposed to put the first group in with the second?! No. P&Z denied the zoning change 6-2.
So now it goes to Council. I am pretty impressed by the city staff. They got smacked down hard at P&Z, and they got to work. First they had a bunch of meetings with the neighborhood and with all the different engineers and utility workers, and they sent little cameras down pipes and tried to figure out what to do.
They came up with a medium-term plan and a short-term plan to supplement the long-term plan.
Medium-term: they’re going to replace one of the worst sagging, splitting pipes running down Broadway.
Short-term: They’re going to massively enlarge a detention pond, to help with the flooding. For the sewer, they’re going to add an access point to the sewage line where it gets clogged, and they’re committing to cleaning it out on a regular basis. This should go a long way to keep the pipes flowing and prevent sewage from backing up into homes. (The new houses can be built with back-flow preventors, but the city can’t pay for those to be installed in existing private houses.)
Why haven’t we already been cleaning the pipes regularly? It depends what kind answer you want. Over the past decades and generations, we haven’t been doing these things due to negligence and systemic inequity. More recently, we haven’t been doing it due to a shoestring budget. We’re not doing tons of things throughout the city that we could, if we had more money.
Everyone on City Council was both impressed and appropriately cautious with this potential solution. Sunset Acres residents are so burnt out on being ignored by the city that they are not exactly celebrating yet. A lot hinges on how well the city implements the short and medium-term solutions.
Still, I don’t want to gloss over the tremendous amount of effort that the city staff went to, to make this a win-win-win situation. It would be great to remedy the raw sewage backflow and house these three families and restore everyone’s faith in the power of a group of citizens raising a fuss.
The San Marxist 