Season’s greetings! It’s the last meeting of the year. (Wednesday council meetings are hard. I missed having the extra day to write this all up.)
Let’s do this!
Hours 0:00-2:04: Electric cabs downtown! And the dumb curfew, for the third meeting in a row, finally passes.
Hours 2:04-2:40: The Cotton Center is going to maybe donate 600 acres to the SMART Terminal. We take a beat to figure out what these things are. Plus some money to nonprofits.
Hours 2:50-3:40: In which we discuss campaign finance, and whether councilmembers want the Ethics Review Committee double-checking their disclosures.
And that’s a wrap! 2022 is on the books. See you back here in January!
Citizen comment: equally split among a few topics: – a smattering of anti-curfew advocates, – representatives from nonprofits who are upset about the allocations this year.
We’ll get to both in due time.
Item 1: Free electric cabs downtown! The pilot program is underway. You can call them, or hail them just by waving your arm when you see one, or you can use the app.
They’re kinda cute!
The cabs have a fixed route, but they’re allowed to go off route to pick someone up or drop them off, and then they just return back to the route.
And since you asked:
Okay, I think the route is kind of weird. – It doesn’t go through the actual town square. – It’s all kind of peripheral – There aren’t any designated park-and-ride parking lots, from what I can tell.
The more I stare at it, the more convinced I am that that can’t possibly be the route. That has to just be the boundary of the Main Street district. There’s nothing on the website that can plausibly be the route, though, either. I give up.
But I’m strongly in favor of free public transit, so hopefully this will stay and grow! I would most like to use it during July/August/September, when being outside feels like Satan’s butt.
The pilot program is supposed to stay under $500K, and last for another six months. Then hopefully it will become a permanent thing.
As long as this is turning into a full-fledged PSA, I may as well post the flyer:
Ok, I tested out that QR code above. It just goes to the same San Marcos website that I linked to above. There’s just a phone number to call the cab. No link to an app, no route, just a phone number. (The presentation definitely claimed there is an app.) Oh San Marcos: so many great ideas, so many terrible websites.
Nevertheless: test it out, why dontcha? Public transportation is a great thing!
…
Items 2,3, and 4: Several financial reports. – the quarterly CBDG audit, – the quarterly investment report, and – the quarterly financial report.
On that last one, we’re making bank. This is the most striking graph:
In other words, we planned to spend light-blue-money, but we actually spent dark-blue-money. And we thought we’d bring in medium-blue-revenue, but we actually brought in green-revenue. Wowza. Across the board, we’ve come in under budget and over revenue, in almost every category.
On the one hand, this is good: we operated under prudent expectations and it worked out. On the other hand, we have a community with needs, and we should not sit on a windfall of money. (Nor should we return it via tax breaks.) We should spend it thoughtfully, on high quality programs.
Mark Gleason moves to approve, and Jude Prather seconds it.
Alyssa Garza wants everyone to please explain why they’re acting against the boatload of emails, calls, and petition signatures they’ve received.
No one really answers.
Jude Prather wants the CJR committee to look at the severity of the crime. He makes several points: – Government should protect civil liberty, but also safety. – he had an awful experience as a teenager, when he was strip-searched at a mall, under accusation of shop-lifting. So he understands how negative police interactions can alter someone’s point of view. – But this is not 1998 or 1999, which was a simpler time. This is a more dangerous time with greater public safety concerns. So he’s siding with the curfew.
Jude gave the same line at the last meeting, “This is not 1999, a simpler time,” which I ignored for being dumb and bland. But the second time he says it, we have to take it more seriously, because it’s mostly wrong:
So homicides did spike during Covid, but it’s absolutely in no way true that 1999 was significantly safer than, say, 2019.
Furthermore: on the murder spike, Chief Standridge specifically said that there have not been any murders in 2022 in San Marcos, for the first time in forever. So things are really not grim today!
(I’m guessing that Jude Prather graduated high school in 1999, and he imprinted on 1999 as a kind of The Most Generic Year yardstick for America.)
Back to Council discussion
Shane Scott brings up Max’s question from two meetings ago: How many encounters do young people have with police? In the last few months?
Chief Standridge answers, (at 1:42): “We don’t capture data associated with nonenforcement. And contrary to anything that’s been heard before, I never said that to do so would be “draconion”. I never used that word.” He basically says it’s complicated and expensive to get that data.
Why is Chief Standridge fixated on the word “draconian”? Shane didn’t use the word. No, it’s because Max Baker has been using it, during citizen comment, and attributing it to Chief Standridge. Max has been claiming that Chief Standridge said it would be draconian to record every instance of police interactions with community members.
So what did Chief Standridge actually say? Let’s go back to November 15th. At 1:22, Max says: “There’s presumably some other data set that says this is how many times we stopped and talked to people, with this as the reason, and is that data that you all keep? Your officers presumably should be tracking every time they stop somebody, to talk to them, right?”
Chief Standridge answers, “I would hope not! I hope we don’t ever live in a police state or a police city, where we document every time we speak to a person.”
I am pretty sure that’s the line that Max refers to. Max has substituted in the word “draconian” for “police state”. So Chief Standridge is right that he never used “draconian,” but what he actually said has roughly the same meaning.
Goddamnit, I’ve got to stop getting off-track on these dumb tangents.
Back to Council discussion:
Shane Scott, continuing in good faith: “When I was a kid, the PD made friends with me and I got a degree in CJ. Most kids are good kids, and it’s hard for me to do curfews based on my experiences.”
Shane Scott moves to postpone until after it goes to CJR. This is, of course, the same thing they voted on last week. But sounds good to me!
Also, his relative is scared of 16-year-olds because he doesn’t know about drunk people yet. Don’t you dare tell him and ruin his innocence!
But more seriously: Mark is very worried about 15-year-olds with guns, but not at all worried about this:
It sort of makes curfews just seem quaint.
Back to Council Discussion
I’m getting bored of this whole discussion.
Alyssa makes a case for tabling it: Tabling this will bring a sense of haste to the CJR. Otherwise it will join the endless, non-urgent queue.
Jane says that over the years, she’s voted on this 4 times before with no issue. No need to postpone.
Chief Standridge answers the racial data coding question from last time: SMCISD uses racial data as provided by parents.
Saul asks Alyssa’s question from two meetings ago: What percent of violent crimes is coming from teenagers? Unfortunately, Chief Standridge explains that the answer involves queries into several databases, and will take a little bit of time. They’ll give it to the CJR committee when they have it.
The vote to postpone:
Fails yet again.
Final vote on the whole damn thing:
So that’s that.
It will go to Criminal Justice Reform committee, and they will do whatever they do. In the meantime, the curfew is in effect.
Item 15: San Marcos puts $500K from the General Fund towards nonprofits. The Human Services Advisory Board recommends how it gets spent. Things did not go smoothly this year.
During Citizen Comment, representatives from the Hays County Women’s Shelter, Greater San Marcos Youth Partnership, and one other (I missed the name), all spoke up about the funding process. The procedure was new, they got less money than before, and the new process is problematic. In addition, each year, the money is getting spread more thinly across more and more organizations.
It sounds like the Advisory Board put a lot of effort into trying to rate each organization and be fair. They had a rubric, came up with average ratings and ranked the organizations. They decided that the top 15 would get funded at 55% and the rest at 20% as a baseline, and then they tweaked some individual organizations from there. But within each organization, this amount ended up seeming arbitrary and inconsistent. Some organizations got way less than they used to.
Here’s the thing: everyone is acting in good faith, and trying to get money to these nonprofits. (The process has morphed over the past 3-5 years, it sounds like.)
Jane Hughson handled it wisely. She basically said, “It’s been years since Council gave direction to the committee. This is our fault for not issuing clear instructions.”
She moved to postpone it to January, and then have Council figure out clear instructions, and re-do the allocations. Everyone agreed.
Way later, during Q&A, Jane added some other details: First off, San Marcos is a little unusual to put General Fund money towards nonprofits. Similar Texas cities just include this in with their CBDG money. So good on us, for taking care of each other in our community. Second, the original plan was that this fund was supposed to scale up as the city grew. It was supposed to be 2% of the budget eventually. But it hasn’t grown in a long time, and it’s probably time for it to do so.
…
Item 17: Remove 660 acres from the Cotton Center and make it available for the SMART Terminal.
Yellow is the SMART Terminal, nestled along the railroad tracks. The blue thing is the Cotton Center – that’s shape I tried to draw above. (The little pink trapezoid is Katerra. I think Katerra is a specific business that was going to be part of the SMART Terminal.)
What is the SMART Terminal, anyway? I read through the presentation and it’s very handwavey on what it actually is. Like a regular terminal, but smarter! (Clearly it has something to do with the proximity of railroad and airport, and smartness.)
Jane Hughson said that the SMART Terminal got dropped for awhile, and then sold to someone new, and so now it’s back.
So, which 660 acres do they want to take from the Cotton Center and add to the SMART Terminal? There’s no map anywhere I can find! There’s this vague map of the Cotton Center:
so my best guess is that they’re removing a perfect, circular red ring and leaving a bunch of disjointed chunks. I have no idea.
Is this a good idea? San Marcos River Foundation says hard no. Here is their issue:
The Cotton Center has a bunch of 100 year floodplain, and some dry creek beds running through it.
And here’s the corresponding water map of the SMART Terminal:
I believe that’s the San Marcos river at the bottom, running along the south side of Highway 80. So this is all draining into the river and potentially increasing flooding.
Council decided to send it to committee. Everyone acted like this was the beginning of the negotiation, and not the end of the negotiation, and that they’d be sure to talk about things like flooding, and impervious cover, and industrial run-off into the river. Hopefully that all comes true.
So you want to raise money for your city council campaign! Right now there are a few caps:
Individuals cannot contribute more than $500.
If you contribute more than $300, then your councilmember has to recuse themself when anything that you’re connected to comes up.
There’s an overall limit, based on the number of registered voters. Councilmember’s cap is 50¢ per registered voter, and mayor’s cap is 75¢ per registered voter.
Jude Prather and Shane Scott brought this issue up.
Jude Prather goes first. “It’s not the cap that’s the issue. It’s just confusing and too complicated. Things keep getting more expensive, and we’re going to have to revisit this year after year. Make it simpler. What if you get a lot of contributions? There should just be a max of $300 per person.”
Jane: We currently have a limit of $500 per person.
Jude: This is just so complicated. I mean, cost per voter?
Jane explains, “It’s just supposed to grow as San Marcos grows. If they just had a hard cap, the amount wouldn’t grow as San Marcos grows. We could change the scaling factor, though.”
(They keep saying “Teepo signs” when they talk about campaign costs. I have no idea what a Teepo sign is.)
Jude keeps going. He’s on quite a tear. What about ballot initiatives? And PACs? This doesn’t apply to them! What if a ballot initiative affects a race? (He was worried about this with marijuana decriminalization, if you’ll recall. What if we turn out young, liberal voters??)
Jane: I’m having trouble following what your solution is.
Jude Prather: I want it simpler. Just $300 cap per person. Get rid of the complicated charts with different numbers and amounts.
(OH!! T-Post signs! Got it.)
Jane Hughson was my favorite councilmember of the evening. She cannot get over the accusation that the funding cap is “too complicated”. She keeps saying things like, “I’m really trying to understand what you mean. You take the number of voters, and multiply by 50¢. What is the complicated part?” and “I can understand if you want to change 50¢ to $1 or $1.25. But what is the complicated part?”
Eventually Shane and Jude have enough dignity to stop asserting that it’s too complicated, when it’s plainly not. (And they’re not shameless enough to just bluntly say they want unlimited campaign spending.)
Everyone weighs in on what they’d like the scaling factor to be:
Shane Scott and Alyssa Garza: $1.25 per voter, for both mayor and councilmembers Matthew Mendoza and Mark Gleason: $1 per voter, for both mayor and councilmembers Saul Gonzales and Jane Hughson don’t seem to care.
Everyone seems to settle on the simplicity of $1 per registered voter. There! We did actually make it simpler!
One final note: last time, there was also griping that the number of registered voters fluctuates with different election cycle. No one really pursued that this time, which is good, because it is a pretty lame complaint.
…
I was surprised that Alyssa Garza is opposed to spending caps. Her argument goes that more money means hiring more local neighbors who might otherwise be disengaged, and increase local involvement.
I can see her point, but I don’t think that outweighs the built-in advantage for candidates with wealthy friends. I put a higher weight on making sure anyone can run a competitive campaign, regardless of economic background. (On the other hand, Alyssa has run for city council and I haven’t. So she has relevant knowledge.)
As a side note, apparently in Texas it is illegal to cap self-donations to one’s own campaign. So wealthy candidates will always have an advantage.
Item 13:
The Ethics Review Committee seems to always be a thorn in the side of Shane Scott, and to a lesser degree Jude Prather and Mark Gleason. I don’t know if they’ve been busted for something, or if they just don’t like the idea that they’re being watched.
Right now, councilmembers have to turn in two sets of documentation:
Yearly financial disclosure
Campaign contributions disclosure
The ERC looks over these, and flags anything that looks fishy. They’ve been doing this for years, but it’s not formally city policy. Jane Hughson wanted to formally codify the practice.
Shane Scott moves to deny. “The ERC does not need to meddle,” he says, “There are state rules, and the state will get involved.”
Jane explains where it came from, “After we passed the $500 cap, there was a candidate who took $1000, not knowing about the cap, and people were asking, “What do we do? Where do we report this?” It didn’t violate state rules, so you can’t report it to the Texas Ethics Commission.”
Shane Scott: “We shouldn’t be more restrictive than the state.”
Jane: “Okay, but we are. We just discussed the campaign caps. So…?”
Shane Scott removes his motion to deny, and Mark Gleason makes a motion to approve.
Next, Shane Scott makes an amendment to remove all the parts where the ERC looks at financial disclosure statements. “The state will take care of it!” he says again.
Jane again asks, “How would the state take care of it?”
Shane says, “FOIA requests, etc.”
The lawyer, Michael Consantino, says nope. The state would not get involved.
No one seconds Shane Scott’s amendment, and so it dies.
The overall vote to let the ERC review financial disclosures and campaign contributions:
There you have it.
…
Item 21: Jane Hughson wants a new zoning. There are a lot of applications for Heavy Commercial or Light Industrial where council has to write up a bunch of good-neighbor exceptions because there are residents living nearby. Usually they want to rule out uses based on loudness/smell/vibrations/etc. The method is to make a “restricted covenant agreement,” which sounds religious, but isn’t.
Jane is proposing something that she calls “Business Park”. Maybe not storefronts, but businesses that you wouldn’t mind living next door to. Smaller in scale and height, regulations on where loading docks could be, cranking down on noise/smell/vibrations/etc.
Everyone likes this idea. It’ll come back in some form.
Welcome back! It’s been an entire Sights & Sounds of San Marcos, plus Thanksgiving, since you were last here!
Exciting news:
Clickers are back! That’s right. Now all councilmembers have to vote at the same time, so they can’t cheat off each other and game their vote.
Let’s dive in:
Hours 0:00-1:40: In which we revisit the little plot of land behind Embassy Suites.
Hours 1:40-3:30: The curfew ordinance takes center stage. This is the big topic of the night.
Hours 3:30- 4:42: In which we reallocate some unspent Covid money.
This coming Wednesday – December 14th – is the last council meeting of the year. That’s right – you get two consecutive weeks of my drivel this month. And then 2022 will be on the books!
Citizen Comment: the San Marcos activist community is a force. It warms a blogger’s heart to have a dozen activists show up and speak passionately against the proposed curfew. (You can read about why I loathe the curfew ordinance here.) They make the right arguments – keep kids out of the criminal justice system, it’s not equitably enforced, it can be traumatizing to kids, etc. In addition, a ton of homeschool parents signed on some quick petition, worrying that their kids might get tangled up in the daytime curfew.
One speaker – Bucky Couch – did show up to talk in favor of the curfew ordinance. I believe he’s the owner/developer of lots of things in town, maybe including the Kissing Tree? His kids own Cody’s restaurant, maybe? The Couches are in on many, many profitable projects around town.
…
Item 9: First up is a zoning request. You may remember this, from August:
Today we’re looking at the green square, #3, again, between Amazon and Embassy Suites.
Last time, the developer wanted to rezone it from General Commercial to Heavy Commercial. P&Z approved the zoning change, but then City council swatted them down, citing the beauty of Embassy Suites. We do not want clanky old Heavy Commercial zoning next to our prized and glorious tourist conference space.
Now they’re back, changing their request to Light Industrial. This time, P&Z denied it (due to the beauty of Embassy Suites), and Council felt stuck. It would now require 6 votes to overturn P&Z.
Council would like things like restaurants and service-related businesses to go in. They don’t want a bunch of warehouses. The developers want to include restaurants, but also a bunch of warehouses.
In the end, Council decided to form a committee and punt the matter to them. Stay tuned.
Item 10: This is the big item of the night, the curfew ordinance. (Discussed previously here.)
In Citizen Comment, the speakers made all the basic arguments against the curfew: – It does not reduce crime – It creates unnecessary and negative interactions between kids and cops – It can serve as an entry point for getting a kid ensnared in the legal and criminal justice system – It’s an extra expense levied on poorer families – It requires a high degree of officer discretion, and many of us don’t trust cops to use that discretion wisely – Other interventions for troubled kids work better – It targets certain people for their age, not for any misconduct. – Plenty of cities (Austin, Waco) have done away with curfews, and it’s been fine. – (Plus some hyperbolic arguments that overstated the dangers. Maybe they helped move the Overton window a tad.)
The presentation
Objectively, Chief Standridge has a great presentation. I don’t agree with him and I didn’t change my mind, but he’s a very good public speaker.
Here’s his basic claims:
The fears are overstated. The implementation is very mild.
We can run the data and show that there is no racial bias.
The curfew is a helpful tool – both anecdotally, and based on the literature.
Here’s the longer version of the Chief’s argument:
The fears are overstated. The implementation is very mild.
There are 13 excused reasons that minors can be out and about during curfew. Many of the speakers ignored this list of acceptable reasons, and asked things like, “What if you’re coming home late from work?” Well, coming home from work is on the list of excuses.
The fines tend to be at most $100 plus court fees. Not $500.
There aren’t that many juvenile citations, and there really aren’t that many curfew citations. Pre-pandemic, there were ~15 curfew violations per year. Last year and this year, it’s about 2-3 per year. This supposedly shows good discretion by officers. It’s not being abused. Also it’s supposed to show that the police have other priorities, namely violent crime and traffic crashes.
I’ll concede part of this: as far as curfews go, this current implementation does seem to be on the milder side. However, he’s super short-staffed right now, and his focus is on violent crime and car crashes right now. Maybe next year, the focus will be elsewhere.
Is there a racial bias?
Chief Standridge wants to unpack the claim that these stops are racially biased. The numbers look racially biased. Since 2017, there have been 87 curfew citations. (There’s a lot of problems with these numbers, but I’ll tackle that at the end. For now, let’s just go with them.)
These citations break down by race as so:
3 Black males 17 Hispanic females 40 Hispanic males 16 white males Zero white females or black females
Here’s how the chief spins this: “I admit it looks bad when you compare to census data. Hispanics are only 40% of the population in town, but they’re 65% of these citations. But remember, most of these were daytime truancy tickets! The right comparison is to the SMCISD demographics. And SMCISD is 73% Hispanic, so we’re actually not targeting Hispanic students disproportionately, after all!”
Alyssa Garza goes after him for sloppy data and mixing which data he wants to use. This is a thing that public policy folks have to be extremely careful about – how exactly are you coding race? Federal data calls Hispanic people “white”, which is a choice that feels at odds with how everyone thinks about race. Is he using self-identified race? How reliable are these numbers?
I’m also skeptical of his comparison. If he wants to use SMCISD data as his comparison group, then he needs to separate out the truancy data from the overnight data. What are the demographics for the 35% that are overnight violations? Where kids live in “certain” neighborhoods, as the chief put it last time?
The curfew is a helpful tool – both anecdotally, and based on the literature.
Next, he gets some anecdotes from cops that this ordinance has caused minors to change their behavior for the better. It keeps students at Lamar/Rebound on campus. There were gang kids involved with guns and shoot outs. There was a suicidal kid who was reconnected with their parents, back in 2001.
(This gang business is problematic, but I’m leaving that alone for today.)
Last time, Alyssa Garza specifically asked what percent of violent crimes are committed by minors in San Marcos. I want to know this, too, and it should be easy to acquire. He did not provide that data, which makes me speculate that it’s negligible.
The literature: Standridge acknowledges that the evidence is thin on curfews actually reducing violent crime. However, curfews help keep kids from being victims of crimes. And possibly they end up committing less crimes later on in life.
He also discusses truancy. Truancy is entirely separate from the police department. The elementary and middle schools all have attendance committees and parent liaisons and make home visits. (He didn’t say what the high schools do. But school funding is tied to attendance, so I’m guessing they have a lot of people dedicated to it.) He has talked with Judge Moreno about the extent and outcomes of truancy cases she sees: it’s a lot.
To me, the discussion of truancy court makes the opposite point – that the schools have an established system for kids who miss school, and the world won’t fall apart if curfew is ended.
My analysis:
First, Chief Standridge is focused on “Which kids are helped by the curfew?” The activists during citizen comment were all focused on “Which kids are hurt by the curfew?” Fundamentally, they are each focused on different groups of people. And look: life is messy. Both could be true – some kids can be helped, while others are hurt. The question is how to weigh and decide which of those claims gets priority.
Are kids helped by the curfew, like he claims? I’m skeptical of his anecdotes. For the kids carrying guns around, the cops can already intervene. For the kids who want to leave Lamar campus, I suppose the threat of a $50 fine could motivate them to stay put.
Does curfew protect minors from victimization, like the literature shows? Sure! I can believe that minors are protected from certain kinds of crimes if they obey curfews. On the other hand, this is a bit close to “lock up your daughters so they don’t get raped” territory.
But also: when we say that minors are less likely to be victims under a curfew, what kinds of crimes are we measuring? Is domestic violence included in that statistic? Because when people are trapped at home – like during covid – domestic violence increases a lot.
Now on to the activists’ side: are kids hurt by the curfew? It’s not automatically traumatizing to all kids to get stopped and asked why you’re out at 3 am. But most of these kids have seen the videos of cops shooting black and brown men, and then, if you’re black or brown, it might be terrifying. I’m not sure Chief Standridge fully gets what a trust-deficit the police have. And he also glosses over the idea that he may have racist officers that are rougher with black and brown kids than with white kids. (He’d be foolish to pretend he has no chance of having MAGA police officers.)
Finally: some kids would just like to wander around at night, and they’re not going to be destructive jerks about it. We generally take civil liberties extremely seriously. You need to have a compelling reason to remove someone’s freedom.
One final thought: You maybe could probably talk me into the daytime truancy curfew more easily than the late-night curfew. I can see a clear, direct benefit to kids to making sure they get that high school diploma. But you need to be talking with the school district, and as far as I can tell, the school district hasn’t been involved at all.
So what do our councilmembers do?
Everyone is more uneasy about the curfew now. Last time, the focus was on crime in neighborhoods and how this curfew was good for everyone else. The focus was not on the kids (besides Max and Alyssa). Even Mark “gunshots every day outside my house!” Gleason is now thinking about actual juveniles, and he is worried that home schooled kids will get caught up in the truancy curfew. (The ordinance gets amended to include home schooling as a defense to prosecution.)
Saul proposes that the whole thing get sent back to committee for further drafting.
Jane Hughson says, “Back? It never was in a committee.” But nevertheless, Saul’s proposal sets things in motion.
Alyssa Garza always makes the most sense. But tonight, Shane Scott makes the second-most sense. He basically says, “The speakers were convincing and the chief was also convincing. But when I was a kid, I was allowed total freedom as long as I didn’t get in trouble. I just don’t like constraining anyone’s freedom if they’re not doing anything wrong.”
Alyssa Garza makes the best points. Basically, it’s complicated:
What about kids with informal jobs?
What about kids avoiding violent or unsafe homes?
Can we involve more players at the table?
This is exactly right. The reasons that a kid might be out at 3 am are big and complicated, and sometimes innocent and totally fine. Let’s bring social services and Community Action and the schools into the conversation, instead of being authoritarian about it.
Last time, Max Baker made an amendment to cap the citation at $50, plus court fees. Mark Gleason was the only person to vote against the cap.
This meeting, Mark Gleason tries to undo it. He makes a motion to allow penalties of up to $100 plus court fees, because he’s a jerk because he mistakenly believes that stiffer penalties are a bigger deterrent to bad decisions. (Actually, if you want to deter crime, you should have small, predictable consequences. The main problem here is that getting caught is extremely erratic, not the size of the penalty.)
But no one seconds Mark’s motion, and I enjoyed listening to the silence drag out. The malevolent little amendment gasped for breath, and died.
The curfew expired at the beginning of November. So currently, there is no curfew ordinance. (Children! Go run nuts! All hell has broken loose!) The question is:
Should this get sent to the Criminal Justice Reform Committee, and then renewed when they come back with their recommendations?
Or should this get renewed, and then sent to the CJR committee, and then revised when they come back with recommendations?
Alyssa makes a motion for the first option.
The vote to postpone without renewal:
So that fails. (Alyssa mutters “y’all are so fake” quietly.)
They unanimously agree to send it to the Criminal Justice Reform committee.
Should it be approved in the meantime?
One technicality: this is still the first reading. Last time, the first reading never passed. So this still has one more reading to go through.
…
Post Script #1: Just for funsies, let’s dunk on “defenses to prosecution” for a moment:
#9: Anyone between the ages of 10-17 who is married can be out past curfew. What the fuck is going on with that?
This ordinance was originally written in 1994. You know what it was intended to mean back then, of course: if an underage girl has married an adult man, and she’s out past curfew, then you wouldn’t take her home to her parents anymore. She’s married into the adult class of people now, and her husband deserves all deference on the matter. It is super-duper creepy as hell!
Furthermore, it doesn’t stand up to the barest of logic. An underage married person isn’t at risk of being a victim of crimes? An underage married person can’t commit crimes? Doesn’t need to finish high school anymore?
Honestly, show me a 17 year old married girl, and I actively want someone pulling her aside and asking if she needs help. Most likely, she either got pregnant, or she was escaping something worse at home. Either way, she could probably use a hand.
…
Post Script #2: The the data from Chief Standridge’s presentation is kinda gibberish.
Exhibit A:
Brought to you in patented squint-o-vision, because I had to take a screen shot, because it doesn’t appear in the packet.
At 1:49:45, Chief Standridge is partway through this slide, and he talks about the green area on the far right, Curfew Citations. He says “the raw number of citations for 2022 is two.” So I’m inferring that the 3rd-from-right column is the raw number of curfew citations for the past five years. Add those up: 17+14+11+3+2=47 curfew violations over the past five years.
However, no one refers to 47 as the total curfew violations. The total violations cited everywhere is 87 citations for the past five years. It’s in both the presentation, it’s used throughout the discussion, and it’s in the police memo from the packet.
Chief Standridge uses the smaller numbers to illustrate how sparingly this is used, but uses the bigger numbers to talk about demographics and how there’s no racial bias. It’s weird and I don’t understand the disparity between the two numbers.
But wait! There’s more!
Exhibit B: Here’s how the 87 breaks down racially:
Standridge computes the percentages black/Hispanic/white from this. Here’s how he gets his percents:
3 Black kids out of 87 total violations: 3/87 = 3.45% 17 females + 40 males = 57 Hispanic kids out of 87 total violations: 57/87 = 65.52% 26 white kids out of 87 total violations: 26/87 = 29.89%.
See how there are 26 white kids, instead of 16? That’s because 3+17+40+1+16=77 total citations, not 87 citations. There are 10 unaccounted kids in his racial breakdown, and so he made them all white. (And maybe it is just a typo. It could be that the true number is actually 26 white kids, not 16.)
Those are the percents for the blue bars in this chart:
I know, it’s miserable to read that chart. But the three blue bars are labeled 3.45% on the far left, 65.52% for the middle blue bar, and 29.89% for the blue bar on the right.
(That graph is supposed to be the defining argument that the curfew isn’t being administered in a racist way. He’s comparing the blue curfew citations with federal census racial demographics (orange), and SMCISD racial demographics (gray). Each cluster of three bars is a different race, with Black kids on the left, Hispanic kids in the middle, and white kids on the right.)
What’s the correct computation, then? You need to change the denominator. You only know the demographics of 76 kids, so you must compute the racial percents out of 76.
Here are the correct percents: 3 Black kids out of 76 violations: 3/76 = 3.95% 57 Hispanic kids out of 76 total violations: 57/76 = 75% 16 white kids out of 76 total violations: 16/76 = 21.05%
I don’t think this is part of some big conspiracy where Chief Standridge is intentionally massaging the data. I do think he’s spouting a bunch of gibberish, because he’s got inconsistent numbers handed to him, and he went with what was most expedient to serve the narrative he wanted to tell.
Item 13: Marijuana has now been decriminalized in San Marcos! Go nuts. But not too nuts, because you’re still in Texas and none of the other police forces (including the Tx State campus cops) are playing by these new rules.
….
Items 14/15: Reallocating money.
The Chamber of Commerce has $200K leftover Covid Relief money. The city is giving it to a few other programs:
Training members of the community to get certified on QuickBooks for bookkeeping
Training local small business owners and setting them up with bookkeepers from the first program
Childcare gap funding for families
I am hugely in favor of that last one. Childcare is wildly expensive.
There’s also some CBDG-covid money to be reallocated, $188K worth. The city staff propose that it go to two programs:
Marble Falls has a stress-healing nature program, where you’d take a bus there and spend a day or two outside. It’s ~$300 per person, which would be covered by $75K of the Covid money.
Improvements to the Kenneth Copeland Memorial Park. It used to be the El Camino park, but was renamed to honor the officer that was killed in 2017. They want to put $112K into improvements to it.
Nobody likes the Marble Falls idea. Too far away, too expensive, and we have very nice local parks.
Alyssa Garza proposes that we use the money on something that meets people’s direct needs a little better – rental assistance, utility assistance, that kind of thing. Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzalez, and Matt Mendoza all basically agree with Alyssa.
Mark Gleason and Jude Prather want to put $113K on the Kenneth Copeland park, and the other $75K on rental assistance.
Shane Scott wants to put all $188K on local parks, arguing that parks benefit everyone, while rental assistance only benefits some people.
Alyssa says, “You guys. The people are going to be living in those parks if we don’t help them cover their rent,” and tells them they’re out of touch with the needs of the community.
Jude Prather relents. But he makes some dippy comments here, “Could we call it Kenneth Copeland rental assistance?” (The park is already called the Kenneth Copeland park. We’re not disrespecting the officer by postponing new picnic tables. It’s already a nice park.) “Next September, I’m knocking on your door for that Kenneth Copeland money!” he says. Jane Hughson suggests that he doesn’t need to wait till next September. He can just go through the normal budgeting process that starts in a few months.
Anyway, five councilmembers want to direct the money towards rental assistance, so that’s how it will go.
…
Finally, they have to go through and replace Max on a bunch of committees and such. There’s probably 20 appointments or so.
Some that caught my attention:
Shane Scott has joined the Criminal Justice Review committee
Alyssa Garza has joined the Workforce Housing committee.
And a bunch more. Mostly these details are getting too into the weeds, even for me.
The San Marxist 