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.
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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.
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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 