It was a very short meeting! Mark Gleason was leading the meeting, although Mayor Hughson was still present. (She had shoulder surgery the day before. Hope she’s mending well.)
Hours 0:00 – 50:31: Citizen Comment, a bit on SMART and the notification radius, a bit on the speed limit for 123, and a little bit more on civil forfeiture and why it’s so gross.
Hours 50:31 – 1:22: Stephanie Reyes is officially your new city manager! And new rules for governing council committees.
Several people (mostly from Mano Amiga) speak on Josh Wright, the guy killed by a corrections officer at the hospital a few months ago. (Six shots in his back, while wearing leg shackles. There’s no way to parse that as anything but cold-blooded murder.)
Several of the speakers point out that none of the councilmembers, besides Alyssa Garza, have issued statements on Joshua Wright’s death, nor offered condolences to the family. It’s true that the corrections officer is part of the Hays County system, not the city system, but councilmembers are still public officials with a platform and influence. Right now, they’re using that influence to quietly twiddle their thumbs.
Several people speak on the SMART Terminal. SMART Terminal was approved two weeks ago. Last week, at P&Z, the SMART Terminal was up for re-zoning to Heavy Industrial. An even bigger turnout of people showed up to speak against it. A ton of people shared stories of flooding downstream of the proposed SMART location. I do not see how Council could have thoroughly vetted stories of flooding before approving the terminal, given the vast number of personal stories that popped up last week.
P&Z ended up postponing it for a month, to give the developer time to meet with community members and gain their support.
As an aside: A lot of people are upset because the SMART Terminal was approved before they even heard it was coming. This is a big problem: how can a city notify the public about a project in their area? The city does actually try pretty hard: there are supposed to be signs posted, in big font, and there are supposed to be notifications mailed out to residents nearby. The problem is that these things are time-consuming, expensive and still don’t work that well. Signs blow over, mailers go out to home owners and not renters, people live further than 400 yards away but still will be affected, etc. (Council is fixing the renter problem – they will start getting notifications too.)
I want to talk about mailing notifications. The notification radius is 400 yards. Everyone who lives within 400 yards of the boundary of a project is supposed to get a notification in the mail. It used to be 200 yards. It was expanded a few years ago. City staff was stressed out by increasing the radius – it increases their workload, and also gets expensive.
So look, here’s an easy solution: the notification radius should be proportional to the size of the project. Rare gigantic project like the SMART Terminal or the entire Riverbend Ranch Development? Should have a very large notification radius. Frequent, ordinary, small scale project? Should have a proportionally smaller notification radius. It’s very weird that the notification for Sean Patrick’s CUP is the same radius as for the Martindale-sized massive-slab-of-concrete-by-the-river future SMART Terminal.
…
Item 17: The speed limit on 123 is going to be reduced from 60 mph to 55 mph.
I mean, this is basically the stretch that half the high school students take to get to the high school. It doesn’t seem crazy to me to knock the speed down just a hair.
(There was an awful tragedy at Goodnight Middle School on Friday, involving a car. We are all so fragile, and the people we love are so fragile, too.)
…
Item 18: Apparently the state of Texas wants to give us $45,000 for us to build a metal awning to protect police cars. Nothing wrong with a metal awning to protect cars.
The problem is that the source of the $45k is deeply tainted: it’s from State Seized Asset Funds. Civil asset forfeiture is a giant gross mess. Basically cops are allowed to confiscate anything potentially related to a crime. But then, regardless of whether the owner was innocent, guilty, or completely unrelated to the crime, the cops end up keeping the property. Police departments end up profiting hugely off it, which then motivates them to grab property even more aggressively and ever so tenuously connected to an actual crime.
Do I think we should turn down the money? I don’t know. This state is so broken on this topic that I don’t think it would do any good, frankly, except as protest. Whether we accept the money has zero bearing on whether or not Texas ever reforms its civil forfeiture policies. But it’s worth adding this to your mental rolodex of ways that police abuse community members.
Item 21: Stephanie Reyes is being promoted from Interim City Manager to Actual City Manager. She’s been Interim for about a year, since Bert Lumbreras retired.
Everyone – literally everyone – falls all over themselves to be the most enthusiastic in congratulating her. But seriously: everyone is correct. She is great. I kinda want to fall all over myself and be the most enthusiastic, fawning cheerleader for her, too.
Obviously I have no idea what people are like off-camera, so I never know the whole story. But what I’ve seen on camera, Stephanie is always extraordinarily prepared, organized, and poised during meetings. She’s smart and speaks carefully, and her words generally indicate that she’s considering many different perspectives. She knows San Marcos very well. She comes across as a hugely competent leader. And a great leader is worth their weight in gold, no joke.
….
Item 23: Rules and procedures to committees. This was such vague-booking. There was no presentation and no background. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and had to dive into the packet.
Council has a bunch of committees, to study little issues outside of regular council meetings. Think things like the Workforce Housing Committee, or the La Cima Committee, Criminal Justice Reform, or Sustainability. Here, council is amending the rules that govern these committees. In other words, this is dry, dry, in-the-weeds business. They want to divide committees into three categories, and then further subdivide the types of meetings each committee may have into sub-categories. Each subcategory has different rules. And then post the recordings of many city council meetings, which would be new (I think).
Mayor Hughson has a few more amendments:
If a councilmember misses more than two consecutive committee meetings, they get booted from that committee
The staff liaison and the committee chair are in charge of screening which agenda items fit with the purpose of the committee, and which ones don’t. Before it just said, “Agenda items must fit the purpose of the committee” and left it there.
(And some other minor ones.)
This would have seemed like minor organizing, except that Alyssa Garza was clearly biting her tongue.
At one point, Alyssa asked Jane Hughson what her conceptualization of a “subject matter expert” is. Jane gives a few examples from the homelessness committee and the animal welfare committee.
That’s all that is said on that. But I’m reminded of Max Baker raising the point that experts on police reform were being excluded from different meetings, because others didn’t think they qualified as experts. There’ve been implications, although never fully explained on camera.
The key moment comes at 1:07, and look, I’ll just quote Alyssa wholesale:
“I just want the record to reflect that I find the entire packet fundamentally problematic. I think it’s restrictive and unnecessary and quite frankly I have expressed my frustrations over this for the past three years, on multiple occasions. These rules are not applied across the board. We got the receipts, okay. My other question is then who is responsible for ensuring that these committee rules – if approved – are applied across the board?
So historically, as they have not been applied across the board, where is there some sort of road map or guide that shows how to proceed from there? Because historically this is just business as usual. We just ignore the blatant not-following of the committee rules.”
The other committee members respond to the easy parts of what she’s saying: Who will enforce the rules? The committee chair will enforce the rules! How will items get on future agendas? There’s a rule that the last agenda item now to plan future agendas! Everyone ignores the scathing accusation of structural bias behind the scenes.
There’s a complete mismatch in tone: Alyssa is clearly seething. Everyone else is mild and upbeat, like we’re choosing which typefont to use on next year’s internal memos.
I don’t know the backstory, but here’s my guess: Rules can entrench the status quo. People on the inside know the rules well, and they know how to play them. Rules are enforced strictly on outsiders, but loosely on insiders, and that’s how you perpetuate a status quo. My guess is that Alyssa has come to committee meetings ready to roll up her sleeves and get to work, and she’s finding herself cut off by committee rules enforced very strictly, while other councilmembers are given grace and flexibility to work around committee rules in order to get their work done.
It sounds like she raised this point to Jane Hughson, and Jane has responded by saying, “Let’s make the rules more detailed and prescriptive,” and Alyssa is saying, “You’re missing the point. You’re not responding to the underlying problem.”
I actually do think that Jane is acting in good faith, in this moment. She believes that strict, well-written rules enable people from different backgrounds to come together and solve problems. So that’s the philosophy that she’s applying to this problem: let’s tighten up the rules.
But she’s not acknowledging Alyssa’s basic point: that rules have been applied capriciously in the past (and possibly by Jane herself). So I’m skeptical that anything will change in the future.
Last Monday, the 13th, they met and appointed people to various commissions. The most visible of these is Planning & Zoning.
There were four positions to fill:
Matthew Mendoza’s vacant spot has two years left on it, since he moved to council
Zach Sambrano is cycling off, and it sounds like he didn’t re-apply. (As far as I can tell – they didn’t put a packet online.)
Griffin Spell is reapplying for another three year term
Amy Meeks is also reapplying for another three years
Both Griffin Spell and Amy Meeks were easily reappointed. (In general, I’m highly reluctant to criticize individual P&Z members on this blog, since they are citizen volunteers who are still mostly-private, as opposed to council members who have stood for public election. So I’m not passing judgement on Griffin and Amy one way or the other. I appreciate their service!)
So there are two other spots to fill. Total, P&Z has nine people. Including Griffin and Amy, the seven filled spots are not very representative of San Marcos:
Six of the seven are white
Five of the seven are male
I’d guess five of the seven are probably over 50 years old.
The two remaining spots are filled by Michele Burleson and Mark Rockeymoore, which helps balance out the whiteness (although the Hispanic community is still underrepresented). I’m not familiar with Michele, but they gave a long list of community activism and participation. Markeymoore is familiar to me, though! Hi Mark, congratulations on your appointment. You’re a great pick.
Alyssa Garza is concerned with the process, and how we keep perpetuating a mostly older/white/male pool of applicants for committees. She’s bringing something forward next month to look at possible reforms.
…
2/21/23 Workshop: Bike lanes on Craddock. The trial period is over, so how do we like them?
Fears of traffic snarls turned out to be overblown. To his credit, Mark Gleason mentions his own opposition, and how his fears have not come to pass.
The biggest effect is traffic-calming: cars have slowed down. You can’t swerve around someone who is going the speed limit when there’s only one lane. There still isn’t much bike traffic out there. Arguably, that’s because the lanes don’t connect to other lanes that would help you get places.
Craddock is a weird road. It connects two major roads – RR12 and Old 12 – but not in a particularly useful way. Usually either Old 12 or Hopkins is going to be a more direct route, except for a few residential areas specifically along Craddock. It probably didn’t need to be made that big in the first place. (Which is to say: there’s probably not ever going to be a ton of bikers on it. But that’s okay.)
Bike lanes are also coming to Sessom Drive – painted, not with a physical barrier, and it will be one lane in each direction. I think the long term plan is for proper, separated bike lanes. But in the meantime, they are going to just paint on bike lanes, which help slow cars down, because the lanes are narrower. This is called “traffic-calming.”
It seems harrowing to bike down Sessom, period, unless there’s an actual physical barrier separating you from the cars. Drivers, please please please look out for bikers. We are all so fragile.
Welcome to last Tuesday. The big story of the night is that Meet and Confer is repealed!
Hours 0:00 – 1:50: The whole complicated story of the Mano Amiga petition, and how council ended up rescinding the Meet-and-confer agreement with SMPOA
Hours 3:22 – 4:16: In which we have a CUP, and a tiny bit on the SMART Terminal and committee appointments. And some speculation about the Top Secret Executive Committee session.
This blog is not intended to be the cheerleader section for Alyssa Garza. But the fact is that we’ve got one progressive council member, and she’s generally right. I’m just stating the facts, ma’am.
Most people were there to talk about the repeal of Meet & Confer, and the implementation of the Hartmann reforms. We’ll get to that shortly. A few people were there to talk against the SMART Terminal, or about the sprinkler systems in the new fire codes.
Items 23 and 25: Repeal of Meet & Confer
First item of the day!
Background
How did we get here? Most unions are legally hamstrung in Texas, but cops and fire fighters unions are privileged. They’re allowed to bargain collectively. The San Marcos PD union is SMPOA.
Every year, SMPOA negotiates a contract with the city, through a process called Meet and Confer. They’ve done this since 2009. So each year, they build on last year’s contract, and then they add a little. Each side gives a little and each side gets a little. How nice for cops.
In theory, the city is bargaining on behalf of the people San Marcos. Last summer, Mano Amiga put forth a list of reforms. The city ignored the reforms and passed a meet-and-confer contract without them.
So Mano Amiga vowed to repeal the meet-and-confer agreement. They rounded up 1300 signatures and submitted a petition to repeal the meet-and-confer agreement. That petition is the issue of the night.
So what are the proposed reforms? Here’s their graphic:
They are all fairly reasonable. (Honestly, if you want to understand the Hartman Reforms, go listen to minutes 8:00-25:00 of this video. It’s the citizen comment period of the January 17th City Council workshop, and members of Mano Amiga show up and explain each reform. I found it super helpful.)
The Hartman Reforms are not actually on the table tonight. It’s only about whether or not to repeal the current Meet-and-Confer agreement.
Council has two options:
Undo the contract and return to negotiations, or
Send it to the voters.
Right off the bat, Mark Gleason moved to deny, and Matthew Mendoza seconds it. Not a good start.
Next, the Director of San Marcos HR gives a presentation: Basically, if the entire Meet-and-confer agreement was burned to the ground, the default agreement is called the Civil Service agreement. The Civil Service agreement is very weak and lacks a lot of good parts to our current agreement. We’d be very sad to burn it all down, because we’d lose 14 years worth of negotiations. But that’s the choice before council tonight: keep the current agreement, or burn it all down and feel really sad about it.
This is so dumb that I found it confusing at first. Why are we talking about burning anything down? Mano Amiga doesn’t care about burning down the past 14 years of negotiations. They just want to add in five extra conditions, on top of the past 14 years.
But the HR director was fixated on the idea that repealing Meet-and-Confer meant that the past 14 years of foundational agreements will instantly be tossed in the trash. “These poor Mano Amiga shmucks don’t realize they’re playing with fire! Once you realize what’s at stake, you surely won’t throw away the entire negotiation!”
For example, this was the slide used for most of the presentation:
Over and over again, different staff members say things like, “All of the accountability structures in the current agreement that you all really like, will go away if you repeal” and “Without meet-and-confer, we won’t be able to hire retired cops on a part time basis for Blue Santa anymore.”
Saul Gonzalez, Matt Mendoza, and Jude Prather all ask questions comparing the current 2022 Meet-and-Confer agreement with the burn-it-all-down Civil Service agreement.
Saul asks if the chief has more power to discipline cops under the 2022 agreement than under the Civil Service one?
Answer: Yes! So much better!
Then an interesting thing happened: At 1:23, Saul asked, “Negotiations are supposed to be a win-win for both sides. Let’s say it gets rescinded. There’s things the other side wants and things that we want. It could change a little bit. It’s not guaranteed that it’s all going to go away? It’s going to benefit our interests as well as theirs.”
I think Saul is asking, “Are we allowed to build on the current agreement? If both sides want that, it doesn’t have to go away, right?”
But here’s how it’s answered: “When we meet-and-confer, we use interest-based bargaining, where we all talk about an issue. Both sides come with a list and we work as a team. We get our issues lists from council. Then it’s a give-and-take to come to an agreement.” That’s an answer to an entirely different question. It’s an answer about the normal summer process, not about whether or not we will be forced to burn down 14 years of negotiations if we vote to rescind
Matthew Mendoza asks if a cop can drag out arbitration forever? Answer: No. Both sides have to agree to arbitration.
Jude Prather says, “So there are lots of good things in Meet and Confer?”
The city manager, Stephanie Reyes, steps in. A lot of the good things in Meet and Confer have been there ever since 2009! Therefore if we rescind it, we’d be going back to square one.” ….[ominous music plays]
Finally, Alyssa Garza is the one who untangles the mess. She point blank asks, “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. The fear is that if we rescind, we think SMPOA will erase the whole agreement?” and basically points out that that’s nonsensical. “Why wouldn’t they start from where they are?”
Stephanie Reyes says, “Well, it’s a bargaining process. They’ll expect something in return.”
That’s a very different argument! Sure, if we re-enter negotiations, they’ll ask for something in return. That’s how negotiations work. Nowhere does that imply burn-it-all-down.
Next Chase Stapp speaks up: The reason that the city ignored the Hartman reforms last summer is because Mano Amiga missed a key deadline. The city had already submitted its lists of interests by May 27th. The Hartman reforms didn’t come out until June 10th.
Alyssa speaks pointedly: council regularly does whatever the hell it wants. If we’d wanted to negotiate the Hartman Reforms, we would have negotiated the Hartman reforms. The fact is we ignored them and hoped they’d go away. (She says it far more diplomatically, at 1:37:15 if you want to watch.)
That was pretty much the entire discussion! Even though I knew the outcome already, it still felt like Alyssa was the only person fighting for repeal.
And yet….
The vote: Deny the petition: Mark Gleason, Jane Hughson, Matthew Mendoza Repeal Meet-and-Confer: Alyssa Garza, Saul Gonzalez, Shane Scott, and Jude Prather
I still feel shocked and elated! There was no advance warning in the discussion at all that Saul, Shane, and Jude were listening and open-minded on this topic. Complete surprise to me, at least!
Saul and Jude give brief justifications after the vote:
Saul says he’d rather renegotiate before giving up, and maybe we can come up with a win-win for everyone.
Jude says that under the constitution, citizens have a process to file a grievance against government, and since Mano Amiga used that process, they should get to see due process followed.
After the dust settles, Mark Gleason speaks up again. He just wanted this to go to the voters. He finds it highly ironic that Mano Amiga is being so inconsistent. They wanted Prop A on marijuana decriminalization to go to the voters, but now they want to skip the voters and go straight to renegotiations. So ironic! His contempt for Mano Amiga is palpable.
But let’s take his words at face value for a sec: Mark is being a twat. Mano Amiga is fighting for police and criminal justice reforms. They’re not dedicated to the ballot box per se. If council had decriminalized marijuana, they wouldn’t have wept over the lack of a public vote. If council had voted to send this to a vote, they would have geared up for a fight.
Anyway, big congratulations to Mano Amiga for all their hard work and persistence. Of course, the Hartman Reforms are not actually part of any contract yet. I have no idea how the renegotiations will play out.
….
One last thing: Matthew Mendoza seems to be positioning himself as a yes-man to Mark Gleason, who himself is a yes-man to Jane Hughson.
Confidential to Matthew (if I may call you Matthew): you’ve picked the Dwight Shrute of the bunch to emulate. Maybe back away slowly and reconsider someone a little less authoritarian and preachy?
Next we have a whole bunch of zoning and land use items.
Items 12-13: Trace Development (Scroll down here for quick explainer on Trace.)
There’s a little rectangular patch of 5 acres which is surrounded on three sides by Trace. You can see it down at the bottom:
The Trace developers didn’t own it when they started Trace, but now they do. They can’t formally absorb it into Trace, but they basically want it to feel like it’s part of Trace.
The developers want to build townhomes. This sounds great – I like townhomes. Still, let’s hit the five questions:
Price Tag to the City: Will it bring in taxes that pay for itself, over the lifespan of the infrastructure and future repair? How much will it cost to extend roads, utilities, on fire and police coverage, on water and wastewater?
Development is already planned for three sides. Infill is very useful.
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?
Townhomes hit an underserved price point
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 anywhere close to the river, not environmentally sensitive, not single-family homes. Great.
Trace itself is sprawl, but that ship has sailed.
Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?
Trace is decently mixed income, yes. There’s an elementary school in the middle of it.
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?
Closer than normal. No shops or restaurants nearby. Rather than have four-plexes and eight-plexes, they segregate the apartments into a giant apartment complex section, which I don’t love. But that’s where we’re at.
One detail irritated me: P&Z recommended that council nix 3 story apartments in this small patch, because it is adjacent to future single family houses.
The houses aren’t built yet! No one’s beautiful view is getting thwarted. There is nothing intrinsically offensive about apartments! But city council agrees and passes a restriction.
It doesn’t really matter – the developer is going to build townhomes, and I think townhomes are generally a good, dense-ish product. I just get irritated at displays of contempt towards apartment-dwellers.
The whole thing passes unanimously.
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Items 14-15: Ringtail Ridge
Ringtail Ridge is a tiny little park off Old 12, outlined in yellow below:
It’s hidden and hard to get to, but very pretty!
Country Estates is the neighborhood next to it, outlined in green. It’s just outside the city limits. A bunch of libertarians live there.
This red part is owned by the city:
It was acquired in 2017/2018. Since it’s owned by the city, the city decided to annex it. This doesn’t really affect anything, but it’s tidier this way.
The plan is to zone it CD-1, which means keeping it as undeveloped as possible. The whole point is that it was acquired for conservation purposes, so they want to keep it natural.
There were a number of speakers from Country Estates on this item at P&Z, on January 10th, and one more at City Council this past Tuesday (who was very annoyed that we were three hours deep in the meeting by the time we got to this item.)
The speakers wanted their natural countryside preserved, but they’re also libertarians, so they were very skeptical about whether or not government can be trusted to help. Sorry, dude-ertarians, the free market is not going to preserve your beautiful nature! But local government to the rescue – the land will now be kept undeveloped, and the longterm goal is to make it available for trails and such.
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Item 17-18: Tiny houses! What fun.
This is out on Post Road:
There’s going to be a small portion of town homes (6 acres) and then a larger portion of tiny homes (24 acres).
Tiny homes seem delightful, because who doesn’t love a dollhouse? But they only work for a very small portion of people:
you can’t really live with a kid in one.
You have to figure out a plan for all those household items that you need monthly or a few times a year. Either you need disposable income to replace things all the time, or you really need to commit to a spartan existence. Which is tricky, because you’re stuck in the US, which is not set up that way.
However: if you are too prickly to share a wall with someone else and you are a serious minimalist, then it’s perfect. Go live your dreams, Freebird.
One last thing: This property is on the SMCISD side of the boundary between Hays CISD and SMCISD. This is something that Council never talks about, but it ends up affecting San Marcos schools a lot.
SMCISD needs more kids, basically. Tiny houses are going to be for kid-free adults. So it’s a bit of a bummer that this is in SMCISD, whereas all of the families right over in Blanco Vista go to Hays CISD.
(It’s because of the state funding formula. Because of the university, we look like a wealthier district than we are, and so we’re always on the brink of having to send money back to the state. But we’re actually a Title 1 district, because our students are largely poor. We need more families to keep the state of Texas from sabotaging us.)
….
Item 19: Blanco Riverwalk
These guys have come up before, most recently in June 2021, when they were swatted down for proposing an apartment complex in a flood zone.
This time they are proposing… an apartment complex in a flood zone. It went about as well as it did last time. (Mumble mumble definition of insanity.)
It’s actually very close to the tiny houses, but you can see that it’s like two inches from the Blanco River.
P&Z denied the request on January 10th, so it would require 6 votes from Council to overturn the outcome. Council denied it unanimously.
Back in December, they applied to P&Z for a renewal of their alcohol permit.
At the same meeting, Industry was up for a renewal of their alcohol permit, too.
Industry, of course, is right next to the Dunbar neighborhood. A lot of people are very cranky about the noise coming from Industry. In response, P&Z said “No live music after 10 pm.”
Then Sean Patrick’s came up. There haven’t been any noise violations against Sean Patrick’s. But P&Z made an issue out of it, kinda out of nowhere. They changed Sean Patrick’s hours of live music from midnight to 10 pm.
This seemed way off-base to me. Sean Patrick’s is not near houses the way Industry is near houses:
P&Z wanted to be consistent, which is understandable. But the whole point of P&Z is to look at individual circumstances and make a judgement call. You do want consistency when it comes to values and ideology! Just not necessarily when it comes to outcomes.
So Sean Patrick’s appealed P&Z’s decision, and Council agreed. The bar gets its live outdoor music back, after all. At least until midnight.
…
Item 6: The SMART Terminal got revisited for about two seconds.
Alyssa brought the item up for discussion. She is a “no” on the SMART Terminal. But they’ve gotten a lot of complaints and questions over email. So she asks if the other council members – the ones who want the SMART Terminal – could respond to these citizen questions and complaints.
Translation: We all know this is going to pass, and we all know people are furious. Why don’t you all go on record addressing the environmental concerns and all the rest of it?
Jane Hughson said, “Why don’t we update a FAQ about the project? We can make it available to the public online!”
Translation: Or how about we don’t? Staff can script some soothing language about “dialogue” and “different stake-holders” and this will all go away.
And lo, that’s how it’ll go.
…
Item 24: Council appointments to all the various committees
This got postponed. Womp-womp.
It really is understandable. It was getting late, and Council has been there since 3 pm. It takes like an hour to go through all the committees. It’s also kind of a bummer, since many of the nominees have been watching for four hours, waiting for this.
Alyssa speaks up: she crunched the numbers on the applicants, and they’re overwhelmingly old and white. She brought this up last year as well. When are we going to take this seriously?
Jane defends city staff and how they worked hard to publicize the committee process.
That’s not really relevant – staff does work really hard! No one is criticizing staff! But what we’re doing isn’t working.
Jane says that she does think it would be better to push the process out a month and give more people time to apply.
That can’t hurt, but it also won’t solve the problem.
Alyssa says that only part of the problem is the publicity – the process also has to be demystified. It’s intimidating to sign up for a board or commission, especially if you consider yourself to be an outsider to the process.
Jane says it’s much better than it was five years ago. Also true, but not sufficient.
My opinion: it won’t change until we overhaul community outreach. We have to have relationships with the key individuals who work at churches, barber shops, and bars and restaurants that function as community spaces. And I specifically mean venues that cater to underrepresented groups in town: Hispanic communities east of I-35.
There is just no shortcut to building relationships. It’s time-consuming. It goes faster if your staff is also a part of the underrepresented communities, but that’s kind of a chicken-and-egg problem.
…
Items 25-26: Top Secret Executive Session
Obviously I don’t know what happens in the room where it happens, but the topics are very interesting:
1. Albian Leyva vs Ryan Harman and Jacinto Melendrez. This is the excessive force/tasing incident. This incident ispretty extreme. At the January 17th work session, one of the Mano Amiga representatives read outloud from the internal police investigation. (You can go listen here, starting at about 8 minutes in.)
It’s pretty awful. Melendrez is the second officer who also tazes Leyva.
This is from the Mano Amiga FB page:
2. Eric Cervini, et al. vs. Chase Stapp, Brandon Winkenwerder, Matthew Danzer, and City of San Marcos
I’m guessing this is the Biden Bus incident? It’s been two years. I am very interested in there being some consequences for this.
3. Repealing Meet and Confer. Obviously we know how this turned out. (This part of Executive Session was held early on.)
Plus some miscellaneous conservation of land items, and personnel things.
The San Marxist 