Item 20: Sean Patrick’s
You know, the Irish bar downtown:
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 is pretty 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 