P&Z meeting, 3/27/23

Let’s start with some SMART Background

Here’s a quick timeline of events:

• 2017:  original SMART Terminal (880 acres) is proposed Heavy Industrial.  P&Z denies it.
• Brought back in 2018.  It sounds like Council leaned on P&Z, and they approved it. Council also approves it.
• The developer (Katerra?)  backs out.
• 880 acres zoned Heavy Industrial just sits there for three years.

Here’s my rendition of it:

Just sitting there for three years.

Listen: developers bail on projects, or sell them off.   The developer you talk to is not necessarily the one who ends up building on the land.  But once it’s rezoned, you’re stuck with the zoning.  Zoning lasts forever!

So: The current developer comes along in 2022.  This one wants to increase from 880 acres to 2000 acres:

The blue is the same blue from my map above. The green and yellow are new.

But where is that, really? The city maps are always so terrible! Here’s my best guess, from squinting at tiny country roads on different maps:

That’s how big this thing is.

Council met in December and formed a subcommittee. The subcommittee met.  Then Council approved the development agreement in January.

Why wasn’t anyone mad when the development agreement passed?

Some were! People showed up and spoke at citizen council back in January. But way more people are angry now. And several said that they hadn’t heard about the SMART Terminal until after it had been approved.

So let’s look this up. Who gets notified, according the city code, for a development agreement? Here’s the relevant bit:

So there you have it:  notifications weren’t sent out. All they had to do was post it on a website somewhere. No alerting the neighbors, and no physical sign out on the property.   That seems…. unhelpful.

ANYWAY.  The Development Agreement passes, and this brings us up-to-date.

The current developer has no plans to use the airport or railway. They plan on renting or selling lots off to companies, who will each do their own individual heavy industrial thing.

The new stuff starts here

The first 880 acres is already zoned Heavy Industrial. The developer is applying now to get the other 1200 acres zoned heavy industrial. As you can see from that same chart:

this DOES trigger a bunch of notifications. So now the community finds out that a gigantic, 2000 acre heavy industrial wasteland is imminent, on HW 80, heading east. 

At the February 14th P&Z meeting, a lot of community members showed up to citizen comment. They were angry and concerned. So P&Z postponed the vote for a month, to give the developer time to meet and build goodwill with the community.  

Tuesday, March 27th P&Z meeting

Which brings us to Tuesday, almost two weeks ago. About 20 community members showed up to speak at P&Z, another 7 wrote letters, and there there was an online petition with 600+ people. The in-person comments are really notable – that’s a huge turnout! They were furious and concerned. 

• The cut-and-fill is going to hit their well water
• the river is going to be polluted
• this thing is going to basically eat Reedville and Maxwell and these other little towns.
• We’re underestimating the flooding
• Sure does seem like the city of San Marcos is shitting downstream! No one would want this upstream of them.

The developers had held community outreach, but as weakly and limply as possible. Basically the developers held drop-in meetings, and then answered every question as mushy, gray, non-answers. “We’ll abide by the development agreement.” “We don’t know yet.” “We’ll see what the city says.” That kind of thing.

First, I’d like to point out that P&Z grilled the developer more closely than council ever did (at least on camera). Here’s some nice comments by Jim Garber about the sheer size of this thing – how big is 2000 acres, really?

• 9% of the total area of San Marcos
• 75x larger than the outlet malls
• 10x larger than 6 Flags Fiesta Texas
• 107x bigger than Amazon
• 4x larger than Disneyland
• 4.5x larger than the Texas State Campus

Elsewhere he notes that it’s 3 miles long.  That’s really long. 

Next: this thing is a money pit. Fire Chief Les Stevens goes into detail on how much it will cost to supply fire coverage alone, when it’s fully built out: it’ll take two fire stations to cover this land.  The developer is setting aside two 3-acre tracts for future fire stations.

So how much will it cost to build and staff these fire stations? According to Chief Stevens:

• $8-13 million to construct each station
• Apparatus: $1 million for a fire engine, need 2 per station.
• Staffing: $2.5 million annually for 12-15 people

So basically, San Marcos is on the hook for $25 million dollars worth of fire stations, and then an extra $5 million/year to staff these.   And that’s not including SMPD coverage and any utilities or anything else that we agree to. That’s laughable. The entire General Fund budget is about $90 million/year.

(We’re already massively behind in spending for Fire and EMS. Last year, Chief Stevens asked for 32 additional positions. We added 7 of them. And we have several future fire stations already in the queue to be built.)

The plan is to split the tax revenue with Martindale.  And this is not accounting for police coverage and any other services they’re getting from us. It feels like this SMART Terminal is a money pit.

So how is it that P&Z approved this Heavy Industrial?

The San Marcos River Foundation (SMRF) wrote a letter to the P&Z members about this. Now, letters to P&Z are generally included in the packet. You can find seven letters to P&Z on this topic here. (Go to “Written Comments”)  But the letter from Virginia Parker (the head of SMRF) is not there.

So I can’t read the letter, and I generally have a lot of respect for SMRF.  But how this letter got used was disastrous.

Several P&Z members said they were voting “yes” for Heavy Industrial, because of the SMRF letter. The argument goes that if we don’t approve Heavy Industrial, then the SMART Terminal will be built anyway. But it will be built under county codes instead of city codes, which are much more lax. So if you want to protect the river, you must avoid this scenario at all costs.

In other words, “Nice river you got there. Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

It’s true that SMRF got some river protections in the Development Agreement.  But it feels like a compromise level of river protection. Definitely better than nothing, yes.

But is that the choice before us? This development agreement, or the river will be polluted all to hell? If this is the threat on the table, I think the developer is bluffing, in order to threaten us into giving him whatever he wants. My guess is that the SMART Terminal would not develop under the county regulations, because insurance and utilities would be astronomical. I don’t think they’d be able to find tenants. I don’t think these are the only two options.

Jim Garber asks Chief Stevens about this: How much would fire insurance be for the developer, if they weren’t annexed into the city?

Here’s Chief Stevens’ answer:

• Insurance rates are based on ratings. Most of San Marcos is rated a 2. (1 is the best).  The land out there is rated a 9 or 10.   (10 is the worst.)
• Every time you go up one number, the insurance costs go up. If you go from a 2 to a 3, commercial rates will go up about 10%.

So their fire rates alone will go up by 1.1⁸, which is a little over double. I haven’t looked into where they’re getting water, sewer, and electricity from, but I bet at least some of that is from us, too.

Dude. You’ve already got 880 acres

Garber makes one last key point:  Why not develop the 880 acres first, and then come back for the other 1200 acres?  Have you looked for tenants for the current parcel?

The developer gives one of those mushy answers: It needs to be one cohesive project with all the same zoning.

Garber says: “One cohesive property? I thought the whole point was that you’re going to have a bunch of little tenants and projects. Can’t some of them move in the existing 880 acres?”

Developer: “They could! We just haven’t marketed that property yet because we’re still in process of zoning everything together.”

That is smoke and mirrors.  That is a worthless non-answer. That is stone-walling.

So P&Z voted to approve Heavy Industrial.

I think this was a mistake. Those who voted “yes” seemed to just trust and believe that the developer was operating in good faith. That the developer would be open to reconsidering the development agreement. I have not seen any evidence that this developer is willing to do anything they aren’t being forced to do.

Bottom line

The developer needs to establish themselves as good neighbors. Find tenants for the original 880 acres, and then come back for rezoning the rest, once the community trusts them a little bit.

Right now we’re giving the developer an unbelievably massive blank check.   We need to verify that they are:

• Actually good stewards of the environment
• How the property handles the first few really big storms
• What are their labor practices like
• How environmentally disastrous are the clients that end up building there

I don’t understand the rush to give the developer the entire massive 2000 acres. They’re not planning on building one cohesive thing there – it’s going to be subdivided among a lot of companies.  So let’s let them prove themselves first. 

Footnote:

The city used to have PDDs, where the city could find out and negotiate all the details of a project before it’s built. But we threw those out in 2018 with the new Land Development Code. This was a mistake, and I assume we did it because developers hated them. This kind of project should be a PDD.