Item 14: The ever-loving SMART Terminal.
(Background here, here, here, and here.)
The development agreement has been opened back up! Cue angels singing.
First order of business: who is going to do the actual renegotiating with Franklin Mountain?
- Staff?
- A subcommittee of council?
- The entire council?
If you picked 1, then you agree with Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Mark Gleason, and Mayor Hughson.
If you picked 2 or 3, you have the company of Alyssa Garza, Matthew Mendoza, and Saul Gonzalez.
So option 1 wins, and it will go back to staff to renegotiate things.
Alyssa Garza brings up the issue of dialogue: the community has been asking for a back-and-forth conversation. They’re not getting it. Jane Hughson points out that council has heard hours of comments from the community, and she had a three hour conversation with three of the community members. I kinda see where both sides are coming from.
Straight talk: do community members really want dialogue? No, they want the SMART Terminal to be cancelled. But they’ll settle for dialogue because they suspect they’re going to lose the war, the moment they stop talking. If they truly believed that a majority of council was fighting hard for their interests and was willing to cancel the whole SMARTGASBORG, then I bet community members would feel comfortable relinquishing control.
Dialogue without changing the outcome is infuriating. No dialogue, but a responsive government who shuts down the whole SMART boondoggle would be fine. Dialogue is important, but I kinda agree that there’s not a whole lot of team-building to be done here.
Next order of business: which issues should be renegotiated by staff?
The planning director, Amanda Hernandez, gave a quick presentation. They amalgamated the 12 concerns from the community (that I posted here last time), along with an email from Ed Theriot and one from Virgina Parker. In addition, the emails were all included in the packet.
However: you know whose email wasn’t included in the packet? MINE. Since they had specifically invited the community to email any additional suggestions, I sent one in about labor practices, and specifically indexing the minimum wage to inflation.
And….<crickets>. So city staff: I hope you feel the mighty burn of my stink-eye, aimed in your general direction, from the safety of my own living room.
(Jane even asked, “Is that everything that was sent in?” And still they suppressed my wee little marxist voice! For shame.)
Matthew Mendoza proposes that we send all the issues to the negotiating table, and see where it lands. Everybody seems on board with that.
…
Item 14: Coming up in future discussions:
Car boots. Apparently we bought a bunch in the 90s and never used them, in part because we needed a court order to do so.
They’re going to discuss a policy where you can get booted if you have three unpaid parking tickets.
The idea is not to be punitive. In order to get the boot off, all you need to do is get in touch with the city and come up with a payment plan.
Item 17: Eviction Delay: Currently we have a 3 month eviction delay. This is still under the auspices of the Covid Emergency Declaration, which is still in effect.
There’s a couple things going on:
- Some landlords are ignoring the delay and illegally evicting tenants early.
- Some renters are intentionally skipping out on the last three months of rent, knowing they can’t be evicted
- Rents are insanely high in San Marcos, especially with regard to the median income
So there’s bad circumstances all around, plus some bad actors on both sides.
Alyssa is very concerned that we will not be able to properly notify community members that the extension is coming to an end. This is grounded! We’re really terrible about outreach. Or rather, outreach is incredibly hard to do well.
Mayor Hughson puts a call out for media outlets to help spread the word. I GOT YOU, MAYOR HUGHSON! From your lips to my ear! I’m doing it!
There are a lot of details to hammer out, but expect to see it end around July 1st.
The San Marxist 