This week’s meeting is mostly the kind of small scale local dithering that I love best. Parking fee structures and new art installations, all in one week? Count me in!
Hours 0:00-1:39: A little on SMART/Axis Terminal, a little on CDBG money, and a lot on parking.
Hours 1:39-3:02: A little ARP, a little art, and a lot more on parking.
The summer months are quiet: there’s only one meeting in June and one meeting in July. July will have some hot-button items, though – namely, the SMART/Axis Terminal.
The July meeting is on the 3rd, which is a Monday. The 4th of July is a Tuesday. It’s a very weird day to have a big meeting with consequential decisions, but there you have it.
Citizen Comment: We’re going to focus on the SMART/Axis Terminal here. (It’s not otherwise on the agenda today.) There’s a group, Citizens Against SMART/Axis, which is holding a public meeting at the library on Sunday (6/11) at 3 pm. Here’s their flyer, off Facebook:
Ie, if you’re reading this on Sunday morning and you’re free this afternoon, why not head on over? They seem like nice people.
The big day will be July 3rd, when City Council votes on the Heavy Industrial zoning. If it passes, then we’ve given a massive blank check to a jerk who will then decide which industries come to San Marcos. Right now, there’s a lot of money in batteries and tech fabrication plants and things involving toxic rare metals and lots of water, and Texas has very lax environmental restrictions. That’s the kind of scenario that I’m particularly worried about. (I also think the sheer scale of it is bonkers.)
And if the zoning doesn’t pass? My guess is that there’s a contingency clause in the development agreement – if the zoning doesn’t pass, it invalidates the contract. Then the company could either develop under county regulations, or walk away for a year, or come up with a different proposal.
Have you all seen the yard signs around town?
I think they’re pretty effective. Partly because they put council members on notice that the community is willing to launch a public campaign: vote down Heavy Industrial, or the next public campaign may be against you.
Bottom line: Council shat the bed. It’s really astonishing how they passed this development agreement under so much quiet and stealth. It’s 2000 acres, for god’s sake!
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Item 6: Community Development Block Grant money. (CDBG) The city gets federal money to spend on nonprofits. This year, we’ve got about $700K to distribute.
Here’s the criteria that staff uses to assess projects:
And here are staff recommendations:
Saul Gonzales asked about Habitat getting $0 for Housing Counseling. The answer: Habitat is really good at lots of things, but counseling ain’t one of them. Plus they’ve still got leftover money from last year. In general, we’re still partnering with Habitat, but just not for counseling.
As for the Housing Rehab program getting $0: somehow this is good for the city, for reasons I didn’t quite follow.
Alyssa Garza mentions that she hears a lack of trust in the nonprofit community about how these funds get allocated, and that increased transparency would help. I don’t have the expertise to read between the lines! But transparency generally sounds good to me.
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Item 7: P&Z is going to gain some new powers: the powers of AIRPORTATION. Specifically, some height hazard zone regulations and compatible land use zonings. A lot of this is regulated by the FAA, but P&Z will get to weigh in on the remaining bits.
Whenever the airport comes up, everyone speaks cryptically about scandals that I’m uninformed on. We saw a snippet of it here. Even LMC weighed in on some convoluted past event from ten years ago. Frankly, I’m pretty sure I’m not capable of fully understanding whatever the hell went down.
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Item 8: The city has a lot of 2 hour parking downtown. Now some of those sites will be relaxed, to 4 hour parking. Here’s where it will go:
Take your time! Shop around! You’ve got four hours now.
Council members asked some worried, nonsensical questions, as though we were tightening up restrictions instead of loosening them. Everything will be fine.
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Item 9: We’re pretty terrible at paying parking tickets:
So the city is going to start putting boots on cars, if you have 3 or more unpaid tickets.
The point is to force the worst offenders to get in touch with the city and come up with a payment plan (or maybe schedule some volunteer hours instead – more on this later.) The plan is not to turn the screws on someone who is teetering on the edge of economic catastrophe. Of course, it always just depends if the program is implemented in good faith or not.
The top left and top right roads are Craddock and Old 12, where The Retreat is. This is the Crockett elementary neighborhood. The speed limit used to be 30 mph.
Now it will have a new, lower speed limit of 25 mph in on these streets:
Good for them! Drive like a grandma, everyone. Your car is lethal.
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This is Uhland Road:
It runs from Post Road to I35, and then jumps north, and runs east to Harris Hill road.
Here we’re only looking at the part west of 35. These lucky folks are getting some speed cushions here:
Good job! Drive safe.
Jane Hughson wraps up by saying, “All right! We do listen to our residents! …um …when we’re talking about speed cushions. And changing however many miles per hour you can go in a neighborhood.”
That is hilariously self-aware of Jane Hughson. And it’s true: sometimes we listen to our residents. Other times, we don’t.
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Item 13: $250K more to GSMP to fund a small business program. Seems fine, as far as capitalism goes. The only reason I noticed it was because Matthew Mendoza made a special point of praising this accomplishment.
Item 14: “ARP” stands for “American Rescue Plan”, ie Covid money. We’re down to our last $3 million. We started off with $18 million. This last bit has to be spent by the end of 2024, or we have to give the remainder back.
Here’s what staff is proposing, based on instructions from council:
The controversial part is spending $1.3 million on Uhland Road quiet district. Here’s what I think that means: Every time the trains cross the road, they blast their horns. If you want that to stop, you have to construct automatic traffic arms, and turn-around barriers, and some other safety things. We’ve done this in other neighborhoods.
Staff is trying to get the quiet zone funded through other grant money, but their most recent grant application was denied, so they stuck it here. It’s not really connected with Covid, though.
Alyssa Garza makes the case that ARP funds should be used to address direct needs. In other words, we shouldn’t be spending $2 million on the two parks and a quiet district. Direct needs are things like financial emergencies, mental health care, and violence prevention programs. Alyssa focuses in on that last one: other cities are using ARP money to pilot communiy violence prevention programs. Why not us?
She’s making a clever case: all of you who are obsessed with the police and crime rates? Let’s address violence in a preventative way. Wouldn’t that be better than just being reactive?
Objectively, Alyssa is right. (Let’s pretend I’m objective.) Support for police departments is generally shrouded in language about public safety and rising rates of violent crime. But police departments respond to violence. They’re reactive. That’s different from proactively working to reduce the causes of violent crime. If you claim you care about public safety, then you should support community violence prevention programs.
So Alyssa asks point blank: Can we re-arrange this money to pilot a violence prevention program?
And…. <crickets> … the silence dragged out, and no one joined in.
The problem is that the rest of council has a semi-acceptable excuse: there really is a fixed deadline to spend this money. Staff’s recommendations are all shovel-ready programs. So the rest of council doesn’t really have to entertain what Alyssa is saying, because momentum is on their side.
Should we be furious at them? It depends on what happens next.
Possibility 1:
Alyssa brings up community violence prevention programs at the next CJR subcommittee meeting.
Mayor Hughson and Shane Scott respond enthusiastically!
They work up a pilot program for Council.
Council enthusiastically finds some funding and moves forward with it!
In this case, everyone is forgiven for squirming uncomfortably and avoiding Alyssa’s proposal to use ARP funding right now.
Possibility 2:
Alyssa brings up community violence prevention programs at the next CJR subcommittee meeting.
It gets bogged down in the slow wheels of San Marcos city government.
Everyone says nice things, but also sandbags the process.
It stays in the background as a nice idea, and never quite makes it into implementation for the next several years.
In this case, City Council is making it clear: “Public safety” is a code word for “We love the police!” and they are going to prioritize SMPD over actual public safety whenever given the choice. Vote the jerks out of office!
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Item 18: Here’s Trace development, way down south, past the outlet malls:
That’s where Rodriguez Elementary is.
Some sort of development wants to go in here:
The Trace developers are definitely worried about something industrial right going in right behind people’s backyards. Council decides to form a subcommittee: Jane Hughson, Matthew Mendoza, and Jude Prather are going to take care of business for ya.
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Item 19: File this one under “victories are anticlimactic”: eight months after Max Baker loses his city council seat, they officially change the rules to allow subject matter experts to attend subcommittee meetings. (Discussed here previously.)
This was a flashpoint with Max – he’d bring up new issues, and everyone would cock their heads like a confused golden retriever, and then ignore what he was saying. Max wanted to bring in experts to explain complex issues, so that others would take him seriously, but he couldn’t even get experts in, because no one took him seriously. (Partly, this was because Max generally had 50 issues to solve simultaneously, and everyone kind of just got woozy at the overload. But partly, they just didn’t want to consider new ideas, like the environmental impact of the SMART/Axis Terminal.)
But this can also be abused, as noted by Markeymoore and Forrest Fulkerson in the comments here. If you have councilmembers who are shmoozy with a developer, and they invite the developer to the subcommittee meeting, you may essentially have a developer writing their own agreement with the city.
There’s also a little path to a bridge over the river, which leads to some trails. And there are some art installations, right where you’d head from the parking lot towards the river.
More art is coming!
I am not sure where it will go, but I’m guessing with the other art installations. (Not at the falls, despite that picture.)
It’s big:
This is the winner of a nationwide call for artist submissions, and then an open house forum, and finally the arts commission picked this one.
I didn’t find the price tag anywhere, but I generally think that arts enrich a community, and it’s worth spending money to compensate artists fairly.
Item 20: Finally! I promised you more parking news, and you stayed for it. Here’s your big pay-off:
Things in the works:
Parking Benefit Districts: this is not paid parking, but it’s a necessary pre-condition.
Parking Mobility Funds: if we had paid parking, we’d need a bucket to put the revenue in.
COLAs for fees
Currently, our parking tickets cost $20. They’ve been at that rate since 1974. That’s almost 50 years! Congratulations, $20 parking tickets, you’ve had a great run.
(Just for funsies, I went to an inflation calculator: a $20 ticket in 1974 is equivalent to a $126 ticket in 2023. What a bargain we’re getting!)
What’s proposed is having fees drift upward automatically with inflation. In other words, every three years or so, you’d just set a new, higher fee rate to match inflation. (COLA stands for Cost of Living Adjustments.)
Jane Hughson cracked me up again: “This is a good idea. We should just get it automated, so we don’t have to update it every… fifty years.”
Here’s why I like this so much: First, Jane says that we do this already with other fees that the city charges. Second, we do this with certain city employees. In other words, we are already well-versed in COLAs!
Which brings me to my hobbyhorse: Automatic COLAs for minimum wage. San Marcos does have a minimum wage of $15/hour for any business receiving tax breaks from the city. LET’S PEG IT TO INFLATION! If we can do this for parking tickets and city employees, surely we understand why this is so important for our neighbors earning minimum wage.
But wait! There’s more!
An amnesty/incentive program. Suppose you rack up a huge amount in fines. Maybe you even got booted. This is the program that will make it easier for you to settle up with the city – like signing up for volunteer hours instead of owing money, for example.
Everyone loves this idea. I love this idea, too.
5. Dynamic pricing. In other words, a little sign that says “Violators will be fined $20-$60” or whatever. So if you park illegally in off-peak hours, it’s not so bad. If you park illegally in the middle of Sights & Sounds, you get charged more.
(They claimed this was about deterrence, but surely it’s about making more money. It’s hard to see how dynamic pricing would make a dent in the decision-making of the shmuck clogging up Sights & Sounds, in the middle of four different choir performances.)
All of these will be fine-tuned before Council officially votes on them. But it’s clear: our widdle San Marcos is gwowing up.
The San Marxist 