This was a very short meeting! Some weeks are like that. Let’s hop to it.
Hours 0:00 – 1:26: In which we talk about Leah Avenue and Rattler Road. We worry about flooding in Hills of Hays, and the low water level in the river. And some property taxes and public transit.
Some election talk:
Place 3: Alyssa Garza is the incumbent. There’s currently no one running against her. Griffin Spell had filed to run against her, but he withdrew his candidacy.
Vote for Alyssa! She is great, and she’s your only choice! Win-win.
Place 4: Shane Scott is the encumbent. Adam “Atom Von” Arndt is running against him.
Preliminary thoughts: Shane is basically your standard libertarian. He likes businesses, he does not like authority, and he really does not like council discussions that exceed his attention span.
Adam “Atom Von” Arndt is very green. Or at least, he was when he ran against Saul Gonzalez last year. I’m curious to know what he’s done in the past year to grow as a candidate. (If he wants to learn city politics, may I politely recommend this very blog?)
If Atom wants to have a prayer against Shane, he needs to get out there and shake a lot of hands. Shane is very well known at this point, and I don’t think many people have any idea who Atom is. Lots of signs help too, but shaking hands and meeting voters one at a time is how this town still functions.
August 21st is the last day to file to run, so we’ll know by Monday night if there’s any wild cards. But my guess is that this is it.
Citizen Comment: Max Baker was the only speaker. He showed up to comment on several things:
Damage to the river at Sewell park – litter, wild rice.
Working with Chief Standridge: do our cops run unnecessary background checks?
Upcoming elections: will the student center be properly staffed?
All good points!
Item 17: Platinum Drive
First, Leah Ave is one of those streets that you know you’ve been on a million times, but you may be vaguely confused about. That’s because there are two parts to Leah Ave, and they don’t currently connect:
The top half starts behind the hospital, crosses Wonderworld, and ends after Lowe’s and Petsmart and Marshalls.
The other half picks up again by Amazon:
I assume at some point the plan is to connect the two Leahs. But not today!
Today we’re talking about this little street that never got a name:
The solid part is the unnamed street, the dotted part is private. There’s a company, PGM, down that road and no one can find them, because their address is on I-35.
So that little road is now getting christened “Platinum Drive”.
According to the Transportation Master Plan, that road may some day hook up with Rattler Road:
So for now, the fire marshalls did not want to name it Rattler Road, lest there be confusion in an emergency. I guess the folks on Leah Ave can just deal with a disconnected street.
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Item 18: Cut and Fill
This is a development going in next to the Hills of Hays neighborhood:
They want an exemption for cut-and-fill. Cut-and-fill means you’re building on a hill and you need it to be flat. So you want turn it into level pieces. If you have just a few large stair steps, then each riser is taller. If you have more stair steps, then each riser is smaller.
The problem with cut-and-fill is that this affects how water flows. You don’t want to cause someone else to flood. The code places a limit on how big the riser can be. You’re not allowed to cut-and-fill more than eight feet. Here, they want to cut to 22 feet and fill to 18 feet.
The Hills of Hays neighborhood is right next door:
That neighborhood has a lot of drainage and flooding problems with stormwater. This is exactly the type of thing that can get worse if some developer does a bunch of cut-and-fill uphill from you.
Back in May, the cut-and-fill permit came to P&Z. Several residents from Hills of Hays showed up and talked about their constant flooding problems. P&Z voted unanimously to recommend denial to City Council.
Now, there is a big city project to fix the flooding in Hills of Hays, and in fact it got started this summer. So this is what city staff tells council on Tuesday: hey, we met with the residents of Hills of Hays. Construction on their drainage project got started since the P&Z meeting. Things are different now!
No one from Hills of Hays showed up to comment on Tuesday, but Saul Gonzalez asked a good question – Did they think the issue was settled when P&Z voted it down? Staff said that they’d sent out more notices for this hearing, so probably not? (Only the back street of Hills will be in the 400′ notification radius, though. Not the entire neighborhood.)
Here’s my question: the drainage project for Hills of Hays has been planned for years. Did the engineers re-tool the stormwater drainage models to account for this cut-and-fill? How much excess capacity is being built into the new drainage system?
The vote:
Yes: Mayor Hughson, Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Matthew Mendoza
No: Alyssa Garza, Saul Gonzalez
I probably would have voted “no”, because developers can follow the goddamn rules. But I do think that Jane at least was torn.
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(The items go out of order because the Items 17 and 18 were Public Hearings, and so those go first.)
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Item 8: the Interlocal Agreement (ILA) with the university over the river.
The city and the university have an agreement on river management. It’s not new, and they’re just minorly updating it this time around.
The city pays Texas State $276K a year, and the university does things like: – non-native plant removal – planting more Texas Wild Rice – managing recreation and educating river users – removing floating plant mats and any litter that’s part of them.
This isn’t changing much. I just bring this up because the river is incredibly low right now, and it’s upsetting.
Here’s the water level over the past year, compared to the previous 27 years:
The speaker at City Council said it’s the lowest in 25-30 years. This article from June said that the June level was the lowest in 70 years.
It’s all very anxiety-provoking!
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Item 19: Property tax rate for the new year.
Last year, the city tax rate was 60.3 ¢ on every $100 of property value.
The budget isn’t decided yet, but the city sets an upper limit on the tax rate.
There’s a couple possible property tax rates that get discussed:
Last year’s rate: 60.3 ¢ on every $100.
“No New Revenue Rate”: 53.05 ¢ per $100. This is the rate that undoes the effect of inflation. If you lowered the tax rate to 53.05 ¢, then you’d get the same amount of money from the properties that were taxed in both years, even though the value of those properties have gone up.
“Voter approval rate”: 68.87 ¢ per $100: By state law, the is the highest you can go without having to hold a citizen vote on it.
Every penny increase brings in about $800K in tax revenue to the city. So Option 2 is about $6 million lower than Option 1, and Option 3 is about $7 million higher than Option 1.
Here’s an interesting chart from the presentation:
Hence everyone complaining that their property taxes are going up, even when the rate doesn’t change.
Useful things I feel compelled to remind everyone about:
We have no state income tax! Wealthy people benefit the most from this.
Property taxes are somewhat regressive.
Sales taxes are really regressive.
Today’s task is just to set an upper limit on the tax rate. I’m not sure exactly why Texas requires city council to do this, but here we are.
City staff has proposed a budget based on a 60.3 ¢ tax rate, so Council sets 60.3 ¢ as their upper bound. I’m also not sure why they wouldn’t give themselves a little wiggle room on this vote. Why not set your upper bound at 61 ¢, and then approve the lower amount when the budget actually gets approved?
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Item 20: Public transit is a great thing. But only when it works well. When it doesn’t work well, nobody uses it unless they’re in a bind.
What makes public transportation easy to use?
Frequency. If you don’t need to consult a schedule because busses come every 15 minutes, it’s easier to use.
Lots of stops: no one wants to walk very far in this heat.
Range: it has to get you where you’re going, preferably without too many changes
There is federal money available for all this, if you can demonstrate ridership. This is the tricky part – how do you demonstrate demand, if your system is underfunded? It’s a little bit of a catch-22.
ENTER: THE INTERLOCAL AGREEMENT WITH TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY!
A few years ago, Texas State started reporting its ridership numbers to the federal agency that keeps track of these things. Now we’re going to pool our systems. So we get a giant boon because Texas State has high ridership.
This opens up a lot of funding and growth opportunities! This is great! Hooray!
I just want to point out a pattern. Several times in this meeting, this happens:
“Look, here’s a problem!” “Yes, yes! We all agree that this is a problem!”
Then we sit, waiting for someone to make a motion to fix the problem.
No one makes a motion.
Everyone shrugs and moves on. It drives me crazy. You all just acknowledged it was a problem! You got to third base, but then got bored and never got to home plate.
Oh well, moving right along:
Hours 0:00 – 1:29: A bunch of fiddly little items. And my favorite: the curfew is dead! Hours 1:29 – 2:57: In which the Land Development Code is scrutinized. Some important changes are coming. Bonus workshop: There’s some nasty chemicals in the ground near the town square. Read all about our plan to do nothing! We’re doing it responsibly, though.
Several people from the SMART protest community showed up to talk about Item 18, the revision to the San Marcos Development Codes. We’ll get to this.
A few people talked about different good projects for the CBDG money.
Item 10: CBDG money for 2023-24.
This is $712K of federal money from HUD that’s intended to help community programs for low-income folk.
Here’s the requested amounts, and what ends up being awarded:
The “rec” amounts end up being approved by council.
On the Habitat House Counselling program: The federal department, HUD, requires housing counselling in certain situations. Habitat offers an online course and then individual counselling thereafter. A rep from Habitat for Humanity shows up to explain all this. But it wasn’t persuasive, because the cost is wild: Last year, Habitat charged San Marcos $13,000, and only 11 San Marcos households participated.
HUD offers a free online house counselling course. Sso we’re going with that. (We still work with Habitat on housing construction. Just not counseling.)
Shane Scott asks if we can boost CASA to $60K. The problem is that HUD has categories for this money, so you can’t dip into any project you want to move funds around. They decide that they’ll just boost CASA from the other money they dole out – the city money (HSAB) or the last bit of Covid money (ARP).
Item 11: Running wastewater from Whisper Tract down through Blanco Shoals natural area, to connect with the city wastewater system.
I’m only including this item because it annoyed me. LMC spoke during the public hearing, and asked if this involved tree removal. Would the city hold itself to the standards that it holds its citizens?
Mark Gleason follows up: Will this require tree removal? Answer: It could! Mark: Is there a remediation procedure? Answer: nope! Jane Hughson: Can we add a remediation procedure in? Answer: It’s not in the development agreement with Whisper. [Translation: you can’t make the developer pay for tree remediation.]
Ok, fine, but we can certainly pay for tree remediation. But it just gets dropped, exasperatingly.
This is the Council Dance: – Here, we identified a problem. – Let’s all sit uncomfortably for a sec – Rather than fix it, just pat it on the head and go on our merry way.
Also: Add in tree remediation to your goddamn development agreements, Council!
Item 12: Issuing $3.7 million dollars in bond debt. I didn’t really follow the details, but our AA bond rating was affirmed by Standard & Poors, which was presented as a thing we should feel good about.
Item 14: CURFEWS ARE BACK. This is delicious.
If you’ll remember, there was a three part giant shitstorm over renewing the curfew, last year. Mark Gleason decried the roving gangs of minors in his neighborhood. Mano Amiga turned out a large number of people speaking out against it. I myself made the case that curfews are dumb and wrong.
The final vote on curfews, back on 12/14/22:
So it passed. (I miss the clickers.) In theory, the Criminal Justice Reform committee was going to study the issue and bring it back.
However, the good hypocrites at the state level, in their quest to micromanage cities, felt differently!
H.B. 1819 seeks to ensure that all young Texans have opportunities to succeed without the burden of a criminal record early in life by eliminating the authority of political subdivisions to adopt or enforce juvenile curfews.
It’s really an oddly specific thing for the State Legislature to care about. Based on this flyer, it was supported by a real mix of groups: a conservative think tank, homeschoolers, youth services and racial and social justice organizations.
The common thread seems to be anti-authoritarianism. Works for me.
Upshot: in order to comply with the new state law, the curfew has now been repealed. Hooray!
Item 15: Ending the contractor test requirement to pull a permit. This came up before as a discussion item, and now it’s happening. This is a good thing. Anyone can pull a building permit now.
Firefighters also get to unionize and collectively bargain for their contracts. The firefighter’s union is SMPFFA. Since firefighters aren’t known for systematically stopping, harassing, and abusing people of color, SMPFFA gets a lot less attention than the police.
The state just passed a bunch of laws, like repealing all curfews. What else do we need to fix to be legal?
Plats: A plat is the drawing that shows things like roads, bus stops, parks, parking lots, and things like that. Everything but the details of the actual building.
Right now plats get approved by P&Z. But P&Z is legally not allowed to make a judgement call. They’re only allowed to consider if the plat meets the conditions in the land development code.
In the future, plats won’t go to P&Z anymore. City staff will approve them. We’re told this is because the state legislature tightened the shot clock, so we have less time to approve applications. We need to streamline processes to comply. They will publish the plats on a website
Okay: this is a small thing, but city staff is mildly bullshitting their case to City Council here. The shot clock was tightened back in 2019 to 30 days. This most recent bill says it’s okay to skip P&Z approval. So P&Z approval used to be required by the state, but now we’re allowed to let staff approve plats.
What else?
More appeals procedures added in to land at City Council, and we modified the timeline
Private schools must be zoned just like public schools.
City staff is misleading us a teeny bit here, too. This says “Municipalities will be required to treat charters as they would an independent school district for the purposes of permitting, zoning, etc.” It does not say private schools. Just charter schools. We’re allowed to zone private schools however we want, but don’t pretend that the state is making us do this.
Listen: the city staff work hard and they’re good people. I’m just being persnickety here.
Part 2: A new zoning district, called “Business Park”.
That’s not what we’re talking about. What Jane Hughson means is, “Hey, if you want to put industrial next to residential, it has to be super mild and chill.”
I think she actually means little warehouses, like this:
Either way, it’s going to be capped at 35′ high, and excludes a lot of bad neighbor uses. If you wanted it higher than 35′ or to include warehouse and delivery, you’d have to get a Conditional Use Permit from P&Z.
Part 3: Process improvements
City council keeps getting bit in the butt over Development Agreements. They pass something in the dead of night, and then when everyone finds out the details, they’re furious.
In recent memory:
La Cinema. Council modified the Development Agreement with La Cima to allow for movie studios back in December 2021. There were no notifications sent out and no one noticed. Then it came time to negotiate tax credits, and everyone got super mad that movie studios were allowed over the aquifer. But it was too late.
The SMART Terminal. They doubled the size of the SMART Terminal back in January. But there were no notifications to the public. Afterwards, everyone was furious. I would have to link to every single meeting from the past six months to flesh this out.
Clearly we need to mail out notifications for Development Agreements and for amendments. We’re finally going to start doing this.
How many people should get notified? They’re proposing a 400 foot radius – everyone who lives within 400′ gets mailed a notification. That matches what we do for zoning changes.
Listen: It should not be 400′. It should be proportional to the size of the project. Tiny projects get a tiny notification radius. Giant projects need a larger notification radius.
If you’re looking at the 2000 acre SMART/Logistics park, 400 feet is a tiny sliver around it. If you’re talking about a little 4-plex, 400 feet is plenty.
Note to Council: Since you’re tinkering with Development Agreements, why not also add in tree remediation?
Other changes
Historical Preservation Commission (HPC) can postpone things now.
Timeline for Demolition by Neglect is increased from 30 to 45 days
Park land dedication – this one is a bit weird. Let’s spend a moment here.
Right now, if you want to build anything residential, you have to set aside some land for parks. The equation is 5.7 acres per 1000 people.
The old code says this: “A minimum of 50% of the parkland required under this ordinance shall be dedicated to the City of San Marcos as a neighborhood or regional park under Section 3.10.2.1. The remaining 50% may be owned and managed by one of the entities under Section 3.10.1.6.”. Those entities are the city, a land conservancy or land trust, an HOA, or a public easement.
The new code says: “Appropriate plat notes describing the ownership and maintenance of all proposed parks are provided on the plat.”
In other words, maintenance is expensive and we want to pawn it off onto HOAs. But then the city doesn’t actually own the land. We could just make the developers and HOAs cover the costs, but we still own the land. But that’s not what’s proposed.
Jane Hughson asks: Will the park still be open to the public? Answer: Yes, dedicated parkland is required to be open to the public.
Mark Gleason asks: What can we do if it’s not maintained? Answer: We withhold their final permits until the park looks good. Mark: No, I mean like five years later. What if the bathrooms are all broken and there’s garbage all over the place? What can we do? Answer: [squirming in the uncomfortable silence]
Looking in the code, I see this bit:
That doesn’t quite apply here.
No one offers a motion and the motion passes.
See? This is the Council Dance again: – Here, we identified a problem. – Let’s all sit uncomfortably for a sec – Rather than fix it, just pat it on the head and go on our merry way.
Occupancy restrictions: let’s dish on this.
We have an occupancy ban in San Marcos. No more than two unrelated people can live in the same house. This is an extremely shitty policy that punishes poor people, out of fear that college students will throw wild keggers next door. There is a housing crisis, and people need to be able to move in with each other. (Furthermore, this dumb policy is totally unenforceable, so it only gets trotted out when someone has an axe to grind. It’s the worst!)
Listen: you cannot govern San Marcos solely out of fear of beer cans from college kids. That is a code compliance issue. That is not the basis for good policy.
Somehow it took city staff 15 months to bring it back, so here we are. However, during that 15 months, Max Baker was voted out and Matthew Mendoza was voted in. And Matthew Mendoza is very salty on this issue.
The more he talks, the more conservative Matthew seems. He sees this all the time in his neighborhood: a bunch of unrelated people live together, and it reduces home values for families in his neighborhood, which is how you buld generational wealth. He was calling this New Urbanism and claiming this was a gateway for big apartment complexes. It was kind of unhinged.
Everyone reassured him that there’d been a big conversation. Matthew did not get any traction re-opening the topic. But it was still a weird rant.
Awnings can be now be 7′ clearance instead of 9′ minimum clearance. This is in response to the owner of Chances R Bar downtown, who pointed out that the building literally isn’t tall enough for a 9′ awning.
Mark Gleason is super mad at his neighbor.
Apparently there’s a house in Mark’s neighborhood which is lifted off the ground and is two stories high. It’s got a flat roof, and they made a little patio up there. Mark is livid that they can see into other people’s backyards, but you can’t really legislate that, so instead he is livid that there is a structure up there – “with shingles!” – that allows them to hang out and see into people’s backyards.
Shane Scott says, “Our house in Mexico is like that. It sounds pretty cool.”
This is the Shane I like best, when he needles Mark for being a prig. You can practically see them in the same high school cafeteria, circa 1991: Shane wearing a Metallica t-shirt and black jeans, Mark wearing the same khakis and golf shirts that he wears to city council meetings. Shane leaves his lunch trash behind on the table when he leaves, and Mark urgently flags down the teacher to let them know that it was Shane.
Amanda Hernandez, the planning department director, strongly suspects that this house is probably already violating city code. The top of a house can’t be more than 35′ off the ground. If this is elevated and two stories already, you’ve got to be pretty close. Mezzanine structures count if they’re at least 30% of the area.
Mark makes a motion to measure height from the ground to top of rooftop structures.
Yes: Everyone besides Shane Scott. No: Shane Scott (Jude Prather is absent.)
I prefer to live in a world that facilitates rooftop patios and rejects Mark’s killjoy tendencies. So I’m a “no”, if anyone asks.
So what do you do with a bunch of toxic shit in the ground? There are procedures, it turns out. You need some information:
What contaminants exactly got dumped?
How far underground has it spread? How deep is it, and how far north/east/west/south?
Is it staying put? Or is it moving?
How exactly do you clean up these chemicals?
If you don’t clean up these chemicals, what do they decompose into, and how long does it take for it to decompose?
It turns out we have answers to all these questions!
The chemicals: Tetrachloroethene (PERC) Trichloroethene (TCE) Vinyl Chloride (VC)
Chlorinated solvents are synthetic chlorinated chemicals, I’m told. Bacteria won’t touch them, but they’ll break down on their own over time.
I have no background in chemistry, but if the chemists tell me to stay away from these, I’m going to believe them.
Where are these nasty chemicals currently?
We dug a bunch of different types of wells:
I’ll explain the “MSD” acronym in a bit.
So here’s what you find when you drill down:
The normal soil or whatever on top. Very dense silt and clay. No moisture.
About 22’-23’ down, you get fine sand. It’s got groundwater in it. That’s called silten clay.
Below that, you get Navarro Clay. The Navarro Clay is super thick and water doesn’t pass through it. (The vocabulary word is aquitard, which sounds like an insult but isn’t.)
The Navarro Clay is a shield, and then below is the aquifer water.
So the contaminants – the PERCs, the TCEs, and the VCs – they are all heavier than water, and they sink through all that wet sand and puddle on top of the Navarro Clay. That tells us how deep these things are.
Note: the geologists made it sound like the aquifer was hundreds of feet further below the Navarro Clay, so far away that we should sleep easy at night.
So we are really trusting the aquitardiness of that Navarro Clay.
What about how far north/east/south/west?
The skinny red line is the boundary of the PERC plume:
And here the TCE plume:
And the VC plume:
Is it staying put? Or is it moving?
It is moving incredibly slowly in this direction:
Because it’s resting on the Navarro Clay, and it’s all gunked up in there, it’s moving incredibly slowly. It won’t reach Purgatory Creek for another 89-8900 years. It won’t reach the San Marcos River for another 188-18,800 years.
How exactly would you clean this up?
They didn’t actually answer this. They basically said it would be impossible, because of all the sand in the way, and the gunkiness of the Navarro Clay.
What would it decompose to?
The PERC is the stuff that was dumped by the drycleaners. The PERC breaks down into the TCE, which is also nasty. The TCE breaks down into two dichloroethylenes, also bad. That breaks down into VC, still bad. But then after that you get carbon dioxide, a little chlorine, and water, which is not nasty anymore. This process will happen over the next 50-100 years.
Listen: I am sharing what was presented. I am not a scientist. If you are a scientist, and we are being told an overly optimistic picture, please fill me in.
So what do we do?
So if the PERCs and TCEs and VCs will all break down before they reach anything sensitive, what do we do?
You declare an MSD: Municipal Settings Designation.
Back to this slide, which has the perimeter of the MSD:
This means that within these borders, no one is allowed to drink well water. Everyone has to be on city water.
It also means that within a few years, we can “achieve regulatory clearance”.
Congratulations! You have nasty stuff in the ground, but your regulatory conscience is clear!
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So what happens up top, where people wander around? This was the second half of the presentation.
Again, this is what it looks like:
It’s fine, as long as you don’t dig up that concrete.
We’re proposing a short term plan: the left and right would be city parking, and the middle will be a little public area. Shade, seating, bathrooms, bike and scooter parking. Room for extra booths for the farmer’s market or Art Squared.
Council was nervous about having a stage there, but liked the rest of it. So this will come back around as an agenda item in the future.
The San Marxist 