Morning all! I know you just saw me last week, but we had back-to-back meetings this month, to get it all done before Thanksgiving. We’re talking about the Purgatory Creek drainage project, and building low-income housing, and why it’s slow.
The whole meeting was only 55 minutes long. It’s a Thanksgiving miracle!
Hours 0:00 – 0:55: In which we look at the Purgatory Creek drainage project, and why low-income housing doesn’t get built much. And a fire truck.
Bonus! 3 pm Workshops: The city did a compensation study for city employees. Let’s see how we stack up.
Hello all! Short meeting this week. But still interesting!
Item 5: We are purchasing 6.28 acres on the corner of Hunter and Dixon, here:
This is exactly where Hopkins turns into Hunter, by the way. We’re talking about the field opposite the VFW:
It sometimes has horses in it.
This is part of a giant $60 million dollar project to address Purgatory Creek flooding. (We don’t yet have the $60 million. That part will take a while.)
It’s hard to find a map of Purgatory Creek, because everything online refers to the natural area at Hunter and Wonderworld:
But we’re talking here about the actual creek, which starts at Purgatory Creek Natural Area and flows up towards Belvin, then cuts across Hopkins to Dunbar, and then keeps going toward the river, meeting the river near the Children’s Park:
(This slide wasn’t in the packet, so it’s a low-quality screenshot. Sorry!)
About a decade ago, I had a random conversation with an old-timer, and they told me that Purgatory Creek was re-routed at some point in history – like some hair-brained engineering scheme conceived in a honky-tonk and made real. The idea was that this had caused some of our current flooding problems.
They didn’t provide enough details for me to make sense of the whole thing, so consider this an open invitation: can someone fill me in on how we’ve meddled with Purgatory Creek over the years? I am very curious!
Here’s another view of the whole thing:
(Also low quality! Sorry.) It’s going from Wonderworld over to Dunbar, and then from Dunbar over to the river.
So what is the project? What are they doing?
(More screenshots, sorry.) Basically it’s going to be a giant channel to catch stormwater and take it to the river.
Phase 1 is supposed to start in 2026, going roughly from Dunbar Park to the river:
Phase 2 is still 5-10 years out. (We move slowly.) This part is Phase 2, Dunbar out to Wonderworld:
It’s also supposed to eventually have some trails and nice features for people to use.
…
It occurs to me that if they put paved bike trails alongside it, this would be an incredibly handy bike path for getting around town safely.
Biking directly from the river to Wonderworld, skipping all of downtown and Hopkins? That could be really convenient.
Along these lines, I’ve long thought that we should put bike paths along the railroads – why should bikes be constrained to car-paths when we’ve already got these giant rail lines cutting directly across the city?
Just look at these railroad lines!
Imagine if there was a little side path that allowed you to use the railroad bridges to get across the river. You could take the future Purgatory Creek path from Wonderworld all the way to the river, and then take the railroad-adjacent path across the river, over to Aquarena, and north up to Blanco Vista. You could avoid all the cars on Post Road, Aquarena, and Hopkins!
And then you could bike directly from Aquarena Springs down to Target! After all, the trains go right along I-35, behind Target. If you work at the Outlet Malls, it would take you almost all the way there. If you live on the northeast side of town, you could easily get back and forth across I-35!
(I didn’t make this up! It’s a real thing, called Rails-with-Trails.
There are a ton of resources at the Rails-with-Trails link.)
…
Back to our little patch of land, across from the VFW.
Saul asks, “Will this help the flooding on Bishop?”
Answer: Not really, no. There’s a separate project, the Bishop-Belvin project, that is aiming specifically at that.
….
Item 6: Each year, Hays County gives San Marcos $85,000 to provide library services to county residents. The other local libraries – Wimberly, Buda, Kyle, Dripping Springs – all get $35,000 to serve the county.
The per capita funding has gone down dramatically in the past 20 years. Our funding has grown, but not as fast as the population of Hays County.
The presenter did mention this: “As the population has grown in Hays County, the percentage of users outside the city has actually gone down. As these other towns build new libraries, people go to their home library.” But I wasn’t clear if she was referring to the entire 20 year span, or just the past 2-3 years.
They also get $120,000 from Friends of the Library each year, which is also helpful. (For comparison, the library gets a little over $2 million from the city budget.)
Let’s just take a moment to appreciate how much our library does:
It really warms a crabby marxist’s heart.
…
Item 12: We’re going to purchase a Smeal aerial fire apparatus for the Fire Department for $2,300,000.00.
That’s my best guess as to what we’re getting. I’m not a fire truck expert.
…
Item 17: LIHTC Projects. I feel deeply ambivalent about this item.
LIHTC stands for “Low-Income Housing Tax Credit”.
Say you’re a developer and you’re going to build some apartment complexes. The city offers some incentives for you to include some low-income housing. LIHTC is a federal program that helps us give tax credits to developers, in exchange for a certain number of below-market-rate apartments being built. (Another one is a density bonus – you can build more apartments per acre – if you agree to keep a certain number at a cheaper price.)
Here’s what we require from the developer: you have to offer 5 of these 8:
So I suppose you get a 4% discount or a 9% discount on your property taxes.
Here’s the key line for this meeting:
A minimum of 25% of all units within the project shall be affordable to households at or below 30% percent of the AMI for the duration of the tax exemption
What does this mean? First, AMI is Area Median Income. Now, San Marcos gets lumped in with Austin for this computation, so:
Median Income for a 4-person household: $122,300
Median Income for a 1-person household: $85,600
This is obviously a little ridiculous for San Marcos – our single-household median income was $42,500 from 2017-2021. But still, legally we’re going to use Austin’s $122,300 number as the reference point.
Ok, next: “households at or below 30% percent of the AMI”. In other words:
30% below Austin’s median income for a 4-person household: $35,050
30% below Austin’s median income for a 1-person household: $24,550
These are the people we’re trying to help with these LIHTC projects. This includes roughly 30% of San Marcos, or 21,512 people.
Last time with this key sentence again: “ A minimum of 25% of all units within the project shall be affordable to households at or below 30% percent of the AMI for the duration of the tax exemption”
In other words, if you want the tax breaks, then you need to make 25% percent of your units affordable to people earning less than $35,000. Let’s say a big apartment complex has 200 units. So then San Marcos gets 50 units that are affordable to people in poverty, from that one LIHTC project.
Here’s an important question: what’s the current situation? We say there’s a housing shortage, but by how much exactly? How many more apartments need to exist for those 21,512 people, so that everyone can find affordable housing?
We did an excellent Housing Needs Assessment, but it’s out of date – it uses 2017 data. It desperately needs to be updated yearly. But still, in 2017, this was the situation:
Adding up the first six rows, we had 9935 total rental households (in 2017) that earned less than $35,000 a year, and we had a shortfall of 4233 rental units.
Since then:
Prices have surged
A lot has been built (but at what rental price?)
A lot more people have moved to San Marcos
So it’s really impossible to speculate. But my read is that we have an increasingly severe housing shortage for the poorest third of San Marcos. Let’s say we need 4,250 rental units for people earning under $35,000, just because it’s the next nice even number.
To achieve 4,250 affordable units, we only need to build 85 more LIHTC apartment complexes around San Marcos! Right now we have eleven LIHTC projects, and five more that are in the works. This is an excruciatingly slow way to chip away at those 4,250 units.
One last detail on the 25% number: that number was set in March of 2022. Before that, you only had to set aside 10% of your units. So that 200-unit apartment complex would only bring 20 newly affordable units to the table. Only 212 more apartment complexes needed at this rate!
[I’m being a teeny bit of a jerk. This one mechanism is not supposed to solve the housing crisis all by itself. It’s just one tool among many. But in practice, we have very few other ways of generating affordable housing.]
So here was the question being debated on Tuesday: should we stick with requiring that 25% of units be affordable? Should we go back to 10%? Or should we settle somewhere in the middle?
Council quickly settles on 15%: it should only take 15% of your units to qualify for tax breaks.
So what’s the rationale? What’s wrong with 25%? Basically, developers have stopped applying for the program at all. The tax credits aren’t enough to offset the cost of setting aside 25% of their units for low-income housing. The math doesn’t math, as the kids say.
Are developers the bad guys? Eh, not really. They’re not here to solve housing affordability. This is not their problem.
What does this mean then? It means that this is a terrible way to create enough affordable housing.
The honest truth is that this is too big a problem for San Marcos. Poor towns and big cities have high needs and rich towns and rich suburbs have very small needs. Making cities solve their own individual housing crises is idiotic. We actually live in a wealthy state! Texas could meaningfully reduce housing unaffordability, if this state cared about anything besides outlawing trans kids and punishing refugees.
Given that there’s no real solution anywhere in sight, should we:
Require builders provide 25% low-income housing, and have fewer applications? or
Allow builders to only provide 15% low-income housing, and have more applications?
Answer: poor residents lose either way.
…
One final note: Other places build a lot more public housing than we do. For example, Vienna was written up in the NYT recently. (Gifted link – shouldn’t be paywalled).
Given that the US doesn’t have much appetite for building a lot of high-quality public housing, the best way to bring down housing prices is to build an excess of housing that is close to people’s jobs and schools. Put guardrails on what kind of dense housing developers can build, and then let them build it. (My preference for the guardrails is to allow more condos, duplexes, 4-plexes and 8-plexes in quiet neighborhoods, and then some large scale apartment complexes as their own standalone thing. Clearly the Old Guard in town prefers strictly single family housing and massive apartment complexes. But I digress.)
This is actually something that Texas has done better than California. It’s easier there for a few people to gum up the process for a developer indefinitely, and so you end up only building out in the middle of nowhere. Hence the enormous sprawl and wild housing prices.
You may have heard that we carried out a compensation study? I think it’s a good idea to pay people a healthy salary, so this seems fine to me.
First off: not everyone is included. Specifically, appointees, SMPD, and Firefighters are not excluded. (SMPD and firefighters are the only public employees that Texas allows to have unions that negotiate for higher salaries.)
So for everyone else, we brought in some consultants. Here’s the process:
So when you get to that pentagon in the middle, you need some way to quantify the importance of a job. Here’s how they do it:
Magically, those factors turn into some number of points between 0 and 3000.
So are we currently paying people fairly?
The thing about this graphic is that all those dots hug the line fairly closely. That means that roughly speaking, if two people are doing comparable jobs, they’re getting paid a comparable amount. This is good!
If you trust the point system, then we’re internally consistent with that.
So how do we compare to other cities? We picked 107 of our job descriptions to compare.
So Austin pays much better than we do, and we pay a little better than New Braunfels.
Sidenote: this slide is total gibberish. First off, “variance” is how spread out your data is. I’m pretty sure they’re not trying to convey that Austin is 20% less spread out than San Marcos, and New Braunfels is 4% more spread out, because that would be a silly thing to emphasize. So I think they’re actually comparing the averages, or maybe the average trend line.
Second, the left hand side is an even bigger mess. Did they actually measure different things in 2023 and 2024? how did they measure 2024 anyway? And then for total variance… they added together 2023 and 2024? What would that even mean?!
Back to the presentation.
Finally, they took seven of those cities, and inferred what their scatter plot lines would be. Then they compared our trend line to these other cities:
This means we pay a little better for anyone earning up to $50,000, and we pay a little worse if you’re earning 50K-200K.
They tactfully didn’t specify how much the folks on the top will be getting, and I actually don’t care. None of this is the kind of obscene amounts of wealth that actually offends me.
On the lower end, increasing the hourly pay from $16 to $17.42 translates into a yearly income going from $32,000 to $34,840.
Still living in poverty! Still eligible for those low-income LIHTC apartments we just talked about. But moving in the right direction, I suppose.
…
There was also a nice presentation on our grants development process and grant activity. The grants coordinator seems to be coordinating a lot. It seems like an awfully wonky topic even for a blog like this, though, so I’m letting it go.
Happy November! We punted on VisionSMTX and the CM Allen district decision, but we talked extensively about little Spidy Web Lassos for the cops.
Let’s do this:
Hours 0:00 – 1:39: We stuff VisionSMTX++ and the CM Allen District into a little can, and we kick it down the road.
Hours 1:39 – 2:48: BolaWraps! Should police be able to zap-and-wrap you? We also discuss cosmetic improvements to vacant buildings, Sunset Acres flood mitigation, and whether Shannon Mattingly broke any rules.
Bonus! 3 pm Workshops: the river took a beating over the summer. Parks Department tried their best to keep up.
Saul Gonzalez has gotten much more talkative. I’m going to have to update his profile where I called him the silent councilmember. I can’t always tell what he’s getting at, or why he votes the way he votes, but he’s definitely trying harder to make himself known.
Election Results: Congrats to Alyssa and Shane. Nothing surprising happened here.
See you next week for BACK TO BACK MEETINGS, Thanksgiving Special Edition.
VisionSMTX++ is supposed to be approved tonight. The public has opinions:
Go back to the original. The new version constrains the housing market, forces sprawl, and jacks up prices!
Keep the new version! We love sprawl and jacked up housing prices.
Renters need protection!
We live in a cottage court. Stop pretending these don’t exist in existing neighborhoods.
Downtown Area Plan is also supposed to be approved tonight.
Protect the river!
Protect against flooding!
Too much asphalt!
We’re going to become Baltimore!
The water table is very shallow under CM Allen. And there are a bunch of endangered species in the river here.
If you plan for development, you can specify environmental improvements you want. If you plan for parks, you’ll get stuck with the land owner’s choices when they develop it anyway.
…
But before we get to all that, we have a zoning case.
Items 8-9: This is an 18-acre patch at the corner of 123 and Wonderworld:
It’s right behind this little strip:
It sounds like they want to put a little retirement village there.
Saul Gonzales definitely had something on his mind, but I couldn’t figure out what. Here’s how the conversation goes:
First, Saul asks about the cost and tax revenue of the future plot.
Staff answers: 1. the cost to the city is $0! They’re responsible for any extensions of water, sewer, and electricity. 2. We can’t know the tax revenue until it’s built!
This is not a good answer. It evades what Saul is getting at. What Saul wants to know is, “Will this help or hurt the budget, in the future after it’s built?” Right now the costs are extensions of water, sewer, and electricity, but once it’s built, there will be ongoing services, namely police and firefighters.
Here’s my guess at the real answer: 1. Cost: This will not require much from future city budgets. We’re already providing police and fire department coverage to things that are further out than this development – this is infill. 2. Revenue: Since this will be apartments, it should bring in more tax revenue than we spend on it.
So my expectation is that this will be good for the budget.
Next, Saul asks about flooding. He’s told that it’s not in a flood plain, they’ll do an environmental analysis, and everything looks fine.
The Vote: Yes: Everyone but Saul No: Saul
Clearly the answers that Saul got didn’t resolve whatever he’s worried about. So either:
He doesn’t believe the answers, in which case I’m interested to know why.
There’s another reason he’s voting against it, in which case I’m interested to know why.
Price Tag to the City: Will it bring in taxes that pay for itself, over the lifespan of the infrastructure and future repair? How much will it cost to extend roads, utilities, on fire and police coverage, on water and wastewater?
Per Saul’s questions, I’m guessing that it will pay for itself, yes.
Housing stock: How long will it take to build? How much housing will it provide? What is the forecasted housing deficit at that point? Is it targeting a price-point that serves what San Marcos needs?
As always, we need a regularly updated housing report. It sounds like the city has picked back up on the one they dropped in 2019, so maybe this will materialize?
Environment: Is it on the aquifer? Is it in a flood zone? Will it create run off into the river?Are we looking at sprawl? Is it uniformly single-family homes?
Not in a flood zone. Not environmentally sensitive. It’s supposed to be one-story apartments for seniors, which doesn’t sound like sprawl.
Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?
No idea on the mixed income part. Potentially it’s near some future retail, but currently not much.
The San Marxist Special: Is it a mixed-income blend of single family houses, four-plexes, and eight-plexes, all mixed together? With schools, shops, restaurants, and public community space sprinkled throughout?
It never is.
But on the whole, it’s more good than bad, in my opinion.
….
After items 8 and 9, we doubled back to Items 1, 2, and 5. These were pulled off the consent agenda for discussion.
Item 1: VisionSMTX++
Your two-second summary: Original community plan: weakly opposed to sprawl and jacked up housing costs. P&Z rewrite: we LOVE sprawl and jacked up housing costs!
Alyssa: Too many people are expressing frustration with the process. She’s gotten a flood of feedback in the past two days. There are too many barriers for people to engage.
Saul agrees: he’s getting input, more time won’t hurt.
Jude says he doesn’t want to postpone. He thinks just a few tweaks are needed to get it done. He’s got some amendments proposed for some of the missing middle stuff: cottage courts, multiplexes, etc.
I would be very interested to know what these amendments were going to be! But legally, they can only discuss the postponement. Since there’s a motion to postpone, you can’t discuss amendments to the actual plan.
Eventually they settle on January 16th, with a committee to discuss the matter. The committee will be Shane Scott, Alyssa Garza, and Matthew Mendoza.
The vote to postpone to January: 6-0. (Mark Gleason is absent.)
My $0.02:
Yes, the procedure was total garbage. The P&Z-plus-Jane subcommittee rewrote a document that had reflected the input from the town.
But also, the new content is total garbage. It’s not just a problem of procedure. The subcommittee inserted a ton of NIMBYism that made the comprehensive plan worse.
Yes, I would like us to fix the procedure and solicit a bunch more input from the community. But I’m nervous about it all being performative. If nothing actually changes in the comprehensive plan, then we’re just playing a game called Let’s All Perform Community Input. If the garbage content stays, then this was an empty exercise.
Item 2: The Downtown Plan
Your two-second summary: (Discussed previously here and here.) There are four properties along CM Allen.
Right now they’re owned by private citizens who can do whatever they want. But would we really like those to be parks, instead?
Options 1, 2, and 3:
This choice sort of landed like a bomb out of nowhere, and conversation has been intense and emotional.
The Final Approval:
Everyone wants to postpone this, as well. Clearly the community is all worked up over Options 1, 2, and 3. This whole thing unfolded in just one month, unlike VisionSMTX++, which has taken three years, so everyone feels panicked and rushed to weigh in. Taking a beat is a good idea.
Jude wants to nail down specific environmental benefits to Option 3.
Jane wants us to land somewhere between Options 2 and 3.
Staff comes forward with a proposal to break off the CM Allen district from the rest of the downtown plan, and pass the remaining bit. Everyone is glad about this, and it passes 6-0.
So what’s next?
The CM Allen District will then become its own area plan, possibly combined with the rest of the riverfront properties along CM Allen to make a River District. But there are six area plans queued up ahead of it, so it’s not going to happen for another year or two.
Item 5: The police department wants to buy 70 BolaWraps, at a cost of $112k.
A BolaWrap is this surreal Spiderman thing:
You aim your gadget at the bad guy, and shoot out this Y-shaped thread. The outstretched parts whip around your dude, and lasso him up tight.
BAD GUY CONTAINED! You saved the princess!
So should we buy 70 of these 7.5 foot Kevlar lassos for our cops?
Alyssa Garza is a hard no. She is the one pulled this item off the consent agenda for discussion, saying that purchases like this need some scrutiny and public attention.
She read a bunch of cop message boards, and found cops laughing at how terrible they are
She also notes that other communities hold big studies and have well-thought-out policies on new implements like this.
Chief Standridge is present. He comes up to talk.
The point of the BolaWrap is that it’s a nonlethal remote restraint.
It’s used to de-escalate situations where someone is having a mental health crisis, drug psychosis, or some other criminal behavior
Does not rely on pain compliance
“Non-lethal de-escalation” emerges as a major talking point. I’ll grant you non-lethal. But de-escalation?
Let’s meditate on the word de-escalation for a second. That means that tempers have escalated, and you’re trying to calm everyone down, so that the situation can resolve peacefully.
Lassoing someone’s legs may buy you a couple seconds while you slap some handcuffs on them, but it sure as shit does not calm anyone down.
So no, this does not actually count as de-escalation. It’s absurd for Chief Standridge to toss around that word so much. He’s just grabbed it as a useful buzzword du jour. Restraining someone with a bug-zapper so that you can slap handcuffs on them may be less violent, but that’s a gross misinterpretation of de-escalation.
Are BolaWraps the worst thing ever, then? No, of course not. Let’s do some ranking:
Shooting someone: the actual worst thing
Tazing someone: quite dangerous and possibly lethal
Bolawraps: not likely to hurt anyone, aside from making them trip and fall.
If you are happy with cops enforcing the current criminal justice system, BolaWraps are pretty neutral. If you are trying to dismantle the status quo and change the criminal justice system, then things that are neutral are bad.
To Alyssa’s questions, Chief Standridge says: “These are 80% effective. Not 100%. Just another tool in our toolbelt.”
Alyssa asks, “Where did you get the 80% number from?”
Chief Standridge says, “The BoloWrap website!”
Alyssa says, “So the people who are selling it? Who have a profit motive?”
Chief Standridge: “Yep!!”
Chase Stapp, the assistant city manager, steps up and says, “It costs more if we use excessive force.” In other words, if we taze or shoot someone and get sued, the lawsuit is more expensive than a BolaWrap.
[Side note: The reason you shouldn’t taze someone or shoot someone is because you are injuring their body. Cops are not judges nor juries, and so that bad guy is legally an innocent person, and you just injured or killed them. (But yes, lawsuits are expensive.)]
Chief Standridge says, “When you have a mental health crisis, you have a choice. You can use force, or you can use bolaWrap.”
Alyssa says, “Maaaaaybe mental health shouldn’t be under SMPD.”
Chief Standridge quips back, “Maaaaaaybe your police chief would completely agree with you! But until that system is built out, people still call 911 for mental health crises. We send out PD and an embedded mental health clinician, when she’s on duty. We’re working on your solution, but we’re not there yet.”
AnotherSidebar:
This sounds like an invitation to create a new system, yes? Chief Standridge just explicitly says he’d like to see mental health first responders separated from SMPD.
In order to separate out mental health crises responders from SMPD, you’d need a few things: – Public buy-in. If you think that a person having a mental health crisis should get a mental health expert responder instead of getting BolaWrapped, you should reach out and let city council know.
– City Council buy-in: they will only support something like this if they think it will affect their election chances. (Aside from Alyssa.)
– Staff buy-in: My read is that the city manager and assistant city manager don’t approve of progressive revisions of policing. That would have to be overcome.
– Chief Standridge is on record here voicing support for separating off mental health crises from the current police system. But I don’t know what he’s like behind the scenes, and how actively he’d advocate for this.
To me, this seems like something worth pursuing.
…
Some other facts get tossed around:
Seguin has purchased these. (yay?)
In 2022, SMPD had 65,000 interactions with citizens, and 59 required use of force. In other words, about once a week, they use force.
Saul: I need a demonstration.
Chief Standridge: I mean, it’s still a firearm. We shouldn’t just be discharging it indoors. But here’s a video!
Here’s the video they watched:
Next up, Matthew Mendoza chimes in.
I’m going to quote Matthew fully, because this is starting to be a trend. Clearly he’s done something like research, but whatever he found is total nonsense. He says, at 1:57:
Columbia County, in Oregon – it’s where Portland actually sits, in the center of that county. Let’s be honest, that tends to be an area where they are very observant of… they want a lot of visibility and interactions with our first responders and authority. As of 6 hours ago, their Fox station released a report saying that Columbia County sheriff’s department has been using this for the last two weeks. And it’s been successful! If Columbia County, Oregon finds this to be suitable…
Alyssa: For how long, now?
Matthew: For six days now! But I’m sure they’ve taken months to, I mean, this is Oregon. This isn’t someone I would imagine would just be jumping in, or tossing it up there. I’m seeing everywhere that people are trying this!
His argument seems to be: “We all know Portland is a bunch of liberal mushy-hearted saps, and even they love this technology! We know Portland would vet it thoroughly. If they’re in, I’m in!”
Just to be clear:
First, Portland is not in Columbia County, although I’m sure there are suburbs that spill over out that far.
Second, here’s the map for the 2020 presidential election.
Columbia County is Trump Country, by a margin of 53% to 42%. Whereas Hays County broke for Biden, 54% to 44%. So let’s not hold them up as a standard for anything, okay?
I’m editing things down significantly. There’s lots more repetition of: – the nonlethal de-escalation bit – how they are only 80% effective – how they’re cheaper than lawsuits
Alyssa: We have a Use of Force Policy for the department. Where can we find policy and procedures document for this?
Chief Standridge: That would be backwards! The order goes:
First I get permission from you all to buy them.
Buy them.
Get all the training done.
Then we’ll know enough to write a good policy about them.
This is cousin to “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.” Chief Standridge could have easily showed up today with a few policies that other police departments use, as possible rough drafts. But once you already have the BolaWraps in officers’ hands, you’re going to write the policy framed by eagerness to get out there and get going. You would have gotten a much more cautious and measured policy if they weren’t already holding their new toys.
Alyssa: A bunch of people say it sounds like a gunshot. Doesn’t that make a situation more dangerous?
Chief Standridge: I always wear hearing protection around guns, and I did not use hearing protection with these.
Alyssa: I’m a no. There are much better uses of this money.
Saul: How long do batteries last?
Chief: I don’t know!
Saul: Who gets the 70 units?
Chief: Patrol, School Resource Officers, Mental Health Unit, and Traffic Stops.
Matthew Mendoza asks if officers also carry lethal weapons.
Answer: Yes. Cops have guns.
Finally, Chief Standridge ends with a speech: “We act like officers are the impediment to change. But we’re all stakeholders in this community! The people, the city council, and the department. If we want to change the system, let’s do it!”
We don’t want to make the opossums and raccoons live somewhere so sad.
But we can give them a quick glow up:
by requiring that boarded up doors and windows be painted to look like regular doors and windows.
Hooray!
In fact, we already have a version of this downtown:
and
So there you have it. Coming soon to a derelict property near you!
…
Item 11: I know “Sunset Acres” sounds like a retirement village, but it’s actually this neighborhood:
Mendez Elementary is right in the middle of it.
At Council one year ago, Sunset Acres came up because they’ve got a disastrous flooding situation happening. (And it sounds like it’s been going on for decades, and has just been chronically neglected by the city.)
The city is finally working on it:
Phase 1 costs $1,642,910.00. With that kind of money, you could buy 1,027 BolaWraps! So you can tell this is important. We’re starting Phase 1 now.
Saul asks: What happens if they take too long?
Answer: Contracts have timeline clauses. They get fined $800-$1K per day if their time runs out.
Sounds great! But also sounds like the kind of fine that never quite gets enforced.
(That’s a fine of about half a BolaWrap per day.)
…..
Item 13: Remember this, from last month? Shannon Mattingly was head of the Planning Department from 2015 to 2022. Then she resigned, started working for a developer, and showed up recently to advocate for some new student housing.
Apparently Jane Hughson has been getting an earful from people who are pissed off about this. It certainly looks shady.
It’s not technically a violation of our current code:
(Yes, it’s a screen shot because it’s not in the packet.) She showed up at Council meetings, not P&Z meetings, and so she is fine under the current policy.
So the point is: maybe our conflict-of-interest statement needs to be strengthened? Council is sending it over to the Ethics Review Committee to look it over.
…
Item 14: Let’s summarize all these Comprehensive and Area Plans:
VisionSMTX++: punted till January.
Downtown Area Plan: passed, minus CM Allen district.
All the other Area Plans: still to come, over the next few years.
The current plan is that each Area Plan gets seen by Council at one meeting: there’s a presentation, a discussion, and a final vote. All wrapped up in one night.
Jane Hughson wants each Area Plan to come before Council twice, instead of once. In other words, the first meeting would have a hearing and a discussion. Two weeks later, at the second meeting, you’d get any fall-out from the first meeting, more discussion, and the final vote.
This is an example of Jane’s best skill as mayor: she’s looking ahead to upcoming issues, and figuring out that the community will care a lot, and that it may blow up if they don’t have enough opportunity to weigh in. She’s very thorough and thoughtful in detail-oriented ways like this.
City Staff says that the area plans will:
Go through Neighborhood Commissions
Go through P&Z
Then come to Council
And now, come back to Council a second time.
All this is to make sure that no one feels blindsided by things.
How does it compare to other industries in the city? How does it compare to other cities? I have no idea! So those numbers are kind of meaningless without context, unfortunately.
We have 29 hotels and 50 short term rentals
We have a hotel occupancy tax, and we use it on the various festivals, mural arts, Sights & Sounds, and things around town.
Apparently we advertise outside of San Marcos, like so:
Whatever works, man. I guess Marketing knows best.
As a marxist, I’m mostly not a marketing and business person. But then they started talking about the river, which is more interesting to me.
So, who goes to the river?
They hired some consultants to track our cell phones, and see where we sleep at night.
So after we tube the river, where do we sleep?
This year, about a quarter were local, half were regional, and 20% were more than 50 miles away. Last year, 40% were local, a third were regional, and a quarter were from further away.
It would be nice to have some absolute numbers here, by the way. It was implied that we had more users this year, due to the drought, but you can’t tell that from the percents.
2. The second presentation was on Summer 2023 at the River Parks
We tried a new Park Ambassador program this year. We hired 8 staff members to wander through the river parks all summer long, and try to be helpful.
It sounds like they told a lot of people to put their glass bottles away, put their charcoal grills away, put their dog on a leash, and put their trash bags in the right places.
You can see those spikes right at the 4th of July weekend, and the weekend before school starts.
Apparently park use is up this year. In the first presentation, they speculated that it was because of the drought: local watering holes dried up and were closed, to preserve them, and so people came here instead.
This photo was taken by Christopher Paul Cardoza:
(I got it from the slide show, though.) It’s 5 pm on the 4th of July.
There’s a serious problem here:
How else are you going to escape the heat on the 4th of July, unless you find some water? In our shitty world of capitalism, we’ve eliminated almost all free ways to have recreation and a little joy in people’s lives.
But the river is super overused. This is extremely bad for the health of the river.
(Might I suggest overthrowing our capitalist overlords and breaking free from the chains that bind? No? Ah well.)
One of the biggest problems is the litter:
Pretty much every weekend, the river parks are trashed. It’s one of the biggest problems the parks department faces, and they have a ton of clean up efforts going simultaneously.
They spend $191K each summer on litter abatement alone. (That’s enough to buy 120 BolaWraps, for those of you keeping track.)
Anyway, the Parks Department has some suggestions:
My opinions:
Single-Use Container Ban: yes. You’ve got to get the trash under control.
Tube size limitation: yes. It’s super dangerous when these giant 8 person contraptions go over the falls and over people swimming.
Paid Parking and Picnic Permits: The idea is to charge non-residents. It’ll be a headache for residents, though – you probably have to download some app and verify your address.
Managed Access Points: I think this means that the park gets fenced in? That feels sort of sad. Maybe it’s inevitable.
Alyssa Garza asks about the ban on charcoal grills. What’s the history here? Why is propane okay, but charcoal not?
Answer: Until 2013, you could bring charcoal grills. We just could not get people to properly dispose of their charcoal. People dump it on the ground, other people burn their feet. People dump it at the base of the tree, the tree starts on fire:
The photo on the right is offered up as evidence that people dump hot charcoal on tree stumps and start fires, which is really pretty wild.
In 2013, we adopted the Habitat Conservation Plan, and banning charcoal grilling was part of that. Allowing propane grills was the compromise position.
These are going to go to the Parks Board, and then on to City Council very soon.
The San Marxist 