Month: October 2024

TSM Official Take on City Council Candidates, Fall ’24

by The San Marxist, posted in City Council Elections

We’ve got three big races this year! Voting starts tomorrow! (Never forget: San Marcos Elections are Problematic.)

Voting details: Early Voting Hours and Locations.
More voting info: League of Women Voters and Vote411.

Extremely short take: 

  • Amanda Rodriguez is the best candidate of any race.  Vote for her, Place 6.
  • Mayor: I’ll be voting for Juan Miguel Arredondo.
  • Place 5: It’s complicated! Details below.

Longer take:

Quick background: There have been a lot of different forums:

So what are the major issues?

#1 issue: Housing affordability. Every candidate said that housing affordability is the most important issue facing San Marcos. Everyone got that same memo, loud and clear. This makes it a little hard to distinguish the candidates.

Other issues: the river, the business community, bringing in good jobs, public safety, renter protection, Cape’s Dam.

Mayoral Race:  Juan Miguel Arredondo is the progressive candidate. I’ll be voting for him.

  • Jane Hughson is the current mayor. She is the status quo candidate. Her strengths are her attention to detail and general conscientiousness. She always seems to read documents thoroughly. She is a strong centrist and generally beholden to NIMBY types.
  • Juan Miguel Arredondo is the change candidate.  He’s an odd mix of progressive and conservative policies, but he does want to shake things up.  More progressive than not!

Housing Affordability: Miguel wins on this issue. Jane was mayor when the SMTX Housing 4 All plan came up for a vote in 2019. Instead of working to address the issue, Council deep-sixed it, and never actually implemented the plan. Staff even gave a workshop on reviving the plan, and nothing came of it. (Instead, Council prioritized using extra money to hire extra police officers and firefighters. That wasn’t my favorite. If they’d been more mindful about sprawl, we wouldn’t have needed as many extra PD and firefighters.)

Jane will probably prioritize affordable housing now that it’s become everyone’s favorite buzzword. But she will be more NIMBY about it than Miguel.

(Miguel makes me squirm when he starts talking about how property taxes are too high and bringing good jobs to San Marcos. Why not raise the minimum wage? All jobs would be good jobs if they paid a living wage! But there’s no difference between him and Jane on this issue.)

Place 6: I’m doing this one before Place 5, because it’s easier.

  • Amanda Rodriguez:  Just exactly what we need. She has a strong vision, a strong sense of justice, and she answered questions with a depth of knowledge.  She’s here to fight for the most vulnerable people in San Marcos, and she is straight-forwardly honest about this mission. It’s electric.

    Look, Amanda is basically the Johnny Cash of San Marcos. She’s intense, she’ll speak straight to your soul, and you can practically hear her sing: 

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town
I wear it for the prisoner, who has long paid for his crime
But is there because he’s a victim of the times

How can you not vote for Johnny Cash?!  We need her on Council.

🎵 Till things are brighter, she’s the candidate in black.   🎶

  • Maraya Dunn:  She’s been on P&Z for about 5 months, but she has not said much during the meetings.  During the debates, she is Team Business, and says things like, “If you make it easier on businesses, that will help solve the other problems, like housing.” She loves businesses of all sizes, and wants to reduce red tape.

There’s a kernel of truth to that – we do need to revisit our Land Development Code and see where we’re impeding the kind of growth we want. But her language is problematic – she is prioritizing making life easier for businesses, not prioritizing how to get the best results for San Marcos. It’s very conservative, business-friendly, and Texan.

(At the same time, she clearly has a soft spot for animals! She owns the Stinky Dawg Dog Spa downtown, and put Animal Welfare as one of her top three priorities. But I’m sure Amanda is pro-puppy as well, like any good person.)

Place 5: Ugh, this is the hardest one to write about. I would not be upset about any of them being in office.

  • Roland Saucedo: Seems to have a good heart.  His answers are mushy and low on detail, but his heart is generally in the right place.   [Updated to add: “Bad with details” is an understatement. More here, and it’s not good.]
  • Griffin Spell:  He has been on P&Z for years, and so there is a lot of data to go on here. He has been great on P&Z.  Thinks for himself, explains his reasoning, open to arguments from others.  Politically, he is a centrist, but his process is high quality.  He easily has the most experience of anyone here. He’ll govern as a thoughtful centrist.
  • Atom Von Arndt: He is fighting for the tenants. He uses the phrase, “Let’s make it hard in San Marcos for bad landlords.” This is a great fight for Council to take on!

    His thinking is a bit muddled when it comes to the University and opposing Rent-by-the-Bedroom, in that he thinks there are simple answers to complex problems.

    But overall, he seems smart, and a bit of a live wire. If you want to make life interesting on this blog, he’s your guy.
  • Lorenzo Garza: He’s the one candidate that I’d never heard of before he filed, so he’s at a disadvantage. That said, he gave reasonably good answers to the questions.

    He wants to be responsive to the people, and he also wants to redirect some of the police department budget towards things like mental health. He comes across as a progressive who is pretty new to San Marcos.

Bottom line: I think you’ve gotta look in your own heart for Place 5. Are you a Roland, a Griffin, an Atom, or a Lorenzo? Someone write a Buzzfeed quiz for me!

October 15th City Council Meeting

by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

I’ve got your Council election candidate recs, fresh off the presses! Plus: VisionSMTX, the exciting new 3rd HEB, TDS, ARWA and some old timey photos of San Marcos. So many acronyms. What a week.

TSM Official Take on City Council Candidates, Fall ’24: Let’s dish about your favorite candidates, and I’ll spill who I’m voting for.

Hours 0:00 – 1:24:  VisionSMTX is done, and we discuss contracts with the Chamber of Commerce and Texas Disposal Systems.

Hours 1:24 – 2:07:  All the exciting details on the new HEB!  Plus ARWA water and naming the downtown alleys.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops: The Mitchell Center gets a new family. 

This is the last post before the election! (A wave of anxiety crashes over me.)

For the love of god, please go vote. And tell your friends and family: you can vote with an expired license. You know how backed up the DMV is right now.

Hours 0:00 – 1:24, 10/15/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

  • Texas Disposal Systems is the trash/recycling company. They’re up for a five year contract renewal tonight. This topic had the most speakers.
    – There were people saying what an amazing job TDS has done, and how we must renew with them.
    – There were people from other waste systems saying that they can also do a great job, and if we’d just open up bids, they could show us.
  • One speaker made an interesting point about HEB: as long as we’re getting a new HEB, why don’t we revisit the almost-HEB, and see if we can acquire that land?

Here’s what he means:

There was almost an HEB here, back in 2016:

That is when HEB was the controversy of the day. HEB applied for a rezoning to put a grocery store on that corner.

The community was furious. Purgatory Creek had flooded just one year earlier, and it’s very environmentally sensitive. Traffic is already mess at that intersection. The WonderWorld extension was new, and part of the deal struck was that no new curb cuts would occur on WonderWorld. People were worried that HEB would close Little HEB.

But Council approved the rezoning anyway. (Jane Hughson and Jude Prather were two of the yeses.)

Zipping along to 2024: clearly HEB never built the grocery store there. This week’s big announcement is the new HEB on McCarty and I35 instead.  (See item 10.)

So… can we buy this old land from them?  Can we at least approach them for this land? It’s right there, where we’re putting all these trails down. Why don’t we at least ask?  

Great question! 

….

Onto the meeting!

Item 12:  Rezoning a little over an acre, out on Hunter Road:

in other words, just to the right of this Shell station:

as you’re headed south on Hunter.

It got zoned Neighborhood Commercial, so it will definitely not be apartments. Some kind of office or store.

…

Item 2: After four years, we have a new Comprehensive Plan! VisionSMTX is now officially approved.

Backstory here. There are lots of big thank yous, and no major changes.

So how exactly did the committee thread the needle?  If I had to summarize, they:

  • Added back in the language about walking, biking, and transit. How close are you to parks, schools, and stores, without needing to drive?
  • Added ADUs, duplexes, and triplexes back into low intensity areas.
  • But kept one of the major P&Z changes, which was to split “Neighborhood Low” place types into two sub-types: Neighborhood Low-Existing and Neighborhood Low-New.

They did a great job of carving out a compromise position.

…

Item 4: We lease land to the Chamber of Commerce for $1/year:

On CM Allen, on the edge of the river parks.

They’ve been there since 1977. They are raising money to build an extension, but for the time being, they want to extend this contract until 2031.

Here’s what Jane says at 58:00 minutes in:

“Whenever the Chamber got ready to expand, the city discovered that there were a lot of back lease payments that we had never advised the Chamber to pay.  And the Chamber didn’t know they needed to pay, and the Chamber president came to me and said, ‘If you add all this up, and the penalties and interest, the money that we just raised for the expansion kinda goes up in smoke.’ So I brought it to the council and we forgave all of that, so that the Chamber could use the dollars they’d raised for the expansion.”

I can’t find any Council discussion of this, so I assume it happened in top secret executive session?

This bit was boxed red in the packet, so I assume this is the Forgotten Lease Payments:

Look how cute that 1978 typewriter font is.

Here’s the thing: Sure, forgive Chamber’s debt – it got lost to the sands of time. Just be sure that we are equally charitable to other nonprofit organizations that may need a bit of grace.

(We did cover a bunch of debt from Together for a Cause a few years ago. One of the Place 5 candidates is involved, at that link.)

…

Just for funsies: Remember the time that we rented that land to Chamber of Commerce for $1/year, and they turned around and rented office space back to us for $28,760/year? And everyone – besides Alyssa Garza and Max Baker – voted to approve this!

…

Item 5: We finalized the gateway signs business.  It’s going to look like this:

And go here:

and

This was not discussed. I just wanted to wrap up the topic.

….

Item 10: Texas Disposal Systems

Staff did a pretty good job writing up the backstory, so I’m just going to cut-and-paste from the packet:

Council is kind of split. Everyone definitely loves TDS.

  • Jane, Shane, Jude and Alyssa are all fine with going with TDS now, and opening up bids for the 2030 contract.
  • Matthew, Saul, and Mark are all a little more uneasy about not going through the process of soliciting bids, and seeing what other companies can put out there. 

The vote:

TDS it is!

.

Hours 1:24 – 2:05, 10/15/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 13: Remember that time we didn’t have any commerce on the east side?

Will anybody save us from this food desert??

OH YEAH! It’s all very exciting. 

Back in May, Council approved a call for bids, saying “hey Grocery stores! We’ll work with you on tax breaks if you hit up the east side!”  HEB was listening loud and clear, and reached out to us in August.

Here’s where it will be: 

So right next to Embassy Suites, on NB I-35. 

They’ve owned this land for a long time, but HEB likes to do that: purchase potential land and then just chill with it for awhile. 

It’s a pretty ideal location: Between McCarty and I-35, you can zip pretty much all over the place. 

(This would be a great time to connect the two Leah Drives! Which are disconnected for reasons that are still murky to me:

Idk!)

So what are the terms?

Those rebates are pretty much exactly what Council proposed last May.

What kind of dollar amounts are we talking about?

I’m mildly skeptical about these sales tax numbers. Or rather, it’s not all new tax revenue to the city. Some of that money would have been spent at the existing Big and Little HEBs, and is just being diverted to the 3rd HEB. Now, a lot of folks on the east side currently drive down to HEB in New Braunfels, and so that will bring in new tax dollars if they switch to this new store. But not everyone!

What about jobs and such?

Ok, but what kind of pay and benefits? When we negotiated with Buccee’s, the company specified that they will pay $18/hour and get full benefits.

As far as I can tell, we entirely skipped this part of the negotiation. HEB will have to abide by the 2016 San Marcos law requiring companies to pay $15/hour, in exchange for tax breaks.   Does this mean that all HEB stores have to pay at least $15 an hour?

I believe HEB is pretty good to their employees, but this is poor work by Council and staff. We should always be negotiating on behalf of employees.

…

Sidebar: When we passed the 2016 (partial) minimum wage law, we did not include automatic inflation adjustments, the way we do for other contracts. If we had, $15/hour in 2016 would have automatically risen to $19.96 in 2024.

Hey council: Let’s update the 2016 ordinance and include automatic inflation adjustments! Like we do for so many things?

…

Back to HEB. What did Council say?   Mostly everyone gave a victory lap of thank yous. 

Mark Gleason added: “To other grocery stores, our economic incentive offer still stands! The east side can have more than just one grocery store!”  That’s great to hear.

Also: Mark is hearing from the community that lots of people are worried that Little HEB will close. During the meeting, councilmembers say “It’s great that they’ll keep Little HEB open” but I can’t find this actually written down anywhere. It would be good to have that in writing.

So here are my questions:

  • Would all HEB employees get the $15/hour as required by local ordinance, even at the existing stores?
  • Language about elevated minimum wage and benefits should always automatically be in these agreements.
  • Is it in writing that Little HEB will stay open for a certain number of years? 
  • Will Council please update the 2016 ordinance to peg the minimum wage to inflation???
  • Can we ask HEB about purchasing that little triangle of land next to Purgatory Creek?

The vote: 6-0.  Everyone hams it up in really cheesy ways: “Absolutely yes!” “Finally…yes!”  Fist pump. Etc.

…

Item 14: Alliance Regional Water Authority (ARWA)

ARWA is our big plan to shore up our water supply for the next 50 years. We originally signed onto it in 2008.  Instead of getting our water from Canyon Lake and the Edwards Aquifer, we’re piping it in from the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer. 

(image via)

It’s just about time to start drinking that sweet, sweet Carrizo-Wilcox water! 

These are slides from the packet, but no one actually gave a presentation on it.

so I’m just winging it here.

Tonight is about extending a bond for the next part of the project.  Everyone celebrated it, but I’m not sure what the special significance was. 

…

Item 16: Renaming downtown alleys

A couple years ago, Council dipped its toe in the exciting world of naming downtown alleys.  First up was Kissing Alley, in 2017.  It came with a whole revitalization effort – Kissing Alley concerts, etc.  It’s been great!

Next up came Boyhood Alley, to commemorate the movie Boyhood, which has an iconic scene shot there. This council conversation was kinda hilarious, because some councilmembers thought it sounded like Pervert Alley.

In order to dilute the pervy-sounding Boyhood Alley, Jane proposed that the rest of the unnamed alleys to be named after other movies. 

So the Convention and Visitor Bureau Advisory Board and the Main Street Advisory Board took up the charge. Tonight they’re back with their recommendations:

Four of the alleys have names already used:

That’s kinda cute about the dog.

A few others have informal names:

  • Music Alley
  • Imagine Alley
  • Railroad Alley

The committee is proposing two new ones:

  1. Getaway Alley, because some scenes from The Getaway were filmed near there:
Clockwise from top left: Sewell Park (upstream of Aquarena Drive), Texaco at 205 West Hopkins Street, intersection at West Hopkins Street & Moore Street, tire shop at 141 West Hopkins Street. Via this now-defunct website.

Steve McQueen! Ali McGraw! Haven’t seen it, but it seems like a fun romp.

2. Telephone Alley, after the old Telephone building that got torn down in 2019:

Isn’t that a very cute building? I was bummed that it got torn down. (Photo from here.) It was demolished to make room for The Parlor apartments.

That’s on San Antonio. Here’s a before and after, according to Google Maps:

I’m not actually opposed to the apartments, but I wish we could have spared the cute Telephone building.

… 

There are still more alleys without names. Jane wants to pair up the rest of the unnamed alleys with old movies, but other councilmembers want to roll it out more slowly – maybe Main Street can pick one or two per year, and figure out a good name for it. Sounds like that’s how it will go.

Bonus! 3 pm Workshops, 10/15/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

This is the Mitchell Center:

It’s kind of tucked away in the Dunbar Neighborhood:

It’s got deep historical roots:

Since the 30 year lease is coming to an end, the City decided to open up for bids to nonprofits:

In the end, staff recommended the Calaboose African American History as the best choice.

I’m not exactly sure where the $400K is going to come from for the estimated repairs, but certainly the Calaboose folks will be good stewards of this property.

…

Workshop #2 was about the Utility Billing Assistance program. It’s still being hashed out; I’m going to leave this alone for now.

October 2nd City Council Meeting

by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

Extremely short meeting this week! VisionSMTX, some art talk, and Quail Creek park. You’ll zip through the blog post in no time flat.

City Council Elections: Here’s what I’ve heard about:
– Realtors debate (on September 19th)
– SMRF Questionnaire (in their newsletter and online this week)
– League of Women Voters debate (not until Thursday, October 19th)

I’ll write up my thoughts and endorsements after the LWV debate. It’ll come out Sunday, October 20th. Stay tuned!

Onto this tiny little meeting:

Hours 0:00-1:00:  We discuss VisionSMTX, the new downtown mural, and Quail Creek park.  

That was it. There wasn’t even a workshop!

Hours 0:00 – 1:00, 10/2/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Only one speaker! Max Baker, representing the San Marcos Civics Club. They held their “Reasons Why NOT to Vote”* rally last weekend.

At the rally, they had a “Worst Issues in San Marcos” ballot. Here’s how the votes shook out:
-6 for public safety
-9 for economy
-13 for transit
-30 for environment
-40 for housing

Max highlighted those results for City Council: 137 people turned out for this rally, and they definitely care about housing and the environment!

Is this rally – and these votes – representative of San Marcos? Yes and no. It’s not a statistically random sample, no. However, it’s definitely a new and different outreach pathway, so it’s probably capturing a different set of folks than the same people who always fill out the city surveys.

*The name of this rally makes my stomach hurt a little bit. Here’s the Civics Club blurb: “The San Marcos Civics Club has talked a lot about local politics since we’ve formed and we wanna recognize the very real reasons people have to not vote each election cycle with this event.”

I get that they want to amplify the voices of people that are frustrated. The problem is that these two things can both be true:
1. People have real reasons that they don’t vote.
2. Republicans in Texas spend A LOT of time and energy trying to increase the number of people that feel that way. Apathy, hopelessness, and a sense of futility work in favor of Republicans.

It’s so hard to get people to show up and vote! And so important! This whole topic gives me an ulcer. Please vote.

For the record, they did have voter registration at the event! I just feel conflicted about promoting a message of resignation and hopelessness.

….

Item 10:  VisionSMTX is inching towards the finish line!

Background

VisionSMTX is the new city comprehensive plan. Think of this as a master plan for planning & zoning: “We want this kind of development over here, but that kind of development over there.”

In 2020, Council appointed a gigantic 30 person steering committee. They met with consultants for two years, and produced the first draft of VisionSMTX. 

In January 2023, it got handed off to P&Z.  They looked at it and had a heart attack.  “What’s all this stuff about affordable housing?! What’s all this stuff about bike trails and walkability and things besides cars?!”  It was really kinda a self-satire.  They clutched pearls, got the vapors, etc.  “The historic district will be destroyed!” they cried.  

“No no!” said the steering committee and city staff. “We want the rest of San Marcos to be more like the historic district!” 

But P&Z formed a subcommittee (with the mayor) and rewrote it. Here’s their new cover page:

(not really. Sorry, it’s a slow week.) 

The new version basically amounted to: “If you got a 30 year mortgage before 2015, you’re going to LOVE how nothing is changing! Sorry everyone else.”  

Lots of people got mad, myself included.

So it was a major hot potato when it got sent over to city council, in September 2023.  

Council seemed like they were going to pass it, at the first two meetings. But at the third, they unexpectedly postponed and formed a subcommittee. The subcommittee decided to survey the community, to see how popular the P&Z changes were.  This was this past spring.  The survey results showed that the community was split. 

So since March, it’s been total radio silence.

This brings us to the present

The committee has hammered out a compromise position. They threw out some of the P&Z revisions, but also upheld a lot of them.

Two community members spoke during public comment: Gaby Moore and Diana Baker.  (Usually I don’t put private citizen names on the blog, but I think it’s instructive this time.)  What you need to know is that Moore is solidly in the camp of the original draft, and Baker is solidly in the camp of the P&Z revision. 

They both praised the new, committee version! This is kind of wild. I was prepared to hate the current draft, but it seems like the Council Committee managed to thread the needle and carve out a compromise position.  I don’t hate it!

Council still has to vote on it one more time, at the October 15th meeting. Then – after four long years – we might have a new comp plan.

…

Item 5:  The library is commissioning some stained glass windows:

(That’s a mock up on the right – it’s not made yet.)

But isn’t that going to be lovely? Everyone likes it.

Jane Hughson has a question: how come sometimes, Council allocates money for art and gets to see the design, and how come sometimes they allocate money without seeing the design?

Answer: It’s not one single process. There’s a dozen different processes, depending on where the artwork will be and who is funding it.

Jane: I’m really talking about the new mural on LBJ.  We didn’t preview the design for that one.

She means this one, as you’re heading from I-35 towards downtown:

Answer: [mumbo-jumbo about that specific funding process.]

Jane: Look, if I’d seen the design, I would have pointed out that there’s a bobcat, but there’s no rattler.  That’s a pretty big omission.  We should have had more eyes looking at the design so that someone would catch that.

She is totally right:

It is totally gorgeous! But it says “Welcome to the land of arrowheads, Texas State, Downtown, and the River, and that about sums up San Marcos!”

It should have had a rattler, and probably also some nod to Hispanic culture. Maybe on the far left, near the purple flowers.

…

Item 6: Quail Creek

Back in 2022, we bought this: 

That is Quail Creek Park.

Located here:

It used to be Quail Creek Country Club:

But the golfers of yore have all wandered off to graze in greener pastures. Golf on, my preppy brothers! Golf with the wind.

Anyway!

Now we’re hiring some engineers to draft some plans for what we might do with it. There will be lots of opportunities for community input, etc.

Mark Gleason: It would be nice to have some trails and connectivity! It’s actually very close to Walmart.

This is a great point. In other words, Quail Creek is a total pain in the ass to drive to:

But it’s not actually so far if you could bike:

Staff replied: TWINSIES! We have been thinking the same thing.

San Marcos is so carved up by rivers and railroad tracks. Both are hard for cars, but easier for bikes. Once this place gets path-connected, bikers will be able to really sail around town.

Item 15: We’re filling vacancies for three committees:
– Animal Shelter Advisory Committee
– Citizen Utility Advisory Board
– Parks and Rec Advisory Board

Last meeting, they had one applicant for the Animal Shelter committee, but they wouldn’t put that person on the committee because they’d only lived in San Marcos for two months. (I scolded Matthew Mendoza and Jane Hughson for being unwelcoming.)

They postponed so that more people could apply.

So we’re back tonight! And… no one new applied. They were in the exact same situation with the same applicant, all over again. Alyssa pointed out that the “two months” was written back in June. Now that it’s October, they’ve actually been here six months.

But Jane argues that this person hadn’t written anything about why they wanted to save the pups.

The thing is, this is the prompt on the application:

This applicant checked off three possible commissions they would be willing to serve on. So they answered that questions generally: “I want to serve the community, etc.” They didn’t give three separate answers, for each possible commission.

(Furthermore, I’ve never ever seen council nitpick the answers that people give on the application form. This is a weird time to get out the microscope.)

Anyway! It turns out they ALSO only had one applicant for the Utility Advisory board. And this person also didn’t give any detail. So in the name of fairness, they kicked both of these vacancies down the road. (I still disapprove! Give these people a chance unless you have an actual reason to look askance at them.)

If YOU would like to be on a board or commission – or the future City Hall Steering Committee – you can apply here. It’s pretty short and not too painful.

Parks and Rec has a new board member, though. That vacancy got filled.