Big long meeting this week! All the details on the Tantra saga, a lot on housing, and a little on Five Mile Dam, parking tickets, water towers, and deer. And more. A lot going on here!
Seven hours of meetings and workshops! Let’s dig in.
The 6 pm meeting: Hours 0:00 – 3:21: All the exciting details about how Tantra got its groove back. Hours 3:21 – 5:07: Low-income housing, Covid money, parking tickets, Five Mile Dam, some deer, and more!
Bonus! 3 pm workshops: GUYS. Guys. These were so interesting, I can’t stand it. I am being 100% sincere here. Part 1: Rent-by-the-Bedroom corporations are the worst! Part 2: Low-income Housing in San Marcos. Are we spending too much money on them??? (no.)
Say, if you’re like me…
You might be feeling a little vertigo and panic over the looming threat of mass deportations?
If so, let’s channel that energy! Here’s a list of organizations that can use your time and/or money, and are already planning how to best protect immigrants and refugees.
Local to San Marcos:
Mano Amiga is our homegrown organization. They are accepting donations, and will be able to use volunteers in mid-December. (Or they’ll send you to volunteer with a partnering organization.)
Regional Austin-San Antonio:
American Gateways: Their mission is “To champion the dignity and human rights of immigrants, refugees, and survivors of persecution, torture, conflict, and human trafficking through exceptional immigration legal services at no or low cost, education and advocacy.”
RAICES: From their website: “WE defend the rights of immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking people and families, empower communities, and advocate for liberty and justice.”
Texas Civil Rights Project: Has a specific Beyond Borders program, “From the banks of the Río Grande to the plains of rural Texas, we envision a border state that respects the right to migrate and supports human dignity for all people, no exceptions.”
Texas Immigration Law Council: “We work across the political spectrum to bring together diverse voices to catalyze consensus on practical immigration solutions for Texas and our nation.”
….
Final note: All of these came recommended to me. If I’ve left something off, let me know and I’ll add it on!
Live music at Tantra Coffee Shop. P&Z killed their live music back in September. The community is livid! We’ll hash it out in Item 9, below.
One speaker talks about deer. (Item 17, at the end of the meeting.) – Urban deer are responsible for more deaths than any other animal. – In 2010, Council thought hard about this, and decided to do nothing. Now we’ve got an even bigger problem. – Also, stop feeding the deer, even though they’re cutie-patooties, with their big eyes and spritely tails.
November 10th, in Rio Vista. Two speakers talk about this. – Apparently there was a violent dispute, and a shot was fired, and the cops were called. The guy with the gun left the scene. – The cops showed up with 8 cop cars, SWAT teams, set off 6 flash bombs from neighbor’s yard, blared megaphones, and generally acted like the circus-military was setting up camp in Rio Vista for a night of revelry, from midnight to 3 am. – The suspect was not at home, this entire time. – This police response did not make the speakers feel safer, whatsoever. It felt like an untrained, reckless mess.
4. At the 3 pm workshops, Virginia Parker talked about Cape’s Dam. She is the director of the San Marcos River Foundation, aka SMRF. (Cape’s Dam explainer here. Warning: I wrote that when I was a baby blogger. I did my best.)
Here’s what Virginia Parker says: SMRF owns the high bank at Cape’s Dam. For ten years, SMRF has been saying that removal of the dam is the best thing for the environment. The city has been dragging their feet, and saying they’re going to hire a project manager to run a feasibility study on rebuilding the dam. There’s no money to hire this person. This study is not coming anytime soon.
Virginia Parker says: Cut the bullshit. (My words. She is far more polite about it.) SMRF will never agree to rebuilding the dam, and they own the high bank. The city would have to take it under eminent domain.
So (she says): Dissolve the agreement with the county. Reallocate the money. Dams are not safe – a teenager just lost his life there recently.
Plus, there are federal grants available for dam removal. It’s free. It’s the fastest and cheapest way to deal with this situation.
Back in September, Tantra went to renew their alcohol permit. This is where our story starts – at that Planning and Zoning meeting.
The P&Z Meeting: September 24th
There was one speaker (LMC) who was mad about the music. “They’re blasting profanities and obscenities into the HEB parking lot!!” She’s called the cops on them two or three times, but nothing ever came of it. Because there was no actual violation taking place.
Now, LMC talks at almost every meeting. She’s prolific. P&Z and Council are used to taking her comments in stride.
But P&Z kicked things off with guns blazing. Jim Garber had a well-prepared speech. First he compares the decibel levels allowed at a bunch of other towns, but he mostly cherry-picks residential areas. (More on this below.)
This is the most absurd part of the speech, and I’m quoting verbatim here:
“Frank Sinatra tells us that New York City is the city that doesn’t sleep at night. He’s wrong. Because in residential areas, in various boroughs, [the noise cap] varies in daytime 45-55 decibels. We allow 85. At night, 35-45. So New York does sleep at night! The city that doesn’t sleep at night is San Marcos! You experience more noise in downtown San Marcos than you will in New York City. Something to think about.”
New York City is not remotely parallel to live music at Tantra, with the occasional naughty word floating over to HEB.
Garber wraps up his speech with the 60 decibel limit for Tantra. There’s one single other comment from a P&Z commissioner, about how un-family-friendly it is to have vulgar music blasting into a grocery store.
The owner of Tantra is attending the meeting! He’s there on the zoom! But no one asks him a question, so he can’t say anything.
The P&Z vote is unanimous: Tantra’s alcohol permit comes with a 60 decibel cap.
The whole discussion takes just over five minutes.
How bad is 60 decibels?
The problem is that 60 decibels is actually very quiet:
So P&Z has effectively killed live music at Tantra with this decision.
So Tantra appealed P&Z’s decision at City Council this week.
The stakes are high! It takes 6 votes to overturn a P&Z decision.
First off, Council is absolutely flooded with emails and speakers. They got over 200 emails. Between Citizen Comment and the public hearing, there are over 50 people speaking in person. The major themes are “This place is community. This place is love. This place makes me happy when life gets hard.” It’s a pretty amazing testimony.
Everyone’s favorite speaker is a kid who plays the harmonica for council, and explains that they’ll be playing at Tantra on Friday, because Tantra is the only family-friendly music establishment that allows kids to perform. It was adorable.
My favorite written comment – hilarious, but maybe less adorable:
I love a straight-talker. I laughed.
Basically, Council listens to 2.5 hours of people pleading them not to kill their happy place.
Several people have decibel readers with them, and point out that this very city council meeting has ranged from about 70-90 decibels!
(Staff also provided this corrective to the specific noise ordinances mentioned at P&Z:
So San Marcos is not an outlier.)
Council discussion
Right off the bat, it’s clear that it’s going to be reversed. No one is defending the ridiculous 60 decibel cap.
Mark Gleason proposes:
1 year permit instead of a 3 year permit
75 decibels after 7 pm on Sundays
No one goes for either of these propositions.
Amanda Rodriguez – our new, shiny councilmember! – asks about getting the owner reimbursed for the $750 appeals fee. Everyone is on board with this, but it’s a whole process. So yes, but not tonight.
Both Alyssa Garza and Mark Gleason say, “This is why the community has to show up at P&Z meetings!”
I think that’s wrong! This should have been an easy case at P&Z. It would be exhausting if you had to rally all your clientele every time an ordinary alcohol permit needed to be renewed. Tantra was in good standing and had not violated any conditions of their permit.
Really, P&Z made a mangled mess of this permit. No one could have seen this coming. They should have spent more than five minutes on this discussion (and perhaps staff should have encouraged them to postpone when they felt it was going off the rails.)
THE VOTE TO REVERSE THE DECIBEL BAN:
Council knows which side its bread is buttered on.
Finally, let’s talk about swear words.
Some band was playing Rage Against the Machine songs on a Sunday night. There was profanity. You could hear it at HEB.
But listen: Can we stop pretending that bad words make little childrens’ ears bleed?
You can say a really kind, nice sentence with the word “shit” in it, and you can cruelly eviscerate someone without using any bad words at all. The absolute deference that this country pays to naughty words is mind-boggling.
One last nerdy note:
Decibels are a logarithmic scale. If you increase by ten units, you’ve multiplied the sound by a factor of 10. So Garber’s proposal to go from 85 db to 60 db was gigantic: he actually scaled the cap by 1/500th.
If he had only dropped the cap to 82 db, he could have cut the sound in half, without anyone being the wiser. (Nice chart here.)
It’s for senior citizens. Right around the corner from Target.
How affordable will these units be? The developer agreed to set aside a certain number of affordable units:
AMI means the Austin Area Median Income. So 30% AMI means your family’s yearly income is 30% of the median Austin income. But the Austin median income is $86K, whereas the San Marcos median household income is $47K.
So the categories are a little weird. Those 188 units at 51-60% AMI? That’s low income for Austin, but pretty normal for San Marcos.
….
The developer is back, and wants permission to change some things. First, they want to loosen the ranges of incomes:
So he wants to take the 188 units for families earning $63-$75K, and spread them out for incomes earning $63K-$100K.
Side note: You can live in an apartment intended for a higher income than yours. However, you would not get a fully reduced rent:
The guy also changed his mind on BBQ grills and picnic tables, due to space concerns. He wants to swap them out for two horseshoe pits.
Jane, Alyssa, and Amanda are all not happy about this.
The developer says he’s got a market study. There’s just not demand for the under 60% AMI group! If he can extend to the 80% range, he’ll be able to find more residents.
Jane is open to this, but she doesn’t like the unspecified numbers. She proposes this:
0-30% AMI: 34 units 51-60% AMI: 86 units 61-80 % AMI: 102 units
Her reasoning goes like this: Seniors get a yearly 3% cost of living increase on Social Security. If you were earning 60% AMI and you get that bump, you could get priced out. Suddenly you’re making 61% of the AMI. You don’t qualify for your apartment anymore. If there’s not a tier above you, you have to pay market rate, or move.
Alyssa and Amanda call bullshit on the whole market study. (ME TOO.) It just doesn’t pass the sniff test that San Marcos has run out of families earning less than $75K, and you have to subsidize families earning up to $100K. Our median household income is $47K, for pete’s sake!
The developer does not have the actual market study on hand, to show council.
Amanda calls him out on this: Does this market study even reflect the people we’re trying to help? We don’t know, because we haven’t seen it.
The vote on Jane’s amendment: (86 units under 60%, 102 units under 80%)
Yes: Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzales, Mark Gleason No: Alyssa Garza, Amanda Rodriguez
But!! It takes four votes to pass. Since Matthew and Shane are absent, this fails.
The developer pleads that it’s not a complete blank check! The subsidized apartments still have to average out to 60%!
The final vote:
Should the developer get to split up the Under 60% category however he wants?
Sorry, dude!
…
Item 7: We’re down to the final dregs of Covid money.
Alyssa Garza basically chewed everyone out for never, ever prioritizing rental assistance. I mean, she was nice about it. But she has said this one million times.
And lo! They made it work! New funding plan:
Staff thinks we can give this rental assistance out with fewer strings attached than CDBG money. This is very good, too.
…
Item 12: Getting ticketed at the Lion’s Club.
Paid Parking is coming next summer to the City Park parking lot. (Ie the Lions Club parking lot.) Instead of paying someone to write tickets, they want to use cameras and mail the tickets out.
Some extra details:
The lot will free for San Marcos residents, but you have to go online and sign up somehow.
If you pay within 14 days, you get a discount.
Council asks good questions:
Amanda: How does the 14 days work? From the day of the ticket? What if they’ve got some situation and their mail isn’t coming promptly? Answer: We could change that. What about if it’s 14 days from when the ticket arrives at the house? Amanda: ?? How would you know? Let’s just make it 30 days.
Saul: Is there a warrant if this isn’t paid? Answer: San Marcos parking tickets are a civil offense, so no. Hays County, though: those are criminal offenses. They’ll getcha.
Amanda: What happens if someone’s car breaks down? Answer: There is an appeals process.
Amanda: What’s the resident registry process like? Answer: It’s online. We are also going to do some library outreach to help people sign up.
Alyssa: I can’t actually find the appeals process online. Answer: Yep. We’re going to put the link on the actual citation that you get in the mail.
The vote: 5-0
…
Item 13: NEW FIRE TRUCK!
We’re getting an ERV010 Star Side Mount Pumper Truck with a 500-gallon tank and 1500 GPM pump.
The soccer fields opened in 2010. They’re owned by the county, but maintained by the city. So the city pays for the lighting, playground, sprinklers, etc.
This photo makes it look like maybe the sprinklers aren’t working? Idk.
Surge Soccer uses the fields for free. (Surge used to be called SMAYSO, changed their name, missed their opportunity to call themselves Smoccer.) This helps keep prices cheap for San Marcos families. Surge is good about this.
…
Hays County is selling us the Five Mile Dam parks. But Hays County doesn’t actually care about the soccer fields.
So these three properties are a package deal. You want the soccer fields? You have to take Dudley Johnson and Randall Wade Vetter.
How much is Hays charging us?
Zero! It’s free! Wow, they must really want to get rid of those parks.
The last dam report was in 2016, and at that point, the dam was in good condition. And the county will help with maintenance on the parks for the next year.
Is this good for us?
Yes. We want those soccer fields, or else Surge Soccer won’t stay cheap for local kids.
The danger is that Kyle or some private company would buy the fields. They can make a lot of money renting them out. But it would end Surge soccer. Or at least, the affordable, community-focused version of Surge.
Soccer is the biggest youth sport in San Marcos, by far. It’s important to secure these fields.
Council votes unanimously for this deal.
….
Item 16: Blanco Vista Water Tower
Same neighborhood as Five Mile Dam! They’re getting a water tower, as part of all this ARWA stuff. There is $50K in the ARWA budget set aside to paint the water towers.
How would we like to paint it?
Here’s what our other towers look like:
Here’s what some neighbors do:
Here’s what some fancier cities do:
We could either keep it simple, or pay $100K+ to go all out.
Council: keep it simple.
…
Item 17: The Deer
Deer are a big problem. Mostly they cause a lot of car crashes, but they can also get impaled on your fences. (Ewwwwww.)
A speaker came from Texas Parks & Wildlife, and talked to the neighborhood commission. Basically, the first step is to get people to stop feeding the deer.
Should we ban feeding the deer?
Pros: deer are a big problem.
Cons: have you seen how cute they are, with their big eyes and fluffy tails???
The Neighborhood Commission decides on an education campaign, instead of an outright ban, because of all those people who love the big-eyed-fluffy-tailed-deer.
What does Council think?
MARK GLEASON HAS VERY STRONG FEELINGS!
First, even if you ban feeding, it won’t help. Too much available food.
Deer have no natural predators.
You must hunt! Open up the parks to hunting!
We could make a whole weekend of it! Have drawn hunts!
The problem is that Mark is bringing a huge energy here – It must be discussed! It works! Cutting people off. It’s the only thing that works! – and everyone is a little taken aback.
Jane: They’ve been hunting on my land for 20 years, and it doesn’t keep the deer away.
Mark: IT WORKS! You just need to hunt a few. After a few generations, the mothers keep their babies away!
Alyssa: I dunno, doesn’t work on my dad’s ranch either.
Eventually Jane shushes him, and everyone goes back to talking about corn.
Don’t feed the deer, everyone, but really don’t feed them corn.
…
Item 18: Animal Shelter Vacancy
We finally got it filled. The new person talks about how much they love animals, and how they’ve fostered and volunteered before.
(I still have a lingering weird feeling about the other person who was jerked around by Council for months, but this person seems fine.)
Council approved it, but vowed to look at the predatory leasing practices and see what could be done. So here we are!
For what it’s worth, I think Council handled this correctly. – We need physical housing to be built. – We need landlord reform.
You shouldn’t hold the former hostage in order to accomplish the second, but the second is also urgently needed.
…
So let’s dive in! The speaker was Shannon Fitzpatrick (and these are her slides). She’s been a lawyer for Texas State, working with students, for the past 25 years or so. (Go listen here! I’m not doing it justice. It’s so interesting.)
Here’s what we’re basically comparing:
This part isn’t that bad. A student might not want to be on the hook for their roommates’ share of the rent.
Installment Contracts
This is where things start to get sleazy:
First, this “installments” contract.
The point is that it’s a different legal concept than a regular lease. This lets landlords skip out on the state laws that protect renters. And listen: Texas barely has any renter protections, so if you’re finding ways to cheat those, you are seriously trying to slumlord your way to profit.
Okay, so this installments contract. The basic idea is that you could sign a contract for $11,400, and then they break it into 12 monthly payments.
They show up on campus in October, and sell students hard on these apartments:
They’re going fast! You’re not going to have a place to live next year!
Your mom will be so proud that you’re making a grown up decision by yourself!
No security deposit if you sign right now! (We’ll come back to this.)
So the kid flips through some pages (OF A 60 PAGE LEASE!) and signs.
Already, things are rotten and different than normal:
In general, you have to qualify to lease an apartment. If your income is too low to qualify, or your guarantor’s (parent, aunt, etc) income is too low to qualify, then you can’t rent the apartment.
BUT HERE, YOU’VE ALREADY SIGNED! So you can’t live there and you still owe $11K!
Next: regular leases have a “mitigation” clause. If you break your lease, you have to cover the rent until they re-rent the apartment. The landlord has to attempt to rent out the apartment.
Installment contracts do not have this clause. You break your lease, the company still gets their $11k. They can re-rent the apartment, and now they’re getting another $11K for the same room.
Also: They don’t pro-rate partial months. So you would owe rent on August 1st, even if you can’t move in until August 20th.
Next: “As-Is” Clauses
So the kid signed the lease in October.
Usually when you sign a lease, you look at the apartment. You say things like, “Are there any apartments on the second or third floor?” The leaser says, “Sure” and shows you one. You say something like, “Nah, I don’t want to be this close to the dumpster, I’ll go with the first floor apartment, after all.”
The point is that you’ve seen the actual apartment, and you know if it has mushrooms sprouting in the closets.
“As-is” clauses mean “You get the apartment in its current state, not in a pristine state.” But those are only valid if the tenant can inspect the premises. Since these kids are signing in October without seeing the actual apartment, they’ve signed all kinds of rights away.
They show up in August, see the mold, mushrooms, broken furniture, broken locks, etc, and they have no recourse. They’re not able to request a different apartment, because of the “as-is” clause.
Security Deposits
“Sign now and we’ll waive your Security Deposit! You’d be a fool not to sign!” – me, pretending to be a sleazy landlord.
So this is another scam. They waive the security deposit, and tenants lose some rights. Texas has specific laws that state that if you put down a security deposit, you’re entitled to some protections.
For example, you lose your right to a 30-day move out inspection. So they can come after you for up to four years for damages to your apartment. And they sometimes do! The speaker said that what happens is these complexes get sold every three or four years. Sometimes the new owners look at the past few years of tenants and shake them down for damages.
Also: #notallcollegekids but some college kids are little shits. Since they didn’t pay a security deposit, they don’t think they’re on the hook for damages. Chairs in the pool, trash the place, etc.
Roommate matching
In theory, this is fine. This is what happens in a conventional dorm.
But here, it’s done… maliciously? it’s pretty surreal. Here’s the understated tone from the speaker:
In practice it means that they don’t give a shit if you have allergies and the roommate has a cat, or if you are a quiet person and the roommate throws keggers.
But then it gets worse!
You can’t move to a different apartment if you need to. She told a story of a kid who found his roommate, killed, gory, awful, in the living room. They made him stay in that unit.
You can be moved even if you don’t want to! You dared to complain? Fine, you’re being moved. Pack up.
The companies are generally retaliatory and vindictive. You called us in for having cockroaches? We’re going to try to charge you for fumigating the building. Etc.
Just straight up being illegal:
For example:
Legally, they have to tell tenants who the owner is. But they don’t.
The very few protections that Texas law does offer, they can just skip out on doing them. Nobody holds them accountable. (Of course, this applies to all of San Marcos rentals! Not just students!)
What about the rest of San Marcos?
It is really important that we don’t limit this to college students! All renters need protections. San Marcos is mostly renters!
Many, many landlords are vindictive and retaliatory, or don’t provide a safe, clean environment. There’s a huge power imbalance between landlords and tenants. Tenants get exploited.
So what can be done?
Here’s what the speaker suggests:
and
The city lawyer is quick to mention that these are all uncharted territory. Most cities are not in this situation. We can research and explore these ideas further, but there’s not much in the way of precedents.
Council also discusses:
Capping security deposits so they don’t get exploitative
Publishing a list of complexes and grade them, based on complaints to Code Compliance
Making a central complaint spot, where tenants can then get directed to one of the legal aid resources or code compliance, or whatever
Requiring three months notice before forcing someone to move, or forcing companies to give choices (break your lease, stay, or move to this other unit)
Hence this workshop! Let’s find out if we can afford to help vulnerable residents. (Spoiler: we can.)
More Background:
San Marcos is booming!
So we’ll end up somewhere between the purple and the orange, most likely.
You can look at it this way:
The blue parts are our new sprawl.
San Marcos has a good employment rate, but high poverty rate:
This means that our jobs are not good jobs. The cure for this is raising the minimum wage. (Raising the minimum wage does not cause inflation. Paying a living wage turns a bad job into a good one!)
Anyway!
Here’s where the jobs are:
This is fascinating:
In other words:
Only 6700 of us actually live and work in San Marcos
18K of us live in San Marcos, but we work outside of town.
28K people commute into San Marcos, but live elsewhere.
In my humble opinion, this is two things:
people who live here can’t find good jobs here, and
the University has good jobs, but parents who work for Tx state are scared of SMCISD for problematic reasons. (I have lots of opinions on that. Support SMCISD!)
Anyway, those are my own conclusions. City staff did not lob those accusations.
…
So are LIHTC projects breaking our budget?
The city gets both sales tax and property tax.
When it comes to property tax, there’s a lot of tax-exempt property:
So some LIHTC projects don’t pay city taxes, but neither does city land, Texas State land, SMCISD, County land, Churches, Housing Authority, and others.
(One difference is that most of those are nonprofits. LIHTC developments aren’t necessarily nonprofits.)
So how bad is the dent in our budget??
Not very bad!
You are allowed to ask for a lump sum payout. (Payment In Lieu of Taxes = PILOT). So we do this sometimes:
LIHTC apartments are still full of people, so you still have some fire and SMPD costs. But not particularly different than any other apartment complex.
In general, apartments are much cheaper infrastructure for the city than single family housing.
This is a great illustration of why:
I want to love this graphic, but I can’t. The scale is all off.
A 3-4 story apartment building is about 20-30 units per acre. The diagram on the left should be 7-10 acres.
Single Family (ND-3/CD-3) are things like town homes and smaller lots – at most 10 units per acre. So that middle diagram is 20 acres big.
Single Family (SF-6/SF-4.5) are big traditional lots – at most 7 houses per acre. So that right hand diagram is over 28 acres big. That’s three times as big as the one on the left!
Fixed it:
(I am so smug and insufferable. It’s a miracle you all put up with me.)
Anyway: there are also some city costs for things like libraries and transit. Same as for any residents.
…
How much need is there in San Marcos?
More than elsewhere:
…
Onto the state requirements for their tax credits.
The state organization is TDHCA. (Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs.)
They care about:
Location. You can’t put your low income housing in a crappy location.
Clustering – you can’t put them too close together
Flood plain – nope
They must have at least 15 hours each week of an after-school learning center
They must supply a shuttle if they’re not on a bus route
San Marcos does not get those reports, currently. It would be nice if we did.
…
If you’ll recall, we did a big Housing Needs Assessment back in 2019, and came up with a housing plan to work on housing affordability. This is great! And…. council then buried it six feet underground.
Housing affordability has not been a major priority of this council for the past five years. (Except Alyssa Garza.) In the budget we passed in October – two months ago! – our Strategic Plan Goals were:
None of those are affordable housing.
Council did not care until this election cycle, when it became clear that you could lose your election if you didn’t hear the clamor for affordable housing. It was suddenly the #1 issue.
Anyway: We’re finally doing it, five years late. The first step is updating the data for the Housing Needs Assessment, which is almost ten years out of date.
Listen: this workshop was fascinating, and councilmembers asked good questions. I’m not doing it justice. But it was a 5 hour meeting and a 2 hour workshop, and your poor little marxist is tired.
Hoo-boy. We’ve had a big election and a little council meeting. Let’s dig in.
The Little Meeting: It was only 50 minutes long.
Hours 0:00 – 0:50: Parking bans by the river, the new HEB, and more.
Bonus! 3 pm workshops: We’ve got $250K of Covid money left, and time is running out.
The Big Election:
Nationally: I’ve got the same grim despair as you do. There are a lot of people whose lives will be harder, sicker, poorer, and more abused because of this shit-for-brains president-elect.
I feel hopeless, but not helpless. American voters have revealed what they are, but there’s still work to be done. So as shitty as it is out there, we can compartmentalize and work on San Marcos.
Onto the local scene:
Mayor: As you’ve probably heard, Jane Hughson won re-election. This will be her 4th term – she’s won in 2018, 2020, 2022, and now in 2024. This means she’s term-limited, and the mayor will be an open seat in 2026.
Place 6: Amanda Rodriguez won Place 6! I’m so glad. We’re starting to get a progressive bloc up there that can actually win votes.
Place 5: Lorenzo Gonzalez and Roland Saucedo are headed to a run-off. Here’s how it shook out:
That is extremely close. All you can conclude is: – Lorenzo did a little better than the rest, and Atom did a little worse. – Roland got a little lucky. and Griffin got a little unlucky.
I’m backing Lorenzo Gonzalez in the run-off election! His main message has been to be available and responsive to people, redirect more money towards mental health, and focus on housing.
Listen: After I posted my candidate write-up, people came out of the woodwork to warn me that Roland Saucedo is super problematic. The formal documentation is limited – mostly this and this – but sufficiently many people are telling me a consistent story about his disregard for others. It’s troubling.
If you ever wanted your vote to count extra, a local runoff election is your sweet spot. Barely anyone will show up, and it can easily be decided by 50 votes. Or 15 votes. Or even 5!
Just one citizen comment, from a community member about the Dunbar Heritage buildings that are under renovation.
…
Item 12: The good people of Riverside Drive want to ban parking on their street.
The issue is that the street fills up with river-goers in the summer. Since there is not enough proper parking around the falls, people park on Riverside Drive during the summer, and walk over.
Look, I’m not in a great mood. I didn’t like it last month on Sturgeon, and I don’t like it now.
This is exclusionary. The street does not belong to you.
It’s counter-productive! Street parking is a traffic-calming measure. It makes drivers go more slowly, instead of tearing through your neighborhood at 40 mph.
I might be sympathetic if local residents did not have driveways, and were forced to park away from their houses and walk to get home. But that is not what is happening. The residents of this street put out orange traffic cones to block river-users from parking in front of their houses. They’re not putting their own cars out on the street.
The parking ban is year round. (Holidays and weekends.) There is no reason for the ban to exist during the winter. Does it matter? No, but it’s overreach.
Living near the river is a privilege. The streets belong to the public, and that includes those who want to visit the river. I’m just not in the mood for territoriality and exclusion at the moment.
The Vote:
Yes, parking bans are great: everybody No, parking bans are the worst: nobody
Oh well. At least I can rant on the blog.
…
Item 4: The new HEB.
Everyone cheered and quickly voted on this, in about 30 seconds.
Those seven alleys with names in white are getting officially named.
The remaining alleys are driving Jane crazy. She wants to pair them up with movies or anything, and get them named. No one else seems to be in that big a hurry.
…
Item 14: Municipal Court
I guess we’re getting a new spot for our municipal court?
I don’t know if this is where the public will go for court, or if it’s administrative type stuff.
Here’s the building, according to Google Maps:
We signed a 20 year lease.
…
Item 17: River Bridge Ranch is this giant future subdivision:
It’s located here:
(That bit above is actually two closely related developments: River Bend Ranch and River Bridge Ranch. But the details are murky to me.)
This development makes me cranky:
In 2022, they wanted to put an industrial plant on the southern corner, which would have required an insane cut-and-fill. This would have increased flooding in Redwood. Huge numbers of residents from Redwood turned out to argue against it, given the flooding and infrastructure. The permit was denied.
Originally, River Bridge Ranch was approved to be both housing and commerce. After all, it’s huge! And we have this long-standing issue where there isn’t any commerce on the east. They waited for a polite amount of time to pass. Then they came back and asked if Council would just forget about the pesky commerce bit.
Council said “You betcha! This way you’ll make more money!” And lo, no more commerce.
This meeting, Council forms a subcommittee on it: Saul Gonzales, Matthew Mendoza, and Jane Hughson.
So this means it’s going to be coming back around again. Fingers crossed!
…
Items 16 and 18: The New City Hall
We’re designing a new city hall.
Council has this grand idea that the new city hall should replace the dog park and skate park, and the current location should be housing:
I am not convinced! Why should we develop our parks? Why not re-build where you are?
Anyway, Council appointed a 23-person steering committee: – The mayor and two councilmembers – These groups all get to pick a member: P&Z, Library, Downtown Association, River Foundation, University representative, Chamber of Commerce – Each councilmember picked two community members. In total there are 23 people.
SO! After multiple meetings and lots of discussion, what did the DEI Coordinator say about the end result? Did we achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion? Moment of truth!
…Nothing. The DEI coordinator wasn’t there. Status quo was upheld.
This would have been the moment to verify that “business as usual” had produced a diverse committee that matches San Marcos. We did not verify this!
We got $18 million dollars from the federal government during Covid. This is called ARPA money. It all has to be obligated by December 31st, 2024. Not spent, but under contract.
Here’s how we spent our ARPA money:
Some of the projects have come in under budget:
The can ban came in $89K under budget?! But… but we didn’t get rid of the cans…
Anyway, we’ve rounded up all the scraps and put them back in the pot to hand out.
(True story: my mom would collect all the slivers of bar soaps, and put them in a mesh bag to use as one big bag of bar soap. It’s gross! You should try it some time! The connection being that we are putting all the last little ARPA slivers into a mesh bag to use as one final ARPA slushfund.)
So what should we do with this last $246K?
Here’s what City staff recommends:
Every time this comes up, over the past four years, Alyssa Garza argues for direct aid to neighbors. We should use covid money on things like rental assistance, utility assistance, emergency grants for car repairs, etc. But somehow these things never materialize.
The conversation gets bogged down. – Is it because council doesn’t agree on the direction they give staff? – Is it because it’s very hard to implement these direct aid measures? – Is it because the federal restrictions make it really hard for residents to find all the correct paperwork and documentation?
It goes in circles for awhile.
Eventually Alyssa convinces everyone to try to redirect the Dunbar bathroom money towards emergency rental assistance. If staff can’t make that work, Plan B is still the Dunbar bathrooms. B is for Bathrooms.
The San Marxist 