Hours 0:00 – 3:21, 11/19/24

Citizen comment:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

I totally agree! Listen to Virginia Parker!

Onto the meeting!

Item 9: Tantra Coffee Shop

You know you love Tantra:

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.”

You guys: no.  San Marcos is not louder than Manhattan.  I promise. New York is such a dense, stacked place that small noises quickly amplify.  So they have to control the noise output of things like air conditioners, ventilation, bars, construction sites, and garbage trucks.  You get this ambient background noise level, and then all other sounds ratchet up, in competition. 

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.)