Workshops were great this week. Per usual.
- Texas State University. What’s up with them?
This is new! I can’t ever recall someone from the university giving this kind of presentation before.
(That said, the speaker did not supply his slides to the city, and so all I could get were crappy screenshots of the interesting slides. )
Enrollment Growth
Uh, yeah. Sorry about the quality! I bet it looked great in person!
They’re projecting to grow from 40K to 50K students, but most of that is at the Round Rock campus and online.
The green line at the bottom is Round Rock. The blue line in the middle is San Marcos. The San Marcos campus is projected to grow from 37K to 40K over the next ten years.
Housing need
They’ve got about 10K beds on campus right now.
They’re going to need about 1500 more beds by 2027. They’re building more dorms to cover that.
Construction, etc:
The dark red are new buildings that are under construction or are planned.
The light orange are getting major renovations.
So they’re not really planning to acquire any more land. Aside from those red buildings, they’re mostly going to reconfigure existing buildings to handle more capacity.
Note: This is supposed to comfort city council. The city is mad that the university purchased two downtown apartment buildings, in order to convert them into dorms:
We talked about this last March, when council approved the new Lindsey Street apartments.
Texas State doesn’t pay local taxes. And downtown apartment buildings are worth a lot of money. So the problem is that when Texas State bought those buildings, San Marcos lost a lot of tax revenue.
On the super tiny map, I think they’re here:
Sanctuary Lofts is now called the Balcones Apartments and the Vistas is now called the Cypress Apartments.
Parking and transportation:
Light blue boxes might end up being parking garages. Bottom right is Thorpe Lane.
They’ve got 48 busses, 90,000 weekly ridership. It’s a pressure point for the university.
The plan is to merge the city and university bus system. This benefits San Marcos hugely. When the university started reporting their ridership to the feds, San Marcos got about $13 million in funding.
The speaker talks about having an app showing all busses, at any moment, all free for everyone in San Marcos. That sounds amazing!
Spring Lake:
There will be a lot more trails and improvements coming to Spring Lake:
but again, the slides are so murky. It’s hard for me to provide details.
Council questions:
Amanda: Is there any talk about capping growth at 40K?
Answer: That’s as much capacity as we can accommodate. But the regents want to grow all the universities to handle 60% of Texans by 2030. They tell us what they want, and they want to grow.
This is all taken from the next Master Plan, which will be approved in 2025.
Affordability: Recently, UT went free for families earning up to 100K. Can we do that?
Answer: Right now we’re free for families up to 50K. We’re asking to see if we can get funding to be free up to 100K, like UT. We expect that would be similar – 5-10% of our student body would fall in that 50K-100K range. (That is WILD. 85% of their student body comes from families making more than 100K?)
This plan has not been finalized yet. I think the master plan gets voted on next year.
Workshop #2:
Every four years, San Marcos has to review the City Charter.
Council will appoint seven people to the charter review commission. They only have six months to do a ton of work, because it has to be done in time for the fall election.
The community can also add charter amendments to the ballot, like when we outlawed fluoride in 2015. (We were RFK junior before RFK junior even had a brainworm.) Maybe we can undo that!
If you would like to be considered, they will be opening up for applications.
The San Marxist 