Now we get into the weeds. These next five items are pulled from the Consent Agenda by Amanda Rodridguez. This means that Staff guessed that no one would want to discuss anything, and Amanda said, “Not so fast!”.
(Alyssa and Jane also pulled items, but just had a quick question on each one.)
The five items are:
– Mailing parking tickets directly to people
– New bathrooms at Dunbar park
– Covid money for mental health collaboration between SMPD and a mental health treatment center.
– SMPD buying seven new Tahoes for $350K
– SMPD applying for a grant to start a Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Unit
A few observations:
First, Amanda is thorough. Holy moly. She is reading everything with a fine tooth comb.
Second, what is Amanda’s point?
Her larger point is that these are the kinds of things we approve automatically. Taken together, these five items add up to $709K. (For perspective, keep in mind that we budget $550K yearly on social services.)
We just aren’t this generous – both in dollars and spirit – in other areas. Recall how it took Alyssa years of banging on about it to get $115K extra Covid money set up for emergency housing. Why is $350K for police cars so easy, and $115K for emergency housing so difficult? What Amanda is doing in these next five items is scrutinizing items that usually pass uninspected.
Honestly, I would vote in favor of all five items. I don’t actually think they are abusing city dollars.
It’s just that this level of generosity should be the standard, and it’s not. When it comes to my pet issues – homelessness, holding landlords accountable, transit, the parks department, etc – we should be as quick and gracious to fully fund them, as we are when it’s time to spend $350K on new police cars.
“BUT WAIT!” you cry, “We can’t afford to spend a million dollars all over the place like that! We’re broke!”
Gentle Reader: never forget that we spend $1.2 million on Kissing Tree each year. And it’s gated, and you’re not allowed in. Sorry.
….
Anyway! Onto the weedy details. Brace yourself.
Item 4: Mailing parking tickets
The parking lot next to the Lion’s Club is going to become a pay lot. Supposedly it’s going to be free for residents (but the details are murky). Out-of-towners will get their parking tickets mailed to them. (We discussed this last time.)
The first issue: In general, there’s an Early Bird discount – 50% off! – if you pay your tickets off early. You get 14 days to get the discount.
But if you’re mailing tickets out, you’d want to extend that window to account for the mail. Staff said 17 days. Amanda wants 30 days.
This is a little tricky because there’s also a late fee that kicks in at 30 days. Council decides to extend the Early Bird discount to 29 days on tickets-by-mail. The very next day, the late fee deadline will kick in.
Amanda Rodriguez has a number of other notes:
- She wants to fully fund the parks department, but not through fees and fines. (This is a big issue, nationwide. Map here showing that San Marcos is not a big offender, though.)
- There’s a bunch of murkiness in the policy language: operators versus car owner? Standing vs parking? Are robots writing tickets here?
They clean up the ordinance a little bit. Robots are only scanning license plates as you enter or exit the parking lot. The rest of tickets are being written by people, and the system mails them automatically.
You’re supposed to be allowed to load and unload for up to 30 minutes in this lot. But right now, the ordinance is ambiguous:
The Vote: Should we clean up language to allow for lawful loading and unloading?
Yes, of course: Jane, Amanda, Alyssa, Saul, and Mark
HELL NO! Ticket them to smithereens: Matthew Mendoza.
Okay Matthew, if you think that’s best.
…
Amanda’s next point: Paid parking for out-of-town residents reflects an “Us vs. them” mentality. We should welcome our visitors, not shake them down.
The counter argument to this is put forth by Mark Gleason and the city manager, Stephanie Reyes:
- San Marcos residents don’t use the river, because they’re too full of out-of-towners.
- The out-of-towners aren’t spending money in our downtown, or hotels, or restaurants. They pack in a cooler and leave town after they get out of the river.
- The parks and river are getting trashed and destroyed, and there’s a lot of drunken fights and medical problems. San Marcos is stuck paying for this unless we can collect some money from the out-of-towners.
Jane also has a good point: why is this ordinance so narrow? Right now, it’s only city park. Why not write it to include future paid parking lots? (This does not get fixed.)
More points from Amanda:
- This is 6 am – 11 pm every day. No free parking after 5 pm? Holidays or something?
- Registration process for San Marcos residents – how will that work? It’s supposed to be free for them.
Answer: there will be a big education campaign! We’ll hold events at the library.
Alyssa chimes in: San Marcos has a big problem with roll outs. How many people have microchipped their pets? How many people have signed up for the Enhanced ID at the library? How did the can ban PSA go?
All of those public information campaigns sounded great in paper, but in practice, we just don’t connect with people.
(Note: good public outreach is extremely time-intensive. It’s not enough just to translate everything into Spanish and promote things on social media. You basically need to maintain close and healthy relationships with a lot of community leaders who are in close contact with your hard-to-reach populations. What church does your population go to? What barbershop? Etc.)
Finally: This is just a pilot program. If Council wants to shut this down next year, there will be an opportunity.
As Parks and Rec director Jamie Lee Case says, “City Council will have a chance to decide if the juice is worth the squeeze.” She wins my most-favorite line of the night, hands down.
The final vote: Should we mail parking tickets from the City Park parking lot?
Amanda and Alyssa are both no, mostly due to lack of details on how the registration process will work.
I probably would have voted for it? It seems like a pretty cautious step.
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Note: The vast majority of conversation these days is between Alyssa Garza, Amanda Rodriguez, and Jane Hughson. Just because I’m a shit-stirrer and this made me laugh:
At 3:01: Shane Scott, Mark Gleason, and Matthew Mendoza are all clearly on their phones. I guess someone does not find the intricacies of parking violations as thrilling as I do? Talk about a violation of Municode Chapter 23.46, Section 3.0045, paragraph 8.243.
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Item 6: We’re spending some Covid money on installing new bathrooms at Dunbar.
Amanda Rodriguez is thorough. Like thorough.
She catches that the contract does not include baby changing tables nor little trashcans for used period products, and asks that those be added in.
Everyone agrees that this is a good idea.
….
Item 8: Oh, so confusing.
Here’s the caption:
But here’s what was originally posted, back in November:
The problem is that there’s no such thing as “the City Mental Health Court Program”. So they changed it on the agenda to SMPD. (Currently this is how the program works: SMPD mental health unit identifies people who need mental health or substance abuse treatment, and refers them out to Evoke Wellness for treatment. Then Evoke Wellness provides in-patient and out-patient substance abuse and mental health treatment.)
What Amanda brings up, though, is that there’s an entire contract in the packet between the City, the treatment center, and the non-existent City Mental Health Court Program.
No one seems to know what’s going on.
This gets postponed. However, this is Covid money, which expires on December 31st. So it absolutely has to get squared away at the next council meeting.
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Item 9: SMPD wants $371K to buy seven new shiny Chevy Tahoes.
Ideally they like to replace police cars every five years. But due to Covid shortages, these are more like 7-8 years old.
Amanda Rodriguez points out that plenty of people drive cars much longer than that.
Chief Standridge explains that the game is to optimize resale value. The Tahoes we’re selling are 7-8 years old, have about 80-85K miles on them, and about 6500 idle hours. (Reddit tells me each idle hour is equivalent to 25 miles driven.) If they wait any longer, repair costs go up and resale costs go down, and everyone gets bummed out.
Each car is $52K, plus each car gets its own fancy Police costume. Installing the costume on the Tahoe, inside and out, is about $20K per car.
Alyssa Garza follows up: SMPD officers use police cars to do their off-duty work. So they’re putting wear and tear on these cars. Can the private companies pay to offset the cost of the vehicles?
(Max Baker and Alyssa actually first brought this up back in 2021. )
Chief Standridge says he actually just met with someone about this just last month! Nothing happened. One of the off-duty employers is SMCISD, and we don’t want to spring it on them.
(I mean, it’s been over three years.)
They also say that we should be leasing SMPD vehicles instead of buying them. This is cheaper in the long run. But because of the tax shortfall this summer, we couldn’t budget for an ongoing expense, so we have to use special one-time money to purchase them.
The vote:
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I warned you that these items were weedy! There’s still one more to go.
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Item 14: Autocrimes Unit
SMPD is applying for a state grant for $177K. This would pay for establishing a Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Unit, with one full-time officer and a bunch of license plate cameras.
It’s not free – the city pays $35K in matching funds.
Amanda points out that there were 157 stolen cars last year. Out of 70,000 residents, that’s 2.2 vehicles per 1000 people. Her point is that this is inflated in people’s minds. Everyone acts like it’s a giant issue, but that’s actually fairly small.
Here are some other problems, for perspective:
- 27.7% of San Marcos residents live under the poverty line. That is 277 per 1000 people.
- I don’t know how many jobs pay minimum wage, but it is definitely more than 2.2 per 1000 people. We could raise the minimum wage.
- As of 2017, we needed almost 6000 more low-income housing units. Obviously housing prices have gone up, but let’s use the 6000: that works out to 85 units needed per 1000 people.
- The uninsured rate in San Marcos is 16.1%. That works out to 161 uninsured people per 1000 people.
Chief Standridge is a hard no on any mitigating context! He wants zero crime!
Amanda grills him on the value of education, and why is it deprioritized in this grant application?
Chief Standridge argues that they do tons of other education! Also, out-of-towners come in to take cars. We can’t educate out-of-towners. Education is only one piece of the larger approach.
Mark Gleason is furious. This is an epidemic! There is a 50% increase in stolen vehicles from 2023 to 2024! These stolen vehicles get used for crimes!
Mark and Amanda have an angry exchange. If you want to listen, it goes from 4:30:49 – 4:34:15.
Mark is furious that others aren’t taking car theft seriously. He sees a stolen car as derailing someone’s livelihood, and he’s furious that Amanda is challenging Chief Standridge’s plan to reduce this epidemic.
Amanda is furious that we don’t take other problems as seriously as we take car theft. Yes, it’s super shitty if your car gets stolen. But here we are, prepared to drop $35K to match a grant without any discussion, and we don’t apply this same eagerness and dollar amounts to issues that affect a lot more people. As policy makers, council’s job is to figure out how to compare apples and oranges and apply some consistency across many different issues. Right now it’s wildly inconsistent.
Alyssa and Matthew Mendoza also get snippy with each other – if you want to listen, it’s at 4:29-4:30.
Saul doesn’t get snippy with anyone! But he does ask: How do we pay for this two years from now, when the grant runs out?
Answer: It’s a recurring grant. We expect to get it again.
The vote:
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Phew! That’s it for the items pulled from the consent agenda.
…
The rest of the meeting is extremely short.
Item 24: Tantra is going to get reimbursed the $750 fee for appealing the noise violation. Yay!
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Item 25: Right now each councilmember gets $12K to travel to conferences.
Shane Scott wants to double this to $24K. City Manager Stephanie Reyes gets a little faint at the notion of magically locating $84K extra dollars in the budget for this.
This will come back around, with more details. Like do all the council members even spend all their money? Maybe they can share the pool a little bit amongst themselves.
The San Marxist 