Hours 0:00-2:25, 1/7/25

Citizen Comment:

Two issues dominate:

• The Human Services Advisory Board grant money. (HSAB)
• Demolition of a little blue building at 734 Valley Street

Let’s take these one at a time.

1. HSAB grants: These are San Marcos city grants to nonprofits. Back in December, there was a bit of a stand-off between councilmembers supporting Salvation Army and councilmembers supporting HOME Center. Yes, it’s totally weird to pit nonprofits against each other.

It was postponed without resolution. So people showed up to this meeting, to advocate for their nonprofit. By the numbers:

• Advocates for Salvation Army: 2 speakers
• Advocates for HOME Center: 9 speakers
• Nosotros la Gente, ACCEYSS, School Fuel: 1 each

The chair of HSAB (Yancy Arevalo) also spoke. She made the most important point: $550K is peanuts for social services.   There were over $1 million requested in the applications, and the need in the community is far greater than that. We need to be allocating far more money to this cause.

(She is exactly right. This is the heart of all these problems. We should not be pitting HOME Center against Salvation Army – we should be increasing the size of the pie.)  

If you want the most compelling speaker of the meeting, you want to listen to the man speaking at 17:48 here.  He is a formerly homeless man on the brink of death, who was helped by HOME Center and now is in a stable home. It’s really incredible.

2. The other big issue is the demolition of a house at 734 Valley Street.  

• A speaker from the Historical Preservation Commission (HPC) talks in favor of delaying the demolition
• The owner speaks against the delay
• A representative from the Calaboose Museum says, “Please don’t use our name as a reason to delay the ordinance. We are fine with whatever the owner wants to do.”

We’ll unpack all this when we get there.

One final comment worth noting from the 3 pm workshop:

3. At the workshop, Max Baker spoke about the San Marcos Civics Club: they’re putting together a Tenants Bill of Rights.

They want to collaborate widely on this, so if you’re interested, let them know. And they want Council to incorporate this into their upcoming Visioning sessions.

…

Item 12:  The HSAB Grant Money Saga

Brief background:

HSAB stands for Human Services Advisory Board.  This is a committee that meets weekly for four months, and scrutinizes nonprofits who are applying for grant money from the city. 

In December, council got the HSAB recommendations and started tinkering.  First, they moved $10K from ACCEYSS to Salvation Army.

Then Jane Hughson tried to move all of HOME Center’s funding away.  She reduced this to 75% of their funding.  This was the issue that blew up. 

The whole thing looked really, really bad.   It looked partisan. (Full details here.)

This meeting:

Jane drops her motion about changing HOME Center’s funding.  

She justifies the attempt like so: “I went back and watched the HSAB meetings. Originally Salvation Army was given $10K, and that was moved over to HOME Center since they were local.  My feeling is that our local chapter of Salvation Army is also local, so I wanted to move that back.”

Amanda responds:  “I also watched the meetings.  You’re oversimplifying what they said. They didn’t just give it to HOME Center because they’re local.  They noted that HOME Center has a 90% success rate and is one of the few organizations doing high quality longterm casework.”

There’s some more discussion, but things fizzle out pretty quick.   So the only amendment that stuck is the one from last meeting, to move $10K from ACCEYSS to Salvation Army.

There will be a discussion about the HSAB grant process in the future, where Council can do some more tinkering. It’s a work in progress.

…

I want to highlight one thing Amanda says (at 1:38, if you’re so inclined):

Amanda: If you want to get to the root, we – as a city – have created a system that relies on nonprofits to provide critical social services, right? We created that.

Jane: I don’t know that I agree that we created it, but I’ll agree that we have it.

Amanda: I mean, thank god someone’s doing it, to the level that they’re doing it. But I think all of the “thank yous”, the “we’ll work on the criteria”, and all of that – it’s really empty. One of the things that has been reiterated both in this meeting and in the previous one is that $550,000 was never going to be enough.  If so, if we really want to address the issue to its core, we know budget season is coming up.

I mean we’re about to – probably later in this meeting! – approve $684,000 for something probably with no discussion, no pushback. That to me is a shame. And so if we really want to address the issue, it needs more money. They need capital.

Jane interjects about Covid money – one year we were able to double the HSAB budget, but only because we could use Covid money.  

Amanda: That’s great. But we can find the money. We can find the money because we’ve found the money for so many other things. I don’t think it’s a plausibility issue. If we wanted to do it tomorrow, we could fund it. But it’s a matter of desire. 

All I’m saying is if we want to really address the issue, this is the conversation we should have in budget season. We should put our money where our mouths are.

(lightly edited for clarity)

I AM SO EXCITED!! This is my new battle cry: “$550,000 was never going to be enough.” Rally the troops, we’ve got budget season coming up!

The vote:

$550,000 WAS NEVER GOING TO BE ENOUGH!

…

Item 3: The lease with Ruben Becerra

Back again to talk about this cute little building!  

on LBJ, at the railroad tracks, across from Toma Taco.

Background:

Like we said last time, Council bought the property from Union Pacific in 2013, in order to maybe put a railstop there someday. 

Ruben Becerra owns the building, but not the land.  The building sits half on city land, and half on Union Pacific land.  It’s very confusing!

You can see the little building there – it’s half on red land (San Marcos) and half on blue land (Union Pacific Rail Road).

Last time, I wasn’t clear on the full backstory of why there is tension, but this time, city staff had a presentation that sheds some light on it:

Staff recommends tightening up the lease terms a bit:

In addition, Jane Hughson reads a carefully scripted main motion and amendment:

That is legalese for “We met behind closed doors and are scrupulously following the advice of our lawyer.”  

The vote: 

Lorenzo is our brand new councilmember!  The rumor mill generally holds that Lorenzo is Becerra’s candidate, in case you were looking askance at that vote.

But wait! There’s more!

The San Antonio Express-News has an article from Friday:

So Becerra might sue the city over this? That linked article has way more details than I was able to find, so you should trust them over me.

…

Item 5:  The SMPD shooting range

Here’s SMPD, located on I35:

SMPD has a shooting range. It was built in 1991.  

I’m guessing it is here?

because they described it as a sand berm, and when I zoom in, it looks like this:

Which looks like a sand berm to me!

Here’s what it looks like on the inside:

That was built in 1991. Back then, they needed to be able to shoot pistols at 25 yards.  

Since then, you now have to be able to shoot rifles at 50 yards. So officers were going offsite to shoot at ALERRT Shooting range at Texas State.  That is free, but it’s often busy. 

In 2021, they converted the SMPD range from 25 yards to 50 yards. They also put a roof overhead, to keep the sand from getting washed out and to prevent bits of projectiles from going all over the place. Great! 

But the roof also contained all the dust, which has a lot of lead in it, from the bullets. So it’s now super toxic.   Also, they have to mine the sand for the bullets every now and then, or else fragments start to bounce back at the officers.

So what’s the solution? 

Enter the Total Bullet Containment Trap by Action Target!

[Cue jaunty action music]

Basically you shoot into these deflection plates:

And then the bullets get trapped in that round drum on the right:

Plus there’s a whole HVAC thing to help control the toxic dust.

How much does this thing cost? 

The unit is  $643,800.00.  The total installation will be around $800K.  

So what’s the issue?

This item was on the consent agenda. This means no discussion was planned.  The only reason we’re discussing it is because Amanda requested that we pull this item off the Consent Agenda.

Remember how 15 people showed up to plead with Council on whether Salvation Army or HOME Center is more deserving of $10K?  And ten minutes later, we are green-lighting $643K for a bullet containment system.

It’s even worse than that: it’s already been approved. The whole $800K was buried in the CIP list that got approved in 2023.  There was a workshop in June of 2023, which covered the entire CIP list, and then the CIP list got approved in September 2023, along with the rest of the budget. Today is just authorizing the actual purchase.

It just happened automatically! There was literally never any discussion about this $800K, because of the sheer number of projects being addressed. No one single person is the bad guy – this is how systems operate on auto-pilot. But the outcome is unjust.

Look: officers should not be breathing lead-dust.  Of course we want them to be safe! The point is the contrast: we greenlight $800K for SMPD without noticing it, and wring our hands over $10K for the homeless.

[Council has some dull side conversations on whether or not the lead and brass can turn a profit, when scrapped for resale.]

Amanda makes her key point: This is her fourth meeting. Over those four meetings, we’ve spent $1 million on SMPD.  We can afford to double the HSAB budget – the money is there. We just have to choose to do so.  Even people who are paying attention – like herself! – had no idea that $800K got set aside for this TOTAL BULLET CONTAINMENT SYSTEM last summer. It just happens invisibly.

The vote:

C’mon, Lorenzo. I’m rooting for you here, but this isn’t knocking my socks off.