This is a big week! Malachi Williams, that weird Data Center thing you’ve heard about, and Council outlines their hopes and dreams for the next year. Like, how about a Crime Prevention office that is outside of SMPD and the incarceration system? And lots more! It’s very exciting.
Let’s do this!
Hours 0:00 – 2:03: Citizen comments on Malachi Williams, lots of details on the new Data Center proposal, and a little on Council compensation and travel budgets.
Hours 2:03 – 2:33: Council gets to outline the coming year’s priorities, and they’re dreaming big: A tenant’s bill of rights! A non-police office of crime prevention! And so much more.
Bonus! 3 pm Workshops: Fixing the city utility assistance program, and the last little bit of Covid money.
Three people talked about the Data Center that might come to town.
I’ll save the Data Center comments for when we get to that item, and just focus on the Malachi Williams speakers here.
Backstory: Malachi Williams was a 22 year old who was killed by an SMPD officer last April. It was reported that he was carrying knives. Two officers started to detain him at the convenience store on Cheatham and Hopkins. (He was not holding the knives at that point.) He took off running. They chased him over to HEB, and then shot and killed him in pursuit.
Since last April, a number of activists and family members have been pursuing justice for Malachi, and fighting for a fair process for the family and some kind of consequence for the cops.
Last August, a grand jury decided not to press charges against the officer. That basically brings us up to the present day.
The focus today is on inconsistencies between what Chief Standridge and SMPD have claimed, and what actually happened last April.
The biggest problem:
Chief Standridge has been asserting that a fire marshall was there and able to administer first aid in under a minute. Officers are trained in first aid, but they didn’t need to jump in, because the fire marshal is a certified paramedic.
The speakers say that is definitely not what the videos show.
Here’s what the speakers describe: Malachi doesn’t get first aid for about three minutes. During that time, SMPD got mad at him for not putting his hands behind his back. They rolled him around, so they could handcuff him. They checked his pockets. In fact, when first responders did arrive, they had to ask the cops to take the handcuffs off the guy they’d shot, who was bleeding out.
Malachi’s grandfather
I’ve mentioned before what a compelling speaker he is. In his measured way, he asks council, “Think. If what we’re hearing today is true, are you disgusted? Can I get a show of hands, please?” – and he puts his own hand up – “If we’re telling the truth, if we’re telling the truth, are you disgusted?”
Here’s who raises their hands:
That would be Amanda Rodriguez on the left, with both hands up, Alyssa Garza in pink, and Lorenzo Gonzalez on the right. (I will say that so far, Lorenzo Gonzalez is proving to be a good council member. I don’t have any complaints.)
Jane, Saul, Matthew, and Shane refuse to go along with the requested show of sympathy. (Is it performative? Sure, but I also think they genuinely just might not care.)
….
Now for an abrupt change in tone:
5. Fireworks! We put on a fireworks show every 4th of July.
The amount we spend fluctuates from year to year:
This is because some years we get donations, and other years we don’t:
For the record, it’s always a 20 minute show. As they put it, “The more donations we get, the bigger the booms.”
Jane Hughson wants to know why we have to keep making the shows bigger. If donations come in, can’t it just free up some city money that we could send over to the parks department?
Answer: People complain when it’s big one year and smaller the next.
Me personally: I’m with Jane here. I’m having a hard time caring about the size of the fireworks. I’d rather use the donations for fireworks, and free up some money for the parks department.
But then again, I’m a grouchy old tree stump. If other people care, who am I to harsh their mellow?
This isn’t that. In fact, there’s a lot of confusion about what that article exactly is about! We’ll try to unpack it all here.
So if this isn’t that, what is this?
First off, it’s way down here:
(We’ve actually seen this property before, back in August 2nd, 2022. They wanted to put houses out there. I thought it sounded like a super terrible idea!)
Here’s a close-up of that property:
See that funny little yellow square? That’s an old cemetery. Access to the cemetery will be preserved.
Listen: I have some extremely boring confusion regarding this cemetery. I’m sticking it at the end of this page, because it’s truly too weedy to bore you with. This way you can opt out from the dumbest of my dumb shit.
What’s a data center?
Basically a giant computer that takes up an entire building, where AI can perform its massive amount of computations. So there are very few people working here, besides security and some technicians to monitor it.
What are the pros and cons?
The pros:
This is in the middle of nowhere, next to a giant power station.
The city is not going to have to spend much on infrastructure or maintenance.
The city should see some revenue from property taxes.
The cons:
Data centers take a massive amount of water.
Data centers use a massive amount of electricity.
This particular project would not be on city water or electric. They’d use Crystal Clear Water and Pedernales Electric for power. (They’d be on San Marcos wastewater, though.)
Here’s the thing: Crystal Clear Water draws from ARWA, just like we do. It might not be city water, but it’s the same underlying water table, either way.
Can this be done responsibly? Maybe!
Water is the biggest problem. The water is needed to cool the data center, because computers generate a lot of heat, which would then make them overheat and shut down otherwise.
The land-owner says that this will be a closed-loop water cooling system, which means less will be lost to evaporation. Matthew Mendoza says Google developed this technology 8 years ago. (I don’t know if this is the same as this technology, which only rolled out last year, but maybe.)
It’s great to implement the latest water-saving technology! But if quantities are still way too big, it doesn’t help you much.
Bottom line: We can’t make an informed decision unless we have a concrete gallon amount of potable water usage.
How much water does a data center use? This says an average estimate is 550K gallons per day for a hyperscale data center. (I’m pretty sure AI means a hyperscale data center). This closed-loop Microsoft system coming next year is claiming to only use 99.5K gallons per day. So we’ll probably be somewhere between those two estimates.
How much water do we have? According to the presentation in January, our current capacity is 4.8 million gallons per day.
NOTE: They would be using 550K gallons of Crystal Clear Water, not San Marcos water! But I couldn’t find a total capacity for CCW, so I just used San Marcos as a reference point. Both draw on the same underlying water table, so it’s best to still think about water conservation.
Can data centers use reclaimed water? Maybe!
This link says yes, they can, but if the water quality is bad enough, it causes corrosion and microbial growth and other problems.
We do actually have a reclaimed water line that goes very close to there. What’s the quality of the reclaimed water in that pipe? Could they use it?
I think this is the most essential question to answer.
Energy usage: Honestly, this is probably less of a concern than the water. Texas may have a shitty grid system, but we have a fairly healthy renewable energy supply, mostly because of all those windfarms out west. This is a great state for both wind and solar energy, if we’d only stop electing such counterproductive leaders.
On energy, there is something called ASHRAE guidelines for data centers:
So maybe we could ask them to achieve that.
Do we have any leverage?
Sort of! This is a tricky thing to answer.
First, they’re not asking for tax cuts. If they were, we could come back with all kinds of environmental restrictions. But they aren’t.
Second, they’re asking for a Preferred Scenario Amendment and a rezoning. There are rules around how cities make these decisions. You’re not allowed to base it on one specific project. You have to approve or deny based on all the allowed uses, and whether you like the location or not. And specifically, you can’t attach any requirements to these.
You might be able to require a Planned Development District, but I don’t know if water usage is an allowable reason to trigger one.
My opinion: If we can get them to agree to reclaimed water, then we should do this. Otherwise they’ll find another location that still uses the same water source, but isn’t within San Marcos jurisdiction.
I think many data centers will get built in Central Texas, no matter what. I would like them to be as tightly regulated as possible.
Note to Council: An ordinance requiring future data centers to be on reclaimed water might be handy to have!
…
What do citizen comments say?
Let’s go back to the beginning of the meeting. During citizen comment, one speaker had a list of extremely great questions:
What is the current noise ordinance for Light Industrial, within the city of San Marcos?
Will Dark Sky Lighting be considered for all outdoor buildings?
What will the setbacks be for both Francis Harris Road and the private Grant Harris Road?
Do we have a general idea of the size of the buildings?
What will be the estimated daily water usage?
Will it be public drinking water?
Will any measures be taken to lessen the impact of the large amount of impervious cover?
Cloudburst has stated on their website that this site will be part of their flagship data center in central Texas, and plans to aggressively grow its data center network. With a large amount of open farmland around the proposed site, should we expect further development from this company?
Since Cloudburst has already signed a longterm contract with Energy Transfer, the power plant already located on Francis Harris Lane, and KXAN reported on February 13th an AI data center is coming to San Marcos, should we assume decisions to change zoning and city limit boundaries are already confirmed?
Will Cloudburst be responsible for answering any of these questions or have to provide plans for the development, prior to the zoning change and incorporation into the city?
The very next speaker happened to be the land owner. His major points:
I’m working with the Data Center company to answer those questions above. The previous speaker submitted the questions to us in writing, after the P&Z meeting.
We have confirmed that the Data Center uses a closed loop water system. We are still working to quantify the amount of water lost to evaporation.
Hey look, we’re not going to put much wear and tear on the roads, at least!
And the biggie: We have no affiliation with Cloudburst or Energy Transfer. That is not us. The first time I ever heard of them is when that KXAN article came out.
No one knows. The owner swears up and down that he’s never heard of Cloudburst until that article came out, and has no idea what’s going on.
Amanda Rodriguez has headed over to the Cloudburst website, and they have the same exact timeline posted as this project:
Are there two projects?
City staff says that it’s extremely unlikely a project of this size would operate on stealth-mode like this. Companies tend to reach out to either the city for permits, or to the Economic Development Partnership to find out more about working in the area, or whatever.
The city manager Stephanie Reyes does also say that the city has gotten approached by multiple companies about data centers. But no one else has an active application in progress.
Basically: no one knows what’s up with Cloud Center and they’re going to follow up.
….
What next? Tonight was just informational. This is going to drag out all the way to April:
So there was no vote today. Stay tuned.
…
Item 11: Council members don’t get paid much.
Shane Scott wants to double the travel budget and increase the stipend that council members get.
First off: yes, we should pay our council more. If you don’t pay your council enough, then you only get council members who are either independently wealthy, or who are willing to live in poverty in order to serve in council. That’s not a recipe for healthy representation.
Second: yes, we should increase their travel budget. Inflation has made expenses go up. We want council members to attend conferences and gain expertise, and make connections. That’s how you get stronger representation.
However, this is Shane Scott’s proposal, so it comes with a whiff of ridiculousness.
Shane: “At these conferences that I go to, I even get AWARDS for doing all the classes and stuff.”
Alyssa in the background: “he does, it’s so good.”
Jane: “I don’t really care about the awards. What value have you brought back to this council?”
Shane: “If I were to pass all the writing and stuff that I’ve learned before, I’d have a whoooole book of stuff that I’ve provided to council about doing stuff.”
I am dying to know more about these awards he’s winning for participation.
That’s my blogger dream, that Shane has a whole trophy case of these things.
Back to the proposal
The total increase of his proposal is $90K.
One ridiculous thing he’s doing is saying that he wants to increase amounts halfway through this year, instead of just waiting and budgeting the increases into next year’s budget. So city staff had to scramble to figure out where to cut $45K from, in case Council approves Shane’s proposal.
The city manager was not enthusiastic at all about this, back in December, but she managed to find $45K by raiding two budgets, one called “Council- related” and the other is a Contingency fund, for when projects go over their budget.
…
Here’s how much more money Council members would get, under this proposal:
“Expenses Elected” means your travel budget. This is anything where you have to provide receipts for what you did. So Shane wants to double everyone’s travel budget.
“Compensation” isn’t changing, but “Additional Expenses” is being doubled. “Additional Expenses” is basically extra compensation. Councilmembers take it as a monthly lump sum for expenses where they don’t have to provide receipts.
Why not combine “Compensation” and “Additional Expenses”? Just call it all compensation?
There’s actually a good reason: you can’t collect two paychecks from the government. So if you work for the university, or the county, or the state, you can’t collect “Compensation”. You can still collect “Additional Expenses” though – this is what Jude Prather did, since he works for the county.
Amanda is horrified to learn this – “You mean I could have kept my job?! I took a huge paycut to accept this position. I’m struggling. I live with my mom, y’all.”
I’m kind of infuriated on her behalf: there was a better path available and she wasn’t informed??
Other council comments:
Alyssa: Our community members treat us as though we’re fulltime and have staff. Other cities pay their councilmembers to be fulltime, with staff, and they also slice their cities into districts so that you’re not answering to as many people.
Jane: Austin and Dallas pay their councilmembers fulltime and give them staff. Not Kyle, Buda, or New Braunfels. They pay zero.
Note: remember, paying $0 is strategic. If you require someone to work for free, only wealthy people can do the work. That’s not aspirational.
In the end, they move to postpone this. Everyone’s going to come back with amendments and chop it up.
…
Ok, back to the cemetery: The owner of the larger land does not own the cemetery. By state law, he will preserve access to that cemetery. At P&Z, Michele Burleson said she appreciates that – she was just there last weekend.
The owner also says, “Last time, there was some concern about the placement of the fence along the cemetery. So we did a fancy x-ray type survey. No folks beyond the perimeter of the cemetery!”
That’s reassuring! Also I remember that exact conversation. It’s here. But that’s not the same property!!
Here’s the property from the cemetery conversation:
That’s a different cemetery altogether:
Everyone is remembering a conversation about the San Pedro Cemetery, not this one! So what cemetery is in the middle of this current patch of land? I think I found it, in this list of all the cemeteries in Hays County.
I think it must be the one called York Creek Cemetery. From that link:
Those directions put it squarely in the middle of today’s project, but they also don’t make it sound like a very active cemetery that people are visiting often.
[Updated to add: I’ve been corrected by a reader – thank you! – and the graveyard in the middle of this property is the Nichols-Berry Cemetery.
So that settles one question!]
(Which one did the land owner do the x-ray survey on? Is he confused about his own property? Or did he do surveys on both cemeteries? More unimportant questions I have lingering!)
Thank you all for accompanying me on this edition of Untangling Old Cemeteries of San Marcos.
The budget process for 2026 has already started. Back in January, Council had a two day Visioning workshop. First they listen to about five hours of presentations. Then they spend about five hours updating the Strategic Plan from last year.
Usually it’s extremely dull, and filled with mundane wordsmithing. But this year, it was exciting! Really!
Let’s dive in.
The Strategic Goals
Here are the five goals:
Each one gets about 3-4 pages of outcomes. So we’ll take them one at a time.
Goal #1: Quality of Life & Sense of Place
Here are the most exciting changes in this category:
Part iii: The Tenant’s Bill of Rights! This is courtesy of the San Marcos Civics Club, who has been meeting monthly for the past year to focus on different issues. This is great work by them. They are promoting the National Tenant’s Bill of Rights as a model for what Council should adopt.
(I think this was Lorenzo’s contribution, but everyone was on board with it.)
…
Also from that photo, note Part i, “Update housing Data and Adopt the Strategic Housing Action Plan”.
Back in 2018-2019, we carried out a huge Housing Needs Assessment, and created a Strategic Housing Action Plan. And Council just deep-sixed it. Absolutely nothing came of it. For over five years!
In 2023, City Staff held a workshop on it and said, “Hey, you should really be thinking about housing! It’s super unaffordable here!”
Council:
*Except Alyssa.
It got put on last year’s Strategic Action Plan last year, and then ignored for all of 2024.
Until election season came around! Then all the candidates realized that everyone is super broke in San Marcos and can’t afford housing. Every single candidate for every council seat said housing was our biggest issue.
It seems like it really is going to happen this year, hopefully.
….
Also from this same section:
Alyssa has been promoting this for years, and Max promoted it back when he was on Council. So this is great to officially get it in the strategic plan.
Importantly, this will be housed outside of SMPD. What are the actual, evidence-based strategies that reduce crime? Here’s a big list. Things like access to jobs that pay a living wage, access to mental health and addiction treatment services, programs for kids and teens, connecting people with opportunities, etc.
(You know what doesn’t reduce crime? Locking people up. And it’s super expensive!)
This definitely came from Amanda.
(To be fair, Alyssa has brought this up before, but the council then was not interested in giving her ideas any oxygen.)
….
Also, on that same slide:
Also amazing! This is exactly what we discussed last time, when Council voted to postpone the vote on SMPD license plate readers until we could clearly state how we plan on protecting the privacy of the public.
(Also from Amanda.)
…
And further down:
Part B, iv: Making all the websites easy to use. This is very hard to do well. But at least we’re trying to get better.
Part C, iv. This is mostly about HSAB funding. We outsource most of our social services to local nonprofits, and we should probably double the amount that we’re giving out in grants.
(I can’t remember who contributed these. Everyone supports them.)
Hey Council: The budget for HSAB should grow automatically with inflation! You should consider an ordinance to make this happen! Please and thank you.
Goal #4: Mobility and Connectivity
Okay, several thoughts on this:
Section A, ii: What’s this Western Loop business?
Shane Scott wants to bring it back. This is an old topic.
There is a lot of traffic going out west towards Wimberley on RR 12. Right now it all feeds straight through town, on Wonderworld, to get to I-35. Should there be a northern loop that goes around San Marcos?
This was a big point of contention when the Transportation Master Plan was adopted in 2018. My memory is that the San Marcos River Foundation came out hard against it, because it will inevitably lead to development over the aquifer. If you put a road somewhere, it drives development along that road. If you drive development over the recharge zone, you’re going to get a filthy brown river eventually, instead of a sparkly clean river.
Jane Hughson also seems to think it got nixed back then.
Shane Scott wants to resurrect the issue, and he pictures it being an overhead highway, kind of like the Wonderworld overpass.
I have a lot of questions!
Do the environmentalists still approve of the deal cut on the wonderworld overpass? Or do they have reservations about reproducing another deal like that?
How much would it cost to make a zooming overhead line like that, on a much longer stretch?
Who stands to profit from this? What are the various interests?
Anyway, the Transportation Master Plan is coming back around, so we’ll see this again.
…
Section A, iii: Alyssa Garza is interested in on-demand services until we get a better bus system. What’s this?
So, Kyle has a 3.14 program. Any uber ride in the city costs $3.14, and the city pays for the rest. Is this something we should do, at least until we get a better bus system?
I’m a little uneasy about a program like this! I found this, which seems sensible:
So it’s more expensive, and we don’t want to sabotage progress on developing a functional bus system. At the same time, maybe we can use it for high-needs community members as a temporary stop-gap.
Her amendment: “Implement Recommendations from the San Marcos Transportation Equity Cabinet.”
Jane: Weren’t we going to workshop the recommendations?
City Manager Stephanie Reyes diplomatically says that Council supported putting the suggestions in both the Transit and Transportation Master Plans.
Jane: Without further inspection?
Stephanie: Council seemed pretty amenable, yeah.
Amanda: In fact, one of the questions I posed when it was under discussion was what the next steps were to be taken, if all of us agreed. We all said we agreed.
The vote on Amanda’s amendment:
Everyone likes it!
Finally, the vote on the entire strategic plan:
Everyone likes it. INCLUDING ME!!
(Read the whole draft here, if you’re so inclined.)
…
There are a few other items:
Council appointed a Comp Plan Oversight Committee
There’s a bond process for various construction projects around town
There are more committee and board appointments
but this meeting is super long, and we still have the workshops to go. So I’m skipping these.
Here’s the situation: We’ve got city-owned water, electric, and wastewater. (Most of the people here are on city utilities, although some people are on Pedernales or Bluebonnet electric.)
When people can’t pay their utility bills, we offer them a two week delay. But we also give $120K to Community Action, to help pay people’s utility bills when they fall behind and can’t afford to catch up.
This has been an ongoing topic of conversation:
The problem is that most of the $120K we set aside for utility assistance isn’t getting used. There’s a ton of need out there in the community, and we’re not getting the money to the people that need it.
Why??
Community Action gets money from us. They also get grant money from the state and feds. So they use that state and federal money first, and then only use the city money if that money’s not available. That is good!
The problem is that their application process is long and a giant pain in the butt, because they’re trying to give out federal money. So people are being asked to provide all kinds of crazy paperwork documenting their employment or residence or whatever, and it takes weeks, and the person just needs their water turned back on so that they can cook dinner. This part is bad.
…
So the city is working on how to get the funds out faster. Would any other organizations like to also hand out utility assistance? (RFP means “Request for proposals”)
No one wanted to apply! They kept advertising and reaching out and extending the deadline.
Eventually they got three more applicants. Here’s what’s being recommended:
The “donated funds” bit means that San Marcos residents have an option to donate when they pay their bill. There’s about $45K in accumulated donations right now.
(Community Action spoke up on Tuesday and said their capacity is actually $30K, so that extra $10K will get re-distributed.)
Discussion points:
Question: How long will the turnaround time be for people needing assistance?
Answer: Different agencies have estimated 3-5 days. Some a little longer. We’ll nail it down for sure in the contract with each agency.
City Manager Stephanie Reyes proposes having a universal application that all the agencies could use for city funds. Everyone likes that.
…
There’s a lot of discussion about how customers can find out about utility assistance.
If your bill is overdue, you get an automatic robo-call on the 16th day.
On the 18th day, your bill is delinquent.
After that, the delinquency notice goes out.
Right now, we don’t mention the utility assistance on the phone call or on the delinquency letter. The person has to call into the city first.
Everyone wants to know, “Why don’t we tell people about the funds earlier?!”
City Manager Stephanie Reyes says tactfully, “It hasn’t always been the philosophy of Council to make this information available at this stage.”
What she means is this: Previous councils have been more obsessed with the random person who might cheat the system than they were with actually connecting people in need with assistance.
This council – thank god – is more obsessed with connecting people to assistance. They want to have the utility assistance mentioned in the robo-call, and put in the delinquency letter.
…
Late Penalties and Reconnection Fees
Suppose you can’t pay your utility bill. This would make it even harder:
In other words, if you’re $140 behind on your utilities, it will cost almost $200 to get everything turned back on. This is pretty typical.
Council looks at each of these individually.
Penalty Fees: on average, people pay about $14 in penalties – a little higher for houses, a little lower for apartments.
They debate capping it at different amounts – $10? $15? $20? – so that you’d pay either 10% or the cap, whichever is less. (This is Lorenzo’s suggestion.)
(This is for residential, not commercial.)
Reconnection Fees: This cost is based on a 2013 estimate of fuel plus labor to go to the house and turn it back on.
Staff is planning on recalculating these fees and see if they can bring it down.
…
Question: If we did away with all fees altogether, how much would rates go up?
Answer: about 0.5 %. Now, we always have rate increases, because costs go up. But if you want to do away with fees, we’ll need to tack on 0.5% on top of that.
…
Q: Can we change how many times they can get assistance per year?
Answer: Right now it’s twice per year. It might be hard to track among different agencies.
Most councilmembers want to change it to four.
Bottom line: This will come up at a future council meeting, along with some of the answers to questions that Council asked tonight.
…
Workshop #2
Update on American Rescue Plan dollars:
A few programs have a little money leftover:
Here’s where we want to re-allocate it:
Alyssa fought long and hard for us to provide rental service, and to use an agency that doesn’t take weeks and weeks in turnaround time. (Same issue as with the utility assistance – federal money comes with a wild amount of paperwork.) It’s nice that this is now becoming the norm.
Any further money that becomes available will also go to Rental Assistance.
Is the national news making you spiral into a dark place? Come read about City Council, where things are less grim and you can make a difference. This week we’re taking on civil liberties and police license plate scanners, and some housing on Post Road, and some appointments.
Here we go!
Hours 0:00 – 2:73: Rezoning some land on Post Road, SMPD license plate scanners, and just a few of the many, many appointments Council made.
Bonus! 3 pm workshops: There was a transportation equity cabinet over the past eight months. What does that even mean?
Have a good week, and don’t let the bastards grind you down.
I went hunting for photos of the old Bismark Filling Station back in its heyday, but came up empty handed. I did find this deep dive on the history it, though.
…
Q: Are there any concerns about flooding?
Answer: It’s partially in the floodplain, and it is near the headwaters, which is very sensitive. But the land is actually angled so that the water runs away from the sensitive stuff. The water runs away from other houses on Post Road, and towards the stadium.
Q: Are there any concerns about buried gas tanks?
Answer: no, the station is too old. They checked the records. They didn’t bury tanks back then.
Q: Are you going to preserve the gas station?
Answer: We are working with the Historical Preservation Committee on this! Hoping to save the facade and columns, and put it somewhere where it can be memorialized.
Note: This is how you make best friends with Council. Who knows if it will actually happen or not, but Old San Marcos is happy to hear this guy say the right things.
One other note:
The developer is asking for CD-4 zoning. He’s saying he wants to build townhomes:
Ok, maybe not quite that beautiful. But maybe like these, near Wonderworld:
But CD-4 zoning can also mean large scale apartment complexes like so:
When you zone land, you don’t get to pick and choose which use the developer ends up doing. The developer can do anything included in the zoning.
Now, this particular lot isn’t very big:
So my guess is that he will probably build townhomes or condos. But he is allowed to sell it to someone else, and that other person can do anything allowed under CD-4 zoning.
Should the city spend $124K for SMPD to have cameras that read license plates for one year?
Maybe! We need to unpack some stuff first.
Backstory:
Budgets get approved in September. But the planning starts nine months earlier. So at the end of January, Council had a two day workshop where they started laying out big ideas.
They go into great detail on the strategic goals:
Under each goal, Council decides what they want to prioritize for the next year.
On Day 2, they tackled Public Safety. Amanda proposed the following outcome:
Establish clear guidelines and protections governing the use of technology to ensure transparency, accountability, and respect for the personal privacy and civil rights of the public.
A little-noticed surveillance technology designed to track the movements of every passing driver is fast proliferating on America’s streets. Automatic license plate readers—mounted on police cars or on objects like road signs and bridges—use small high-speed cameras to photograph thousands of plates per minute.
The information captured by the readers—including the license plate number and the date, time, and location of every scan—is being collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information are growing rapidly. This information is often retained for years, or even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights.
We don’t find every use of ALPRs objectionable. For example, we do not generally object to using them to check license plates against lists of stolen cars, for AMBER Alerts, or for toll collection, provided they are deployed and used fairly and subject to proper checks and balances, such as ensuring devices are not disproportionately deployed in low-income communities and communities of color, and that the “hot lists” they are run against are legitimate and up to date.
Unlike a targeted ALPR camera system that is designed to take pictures of license plates, check the plates against local hot lists, and then flush the data if there’s no hit, Flock is building a giant camera network that records people’s comings and goings across the nation, and then makes that data available for search by any of its law enforcement customers. Such a system provides even small-town sheriffs access to a sweeping and powerful mass-surveillance tool, and allows big actors like federal agencies and large urban police departments to access the comings and goings of vehicles in even the smallest of towns.
And yes, Flock is exactly the company we’re buying cameras from. And it’s not just the ACLU: other folks also don’t like Flock Safety one bit.
Look, ICE raids have already started. (Not as intensely as Trump would like, but they’ve started.) Do we really think this universal surveillance data will be off-limits? It wasn’t off-limits back in 2019.
Sure might be nice to have a clear policy! Maybe we should “Establish clear guidelines and protections governing the use of technology to ensure transparency, accountability, and respect for the personal privacy and civil rights of the public.”
This brings us to Tuesday’s meeting
Amanda makes a motion: Postpone the purchase of the cameras until we’ve established the policy that focuses on privacy and civil rights when it comes to the public. (After all, it was literally five days earlier that Council agreed this is a priority!)
Chief Standridge says, “No worries! We already have such a policy! It’s four pages long and follows all the best practices in Texas! This is what all the departments across Texas are doing.”
Amanda: “I’ve read the policy. Those may be the best practices in Texas, but they’re not the best practices nationwide. Things like data usage, data retention, data sharing – we should address those things, and then we can bring back the vote on the cameras.”
They get into it a little bit, over how long data should be stored. Is 30 days too long? Just right? (That same article on Flock Safety has recommended legal language specifically for this kind of situation.)
“Furthermore,” Chief Standridge says, “this is already underway. We got the first batch of cameras in 2022, and then we got a grant for some more…” he kind of trails off.
Amanda: “The cameras have already been purchased? The cameras that require council approval?”
Chief Standridge: “The Flock representative is here online, they can confirm or deny if the cameras have been purchased.”
Jane tries to smooth it over: “It was probably something like it was initiated because they thought they’d be under 100K, and then it turned out to be over 100K, so they need needed approval!”
Standridge: “Close enough!”
Note: I think it was because of this:
The original contract was not discussed when Council approved it, in April, 2022. Later on, SMPD applied for some grants, and Council didn’t discuss those, either. My guess is that since the grants were in motion, SMPD assumed it was fine to move forward with the cameras.
(This also happened with the Total Bullet Containment System. It had been purchased before Council actually authorized the purchase.)
…
Back to the conversation:
Jane: I’m game to have a work session on this policy, but I don’t want to hold up the purchase of the cameras in the meantime.
No one else (besides Alyssa) weighs in.
The Vote: Should we postpone the purchase of these cameras?
WHOA! I was not expecting that, but I’m thrilled to see it!
…
Items 10-13: An enormous number of appointments.
The vast majority of the meeting was spent making appointments:
Those are all boards where they appoint community members.
The most public of these is P&Z. P&Z had three open spots. David Case and Maraya Dunn were both re-upped for a second term, and “Rodney” got the last spot.
No one in the meeting ever used Rodney’s last name, and I don’t have access to the applications, so I guess we’ll all find out which Rodney in a few weeks, when he starts attending the meetings.
…
Item 14: Attendance on External Boards
There are a bunch of committees in the city and county that have a representative from city council.
Sometimes you have one of these external boards with a city council rep, but that council member never shows up to any of the meetings, and sometimes his name is Shane Scott.
Jane: Do we want some sort of attendance policy for these situations? Like you can’t have more than three unexcused absences in a row? That’s the policy for the rest of our boards and commissions.
Everyone is on board. So this will come back around.
The first workshop was an update on the budget side of the CIP projects, which is kind of weedy and wonky, so I’m skipping that. But feel free to watch here.
So basically, DEI is hard to do well. It takes time, energy, funding, and expertise. An equity cabinet is one model that the research-folk like, as a way to do it well.
Ours is studying transportation.
Here’s what I got out of it: there’s a lot of expertise about transportation by city staff, and there’s a lot of lived experience by people who don’t have cars, out in the community.
If you want to incorporate their experience into city policy, you need to do a lot of things:
Give people rides to meetings and compensate them for their time. The whole point is to focus on people with barriers to participation, so you’d better address the barriers.
Have the cabinet go into detail about what problems they face.
Have city staff give the cabinet a rundown about how city planners organize and work on transportation issues.
At this point, the cabinet has both sides of the equation: lived experience plus expertise. Then the cabinet members can really identify the sources of the problems and understand what it would take to solve them
Eventually they arrive at a set of recommendations, which the city can then incorporate into their plans.
That’s why it’s a big, drawn out process involving time, money, and energy! But it sounds like it went really well.
First: You have to know exactly what you’re aiming for, if you want a concrete, productive conversation:
The participants were giving the presentation, for what it’s worth.
Here’s their experience:
Life is really not easy in San Marcos, without a car. Like, Workforce Solutions that’s supposed to help you train and find a job, cover childcare, etc, is located way out on Posey Road.
This is the participants incorporating the expertise of city planners into their understanding of San Marcos:
So taking expertise plus lived experience together, they identified some key problems:
Those are categories.
Here’s their specific recommendations in each of those five categories:
Again, it’s a great presentation, so feel free to go listen yourself here.
Council had a few questions:
Jane asks about sidewalk priorities and bus shelter status? Answer: We have 18 sheltered bus stops already. We want more, but we’re holding off because we’re about to re-do the Transportation Master Plan, and we don’t want to put something in that we immediately have to tear out.
Amanda: Are other cities doing anything that we should start doing? Answer: Sometimes when there’s not enough space for a full shelter, they anchor two seats to the bust stop pole, with a little shade on top.
As Amanda put it, these recommendations are all so feasible! There’s nothing impractical to any of this.
There’s two big plans coming up: TXDOT is doing a transit plan, and the city is re-doing our transportation master plan. Both TXDOT and the city were involved in the Equity Cabinet, and want to incorporate the recommendations into their new plans. Hooray!
The San Marxist 
