Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 2/4/25

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.

Workshop #2: Equity Cabinet

Last summer, the city received a presentation from Dr. Rosalie Ray, at Texas State. She was proposing to run an equity cabinet on Transportation, and report back with her findings.

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:

1. 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.
2. Have the cabinet go into detail about what problems they face.
3. Have city staff give the cabinet a rundown about how city planners organize and work on transportation issues.
4. 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
5. 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!