Hours 0:00 – 2:03, 2/18/24

Citizen Comment

Two topics today:

1. Nine people spoke about Malachi Williams. 
2. 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.

Why now?  There was an event recently hosted by Malachi’s family. From what I gather, attendees were able to view some bystander footage for the first time. 

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?

…

Item 10:  Data Centers!

You may have seen this KXAN article, “A new AI data center is coming to San Marcos“?

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.

What does Council say?

What the hell is going on with the KXAN article about Cloudburst?!

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. 

Like at 1:18:30:

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.