Workshop 1: Community Survey
Back in 2022, the city put out a community survey, to find out how happy people are with life in San Marcos and with city services. Now it’s time for the 2025 follow-up survey.
This workshop was mostly about tinkering with the five freebie questions that the city gets to individualize. It was pretty mundane, so I didn’t bother to write it up.
Keep an eye out for the survey over the next few months! And share it with people who don’t generally respond to city surveys.
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Workshop 2: Utility late fees and reconnection fees.
This has been a discussion for the past year, most recently here. Bascially, there was a lot of money available to help people pay their utility bills, but very little of it was getting spent on people who needed help. They’ve (hopefully) fixed that by making the application form much shorter and easier.
The second issue was late fees and reconnection fees. If you already can’t pay, do we really need to charge you more as punishment? The Citizens Utility Advisory Board (CUAB) is bringing back recommendations on what we could change.
There are two main questions:
- How much of a penalty do we want to charge people, once their bill is overdue?
- How much does it cost the city to disconnect and reconnect someone’s water/gas/electricity?
Penalty:
We used to charge a 10% late fee. CUAB is recommending a 5% late fee.
Disconnect/reconnect:
Here we’re just trying to cover our costs. It’s not a punishment. Back in 2014, we set $40 as the fee. In 2025, it now costs $95 to reconnect the utilities.
The problem is that if you decrease the late fee by 5% and then increase the reconnection fee by $55, they kind of cancel each other out:
So Council is a little bummed out over this.
Jane: Can people get late fees and reconnection fees paid for by the Utility assistance program?
Answer: Just late fees, but not reconnection fees.
Jane: That was an oversight. I wish we’d talked that out when we were dealing with utility assistance.
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They end up going in circles for awhile – should they send it back to CUAB? Should they split out water from electricity? Should they subsidize disconnection/reconnection fees? What if the state passes restrictions affecting late fees?
In the end, they decide to accept the proposal for now, and also reduce the water disconnection fee to $40. This will come back around for final approval during a council meeting.
The San Marxist 