Workshop: Heritage Tourism and Preservation Grants
“HOT” stands for Hotel Occupancy Taxes. How shall we spend our HOT money?
The city is proposing offering some grants to nonprofits who have some kind of historical preservation project.
City staff goes through a long list of slides. Who would be eligible? What kinds of projects are okay? How much are the grants for? What’s the rubric for evaluation? What’s the timeline? It’s very detailed.
What does Council say?
“Let’s kill this whole thing and just use the money for repairing the Dunbar School Home Education Building.”
It’s not a bad idea! I felt a little bad for the presenter, though.
What’s the Dunbar School Home Education Center?
It’s this little building in Dunbar Park:
right behind the main Dunbar Recreation Building:
It’s the only building left from the original campus of the Dunbar School.
We just talked about the Dunbar School a moment ago – it’s the original school for black children during segregation, named for the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.
The Dunbar School was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.
But then in 1986, someone deliberately burned down most of the school, leaving just this little building. (Not the only time that major buildings of the African-American community in San Marcos have been destroyed by arson.)
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The plan is to put this HOT money into the Dunbar Home Economics Building each year. Once it’s restored, Council will revisit this whole grant idea.
The San Marxist 