Citizen Comment:
Ten speakers. The two biggest topics are whether San Marcos should sell water to Kyle or not, and the Land Development Code.
Water to Kyle:
- We shouldn’t be giving water to Kyle.
- Only sell water to Kyle on the condition that they don’t then allow data centers
- Don’t give water to Kyle, we don’t know how long this drought will go on.
We’ll get to this in Items 4 and 5.
Land Development Code comments:
- Limit power plants to Heavy Industrial
- Create a distinction between large load back up generators that data centers use, vs ordinary small scale back up generators, in terms of which require CUP.
- 100 ft is too far for bar clean up radius.
- Virginia Parker, director of SMRF:
– Keep the Qualified Water Protection Plan presentation at P&Z, to allow for review by the public.
– Fee-in-lieu for parkland should be restricted to purchasing new parkland, not maintenance
– Fix the wording on impervious cover item
We’ll get to all these in Item 22.
Other comments:
- The Uhland Bridge over the Blanco River has not been cleaned since the last flood. It’s full of debris and could be very dangerous if it floods again.
- The Downtown Association of San Marcos is in favor of giving SMPD these four parking spots on weekend nights
- We need to coordinate with Texas State, be business-friendly in the LDC, and be wise when we give tax breaks.
- We need more accountability.
- The city UniverCity course was great, and it’s too bad it’s being discontinued. You should put slides online.
- A large portion of my land is being purchased by the city, please talk to the liason company so we can move forward.
Onto the meeting!
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Itsme 17-18: Crestwood retail center
This is the Crestwood shopping center, out on Old RR 12:
Back in 2022, it came up that their septic tank was old and degraded and leaking nasty sewage onto a driveway nearby. Gross! Council mentioned back then that the county hadn’t dealt with the septic system for four years already.
Now it’s been another four years, and the septic system is still a problem! Basically they need to get on the city sewer.
That’s what they’re here for, finally. Crestwood is getting annexed and zoned into the city. Great.
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Item 19: A little rezoning
There’s a little piece of property tucked away in this neighborhood:
Right now, it’s a pair of boarded up houses and an empty lot:
They’re going to redevelop it into four houses.
Note: people get really nervous about the word “infill”. The fear is that it’s a Trojan horse, and that if you allow “infill”, you’ll end up with a giant apartment complex in the middle of neighborhoods. (And sometimes that has happened! Developers can be jerks!)
But there’s also a good kind of infill: replacing two abandoned houses with four houses that families can live in. This is what we’re trying to encourage. This is good!
The vote: 7-0. Great.
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Items 4-5: Selling water to Kyle
This sounds really bad! It’s not quite as bad as it sounds. But against a background of severe drought and data centers and reckless development, anything water-related deserves some scrutiny.
So let’s scrutinize! What’s going on?
It’s two slightly different things:
Item 4: Kyle uses San Marcos water in an emergency. In other words, if a water main breaks, or if they’ve got fire hoses on full blast to put out a fire, they tap our water so that they can maintain water pressure for their residents.
It’s an emergency back up, basically. We’ve had an agreement like this for the past ten years, but it expired in November 2025.
Details:
- They pay $6.42 per 1000 gallons, which is our current wholesale rate.
- This would last 10 years, with two 5 year extensions.
- It gets used a few days each season, which works out to about $150K/year
- Texas sets the rules for what constitutes an emergency.
In the past six months, they’ve used emergency water once.
Item 5: Kyle buys regular old everyday water from San Marcos, because they don’t have enough infrastructure yet to get enough water to their residents. The way it works is that we are allocated a certain amount of water from Edward’s Aquifer. We generally don’t use it all, so we sell them our unused Edward’s Aquifer water rights.
We sold them water back in 2023, and then again in 2024. (We might have done it earlier than 2023, but I wasn’t blogging yet.)
Kyle knows they’ll go over their allotted amount of Edward’s water rights, but they don’t yet have infrastructure to get enough water to the parts of the city that need it. Supposedly the infrastructure will be finished in 2028.
(For the record: back in 2023, they were sure the infrastructure would be finished in 2025. Just saying.)
So they need to buy Edward’s Aquifer water from someone. We generally go under our allotted water, so we sell the water rights to them.
Details:
- We automatically get $732K from them, even if they don’t use any of our water
- We get up to $1.5 million if they do.
Here is the big question: why is this happening? Is Kyle being irresponsible and allowing development that it can’t supply with water? Does Kyle allow its residents to be irresponsible with water? (Are we the most virtuous neighbors ever?)
Answer: We can’t really answer any of those questions satisfactorily.
Here’s what we can say: There’s a clause in both contracts that Kyle’s drought restrictions must match or exceed our drought restrictions.
That doesn’t entirely solve the problem, of course. Drought policies say things like, “Residents can’t fill their pools or water their lawns on Thursdays.” They don’t say things like, “Council should not approve a new development here, because the city lacks the water.”
Also, the two drought ordinances are tricky to compare, though. They don’t line up as neatly as you’d like. Also, Kyle is planning on revising their Water Conservation and Drought policy in the next month or two.
Bottom line: We agree to one year of emergency water, and postpone the Edwards Aquifer rights, until Kyle revises their drought policy, so that we can compare apples to apples, and decide how virtuous they are.
This should come back over the summer.
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Item 21: Four police parking spots downtown
Last year, things on the square got disturbingly violent:
In response, SMPD is trying to ramp up its presence downtown. Texas State also kicked in some money to help cover the extra police time.
So officers have been parking in these four spots:
Starting in December, we reserved those parking spots for police cars only, so that cops can park there while monitoring the bar scene.
However, we also don’t want to take away daytime downtown parking spots! So they’re trying to thread the needle: these spots are public parking during the day, and then at night it becomes SMPD parking. (It’s like the Hannah Montana of parking spaces.)
The tricky part is trying to explain that in the parking signs. Here’s an example, the one on Hopkins:
Great. By day, you’ve got the two green signs. By night, you’ve got the red. (Not pictured: an extra sign with an SMPD number to call if you get towed.)
The downtown businesses are very happy with this! They like having the police presence downtown.
This has been a trial run. Does Council want to make these spots permanently designated?
What does council say?
Lorenzo: This is a mess. It’s too complicated. Why not just dedicate the spots to SMPD, day and night?
Amanda: I don’t want to remove them during the day, because of parking shortages.
Jane: What if we stripe them?
Josh: People will learn the hard way.
Alyssa: Are people learning? How many people have been penalized?
Answer: In the past three months, there have been 3 citations, 1 warning, and 10 cars towed.
Also SMPD says: We actually tow a ton of cars downtown. Ten cars towed is barely a drop in the bucket!
The vote: 7-0.
Spots will now be permanent! From now on, it’s green-by-day, red-by-night.
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Item 22: Back to the Land Development Code
We last discussed this here and here. Last time, Council got about halfway through their amendments. Now we’re going to wade through the rest of them.
This item is super long. Sorry! Buckle up.
New Amendments:
1. Clean sidewalks
How far out should restaurants have to keep their sidewalk clean? 50 ft or 100 ft?
Answer: Council goes with 50 ft.
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2. Food trucks downtown.
This is actually two different issues.
First food-truck issue: San Marcos only allows 14 bars downtown. Each bar has an alcohol permit. Everyone else who serves alcohol downtown is technically a restaurant, and they have a different alcohol permit that requires them to serve food.
This is one of the (many) reasons that the Rooftop got in trouble last year. They weren’t serving any food last summer. After they got in trouble for this, they added a food truck.
The question: Is a food truck enough to make a bar feel like a restaurant, for purposes of the alcohol permit?
Amanda: Yes. Look at Zelick’s – it feels like a restaurant, because people are sitting at tables and eating.
Jane: What if the food truck operator gets sick and they don’t show up one weekend?
Lorenzo: Then the business would be out of compliance if they tried to serve alcohol.
Jane: That is naive!
The vote: Should food trucks count as restaurants for purposes of establishments that need to sell food because they have a restaurant-alcohol permit?
Yes: everyone
No: No one.
(Later on, Jane spends a LONG time being mixed up on what exactly they voted on. She and Matthew might have actually intended to vote “no”. But they don’t re-open the vote.)
Food Truck Issue #2: What if you have a food truck that just sells alcohol and no food? Like a margarita truck or a beer truck? These exist – we have one at the outlet mall. Are these allowed downtown?
Lorenzo: Every bar permit has a fixed address. So a bar truck would need to get an alcohol permit and could only sell alcohol at a fixed address, right?
Answer: yes.
The vote: Should Bar Trucks be banned downtown?
So bar trucks are not allowed downtown.
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3. Data Centers: Last time they didn’t quite nail down the definition.
Staff came back with this suggestion:
This passes.
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4. The Waiting Period Loophole: Amanda wants to close this.
Backstory: Say you want to build a development, and you apply to get the land rezoned. Council votes you down. How long do you have to wait before you can try again? It depends!
Here’s how the loophole currently works:
Situation 1: A vote to approve your rezoning fails.
Situation 2: A vote to deny your rezoning succeeds.
These sound like the same thing, but they aren’t the same. Situation 1 means no waiting period. The developer can zip right back to the city office and reapply. Situation 2 means the developer must wait a year before they can reapply.
This is super misleading! Council deliberately uses this when a project is unpopular, but Council still wants to pass it. They’ll vote it down, but then give developers a backdoor to reapply.
(This is what happened last August with the data center. Predictably, everyone got super mad and confused when there was no waiting period.)
Amanda makes a motion to close the loophole. Both Situation 1 and Situation 2 would require a waiting period of one year.
Jane: Council uses the loophole! Sometimes we want something to come back!
Nobody ever seconded Amanda’s motion, so it doesn’t come to a vote.
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5: Gardens and farms
Amanda: Allow community gardens, urban farms, and plant nurseries all over San Marcos.
Specifically:
- Community gardens in all zoning districts
- Urban farms in High Industrial and Business Park
- Plant nurseries: limited/conditional in the kinds of dense, walkable neighborhoods that have businesses in them.
Matthew has opinions: “I am going to vote yes, but I want to go on the record for being against community gardens in single family neighborhoods! I have seen the damage they can do!”
Matthew has seen community gardens:
and he watched some rotten shit go down.
(“Rotten shit” is basically the point of a compost pile, so maybe he just misunderstood.)
Anyway, the vote: 7-0. Great!
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6. Four and five bedroom apartments.
Right now, there’s a rule that you can’t have an apartment with more than three bedrooms. You can have a house with four bedrooms, but not an apartment.
Why is this? What’s the problem with a four-bedroom apartment?
This was the argument: “We have to get rid of four-bedroom apartments, because landlords use them for rent-by-the-bedroom. We’ll only allow with a special permit, in purpose-built-student-housing.”
This has always been insane. Lots of people besides college students need four bedroom apartments! What if you have a family with three kids? What if the family has two kids, and a grandparent, all living together? What about coop living? What about people, generally, trying to share expenses and live together to save money?
Furthermore: wealthy people get to buy 4- and 5-bedroom houses! Why would no one else need this?
Historically, powerful people in San Marcos have cared a lot more about micromanaging students than about the unintentional consequences on poor people.
So this is Amanda’s amendment: let’s fix this.
The vote: should developers be allowed to put 4 bedrooms in a small multifamily, courtyard housing, or multifamily?
Jane opposes it because of parking. She’s worried that if you allow 4 bedroom apartments, you won’t have enough parking spaces for everyone.
However, parking is actually based on the number of bedrooms unless you’re downtown, and downtown is the one place that already has 4-bedroom units. So her argument does not hold water.
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7. Professional Office Space
Right now we’ve got some super weird rules about these:
Got that? No upstairs offices, ya dirty crooks! And don’t you dare try to be mid-block, away from an intersection. You think we were born yesterday?
Amanda proposes that we nix all of these. Staff agrees – they meant to get rid of these, because they’re weird and restrictive, but missed this instance.
Alyssa: I’m a night owl. Can we scrap the 6am-11pm part, too?
The vote: 7-0.
(They did not yet scrap the 6am-11pm part.)
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8. Maximum parking.
Let’s talk about parking lots. Basically too many parking spots and too few parking spots are both problems.
Too few parking spots mean that it’s hard for customers to find places to park. Too many means that your parking lot is huge. You’re paving too much of your city. It’s bad for flooding and walkability.
So if a business really wants an extra large parking lot, they’re required to do some mitigation:
- Use permeable pavers on the extra spots, so water can soak through instead of running off.
- Provide shade trees and keep existing trees
- Shade at least half the extra spaces with solar panels.
Wouldn’t that make a big difference at Target or Walmart?
The question is: when does this kick in? How much wiggle room should we give you to provide extra parking?
Amanda’s amendment: “Extra Parking” means 30% above what’s required. If you’re required to provide 100 spots, and you provide 130, then you have to think about shade and solar panels and permeable pavers.
The vote:
Matthew voted no, because he speaks for the trees the floods. When no one else has the courage, he speaks for the water and the mud that just want to be inside people’s houses.
Matthew speaks for the hot asphalt! for the smelly melting tar! In this busy modern life, Matthew remembers.
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That’s everything that got voted on, officially.
Other discussions – no vote
Most of these will be formalized and voted on in June:
- Major utilities, power plants, and large scale back up generators should require a permit from Council, and only be allowed in Heavy Industrial.
This is mostly about data centers, but not entirely.
- Public notices for zoning and permit hearings.
Should city staff put the signs up, or should the applicant put the signs up?
- Supermajority vs. regular majority to overturn P&Z decisions.
Right now, it takes a supermajority to overturn P&Z. Sometimes when P&Z does something especially stupid (like ban live music at Tantra) it seems dangerous to give them so much power.
Should Council be able to overturn P&Z decisions with a regular majority, instead of a super majority?
My $0.02: This has come up before, in 2022. I was opposed to weakening P&Z then, and I still am. It’s a dangerous sign when a governing body weakens the checks-and-balances that are supposed to put some friction and dissonance in the system.
If P&Z can be overruled with a simple majority, then P&Z does not actually hold any power. They just make recommendations. And I’ve been around long enough to have seen it swing the other way – a wiser P&Z and a more foolish rogue City Council.
P&Z may occasionally make some dumb-ass decisions, but I generally think the principle of checks and balances is wise, and should not be weakened.
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- Qualified Watershed Protection Plans:
Right now, developers have to submit environmental studies, to make sure they’re not going to cause a lot of flooding or poison the river, or something. Part of that is a Qualified Watershed Protection Plan. This gets presented to P&Z. This gives other groups – like the San Marcos River Foundation – a chance to listen and make comments, in case there’s a concern.
However, apparently it makes the whole development process stall out for 6 weeks, while they wait to get on P&Z’s calendar. This costs developers a lot of money, which drives up everyone’s costs.
The question: can we find a way to make the study available to the public, without wasting 6 weeks of everyone’s time?
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- The Business Park Zoning is not complete.
This zoning is not very walkable nor part of a “complete streets” dream where everyone can get their basic needs met without driving.
- Some zoning tinkering to put language in about neighborhood commerce and encouraging affordable ownership and ownership alternatives.
- Permits for special events right now are phrased as “indoor AND outdoor space”. We should switch it to “Indoor OR outdoor space”.
Discussions that will be continued, but not as Land Development Code amendments
- Fiscal Impact studies. If a developer wants to build something in the middle of nowhere, will it cost the city more to maintain roads, utilities, and public safety than the neighborhood will contribute in tax revenue? It would be nice to know this! Right now it’s a big ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
- Single stair apartment buildings: small scale apartment complexes are a sweet spot for places like San Marcos. They’re low profile, can house 8 units or so, and provide affordable housing in neighborhoods. They don’t get built often for big complicated reasons. But one reason is that the building codes for giant buildings often apply to them. One major one is needed two staircases. This is a thing that gets fixed in places like Austin. Can we fix it here?
- Can we mandate water reuse systems for sufficiently gigantic businesses?
I hope these don’t get shelved. They’re very important
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THAT’S THE WHOLE THING!
They vote: 7-0.
This was just a first reading. This will come back for a final vote in June!
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Item 23: Housing Finance Corporations
HFC stands for Housing Finance Corporations. These started off as legitimate attempts to create affordable housing, which then got hijacked by scammers.
It’s supposed to work like this: San Marcos or Hays County partners with a nonprofit. The nonprofit gets a tax waiver in exchange for building affordable housing.
The problem is something called “travelling HFCs”. Can a city 200 miles away partner with a nonprofit, and they build housing in San Marcos? So San Marcos doesn’t get the tax money, but they never agreed to anything? The housing may not even end up being affordable.
So here’s what happened to us: Pecos is a city here:
The city of Pecos partnered with the Pecos HFC, and built (or bought) The Grand at Stone Creek. This is the apartment complex between Academy and Crunch Fitness, near Target. They also had complexes in Kyle and Hays County (and a ton of others throughout Texas).
This was costing us about $200K in property taxes. We don’t know if they actually offered affordable housing or anything.
Anyway, we won! Or we settled. But we got the outcome we wanted, which is the tax money, plus a little extra in legal fees.
There’s 1-2 more HFCs that are still tied up in lawsuits, which will hopefully also tip our way.
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Item 24: We’re building a trail to New Braunfels!
Or rather, we’re applying for Federal land along Hunter Road to build a trail.
The goal is to put a hike-and-bike trail here:
So that’s cool! It sounds like it’s supposed to tie in to a much bigger thing, here:
The Great Springs Project, apparently.
Great!
The San Marxist 