Workshop 1: Advertising the river
When San Marcos flooded in 2015, Council was worried about local businesses. They ran a campaign “San Marcos is Open”. It promoted river recreation and tourism.
It worked! Hotels did better than projected, and the Lion’s Club had their biggest year. But this is when the river began to get overcrowded.
By 2017, the city was more worried about over crowding and capacity issues.
Here’s a bunch of photos from a 2017 city presentation:
Funny parks department!
Mostly a lot of photos of a ton of people.
By the Lion’s Club.
Down at the falls.
Just a lot of big crowds.
We stopped advertising the river, but it was too late. Basically, overcrowding at the river has looked like that ever since. (Except for 2020.)
The problem is that it started to destroy the river. Also the safety concerns got pretty unmanageable. (Links from old TSM)
- We implemented the can ban in 2024. This didn’t help, because safety issues were out of control. We couldn’t really enforce it.
- We fenced off Rio Vista park in 2025. This helped a lot.
- We started charging out-of-towners to park by the Lion’s Club and for entry at Rio Vista in 2026. (We’ll find out how this went in the fall.)
As a quick preview of how this summer is going, they provided some stats:
I don’t know if this is good or bad!
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Today’s presentation is by the VisitSanMarcos.com people: do we want to keep not-promoting the river?
So we no longer promote the river for recreation. We do things like education, rules. and anti-littering instead.
They played this video:
It is very nice and soothing! Council adored it.
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What does council say?
Everyone gives lots of thank yous to staff.
Josh: Maybe we can promote downtown?
Answer: We already do. (They promote downtown a lot.)
Amanda: Can we talk to local stores about not promoting banned items?
Answer: We used to work with HEB, but Walmart and Academy blew us off. When Buccees opens, we’ll have a visitor’s kiosk. That’s baked into the development agreement.
Amanda: Maybe the Chamber of Commerce can take the lead here and work with retailers.
Jane: How far out is signage about banned items from Rio Vista gates? Do we put signage at the baseball fields?
Answer: No. But sure! We can work on that.
Alyssa: Do we have a city TikTok account?
Answer: Nope. Governor Abbott has banned cities from having TikTok accounts.
Alyssa: You could work with micro-influencers and collab with them, like Luis the food guy
Answer: We do have a relationship with Luis!
Bottom line: We’re going to keep our river messaging focused on education, stewardship, park rules, etc.
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Workshop 2: Covid funding
A long time ago, we got two different sources of Covid money from the federal government.
and
Basically, we got about $20 million, and it made a huge difference.
Here’s how we spent it:
Now it’s all ending. All federal Covid money must be spent by December 31st.
As projects wind down, you want to re-allocate that money and get it spent as fast as possible.
Here’s the projects that have come in under budget:
Here’s where we’d like to spend it:
You can’t start any new projects – it has to already be part of Covid funding. BR3T does emergency housing and utility assistance. They’ve gotten about $250K in Covid money so far, so this brings them up to about $300K.
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What does Council think?
Alyssa: What does BR3T say? Can they use some of this on case management?
Answer: Yes, they would like to use some of this on case management.
Amanda: Yeah, I came in at the end but it’s great. I hope we revisit our philosophy about only giving money for services and not case management.
Jane: Yes, big thanks.
Bottom line: 94.6% of Covid money has been spent, and we’re just trying to make sure we eke out this last bit by December.
The San Marxist 