Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 8/18/26

(I combined the 3 pm public comment with the 6 pm public comment, in the first post.)

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Workshop 1: The Budget

It is heavy-duty budget season!

July 25th is the day that City staff finds out exactly how much tax money we’ve received. This is the first concrete draft budget that Council has looked at.

The whole thing has to be approved in the next month.

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Background: How’s San Marcos these days?

We’re growing:

That’s probably an undercount. The city thinks we’re more like 90,000 people.

The next two slides take some thinking.

First: here’s how much the median home owner pays in property taxes to the city:

So home owners pay more here than elsewhere.

However:

the city spends less per resident.

This is because the deck is stacked against San Marcos in some key ways. The only one they mention in this presentation is this, though:

We’ve got more tax-exempt land than most places, in part because the university is our central giant business, but they don’t pay taxes.

You all know about inflation. The city knows about it, too:

However, the city has not increased taxes to keep up with inflation. Department budgets have not changed in 3 years. This year it would take roughly $720K extra to keep up with inflation.

Note: Apparently many cities are going through layoffs and budget cuts right now. Here’s a bunch of major Texas cities with budget problems and here’s a story on Kyle.

We’ve been extremely careful in watching our pennies, and we are weathering this economy in a stable way. So that’s nice.

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Onto the budget!

There are actually many different independent budgets. Each one has its own revenue and spending. So the Electric Fund is funded by utility rates and impact fees, the General Fund is funded by taxes, etc.

Here’s all of them:

The big one is the General Fund. Here’s how it gets funded:

Here’s some of the major pressures on it:

SMPD gets 5% raises and SMFD gets 4.5% raises, because they’re allowed to unionize. That’s what collective bargaining gets you. Texas outlaws all other public unions besides those, though. So everyone else gets 3% raises. It’s not the slightest bit fair.

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Also: this year we had our first round of Participatory Budgeting experiment. The public was asked to submit project ideas, and then we all got to vote on which projects to fund.

Here’s how it went:

Lorenzo: That’s pretty sad. Only 117 votes?
Answer: It was our first rodeo! We’ll promote the projects and try to drum up more enthusiasm.

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Back to the General Fund:

Basically, things are less grim than they feared.

We’re going to have a balanced budget this year, without raising taxes:

For the next three years, we might be on track to have a balanced budget, or we might get unlucky.

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The new property tax rate

Last year, staff presented three different options to Council. Councilmembers all said which one they liked best. City staff went and finalized a bunch of details before the final vote. Then half the council members changed their mind at the last second.

This year, staff did not outline multiple options. They just said, “Hey, we don’t need to raise taxes to make the budget work.”

[Note: I actually think this is a bad idea. The budget is not working! We are not keeping up with inflation. Small incremental tax hikes are much better than having to occasionally lob giant tax hikes at the public.]

Anyway:

They’re not actually voting on the tax rate until September. But for planning purposes, staff is working with the same tax rate as last year, ¢65.15. On a $300,000 house, that works out to about $1,950.

Question: Is Council okay with setting a maximum tax rate of ¢65.15? This is the tax rate we had last year.

Everyone is on board with this.

Note: This is just the tax rate cap. They’re just saying the tax rate won’t be higher than ¢65.15.

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The rest of the budget

The other major funds are:

• Hotel Tax Fund: this has to be used for tourism and museums and things like that.
• Community Enhancement Fund: there’s a big discussion about streetlights, maintenance, and who keeps track of where they should be located.
• Electric Utility Fund: your electricity supplier
• Water and wastewater: ie all your water hook-ups to get fresh water and get your toilet waste taken away and cleaned
• Stormwater: major projects to keep people’s homes from flooding when it rains
• Resource Recovery Fund: think trash and recycling
• Transit Fund: busses and bike lanes
• Airport Fund: airport repair, etc.

Council has a big discussion about a lot of rate hikes:

So the average house would see a $7 increase in their monthly bills.

They spend a lot of time discussing the pros and cons of all these. For example:

The Community Benefit Charge: It’s supposed to cover streetlights and lighting. How do we decide which streets need streetlights? Who is being neglected because the city hasn’t installed their lights or repaired them?

The Electric fund: our bond rating got downgraded a few years ago. This means that it costs more for us to borrow money to complete electric projects. Can we fix this by raising rates? Would it save tax payers money in the long run? (Yes, it would.)

The Stormwater fund: it shows a $0 increase above, but that’s a mistake. This fall, they’re going to roll out a stormwater master plan, and it’s going to take a rate hike to pay for projects in the Wallace Addition and Bishop/Belvin. We have a lot of flooding in town, just from ordinary thunderstorms.

Bottom line: pretty much everyone says “Yes” to all of these increases (besides Alyssa), but none of this is binding yet. They’re just telling staff that they’re open to these rate increases.

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Workshop 2: EMS billing

San Marcos-Hays County EMS was dissolved last year because they had decided to unionize. Police and fire can unionize, and private EMS companies can unionize. But the leaders in Hays County lost their fucking minds when their private EMS company decided to unionize. So Kyle and Dripping Springs each split off to form their own EMS, and San Marcos was stuck holding the bag.

We’re in the process of building San Marcos EMS now.

Question: How much should EMS charge for a ride?

The problem – of course – is that health care is super broken in the US. How do you set rates that are fair within a system that is a hopeless mess?

In San Marcos:

• About half of all EMS calls are Medicare patients
• About 6-12% more calls are from people covered by Medicaid
• About 25% have insurance
• The rest – 13%-19% – don’t have insurance and can’t really pay.

You make up astronomical rates in order to get payments from insurance. Then insurance covers some of it, or none of it, and then people are screwed over for the rest. It’s a terrible system.

(Obviously socialized healthcare is the way to go. You get much better health outcomes in your country for far cheaper.)

San Marcos cannot solve the real, underlying problem.

Here is what’s proposed:

The city can offer certain discounts to help residents:

The other major problem is the time crunch. If Council doesn’t approve something, then the new San Marcos EMS can’t start the paperwork with insurance companies and Medicare and Medicaid, so that they can be operating by October 1st.

Everyone on Council was uncomfortable with everything. It was super rushed – they only had 15 minutes – and no one had time to thoroughly understand the details.

They did give it the thumbs up, so that EMS could make its October 1st opening deadline, but the plan is to revisit these decisions.

We’ll see!