Author: The San Marxist

Hours 2:03 – 2:33, 2/18/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 14: the Strategic Plan

GUYS. Guys. This one is exciting. 

Background

The budget process for 2026 has already started. Back in January, Council had a two day Visioning workshop.  First they listen to about five hours of presentations.  Then they spend about five hours updating the Strategic Plan from last year.  

Usually it’s extremely dull, and filled with mundane wordsmithing.  But this year, it was exciting! Really!

Let’s dive in.

The Strategic Goals

Here are the five goals: 

Each one gets about 3-4 pages of outcomes. So we’ll take them one at a time.

Goal #1: Quality of Life & Sense of Place

    Here are the most exciting changes in this category:

    Part iii: The Tenant’s Bill of Rights!  This is courtesy of the San Marcos Civics Club, who has been meeting monthly for the past year to focus on different issues.  This is great work by them. They are promoting the National Tenant’s Bill of Rights as a model for what Council should adopt.

    (I think this was Lorenzo’s contribution, but everyone was on board with it.)

    …

    Also from that photo, note Part i, “Update housing Data and Adopt the Strategic Housing Action Plan”.

    Back in 2018-2019, we carried out a huge Housing Needs Assessment, and created a Strategic Housing Action Plan. And Council just deep-sixed it. Absolutely nothing came of it. For over five years!

    In 2023, City Staff held a workshop on it and said, “Hey, you should really be thinking about housing! It’s super unaffordable here!”

    Council:

    *Except Alyssa.

    It got put on last year’s Strategic Action Plan last year, and then ignored for all of 2024.

    Until election season came around! Then all the candidates realized that everyone is super broke in San Marcos and can’t afford housing. Every single candidate for every council seat said housing was our biggest issue.

    It seems like it really is going to happen this year, hopefully.

    ….

    Also from this same section:

    Alyssa has been promoting this for years, and Max promoted it back when he was on Council.  So this is great to officially get it in the strategic plan.

    From this link:

    So it’s about giving the community more input on what we prioritize in the budget.

    Goal #2: Economic Vitality:

    Prioritizing the needs and well-being of workers in our economic development?!? This is catnip to my marxist heart.

    (I think this came from Amanda.)

    Goal #3: Public Safety, Core Services, and Fiscal Excellence.

      GUYS. Guys.  Literally squirming in my seat over here, I’m so excited.  Look at this:

      That one in the middle is huge.  This will be an office that is aimed at crime prevention from a non-incarceration perspective.  Dallas has a version of this called the Office of Integrated Public Safety Solutions, and Austin has a version called the Office of Violence Prevention.

      Importantly, this will be housed outside of SMPD.   What are the actual, evidence-based strategies that reduce crime? Here’s a big list. Things like access to jobs that pay a living wage, access to mental health and addiction treatment services, programs for kids and teens, connecting people with opportunities, etc.  

      (You know what doesn’t reduce crime? Locking people up. And it’s super expensive!)

      This definitely came from Amanda.

      (To be fair, Alyssa has brought this up before, but the council then was not interested in giving her ideas any oxygen.)

      ….

      Also, on that same slide:

      Also amazing! This is exactly what we discussed last time, when Council voted to postpone the vote on SMPD license plate readers until we could clearly state how we plan on protecting the privacy of the public.

      (Also from Amanda.)

      …

      And further down:

      Part B, iv:  Making all the websites easy to use. This is very hard to do well. But at least we’re trying to get better.

      Part C, iv. This is mostly about HSAB funding.  We outsource most of our social services to local nonprofits, and we should probably double the amount that we’re giving out in grants.

      (I can’t remember who contributed these. Everyone supports them.)

      Hey Council: The budget for HSAB should grow automatically with inflation! You should consider an ordinance to make this happen! Please and thank you.

      Goal #4: Mobility and Connectivity

      Okay, several thoughts on this:

      Section A, ii:  What’s this Western Loop business?  

      Shane Scott wants to bring it back. This is an old topic.

      There is a lot of traffic going out west towards Wimberley on RR 12. Right now it all feeds straight through town, on Wonderworld, to get to I-35. Should there be a northern loop that goes around San Marcos?

      This was a big point of contention when the Transportation Master Plan was adopted in 2018. My memory is that the San Marcos River Foundation came out hard against it, because it will inevitably lead to development over the aquifer.  If you put a road somewhere, it drives development along that road.  If you drive development over the recharge zone, you’re going to get a filthy brown river eventually, instead of a sparkly clean river.  

      I thought it got voted down. But you can see it here, on the thoroughfare plan:

      I believe it’s that yellow loop around town.

      Jane Hughson also seems to think it got nixed back then.

      Shane Scott wants to resurrect the issue, and he pictures it being an overhead highway, kind of like the Wonderworld overpass.

      I have a lot of questions!   

      • Do the environmentalists still approve of the deal cut on the wonderworld overpass? Or do they have reservations about reproducing another deal like that?
      • How much would it cost to make a zooming overhead line like that, on a much longer stretch?
      • Who stands to profit from this? What are the various interests?

      Anyway, the Transportation Master Plan is coming back around, so we’ll see this again.

      …

      Section A, iii: Alyssa Garza is interested in on-demand services until we get a better bus system.  What’s this?

      So, Kyle has a 3.14 program. Any uber ride in the city costs $3.14, and the city pays for the rest. Is this something we should do, at least until we get a better bus system?

      I’m a little uneasy about a program like this! I found this, which seems sensible:

      So it’s more expensive, and we don’t want to sabotage progress on developing a functional bus system. At the same time, maybe we can use it for high-needs community members as a temporary stop-gap.

      ( Also, Uber is super-shitty on worker rights, and lobbies aggressively against laws providing benefits and minimum wage to workers in the gig economy, so I kinda hate them.)

      …

      Goal #5: Environmental Protection

      Two additions:

      No issues with either of those!

      …

      There isn’t a bullet point about fencing off the rivers. But they did talk about it in the presentations:

      Basically we’ve hired someone to do a feasibility study on fencing the parks.  There’s no way it will be fenced off by this summer, though.

      …

      Which brings us to last Tuesday!

      Amanda offers up one amendment:  Remember the Transportation Equity Cabinet presentation last time? Let’s include their recommendations into Transportation and Traffic Operations.

      Her amendment: “Implement Recommendations from the San Marcos Transportation Equity Cabinet.”

      Jane:  Weren’t we going to workshop the recommendations?  

      City Manager Stephanie Reyes diplomatically says that Council supported putting the suggestions in both the Transit and Transportation Master Plans.

      Jane: Without further inspection?

      Stephanie: Council seemed pretty amenable, yeah.

      Amanda: In fact, one of the questions I posed when it was under discussion was what the next steps were to be taken, if all of us agreed. We all said we agreed.

      The vote on Amanda’s amendment:

      Everyone likes it!

      Finally, the vote on the entire strategic plan:

      Everyone likes it. INCLUDING ME!!

      (Read the whole draft here, if you’re so inclined.)

      …

      There are a few other items:

      • Council appointed a Comp Plan Oversight Committee
      • There’s a bond process for various construction projects around town
      • There are more committee and board appointments

      but this meeting is super long, and we still have the workshops to go. So I’m skipping these.

      Bonus! 3 pm workshops

      by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

      Workshop #1: Utility Payment Assistance

      Here’s the situation: We’ve got city-owned water, electric, and wastewater. (Most of the people here are on city utilities, although some people are on Pedernales or Bluebonnet electric.)

      When people can’t pay their utility bills, we offer them a two week delay. But we also give $120K to Community Action, to help pay people’s utility bills when they fall behind and can’t afford to catch up.

      This has been an ongoing topic of conversation:

      The problem is that most of the $120K we set aside for utility assistance isn’t getting used.  There’s a ton of need out there in the community, and we’re not getting the money to the people that need it.

      Why??

      Community Action gets money from us.  They also get grant money from the state and feds.  So they use that state and federal money first, and then only use the city money if that money’s not available.  That is good!

      The problem is that their application process is long and a giant pain in the butt, because they’re trying to give out federal money.  So people are being asked to provide all kinds of crazy paperwork documenting their employment or residence or whatever, and it takes weeks, and the person just needs their water turned back on so that they can cook dinner. This part is bad.

      …

      So the city is working on how to get the funds out faster.  Would any other organizations like to also hand out utility assistance?  (RFP means “Request for proposals”)

      No one wanted to apply!  They kept advertising and reaching out and extending the deadline. 

      Eventually they got three more applicants. Here’s what’s being recommended:

      The “donated funds” bit means that San Marcos residents have an option to donate when they pay their bill. There’s about $45K in accumulated donations right now.

      (Community Action spoke up on Tuesday and said their capacity is actually $30K, so that extra $10K will get re-distributed.)

      Discussion points:

      Question: How long will the turnaround time be for people needing assistance?

      Answer: Different agencies have estimated 3-5 days. Some a little longer. We’ll nail it down for sure in the contract with each agency.

      City Manager Stephanie Reyes proposes having a universal application that all the agencies could use for city funds. Everyone likes that.

      …

      There’s a lot of discussion about how customers can find out about utility assistance.

      • If your bill is overdue, you get an automatic robo-call on the 16th day.
      • On the 18th day, your bill is delinquent.
      • After that, the delinquency notice goes out.

      Right now, we don’t mention the utility assistance on the phone call or on the delinquency letter. The person has to call into the city first.

      Everyone wants to know, “Why don’t we tell people about the funds earlier?!”

      City Manager Stephanie Reyes says tactfully, “It hasn’t always been the philosophy of Council to make this information available at this stage.”

      What she means is this: Previous councils have been more obsessed with the random person who might cheat the system than they were with actually connecting people in need with assistance.

      This council – thank god – is more obsessed with connecting people to assistance. They want to have the utility assistance mentioned in the robo-call, and put in the delinquency letter.

      …

      Late Penalties and Reconnection Fees

      Suppose you can’t pay your utility bill. This would make it even harder:

      In other words, if you’re $140 behind on your utilities, it will cost almost $200 to get everything turned back on. This is pretty typical.

      Council looks at each of these individually.

      Penalty Fees: on average, people pay about $14 in penalties – a little higher for houses, a little lower for apartments.

      They debate capping it at different amounts – $10? $15? $20? – so that you’d pay either 10% or the cap, whichever is less. (This is Lorenzo’s suggestion.)

      (This is for residential, not commercial.)

      Reconnection Fees: This cost is based on a 2013 estimate of fuel plus labor to go to the house and turn it back on.

      Staff is planning on recalculating these fees and see if they can bring it down.

      …

      Question: If we did away with all fees altogether, how much would rates go up?

      Answer: about 0.5 %. Now, we always have rate increases, because costs go up. But if you want to do away with fees, we’ll need to tack on 0.5% on top of that.

      …

      Q: Can we change how many times they can get assistance per year?

      Answer: Right now it’s twice per year. It might be hard to track among different agencies.

      Most councilmembers want to change it to four.

      Bottom line: This will come up at a future council meeting, along with some of the answers to questions that Council asked tonight.

      …

      Workshop #2

      Update on American Rescue Plan dollars:

      A few programs have a little money leftover:

      Here’s where we want to re-allocate it:

      Alyssa fought long and hard for us to provide rental service, and to use an agency that doesn’t take weeks and weeks in turnaround time. (Same issue as with the utility assistance – federal money comes with a wild amount of paperwork.) It’s nice that this is now becoming the norm.

      Any further money that becomes available will also go to Rental Assistance.

      February 4th City Council Meeting

      by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

      Is the national news making you spiral into a dark place? Come read about City Council, where things are less grim and you can make a difference. This week we’re taking on civil liberties and police license plate scanners, and some housing on Post Road, and some appointments.

      Here we go!

      Hours 0:00 – 2:73:  Rezoning some land on Post Road,  SMPD license plate scanners, and just a few of the many, many appointments Council made.  

      Bonus! 3 pm workshops:  There was a transportation equity cabinet over the past eight months.  What does that even mean?

      Have a good week, and don’t let the bastards grind you down.

      Hours 0:00 – 2:73, 2/4/25

      by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

      Citizen Comment

      No one spoke this week.

      Moving on!

      …

      Item 9: Rezoning some land.

      A developer wants to develop this stretch: 

      and turn it into townhomes.

      Up close, it looks like this:

      It includes the old Bismark filling station: 

      I went hunting for photos of the old Bismark Filling Station back in its heyday, but came up empty handed. I did find this deep dive on the history it, though.

      …

      Q: Are there any concerns about flooding?

      Answer: It’s partially in the floodplain, and it is near the headwaters, which is very sensitive. But the land is actually angled so that the water runs away from the sensitive stuff.  The water runs away from other houses on Post Road, and towards the stadium.

      Q:  Are there any concerns about buried gas tanks?

      Answer: no, the station is too old. They checked the records. They didn’t bury tanks back then.

      Q:  Are you going to preserve the gas station?

      Answer: We are working with the Historical Preservation Committee on this! Hoping to save the facade and columns, and put it somewhere where it can be memorialized.

      Note: This is how you make best friends with Council. Who knows if it will actually happen or not, but Old San Marcos is happy to hear this guy say the right things.

      One other note:  

      The developer is asking for CD-4 zoning.  He’s saying he wants to build townhomes:

      Ok, maybe not quite that beautiful. But maybe like these, near Wonderworld:

      which are also pretty cute. (via)

      But CD-4 zoning can also mean large scale apartment complexes like so:

      When you zone land, you don’t get to pick and choose which use the developer ends up doing.   The developer can do anything included in the zoning.

      Now, this particular lot isn’t very big:

      So my guess is that he will probably build townhomes or condos.  But he is allowed to sell it to someone else, and that other person can do anything allowed under CD-4 zoning.

      The vote:

      Great! That’s how I would have voted, too.

      …

      Item 6: License plate recognition cameras.

      Should the city spend $124K for SMPD to have cameras that read license plates for one year? 

      Maybe! We need to unpack some stuff first.

      Backstory:

      Budgets get approved in September.  But the planning starts nine months earlier.  So at the end of January, Council had a two day workshop where they started laying out big ideas.

      They go into great detail on the strategic goals:

      Under each goal, Council decides what they want to prioritize for the next year.

      On Day 2, they tackled Public Safety. Amanda proposed the following outcome:

      • Establish clear guidelines and protections governing the use of technology to ensure transparency, accountability, and respect for the personal privacy and civil rights of the public.

      (Around 3:05 if you want to watch.)

      Everyone was in favor of this! It sounds great!

      Next: let’s talk about license-plate cameras:

      So these cameras that SMPD wants to buy. They are Automatic License Plate Readers, and they read your license plate when you drive by.

      The ACLU does not like them one bit:

      A little-noticed surveillance technology designed to track the movements of every passing driver is fast proliferating on America’s streets. Automatic license plate readers—mounted on police cars or on objects like road signs and bridges—use small high-speed cameras to photograph thousands of plates per minute.

      The information captured by the readers—including the license plate number and the date, time, and location of every scan—is being collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information are growing rapidly. This information is often retained for years, or even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights.

      Although they do say there are some appropriate uses:

      We don’t find every use of ALPRs objectionable. For example, we do not generally object to using them to check license plates against lists of stolen cars, for AMBER Alerts, or for toll collection, provided they are deployed and used fairly and subject to proper checks and balances, such as ensuring devices are not disproportionately deployed in low-income communities and communities of color, and that the “hot lists” they are run against are legitimate and up to date.

      Now, what the ACLU really doesn’t like is this particular company, Flock Safety:

      Unlike a targeted ALPR camera system that is designed to take pictures of license plates, check the plates against local hot lists, and then flush the data if there’s no hit, Flock is building a giant camera network that records people’s comings and goings across the nation, and then makes that data available for search by any of its law enforcement customers. Such a system provides even small-town sheriffs access to a sweeping and powerful mass-surveillance tool, and allows big actors like federal agencies and large urban police departments to access the comings and goings of vehicles in even the smallest of towns.

      And yes, Flock is exactly the company we’re buying cameras from. And it’s not just the ACLU: other folks also don’t like Flock Safety one bit.

      Look, ICE raids have already started. (Not as intensely as Trump would like, but they’ve started.) Do we really think this universal surveillance data will be off-limits? It wasn’t off-limits back in 2019.

      Sure might be nice to have a clear policy! Maybe we should “Establish clear guidelines and protections governing the use of technology to ensure transparency, accountability, and respect for the personal privacy and civil rights of the public.”

      This brings us to Tuesday’s meeting

      Amanda makes a motion: Postpone the purchase of the cameras until we’ve established the policy that focuses on privacy and civil rights when it comes to the public. (After all, it was literally five days earlier that Council agreed this is a priority!)

      Chief Standridge says, “No worries! We already have such a policy! It’s four pages long and follows all the best practices in Texas! This is what all the departments across Texas are doing.”

      I think he’s referring to this: Policy 5.4: Automated License Plate Readers.

      Amanda: “I’ve read the policy. Those may be the best practices in Texas, but they’re not the best practices nationwide. Things like data usage, data retention, data sharing – we should address those things, and then we can bring back the vote on the cameras.”

      They get into it a little bit, over how long data should be stored. Is 30 days too long? Just right? (That same article on Flock Safety has recommended legal language specifically for this kind of situation.)

      “Furthermore,” Chief Standridge says, “this is already underway. We got the first batch of cameras in 2022, and then we got a grant for some more…” he kind of trails off.

      Amanda: “The cameras have already been purchased? The cameras that require council approval?”

      Chief Standridge: “The Flock representative is here online, they can confirm or deny if the cameras have been purchased.”

      Jane tries to smooth it over: “It was probably something like it was initiated because they thought they’d be under 100K, and then it turned out to be over 100K, so they need needed approval!”

      Standridge: “Close enough!”

      Note: I think it was because of this:

      The original contract was not discussed when Council approved it, in April, 2022. Later on, SMPD applied for some grants, and Council didn’t discuss those, either. My guess is that since the grants were in motion, SMPD assumed it was fine to move forward with the cameras.

      (This also happened with the Total Bullet Containment System. It had been purchased before Council actually authorized the purchase.)

      …

      Back to the conversation:

      Jane: I’m game to have a work session on this policy, but I don’t want to hold up the purchase of the cameras in the meantime.

      No one else (besides Alyssa) weighs in.

      The Vote: Should we postpone the purchase of these cameras?

      WHOA!   I was not expecting that, but I’m thrilled to see it!

      …

      Items 10-13: An enormous number of appointments. 

      The vast majority of the meeting was spent making appointments:

      Those are all boards where they appoint community members.

      The most public of these is P&Z. P&Z had three open spots. David Case and Maraya Dunn were both re-upped for a second term, and “Rodney” got the last spot.

      No one in the meeting ever used Rodney’s last name, and I don’t have access to the applications, so I guess we’ll all find out which Rodney in a few weeks, when he starts attending the meetings.

      …

      Item 14: Attendance on External Boards

      There are a bunch of committees in the city and county that have a representative from city council.

      Sometimes you have one of these external boards with a city council rep, but that council member never shows up to any of the meetings, and sometimes his name is Shane Scott. 

      (Specifically at the January 7th council meeting, where Shane found out that he’s been on the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau Board for the past year, and had missed all of the meetings. Shane was kind of sheepish about the whole thing.)(Around 4:18 in this video. It’s pretty funny.)

      Jane: Do we want some sort of attendance policy for these situations? Like you can’t have more than three unexcused absences in a row? That’s the policy for the rest of our boards and commissions. 

      Everyone is on board. So this will come back around.

      Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 2/4/25

      by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

      The first workshop was an update on the budget side of the CIP projects, which is kind of weedy and wonky, so I’m skipping that. But feel free to watch here.

      Workshop #2: Equity Cabinet

      Last summer, the city received a presentation from Dr. Rosalie Ray, at Texas State. She was proposing to run an equity cabinet on Transportation, and report back with her findings.

      So basically, DEI is hard to do well. It takes time, energy, funding, and expertise. An equity cabinet is one model that the research-folk like, as a way to do it well.

      Ours is studying transportation.

      Here’s what I got out of it: there’s a lot of expertise about transportation by city staff, and there’s a lot of lived experience by people who don’t have cars, out in the community.

      If you want to incorporate their experience into city policy, you need to do a lot of things:

      1. Give people rides to meetings and compensate them for their time. The whole point is to focus on people with barriers to participation, so you’d better address the barriers.
      2. Have the cabinet go into detail about what problems they face.
      3. Have city staff give the cabinet a rundown about how city planners organize and work on transportation issues.
      4. At this point, the cabinet has both sides of the equation: lived experience plus expertise. Then the cabinet members can really identify the sources of the problems and understand what it would take to solve them
      5. Eventually they arrive at a set of recommendations, which the city can then incorporate into their plans.

      That’s why it’s a big, drawn out process involving time, money, and energy! But it sounds like it went really well.

      First: You have to know exactly what you’re aiming for, if you want a concrete, productive conversation:

      The participants were giving the presentation, for what it’s worth.

      Here’s their experience:

      Life is really not easy in San Marcos, without a car. Like, Workforce Solutions that’s supposed to help you train and find a job, cover childcare, etc, is located way out on Posey Road.

      This is the participants incorporating the expertise of city planners into their understanding of San Marcos:

      So taking expertise plus lived experience together, they identified some key problems:

      Those are categories.

      Here’s their specific recommendations in each of those five categories:

      Again, it’s a great presentation, so feel free to go listen yourself here.

      Council had a few questions:

      Jane asks about sidewalk priorities and bus shelter status?
      Answer: We have 18 sheltered bus stops already. We want more, but we’re holding off because we’re about to re-do the Transportation Master Plan, and we don’t want to put something in that we immediately have to tear out.

      Amanda: Are other cities doing anything that we should start doing?
      Answer: Sometimes when there’s not enough space for a full shelter, they anchor two seats to the bust stop pole, with a little shade on top.

      As Amanda put it, these recommendations are all so feasible! There’s nothing impractical to any of this.

      There’s two big plans coming up: TXDOT is doing a transit plan, and the city is re-doing our transportation master plan. Both TXDOT and the city were involved in the Equity Cabinet, and want to incorporate the recommendations into their new plans. Hooray!

      January 21st City Council Meeting

      by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

      Morning, everyone! This week’s meeting was only 26 minutes long. We’ve got the Blanco Gardens Area Plan, bike lanes on Sessom Drive, and we look at whether or not we have enough water for the next 50 years. That last one is the most interesting, for sure. Dive in!

      The whole meeting was only 24 minutes! But the workshops were great, so those are here, too.

      Hours 0:00 – 0:24: There’s literally just one topic: the Blanco Gardens Area plan. So I stretched it out and went deep. You know how I can be.

      Workshop 1:  Sessom and Academy got a make-over. Let’s check in to see how it’s doing.

      Workshop 2:  Do we have enough water to last us 50 years?  Smart people are thinking hard about this question. I love this topic.

      One last note: the round-ups and deportations have begun. Re-posting this list of organizations who can put your time and/or money to good use:

      Local to San Marcos: 

      Mano Amiga is our homegrown organization. They are accepting donations, and will be able to use volunteers in mid-December. (Or they’ll send you to volunteer with a partnering organization.)

      Regional Austin-San Antonio: 

      American Gateways: Their mission is “To champion the dignity and human rights of immigrants, refugees, and survivors of persecution, torture, conflict, and human trafficking through exceptional immigration legal services at no or low cost, education and advocacy.”

      Catholic Charities of Central Texas: Has a specific immigration services wing, “Offering affordable immigration legal assistance from experienced attorneys and staff, with a focus on family reunification.”

      Statewide:

      RAICES: From their website: “WE defend the rights of immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking people and families, empower communities, and advocate for liberty and justice.”

      Texas Civil Rights Project: Has a specific Beyond Borders program, “From the banks of the Río Grande to the plains of rural Texas, we envision a border state that respects the right to migrate and supports human dignity for all people, no exceptions.”

      Texas Immigration Law Council: “We work across the political spectrum to bring together diverse voices to catalyze consensus on practical immigration solutions for Texas and our nation.”

      ….

      Final note: All of these came recommended to me. If I’ve left something off, let me know and I’ll add it on!

      Hours 0:00 – 0:24, 1/21/25

      by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

      Citizen Comment:

      There were ZERO people at Citizen Comment on Tuesday!  Probably because of this:

      and the freezing temperatures.

      Hope you all stayed warm!

      ….

      Item 1: Blanco Gardens Area Plan

      This is basically the only item of the meeting.

      What is an Area Plan?

      An area plan is a big study of your neighborhood. It’s supposed to document what makes your neighborhood feel special, so that it will keep feeling special over the next few decades. This is a really complicated topic, because there are both good reasons and dangers here.

      (We’ve discussed these before, when the Dunbar/Heritage plan got split into two separate plans.)

      Good reasons: Does your neighborhood need more sidewalks? Better safety? Park improvements? Community space? These are great things to put in the plan.

      (Also, historically, developers have seen low-income neighborhoods as cheap real estate to plunder. Low-income neighborhoods get gentrified, or bulldozed for a highway. Area plans can deter this by encoding the current vibe.)

      Bad reasons: Are you trying to micromanage everyone’s home appearance? Are you trying to prevent affordable housing by nixing things like small-scale apartment complexes, small houses, subdividing big houses into smaller rentals, condos, townhomes, 4-plexes, etc? These are bad things to put in a plan!

      (Really, these rules already exist. They’re generally built into a city’s zoning rules and HOAs. An area plan can just lock down the class segregation for another generation.)

      In addition, if you nix all the affordable housing, you’re left with only big, spread-out houses. This is sprawl. It’s bad for traffic, bad for the environment, and makes it way more expensive for the city to maintain pipes and roads and telephone lines.

      …

      So the planners have to thread the needle here: let’s capture what’s special, but without preventing affordable housing from being built in city limits ever again.

      This is a really nice presentation about the San Marcos area plans. It’s got this map that shows how vulnerable each neighborhood is:

      I know that’s tiny, but you can zoom in on the map to anywhere you want:

      (There are a ton of interesting maps in that presentation – maps of rental houses vs. home owners, maps of area of stability vs change, maps of historic districts and maps of environmental sensitivity, etc. It’s worth a scroll.)

      …

      First up is Blanco Gardens!

      Blanco Gardens is a great choice for an area plan, because of The Woods apartments:

      (Now it’s called Redpoint.)

      In 2012 the city had to decide whether to allow this apartment complex to be built. Blanco Gardens was furious.

      In November 2012, there was a non-binding referendum on the issue:

      Wow, 75% of the city wanted us to purchase the park land! Nevertheless, P&Z and Council greenlighted the apartment complex.

      Then Blanco Gardens was massively flooded in 2015. Tons of residents lost their homes. At this point, the apartment complex was half-built. The widespread belief is that the apartments made the flooding much worse. (The flood also destroyed Cape’s Dam, which lead to a whole ‘nother saga.)

      Bottom line: Blanco Gardens has gone through it, and deserves an area plan.

      …

      So how do you do an area plan?

      They form a committee of eight residents, and then also do a ton of outreach:

      One note: At P&Z, one of the commissioners (Lupe Costilla) said, “I live in this neighborhood, and I had no idea that any of this was going on.” And she’s very plugged in to the city.

      This is what I mean when I say that outreach is really, really hard. Even when you do all of those things, even people who are paying attention still fall through the cracks. You’ve got to dedicate time to relationship-building with community leaders.

      ….

      So what’s actually in the plan?

      Here’s the actual plan draft. In the presentation on Tuesday, they gave a few examples of actual Blanco Gardens content, but mostly they talked more generally about what area plans are.

      Examples:

      If you want to read all the recommendations, by each topic, you should go to pages 17-72 here.

      Final notes: There’s not any automatic funding that comes with all these recommendations. It’s just guidelines for the future. So if the city has money, they’ll follow the recommendations, and if a developer wants to build something, it has to be compatible.

      ….

      Here’s the timeline for approval:

      …

      One final note: Who gets an area plan?

      Here are the first five plans:

      In Blanco Gardens, here’s one recommendation under “Building types”:

      I think that’s really great! But notice who does NOT get an area plan:

      Nobody is ever going to go to Willow Creek or La Cima and say, “Consider and support gentle density”. Those neighborhoods have entrenched protections that make sure that affordable housing will not be mixed in. This drives me batty.

      …

      Literally nothing else happened at the 6 pm meeting. It was only 24 minutes long!

      (We were supposed to discuss the Kissing Tree TIRZ and Downtown TIRZ, but those got postponed until February.)

      Keep going for the workshops!

      Bonus! First 3 pm workshop, 1/21/25

      by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

      Workshop #1: Sessom Drive

      In 2018, we updated the Transportation Master Plan. We noted a bunch of dangerous intersections, and put in a bit about safe biking lanes.  Since then, you’ve seen all sorts of bike lanes pop up.  

      Academy and Sessom was flagged as one of the dangerous spots to improve.  This is the stretch we’re talking about:

      It’s always seemed super dangerous to me! Drivers are so zippy through this:

      wheeeee!

      Here’s what was done:

      Here’s a little before and after. Four skinny zippy, windy lanes, in 2021:

      I worry for all the bikers!

      After:

      A light, bike lanes, single lanes, a left turn lane: so much safer.

      Here’s another before-and-after:

      Hopefully bikers don’t feel like they’re going to be run over anymore!

      …

      Did it work? 

      Looks like it worked great! (“Level of Service” means how much traffic can you handle.)

      The bikers have concerns, though. What are “vertical delineators” that the cyclists want?

      These things.  You’ve seen them all over town.

      The city was trying out different kinds, and it seems like the armadillos work best.  (The other kinds require extra maintenance – they don’t pop back up after awhile, or they get torn off and leave bolts sticking up in the road, etc.  The armadillos are just glued down.)

      ….

      So this brings us to the next question!  We’re going to be improving Sessom down to Aquarena:

      We just completed the yellow part. We are about to work on the blue part to the right. We have some choices:

      1. Go back and undo the bike lanes and safety measures in the yellow part.
      2. Keep them, and extend them to the blue part.

      [Updated to add: I got this part wrong – there’s no option to extend the bike lanes to the new part. They’re just deciding on the yellow part, and if they should add armadillos. Also fixed below.]

      Jane Hughson reminisces about when they agreed to try bike lanes on the yellow part. (This was the very first meeting I blogged publicly, back in 2022!
      – Shane, Mark, and Saul all voted against the bike lanes on Sessom and Craddock. 
      – Jane, Alyssa, Jude and Max Baker all voted to try the bike lanes out.
      Jane was reluctant, but she decided since it’s just paint and easily reversible, we might as well try them out.)

      So what should we do?

      Undo the old bike lanes:  No one
      Keep the bike lanes and add armadillos: Everyone

      Hooray! That was a test, Council, and you passed. Good job.

      There’s one more workshop after this! Keep going!

      Bonus-bonus! Second 3 pm workshop, 1/21/25

      by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

      Workshop #2: San Marcos Water Supply.

      (I love this one so much.)

      Where do we get our water from?  

      Until 2000, San Marcos exclusively got Edwards Aquifer water. Then we signed on to get some surface water from Canyon Lake, and in the mid 2000s, we joined ARWA water.  (More on ARWA in a moment.)

      “MGD” means a million gallons of water per day.

      …

      What is ARWA?

      ARWA is kind of crazy.  Basically, in 2006,  San Marcos, Kyle, Buda, and the Canyon Regional Water Authority got together and tried to figure out a longterm plan. They formed ARWA, the Alliance Regional Water Authority.

      They decided to connect to the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, which is over here:

      The crazy part is that this started in 2006, and they knew they wouldn’t be delivering water until 2023.  This was a very longterm plan! That is really good foresight by the councils that agreed to this.

      There was all sorts of infrastructure that had to be built. I think this is the whole project:

      So we’re getting all the water from the green oval on the far right. Then it has to be treated, at the blue dot, so that it’s drinkable. All those red lines are pipe that had to be laid down, and it gets run out to Lockhart, Buda, Kyle, San Marcos, and New Braunfels. That’s why it took so long.

      But now it’s here! This is great!

      ….

      So we’ve got all this water – Edwards, Canyon, and now ARWA.  Is it enough? 

      It depends! How many people are trying to use this water?

      This is the population projection, based on 2017 data:

      In other words, the black line is the projected population, and the red part is how much water we’d need. So in 2055, we’re expecting to have 140K people and need about 16K acre-feet of water each day. (An acre-foot means take an acre of land, and fill it with water that is 1 foot deep.)

      Here’s the water supply, according to when each of those sources kicked in:

      So this looks great! So in 2055, when we need 16K acre-feet of water, and we’ll have access to about 27K acre-feet of water. Through 2075, we’ve always got more water than we need.

      This is great!

      But then…. we had to update our projections.  Between 2017 and 2024, this region grew even more than expected. So we had to ramp up our projections, accordingly:

      So if we’ve got the same amount of water planned, but a ton more people, the graph now looks like this:

      Whoops. Now we are scheduled to run short on water in 2047.

      So what do we do?

      The good news is that we’ve got plenty of planning time, and we’re putting it to good use. There are basically two ways to address this:

      1. Find more water
      2. Use less water

      We’re going to do both.

      First, more water:

      Apparently Buda and Kyle are even shorter on water than we are. Everyone is interested in collaborating and shoring up supplies.  An ARWA Phase 3? Maybe a different source?

      Second, reduce water usage:

      The second two bullet points are huge: reclaiming used water. We’ve already got some reclaimed water already:

      (That slide is from a 2022 presentation, here.) All that purple is where we can send reclaimed water to. We currently have about 5.5 million gallons per day of reclaimed water.

      The problem is that it’s not drinkable. So you can use it to water the golf course at Kissing Tree (which they do!) but you can’t send it to people’s houses.

      The holy grail will be when we can get reclaimed water clean enough to drink. Then we can really ramp up our water re-use.

      (I read once that one of the grand failures of midcentury America was not double-piping all the houses, so that we weren’t mixing our toilet water with our sink water.  Then we wouldn’t be watering our lawns with drinking water, and we wouldn’t be trying to clean and re-use toilet water.)  

      Here’s what we think we can get to:

      Notice that the water supply hasn’t changed. But the red part – our water use – is smaller. The red part dips down again around 2050 because we think we’ll be able to get the reclaimed water clean enough to drink by then.

      What does Council say?

      Amanda asks if we have a problem with water leakage from pipes?
      Answer: We’re actually pretty good on this. It happens, but we’ve got one of the lowest rates in the state.

      Amanda: Can we get a graph of the top ten biggest water users?
      Answer: Yes! We don’t have it on hand, but we’ll email it to you.

      (I love this question. Amanda said she’ll send the graph over when she gets it, but she hasn’t gotten it yet.)

      Amanda: Do we still do rebates for rain barrels?
      Answer: Yes! Details here.

      The City Manager Stephanie Reyes also mentions this: San Marcos water rates are a little higher than those around us, but it’s because of all this advance planning. We are in a much more secure longterm position that most others.

      January 7th City Council meeting

      by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

      You did it! You’re here in this new year. So is Council, and they’re talking this week about HSAB grant money, shooting ranges, demolitions, and their wishlist for the Charter Review Commission.

      Here we go:

      Hours 0:00 – 2:25:  HSAB money gets allocated,  the lease with Ruben Becerra is finalized, and we buy a TOTAL BULLET CONTAINMENT TRAP.

      Hours 2:25 – 4:26: Demolishing some old barracks in Dunbar, and Council’s wishlist for the Charter Review Commission.

      (I didn’t write up the 3 pm workshops this week. The San Marcos Chamber of Commerce gave a presentation about their strategic goals, and answered some questions. Feel free to watch it here.)