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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.)
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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!
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Have the cabinet go into detail about what problems they face.
Have city staff give the cabinet a rundown about how city planners organize and work on transportation issues.
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
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!
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.”
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.”
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Final note: All of these came recommended to me. If I’ve left something off, let me know and I’ll add it on!
There were ZERO people at Citizen Comment on Tuesday! Probably because of this:
and the freezing temperatures.
Hope you all stayed warm!
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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.
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.
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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.
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.)
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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.
Bottom line: Blanco Gardens has gone through it, and deserves an area plan.
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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.
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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.
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Here’s the timeline for approval:
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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.
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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.)
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!
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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.)
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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:
Go back and undo the bike lanes and safety measures in the yellow part.
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.
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.
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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.
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!
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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:
Find more water
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.
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.)
The Human Services Advisory Board grant money. (HSAB)
Demolition of a little blue building at 734 Valley Street
Let’s take these one at a time.
HSAB grants: These are San Marcos city grants to nonprofits. Back in December, there was a bit of a stand-off between councilmembers supporting Salvation Army and councilmembers supporting HOME Center. Yes, it’s totally weird to pit nonprofits against each other.
It was postponed without resolution. So people showed up to this meeting, to advocate for their nonprofit. By the numbers:
Advocates for Salvation Army: 2 speakers
Advocates for HOME Center: 9 speakers
Nosotros la Gente, ACCEYSS, School Fuel: 1 each
The chair of HSAB (Yancy Arevalo) also spoke. She made the most important point: $550K is peanuts for social services. There were over $1 million requested in the applications, and the need in the community is far greater than that. We need to be allocating far more money to this cause.
(She is exactly right. This is the heart of all these problems. We should not be pitting HOME Center against Salvation Army – we should be increasing the size of the pie.)
If you want the most compelling speaker of the meeting, you want to listen to the man speaking at 17:48 here. He is a formerly homeless man on the brink of death, who was helped by HOME Center and now is in a stable home. It’s really incredible.
The other big issue is the demolition of a house at 734 Valley Street.
A speaker from the Historical Preservation Commission (HPC) talks in favor of delaying the demolition
The owner speaks against the delay
A representative from the Calaboose Museum says, “Please don’t use our name as a reason to delay the ordinance. We are fine with whatever the owner wants to do.”
We’ll unpack all this when we get there.
One final comment worth noting from the 3 pm workshop:
3. At the workshop, Max Baker spoke about the San Marcos Civics Club: they’re putting together a Tenants Bill of Rights.
They want to collaborate widely on this, so if you’re interested, let them know. And they want Council to incorporate this into their upcoming Visioning sessions.
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Item 12: The HSAB Grant Money Saga
Brief background:
HSAB stands for Human Services Advisory Board. This is a committee that meets weekly for four months, and scrutinizes nonprofits who are applying for grant money from the city.
In December, council got the HSAB recommendations and started tinkering. First, they moved $10K from ACCEYSS to Salvation Army.
Then Jane Hughson tried to move all of HOME Center’s funding away. She reduced this to 75% of their funding. This was the issue that blew up.
The whole thing looked really, really bad. It looked partisan. (Full details here.)
This meeting:
Jane drops her motion about changing HOME Center’s funding.
She justifies the attempt like so: “I went back and watched the HSAB meetings. Originally Salvation Army was given $10K, and that was moved over to HOME Center since they were local. My feeling is that our local chapter of Salvation Army is also local, so I wanted to move that back.”
Amanda responds: “I also watched the meetings. You’re oversimplifying what they said. They didn’t just give it to HOME Center because they’re local. They noted that HOME Center has a 90% success rate and is one of the few organizations doing high quality longterm casework.”
There’s some more discussion, but things fizzle out pretty quick. So the only amendment that stuck is the one from last meeting, to move $10K from ACCEYSS to Salvation Army.
There will be a discussion about the HSAB grant process in the future, where Council can do some more tinkering. It’s a work in progress.
Amanda: If you want to get to the root, we – as a city – have created a system that relies on nonprofits to provide critical social services, right? We created that.
Jane: I don’t know that I agree that we created it, but I’ll agree that we have it.
Amanda: I mean, thank god someone’s doing it, to the level that they’re doing it. But I think all of the “thank yous”, the “we’ll work on the criteria”, and all of that – it’s really empty. One of the things that has been reiterated both in this meeting and in the previous one is that $550,000 was never going to be enough. If so, if we really want to address the issue to its core, we know budget season is coming up.
I mean we’re about to – probably later in this meeting! – approve $684,000 for something probably with no discussion, no pushback. That to me is a shame. And so if we really want to address the issue, it needs more money. They need capital.
Jane interjects about Covid money – one year we were able to double the HSAB budget, but only because we could use Covid money.
Amanda: That’s great. But we can find the money. We can find the money because we’ve found the money for so many other things. I don’t think it’s a plausibility issue. If we wanted to do it tomorrow, we could fund it. But it’s a matter of desire.
All I’m saying is if we want to really address the issue, this is the conversation we should have in budget season. We should put our money where our mouths are.
(lightly edited for clarity)
I AM SO EXCITED!! This is my new battle cry: “$550,000 was never going to be enough.” Rally the troops, we’ve got budget season coming up!
The vote:
$550,000 WAS NEVER GOING TO BE ENOUGH!
…
Item 3: The lease with Ruben Becerra
Back again to talk about this cute little building!
on LBJ, at the railroad tracks, across from Toma Taco.
Background:
Like we said last time, Council bought the property from Union Pacific in 2013, in order to maybe put a railstop there someday.
Ruben Becerra owns the building, but not the land. The building sits half on city land, and half on Union Pacific land. It’s very confusing!
You can see the little building there – it’s half on red land (San Marcos) and half on blue land (Union Pacific Rail Road).
Last time, I wasn’t clear on the full backstory of why there is tension, but this time, city staff had a presentation that sheds some light on it:
Staff recommends tightening up the lease terms a bit:
In addition, Jane Hughson reads a carefully scripted main motion and amendment:
That is legalese for “We met behind closed doors and are scrupulously following the advice of our lawyer.”
The vote:
Lorenzo is our brand new councilmember! The rumor mill generally holds that Lorenzo is Becerra’s candidate, in case you were looking askance at that vote.
On Thursday, Becerra sent a written statement to the Express-News accusing the city of “targeted interference,” and said that litigation is “the course that will likely be pursued.”
“This project seems to be unjustly targeted due to political motivations,” he wrote. “The city’s refusal to honor prior agreements or pursue reasonable business solutions underscores a deliberate effort by political adversaries to obstruct progress.”
So Becerra might sue the city over this? That linked article has way more details than I was able to find, so you should trust them over me.
…
Item 5: The SMPD shooting range
Here’s SMPD, located on I35:
SMPD has a shooting range. It was built in 1991.
I’m guessing it is here?
because they described it as a sand berm, and when I zoom in, it looks like this:
Which looks like a sand berm to me!
Here’s what it looks like on the inside:
That was built in 1991. Back then, they needed to be able to shoot pistols at 25 yards.
Since then, you now have to be able to shoot rifles at 50 yards. So officers were going offsite to shoot at ALERRT Shooting range at Texas State. That is free, but it’s often busy.
In 2021, they converted the SMPD range from 25 yards to 50 yards. They also put a roof overhead, to keep the sand from getting washed out and to prevent bits of projectiles from going all over the place. Great!
But the roof also contained all the dust, which has a lot of lead in it, from the bullets. So it’s now super toxic. Also, they have to mine the sand for the bullets every now and then, or else fragments start to bounce back at the officers.
And then the bullets get trapped in that round drum on the right:
Plus there’s a whole HVAC thing to help control the toxic dust.
How much does this thing cost?
The unit is $643,800.00. The total installation will be around $800K.
So what’s the issue?
This item was on the consent agenda. This means no discussion was planned. The only reason we’re discussing it is because Amanda requested that we pull this item off the Consent Agenda.
Remember how 15 people showed up to plead with Council on whether Salvation Army or HOME Center is more deserving of $10K? And ten minutes later, we are green-lighting $643K for a bullet containment system.
It’s even worse than that: it’s already been approved. The whole $800K was buried in the CIP list that got approved in 2023. There was a workshop in June of 2023, which covered the entire CIP list, and then the CIP list got approved in September 2023, along with the rest of the budget. Today is just authorizing the actual purchase.
It just happened automatically! There was literally never any discussion about this $800K, because of the sheer number of projects being addressed. No one single person is the bad guy – this is how systems operate on auto-pilot. But the outcome is unjust.
Look: officers should not be breathing lead-dust. Of course we want them to be safe! The point is the contrast: we greenlight $800K for SMPD without noticing it, and wring our hands over $10K for the homeless.
[Council has some dull side conversations on whether or not the lead and brass can turn a profit, when scrapped for resale.]
Amanda makes her key point: This is her fourth meeting. Over those four meetings, we’ve spent $1 million on SMPD. We can afford to double the HSAB budget – the money is there. We just have to choose to do so. Even people who are paying attention – like herself! – had no idea that $800K got set aside for this TOTAL BULLET CONTAINMENT SYSTEM last summer. It just happens invisibly.
The vote:
C’mon, Lorenzo. I’m rooting for you here, but this isn’t knocking my socks off.
