The San Marxist

Hours 0:00-2:04, 5/2/23

May 7, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Landlords are mad about the Eviction Delay still being in effect.
Community members rooting for good SMART re-negotiations

Both of these will come up tonight.

Item 1: Presentation on Meet and Confer negotiations

Background: After the whole mess leading up to Ryan Hartman’s termination, Mano Amiga called for five police reforms. The city negotiated the new SMPD contract and ignored the five reforms. So Mano Amiga circulated a petition to overturn the contract. Legally, City Council had two choices: either re-open the contract, or let the voters decide. Council decided to renegotiate the contract. The negotiation process is called Meet and Confer.

So, We Meet (and confer) Again

Here are the five Hartman Reforms from Mano Amiga:

City staff has met and conferred with SMPOA. They have a new contract they are proposing. At this past Tuesday’s Council meeting, there’s a presentation on the new contract. Then City Council will vote to adopt (or not) the new contract on May 16th. (They will definitely vote to adopt.)

Here’s the short version:

End the 180 Day Rule: “We’re already doing the compromise position!”
End Delay of Interview Rule: “No.”
Public Transparency: “I’m pretending my hands are tied, legally. But we will incorporate reprimands into promotions.”
End 3rd party arbitration: “We’ll tighten up a few situations where the 3rd party can’t overrule us.”
End Vacation Forfeiture: “No.”

City Manager Stephanie Reyes made a point to say that Chief Standridge was not part of the negotiation team, because it would put him in such an awkward position. He was only there as a neutral resource. (Who all actually was doing the negotiations? I couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t on the agendas of the Meet and Confer meetings. I watched a little bit of the videos – April 7, April 19, April 23 – but didn’t see any introductions, and I could only recognize Stephanie Reyes. There are no documents besides the presentation in the packet. So I have no idea.)

It’s a weird situation, where the police union (SMPOA) is on one side, and city staff are supposed to be on the other side, advocating for these five reforms on behalf of Mano Amiga that they don’t necessarily believe in. So it’s mildly amazing that they moved the needle at all.

In other words, my expectations were low, and they successfully cleared my low expectations.

The main presentation

I found myself getting pretty mad, listening to Chief Standridge. We’re going to unpack what he said, but there’s a couple main themes:

He acts deliberately obtuse about the reason activists are requesting a reform. “Why on earth would you not want to support our valiant officers?”
He is mushy about the difference between holding an employee accountable in their job, and someone’s legal rights in a criminal investigation. These are very different things, but he switches back and forth as if they’re the same.
He acts like something is legally forbidden, when he means “Well, we have the power to change the law in these negotiations. But until we do, it’s forbidden!”

He organizes his presentation according to the five Hartman reforms, so I’m going to do the same here.

So here we go.

The 180 Day Rule:

What Mano Amiga says about it:

What Chief Standridge says about it:

Before San Marcos negotiates a contract, there are some background Texas laws in effect. These are the Civil Service laws. If an officer does something wrong, Chief Standridge has 180 days to investigate, meet with all parties, and dispose of an investigation.

Last summer’s Meet and Confer agreement made it stronger. Now Chief Standridge has 180 days to file a complaint, and then another 180 days from the complaint to carry out the investigation and draw a conclusion or punishment or whatever.

Standridge gives some other contexts:

If it’s not a criminal offense, the 180 day clock starts running at the incident. If it’s criminal, the 180 day clock starts running when the crime is discovered.
Federal law mandates 300 days statute of limitations for sexual harassment
Statute of limitations for misdemeanors is 2 years, for run-of-the-mill felonies is 3 years.

Mano Amiga wants to end the statute of limitations altogether.

Standridge’s argument against this is basically:

That’s absurd! The statute of limitations for most crimes is only 2-3 years!
It’s really hard to get good evidence as more time passes! For example, a lot of video footage auto-rewrites every 30 days or so. It’s hard to collect old evidence. “An unlimited time span is unreasonable if we believe in evidence.”

This is Chief Standridge at his worst. He’s completely ducking the issue. The issue – which he is well-aware of – is that nationally, we have a big problem with police department protecting abusive cops and shielding them from investigations. One good way to do this is to circle the wagons and run out the statute of limitations. Then shrug your shoulders and say, “oops! Too late to do anything!”

Does SMPD do this? Clearly Chief Standridge thinks not. I genuinely have no idea. But Chief Standridge is being a jerk by not acknowledging that this is a broader problem among police departments in general.

The next thing that Standridge is doing is switching back and forth between the employment rules for police officers versus the actual law for civilians during a criminal investigation. When it comes to employment rules, there’s no statute of limitations at your job. Your boss can pull you in and say, “Wait a minute. What were you doing back in 2017?” It doesn’t mean that your boss can file criminal charges against you, but they can certainly open an investigation with HR.

The fact that the statute of limitations is 2 years for misdemeanors and 3 years for low-key felonies is 100% irrelevant. Who cares, Chief. You’re their boss. If you have a bad cop and something comes to light from 2019, don’t you want the option of looking into it?

Which brings me to my final point: some crimes have no evidence, and it’s just the end of the road. If the incident was a year ago and there’s no evidence, then you’ve done what you can do. End of matter. Why do you need to decide preemptively that all crimes from a year ago have no merit? None of them could possibly be investigated? Even if someone was deliberately obfuscating and hiding the matter?

Outcome: nothing changed.

Hartman Reform #2. 48 hour delay of interviews and video review.

Here’s what Mano Amiga says:

Here’s what Chief Standridge says:

Suppose an officer is accused of misconduct. That officer is given 48 hours advance notice and shown the video before they are interviewed. Community members are not. You may think this is unfair towards community members, but it’s actually unfair in the opposite way! It’s unfair for officers, because they can’t plead the 5th like you can. You’re allowed to ask for a lawyer before you talk to the cops. The officer is forced to give a statement and answer questions by Internal Affairs. They can be fired if they don’t cooperate!

Again, Chief Standridge is drawing a false equivalence, and it’s bullshit: if you’re being hauled in for questioning, you’re a civilian being questioned by the cops. You’re entitled to rights under the constitution. Whereas if the cop is hauled into Internal Affairs, he’s an employee being questioned by his job. That is not a criminal investigation.

Chief Standridge almost acknowledges this, because he cites Garrity, which is a court decision that says that a cop’s compelled testimony for Internal Affairs can’t be used in a criminal proceeding. In other words, everything is completely fair:

You can be forced to talk to your boss at work, but you can’t be forced to talk to the cops in a criminal investigation.
A cop can be forced to talk to Internal Affairs at their job, but that testimony can’t be used against the cop in a criminal investigation.

Nothing of substance was said regarding the 48 hour delay. It was just glossed over.

Then Chief Standridge talks about why officers are allowed to watch the video before they testify: studies prove that it improves officer recall by 11% when they watch the video before they testify! Isn’t that amazing?

It is a wild misreading of the situation. He is literally explaining the point that watching a video helps you remember what happened. No shit, Sherlock. That’s not the issue.

The issue – just to be painfully explicit here – is that watching the video allows a cop to get their story straight. Does the video show you planting evidence? Did the video catch something that makes you look bad? Wouldn’t you like time to prepare for that?

If we take Chief Standridge at his word – that he literally believes that showing someone a video is best practices because it improves their memory – then he ought to extend that practice to community members. Everyone should get to watch the video! If you haul in a burglary suspect, you should show them the grainy ambiguous video footage before asking them any questions. It might help jog their memory. RIGHT CHIEF? BEST PRACTICES!

This would have been a respectable answer from Chief Standridge:

“Eye witness testimony is notoriously inaccurate. Showing a video to a witness has pros and cons. It can solidify someone’s memory of what happened, but it also reveals to someone the extent of what the investigator knows. If a person has nothing to hide, it helps them give better testimony. If a person does have something to hide, then it allows them to sharpen what they hide in the testimony.”

But that is not what he said.

Outcome: nothing changed.

Hartman Reform #3: Transparency

Here’s what Mano Amiga wants:

(I know, Chief Standridge went out of order. This is 3rd in his presentation, even though Mano Amiga’s graphic has a 4. Ignore it.)

Here’s what Chief Standridge says:

By law, there are two files on every cop, an “A” file and a “G” file.

The A File:
– Anything good that happens to the officer (a commendation, congratulation, or honor)
– Any misconduct that ended in a suspension, firing, or demotion
– Regular formal evaluations

The G File:
– Soft things, like coaching and mentoring and job improvement things. Letters of reprimand go here.

Here’s what the Austin Chronicle says about it:

The G files contain complaints by citizens, testimony from fellow officers, body-cam video, written reprimands and memos, and other details that justice advocates think should be accessible to the public.

Chief Standridge tells us that legally, he can’t release anything in the G file. His hands are tied.

But he’s misrepresenting the situation (and by this point I’m pretty irritated with his whole presentation). Here’s the thing: It’s illegal under Civil Service Laws, yes. But Meet and Confer contracts override Civil Service laws. So it’s only illegal until we pass a contract that says we want the G file released.

This exact issue is currently being debated in Austin:

Subsection (g) applies to Texas municipalities whose police officers (or firefighters) are civil service employees – that is, ones that don’t have unions that negotiate the terms of officers’ employment. Here, the city and the Austin Police Association, through what’s called the “meet-and-confer” process, do hash out a contract that could preempt Subsection (g) should the parties so agree. Both APD and APA leadership insist the G file must remain secret – that it will contain frivolous accusations that officers can’t defend themselves against, particularly under Austin’s current procedures that allow such claims to be made anonymously. However, during this year’s negotiations for a new police contract, the city’s Labor Relations Office is proposing to do away with G files.

In other words: It’s only illegal until your meet-and-confer agreement overrides it. Let’s file the G File in the Chief-Is–Misleading-the-Public File. (Or the circular file.)

(In fact, this is part of what Austin is voting on, on Saturday:

And it passed! Unfortunately, San Antonio’s Prop A, also including some police reform, did not pass.)

Anyway! Chief Standridge says that they found a compromise position: G-files and reprimands should play a bigger role in promotions. Or rather, if you’ve got a bunch of reprimands, you’ll get “negative points” and won’t be able to earn a big promotion quite so fast.

Kinda shocking that this wasn’t already happening, but better late than never!

Outcome: Letters of reprimand and suspension will be included in the promotion process.

Hartman Reform #4: End 3rd Party Arbitration

What Mano Amiga says:

(I know, still out of order. It’s the least of our worries.)

Here’s what Chief Standridge says:

Suppose an officer gets in trouble. There are three kinds of discipline:
– you get fired,
– you get suspended, or
– you get demoted.

If one of those happens and the officer doesn’t like it, they have two options:

Civil Service Commission
Three commissioners hear the appeals. I think they’re local citizens
Hearing Examiner hears the appeals. This is 3rd party arbitration.

What I remember from back in January is Karen Muñoz saying that 3rd party arbitration almost always lightens the discipline, and that arbiters have a motivation to stake out a middle position.

Here’s where Standridge ticked me off in this one: he goes back to Ryan Hartman and says, “Now, Ryan Hartman appealed his discipline to a Hearing Examiner, and the Hearing Examiner upheld the punishment. We prevailed! The system worked! So why would we want to change something that works?!!”

In other words: these dumb, irrational activists! They don’t even realize that their poster child Ryan Hartman was such a shitheel that even the arbiter upheld his punishment! Aren’t they silly?

Okay, you got me? I’m glad that Hartman wasn’t let off with a lighter sentence? Woo-hoo? Now what about the rest of the cases, where they do get a lighter sentence from the arbiter?

Anyway: there’s something called a Dishonorable Discharge on an F5. This means you got fired for criminal conduct, lying, or insubordination.

Standridge proposes using that as a standard: if the appeal is filed for one of those three things – criminal conduct, lying, or insubordination – then the arbiter can’t overturn the chief’s judgment.

Standridge also says this is very progressive. It would be 1st in Texas! Unfortunately I’m too irked by this point to celebrate.

Outcome: Unless there’s evidence that the Chief is violating some ethical conditions, the arbiter can’t override the Chief’s punishment in the most serious cases.

Hartman Reform #5: Vacation Forfeiture.

Mano Amiga:

Using your vacation allow you to avoid a “break of services for promotion”.

Chief Standridge: “I’ll do a pros and cons list.”

Pros of vacation forfeiture :
– We avoid a costly appeals process, because they admit wrongdoing.
– It helps with understaffing because we’re not down yet another police officer
– They still lose those hours of pay, and we don’t have to pay overtime to someone else, so it’s cheaper for us

So it’s a huge win!

Cons: he never got around to this part. (In fact, even in the slide presentation there’s a “pros” slide but no “cons” slide.)

He says the vacation forfeiture will show up on your G-file. So since G-files are now being used in promotions, it will show up there.

Outcome: Double-dipping on the G-file outcome again. Gets used in promotions.

Thus concludes his presentation.

……

There are some outcomes that didn’t show up in my recap above. Here is the full list:

We only discussed bullet points 1, 2, and 5. (And the 5th really isn’t a change.) The 3rd bullet – streaming future meet-and-confer meetings – is a good thing.

So the last bullet: why did SMPOA agree to this? What’s the carrot in it for them?

They make more money. Which, fine.

Both City Manager Stephanie Reyes and Chief Stan chime in about the violent crime rate some more, and their desire to focus on other things beyond this contract. The end!

The Council Discussion

Alyssa asks if the Chief could explain about Ryan Hartman and vacation forfeiture.

Chief Standridge’s answer:

Hartman’s situation is totally different than what’s being discussed here. In the contract, we’re talking about suspension. You can substitute vacation time for suspension.

“Administative leave” is a totally different thing, which means “we don’t trust you with a gun and a badge right now”. Hartman was placed on administrative leave for six months.

…

One moment that I want to highlight:

Chief Standridge gives a very sincere statement on the early part of the Hartman investigation. It wasn’t exactly an apology, but he did show remorse. It was something like, “The early part of the investigation did not live up to SMPD standards. We’re not going to look in the rearview, we’re going to look through the front windshield and move forward, and moving forward, we’ll have higher standards.”

It’s not exactly groveling for forgiveness, but he delivered it with sincerity and I believed him.

…

So what did the rest of Council say?

Jude Prather: This will make us safer!

Mark Gleason: Let’s move on! (And he uses the phrase “so-called Criminal Justice Movement”. I use the phrase “rolling my eyes at him”.)

Saul Gonzalez: Thank you thank you! Win-win. My son is a cop.

Matthew Mendoza: I have faith in this new agreement.

Alyssa Garza: Staff devoted a lot of time. Improvements have been made. It took a ton of work from our neighbors. Town Halls and conversations would help.

Jane Hughson: Thank you to everyone. Everyone worked hard to come up with an agreement that everyone likes.

….

Bottom line: This contract has some legitimate improvements to it. I think the Chief’s presentation was cagey and semi-deceptive, but there are actual improvements to the contract.

There is also still a lot left to fight for!

So there you have it. It will be signed on May 16th and that will be that.

….

Two final notes

1. There was a funny moment at the beginning when Chief Standridge says, “I want to dispel any rumors. I’m not going anywhere. We’ve bought a house here. Abilene is our home.”

Then he waits a couple beats and says, “I just said Abilene, didn’t I. SAN MARCOS! San Marcos is our home!” It was pretty funny.

2. Chief Standridge goes off on a tangent at 1:14 that is very confusing. He seems to think that the activists are being hypocritical by simultaneously believing two things:
– there’s a lot of police misconduct
– there’s no accountability

Standridge believes these contradict each other. You can’t have a lot of police misconduct and no accountability!

Here’s his reasoning: the public doesn’t find out about misconduct until the police department makes it available. Therefore, any time you hear about police misconduct, you’re also seeing evidence of accountability. If there was no accountability, the misconduct would all be invisible. Ta-da!

This is idiotic, of course. Misconduct is not invisible. People seem to notice when they were tazed, or searched, or intimidated, or stopped and harassed, even if the police try to hide and suppress it. Gossip spreads, reputations get formed.

It’s possible that Chief Standridge really does open an honest investigation into every complaint he hears about. But he’s naive if he believes he hears a complaint about every incident that occurs.

Hours 2:04-2:58, 5/2/23

May 7, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries, Uncategorized

Item 10: McCoy’s new headquarters:

This has come up before. They’re building a fancy new campus here:

Those two red highlighter marks are future roads, according to the Transportation Master Plan.

But if McCoy’s wants their campus, the roads are in the way.

So the hypothetical roads must go. DONE!

(The vote was unanimous and this really isn’t a very big deal.)

…

Item 11: 67 acres here:

They want to turn it into apartments that feel like houses. It will be a complex, with the clubhouse and pool and all of that kind of stuff, but each apartment is a standalone house. I went hunting on the company’s website but I couldn’t find a sample photo.

The part I found mildly delusional was that they expect wealthy renters. Their typical renter has an $85K annual salary and wants a multi-year lease. That sounds like a pleasant fantasy version of San Marcos.

Shall we play The Six Criteria For Housing Developments game? YES!

Price Tag to the City: Will it bring in taxes that pay for itself, over the lifespan of the infrastructure and future repair? How much will it cost to extend roads, utilities, on fire and police coverage, on water and wastewater?

Good location. This is infill.

Housing stock: How long will it take to build? How much housing will it provide? What is the forecasted housing deficit at that point? Is it targeting a price-point that serves what San Marcos needs?

We need an ongoing housing needs assessment. We need to know this.

Environment: Is it on the aquifer? Is it in a flood zone? Will it create run off into the river?Are we looking at sprawl? Is it uniformly single-family homes?

Not on the aquifer. Environmentally reasonable.

While I haven’t seen photos, I get the picture that the units have smaller yards than a house. So denser than single family housing, but less dense than apartments. Not the worst.

Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?

I can’t imagine their target clientele is going to materialize. They’re imagining something wealthy-ish, though, which is not mixed income. It’s sort of near Hernandez and Rodriguez elementary school, and sort of near Miller middle school. (The developer is imagining adults without kids, though.)

The San Marxist Special: Is it a mixed-income blend of single family houses, four-plexes, and eight-plexes, all mixed together? With schools, shops, restaurants, and public community space sprinkled throughout?

Not really. I suppose you have the outlet mall right there, but they’re not exactly a charming little public gathering space.

(Remember when you used to be able to ride a gondola back and forth for about 100 yards? Good times.

I never actually got to ride the silly thing.)

My overall opinion: This is a reasonably good use of space. It’s hard to put housing in between I-35 and some railroad tracks.

The vote:
Yes: everyone except Matthew Mendoza
No: Matthew Mendoza

I am not sure what he was opposed to!

…

Item 12: 169 acres at the end of the airport:

It’s got a weird cut out due to an airport runway easement, and there are some FAA height restrictions also because of the runway. The developer wants it zoned Light Industrial.

Max Baker spoke during the public hearing, and raised issues of pollution. He kept mentioning the future airport expansion. I don’t think this particular item is the airport expansion? But maybe it’s in the pipeline?

Anyway, apparently it’s easy to measure pollution, but hard to determine the source, and usually it’s vehicle traffic. (Maybe we should reconsider all this sprawl!)

The vote:
Yes: Matthew Mendoza, Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Mark Gleason, Jane Hughson
No: Alyssa Garza, Saul Gonzales

One last thing:

You can speak during the public hearing, but not during council discussion, unless a council member specifically calls you up to the podium to answer a question.

Which brings me to my favorite moment of the night: Alyssa Garza saying – very deadpan but not mean – “Is it possible for Mr. Baker to tell us what he has ants in his pants about?” I’ve been laughing about that ever since.

(Max was glad to comply, and went to the podium to talk further about CAPCOG and purple machines and air quality.)

Hours 2:58-4:37, 5/2/23

May 7, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 14: The ever-loving SMART Terminal.

(Background here, here, here, and here.)

The development agreement has been opened back up! Cue angels singing.

First order of business: who is going to do the actual renegotiating with Franklin Mountain?

Staff?
A subcommittee of council?
The entire council?

If you picked 1, then you agree with Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Mark Gleason, and Mayor Hughson.

If you picked 2 or 3, you have the company of Alyssa Garza, Matthew Mendoza, and Saul Gonzalez.

So option 1 wins, and it will go back to staff to renegotiate things.

Alyssa Garza brings up the issue of dialogue: the community has been asking for a back-and-forth conversation. They’re not getting it. Jane Hughson points out that council has heard hours of comments from the community, and she had a three hour conversation with three of the community members. I kinda see where both sides are coming from.

Straight talk: do community members really want dialogue? No, they want the SMART Terminal to be cancelled. But they’ll settle for dialogue because they suspect they’re going to lose the war, the moment they stop talking. If they truly believed that a majority of council was fighting hard for their interests and was willing to cancel the whole SMARTGASBORG, then I bet community members would feel comfortable relinquishing control.

Dialogue without changing the outcome is infuriating. No dialogue, but a responsive government who shuts down the whole SMART boondoggle would be fine. Dialogue is important, but I kinda agree that there’s not a whole lot of team-building to be done here.

Next order of business: which issues should be renegotiated by staff?

The planning director, Amanda Hernandez, gave a quick presentation. They amalgamated the 12 concerns from the community (that I posted here last time), along with an email from Ed Theriot and one from Virgina Parker. In addition, the emails were all included in the packet.

However: you know whose email wasn’t included in the packet? MINE. Since they had specifically invited the community to email any additional suggestions, I sent one in about labor practices, and specifically indexing the minimum wage to inflation.

And….<crickets>. So city staff: I hope you feel the mighty burn of my stink-eye, aimed in your general direction, from the safety of my own living room.

(Jane even asked, “Is that everything that was sent in?” And still they suppressed my wee little marxist voice! For shame.)

Matthew Mendoza proposes that we send all the issues to the negotiating table, and see where it lands. Everybody seems on board with that.

…

Item 14: Coming up in future discussions:

Car boots. Apparently we bought a bunch in the 90s and never used them, in part because we needed a court order to do so.

They’re going to discuss a policy where you can get booted if you have three unpaid parking tickets.

The idea is not to be punitive. In order to get the boot off, all you need to do is get in touch with the city and come up with a payment plan.

Item 17: Eviction Delay: Currently we have a 3 month eviction delay. This is still under the auspices of the Covid Emergency Declaration, which is still in effect.

There’s a couple things going on:

Some landlords are ignoring the delay and illegally evicting tenants early.
Some renters are intentionally skipping out on the last three months of rent, knowing they can’t be evicted
Rents are insanely high in San Marcos, especially with regard to the median income

So there’s bad circumstances all around, plus some bad actors on both sides.

Alyssa is very concerned that we will not be able to properly notify community members that the extension is coming to an end. This is grounded! We’re really terrible about outreach. Or rather, outreach is incredibly hard to do well.

Mayor Hughson puts a call out for media outlets to help spread the word. I GOT YOU, MAYOR HUGHSON! From your lips to my ear! I’m doing it!

There are a lot of details to hammer out, but expect to see it end around July 1st.

April 18th City Council meeting

April 23, 2023April 23, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

SMART SMART SHMART TARTS RATS TERMINAL…It was a long city council meeting last Tuesday.

Let’s get into it!

Hours 0:00-4:50: Almost five hours of SMART Terminal. Holy moly.

Hours 4:50-5:25: And just thirty-five minutes on everything else. Some zonings, some carport talk.

But wait! Before you leave!

SMCISD Elections: Early voting starts tomorrow! (Days and locations here.)

Here’s what’s on the ballot:

1. Four separate bonds: everyone can vote for these. (Full details here.)

My opinion: vote yes on all 4.

The first is required by the state , and we have to pass it in order to not raise taxes. The next three are facilities that we need – lots of building repair, swimming pool, and stadium turf. The total tax cost is $0.01. In other words, if you have a $300K house, you’ll pay an extra $30 per year.

2. District 1: Jessica Cain vs Philip Muzzy.

Here’s District 1:

My opinion: vote Jessica Cain.

She’s is the progressive candidate. She seems really great. She’s a pastor, has kids in the district, and has been substitute teaching in the district to really understand it. (The other guy, Phillip Muzzy, is conservative/military background.)

3. ~~District 5:~~ Margie Villapondo vs Kevin Carswell.

Correction!! District 2 is the right district! Fixed the map:

My opinion: Vote Margie Villapondo

Margie Villapondo is the better candidate by far. She’s been on the board for decades, and the opponent is super-MAGA, I hear.

If you need a more detailed map of the school districts, go here.

Listen: school board elections have been decided by 15 votes or even 5 votes in recent years. Both of those elections hurt so much to lose. Please go vote, especially if you live in District 1 or District 2.

Hours 0:00-4:50

April 23, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Items 6/7: The dreaded SMART Terminal

If you’re new here: Giant industrial park going up for zoning, out towards Martindale. Everyone very mad. Read the whole sordid backstory here.

Here’s the basic sketch of what happened Tuesday night:

A ton of community members showed up in and drowned council in a mountain of information, concerns, data, suggestions, and so on.
Council got the message loud and clear.
Council is going to revisit the Development Agreement
Then they’ll revisit the zoning in July.

Just a passing thought: these community members with these careful, well-researched, passionate statements to council? perhaps would make really great progressive potential future candidates for public office!

I’m just putting this out in the universe. Granted, a lot of the speakers live outside city limits, but maybe they were just annexed on Tuesday.

The City Staff presentation:

There was a small bit of new information given on Tuesday from the city:

(Crappy quality because it was not in the packet, so I had to screenshot.)

This fiscal analysis is supposed to happen before every annexation. I can’t remember ever seeing one of these before, and there have been a lot of small annexations. What happened here is that the community members noticed and spoke up repeatedly about it. In response, city staff put this together.

However, Noah Brock (one of the community members) independently did his own revenue estimate, using Amazon Warehouse tax revenue rates as a model. His estimates:

Year 5: $1.4 million annually
Year 10: $4.3 million annually
Year 20: $8.1 million annually

The city’s estimates favor the developer, and Noah’s is less rosy. Draw your own conclusions.

(You know what I’d LOVE to see? The fiscal projections from the Amazon warehouse in 2016, or the Outlet Malls, or Embassy Suites, and how those have panned out. I’m sure they’re sitting in some prospectus, aging like milk. I found the Chapter 380 agreement for Amazon, but not the fiscal projections, which leads me to suspect it was never made public.*)

Seeing the writing on the wall, the developer made some small concessions in the days leading up to the meeting:

Double the buffer zone required by San Marcos code (around creeks I think?)
They will only pile shipping containers 80 feet high in certain areas (in the yellow circle below)
At the purple arrows, they’ll put a 100 foot buffer between the SMART Terminal and residential homes.

100 feet is tiny. A typical house sits on 1/5th of an acre. If that lot is square, it’s roughly 92’x92′. I’ve probably made you read 100 feet of my blathering already, and it’s only Sunday morning.

The idea that these two concessions would mollify the community is pretty arrogant. This developer keeps rubbing me the wrong way.

(Who is this developer anyway? Two of the community members filled us in: Franklin Mountain is an investment conglomeration owned by Paul Foster, an oil baron who is the current chair of ERCOT and part of lots of GOP committees, boards, etc.)

What do community members want?

At P&Z, the question was “If we turn this down, will the developer build in the county, with zero environmental protections?” San Marcos River Foundation director Virginia Parker thinks this is definite. However, this is a convenient threat that developers levy all the time, to spook communities into concessions. Maybe both can be true.

Either way, the SMART Terminal fight has morphed. Community members probably still wish it could be shut down altogether, but they recognize that that ship has sailed. On Tuesday, the conversation was no longer about whether it’ll happen, but instead about how to mitigate the damage. They’re fighting for the least-bad option now.

Seven of the community members (Noah Brock, Annie Donnovan, Ana Juarez, Ramona Brown, Ezra Reynolds, Bruce Jennings, and Rocco Moses) put together this list of recommended changes:

To the list above, I’d add:

13. Labor Protections

We keep being told that the point of the SMART Terminal is:

to increase tax revenue without raising property taxes
to bring good jobs to the community.

There needs to be some labor protections in the development agreement. Otherwise you will get shitty, exploitative jobs.

In 2016, we passed an amendment that any company receiving money from San Marcos should pay minimum $15/hour, plus benefits. This is a good start, but there’s one crucial detail missing: it must be pegged to inflation. You should never set a safety net without planning for inflation-adjustment.

(Honestly, this is one of the most underappreciated near-misses of federal policy of the 20th century: not pegging the minimum wage to inflation.)

Other labor protections: regular schedules with advance notice, no drug testing, and there’s a bunch more here. But mandating that the minimum wage keep up with inflation would be a good start!

Other recommendations: Ed Theriot is a local developer who is usually trying to build the things that make neighbors mad. But this time he’s the neighbor, and also one of the Caldwell County Commissioners, to boot. So his perspective is particularly useful.

However, I don’t have his recs yet. He’s writing up a list of recommended changes to the Development Agreement, and I’ll include it here when he sends it to me.

One more thing:

There was one more very interesting thing in Citizen Comment, which doesn’t fit neatly anywhere. Bruce Jennings offered the following history of the land next to Gary Job Corp:

Let me tell you a story about the land you are about to annex. The area in question has significant history of prior pollution. Some of you may be old enough to recall that the airport and the Gary Job Corp property was Camp Gary, a military installation from 1942 to 1956. Now, one of the duties of the base was aircraft maintenance; engines had to be maintained, parts cleaned, fluids changed, detergents, oils, and degreasers disposed of. But in the 40’s and 50’s few knew about the potential of pollution. Camp Gary personnel dumped these chemicals into a landfill and creek at the back of the property…for years.

Those fluids ran downstream to a earthen detention pond before entering the San Marcos river, where they settled as heavy metals on the bottom of that pond. Later, in the 1970’s and 80’s most people had forgotten and the land was developed for residential use. People started fishing for bait in the pond fed by 2 creeks and springs from the hillside. One day I was approached by an elderly gentleman who told those fishing to NEVER eat what they catch in that pond. I was alarmed to say the least, and began to look for information.

We had city, county, state, and federal representatives on site multiple times. It was suggested that the property be identified as a superfund clean up site. Jake Pickle came out one day and walked the property with us.

The price tag for cleanup in 1981 was 5 million dollars. Options were discussed and a decision was made…to leave the contaminants in the soil. The contaminants were left under a 12 foot cap of mud. And instead, let’s improve the sewage treatment and close the landfill that followed, by the ownership of San Marcos, who owned the landfill out on the back end of Camp Gary. Where 69% of it was on two lots, where Camp Gary became Gary Job Corp. That cost about 1 million dollars. So if I remember correctly, you all had to build about 10 test wells out there, and run them for several years!

Now, at the time, the southeast part of the property, where the San Marcos Municipal Landfill was, encompassed an area of approximately 353 acres, of which two Gary Job Corps Center tracts comprise about 69 percent. Hazardous chemicals found included volatile organic compounds (VOCs), polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), cadmium (Cd), iron (Fe), Ph, and manganese (Mn). Now these chemicals are in the soil out there.

If you do allow the cut and fill, you need to be testing the soil every time you penetrate for a slab out there, because what I understand is that you will be releasing PCBs that have been trapped in the compressed soil, and it will be leaching in the soil and then therefore go into the shallow water system that transfers through those creeks. I know this for a fact because I live two miles from that old landfill, and the pond at the beginning of my street is horribly contaminated! And y’all didn’t want to clean it up. Y’all wanted to just have a cap on it, and y’all went and did improvements over at Camp Gary, did your test wells for several years, y’all came and did tests at my pond for two full years. That shallow water feeds the creeks and the rivers. Any destruction of the soil could release the chemicals that were stored in the soil as hazardous chemicals. There would be a detriment to all of the flow of the water that seeps into and nourishes the river.

(That’s an amalgamation of his spoken and written comments, which he was kind enough to email to me.)

Here is the punchline, an environmental assessment on the land, prepared for the Department of Labor:

The San Marcos Municipal Landfill was once listed as a Texas Superfund Site in Reedville, Texas with the EPA Site # TXD980625222 (USEPA 2021). The landfill is not listed on the National Priorities List (NPL). It is currently registered as an Archived Superfund site by the USEPA (Homefacts.com 2021).

(Link and quote also from Bruce’s email.)

Just think, our very own Archived Superfund Site! With hard work and a fair wind, we could really double down on the legacy of environmental damage here.

Last thoughts:

The point of city planning is to share decision-making with the residents of the city. Developments affect residents, so residents ought to have some decision-making power over what gets built where.

We are giving away our power. Franklin Mountain isn’t an industry, it’s a middle man. They want the power to decide what gets built there.

The SMART Terminal is phenomenally big:

Decision-making power is worth a lot of money on something that big. Franklin Mountain would like to make a lot of money, and so they are working very hard to wrest it from us.

The decision-making power will go to this middle man company. (Specifically, a company owned by a rich oil baron named Paul Foster, as mentioned above.) Then they will hold the power, and they’ll get to decide what happens there, and we’ll be stuck with it.

…

*On the Amazon Chapter 380 agreement, the lack of concrete details is amazing. Here’s the hilariously useless Official Payment Plan:

Have you ever seen an amortization schedule without any, y’know, numbers? Or even percents? Just “yes” or “no”? Me neither.

Hours 4:50-5:25, 4/18/23

April 23, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

The SMART Terminal took almost 5 hours of a 5 1/2 hour meeting. So what else was there?

Items 8 and 9: Zoning a chunk next to the high school:

Literally adjacent to the high school. It’s going to be apartments.

Just because it’s been awhile, let’s walk through our criterion for evaluating residential zoning:

Great location. Fully covered in terms of infrastructure and services.

Probably? Sure would be nice if we had an ongoing housing needs assessment!

Environment: Is it on the aquifer? Is it in a flood zone? Will it create run off into the river?Are we looking at sprawl? Is it uniformly single-family homes?

Not on the aquifer. Environmentally reasonable.

Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?

Not mixed income. That’s the only drawback: I want to intersperse people from all different economic levels. But couldn’t be closer to SMCISD!

Nope. It never is. Bummer.

Overall, this is a reasonably good thing to build here.

Items 12-13: we need some equipment.

Specifically, we are leasing (1) 41′ Digger Derrick-Tracked Backyard, five (5) Ford F350 Supervisor Trucks, two (2) 47′ Digger Derricks (DC47), one (1) AM55 Overcenter Aerial Device, four (4) Articulating Telescopic Aerial Devices (AT41M), for the Electric-Utilities department.

Those look like fun.

Item 15: Carports.

Saul Gonzales brought this item up for discussion:

Apparently, carports are mostly not allowed in San Marcos.

The problem is setbacks:

from the San Marcos Land Development Code.

As one of these Odes to Enshrined Sprawl, you can’t build too close to the edge of your property. The size of your setback varies, depending on your zoning.

You are allowed to park your car in your setback, but you can’t put a structure in it. So where does that leave carports? Carports count as a structure that’s not allowed in your setback zone, even though they house your car. So unless your yard is huge, you probably don’t have room for a carport.

So why? What’s so bad about a carport?

First off, setbacks are different from easements and right-of-ways. Easements and right-of-ways are needed for water lines and future sidewalks and things like that. You definitely can’t put structures up over those.

So what’s the reason for banning carports in the setbacks?

The polite version is “neighborhood character”. The blunt version is that people who care about status think they look trashy.

(Do I think they look trashy? No! They’re fine! Protect your cars from the hail. Who cares.)

Mark Gleason phrases it as, “Some neighborhoods are going to hate carports, while they’re fine in other neighborhoods.” Can’t argue with that. HOAs are the worst!

Bottom line: this will get discussed in the future. If you want a carport, try to live in the right kind of neighborhood.

April 4th City Council Meeting

April 9, 2023April 9, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

You all, I cannot stop talking about the SMART Terminal. It’s not even part of City Council this week, but I still have a lot to say.

P&Z meeting, 3/27/23: I found out way more information from the P&Z meeting two weeks ago than I’ve ever gotten on the SMART Terminal from a city council meeting. So let’s talk about that.

Hours 0:00-2:03: A little empty plot next to Embassy Suite is going to stay a little empty lot, for now. And a vague tease about a 3rd HEB?

Hours 2:03-2:59: Some opioid settlement money, a fire truck, and some Gateway Signs. I’m a proud supporter of Team Heron.

Also, I hear it’s some sort of holiday today? Happy Easter, if that’s your thing!

P&Z meeting, 3/27/23

April 9, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in P&Z Meetings

Let’s start with some SMART Background

Here’s a quick timeline of events:

2017: original SMART Terminal (880 acres) is proposed Heavy Industrial. P&Z denies it.
Brought back in 2018. It sounds like Council leaned on P&Z, and they approved it. Council also approves it.
The developer (Katerra?) backs out.
880 acres zoned Heavy Industrial just sits there for three years.

Here’s my rendition of it:

Just sitting there for three years.

Listen: developers bail on projects, or sell them off. The developer you talk to is not necessarily the one who ends up building on the land. But once it’s rezoned, you’re stuck with the zoning. Zoning lasts forever!

So: The current developer comes along in 2022. This one wants to increase from 880 acres to 2000 acres:

The blue is the same blue from my map above. The green and yellow are new.

But where is that, really? The city maps are always so terrible! Here’s my best guess, from squinting at tiny country roads on different maps:

That’s how big this thing is.

Council met in December and formed a subcommittee. The subcommittee met. Then Council approved the development agreement in January.

Why wasn’t anyone mad when the development agreement passed?

Some were! People showed up and spoke at citizen council back in January. But way more people are angry now. And several said that they hadn’t heard about the SMART Terminal until after it had been approved.

So let’s look this up. Who gets notified, according the city code, for a development agreement? Here’s the relevant bit:

So there you have it: notifications weren’t sent out. All they had to do was post it on a website somewhere. No alerting the neighbors, and no physical sign out on the property. That seems…. unhelpful.

ANYWAY. The Development Agreement passes, and this brings us up-to-date.

The current developer has no plans to use the airport or railway. They plan on renting or selling lots off to companies, who will each do their own individual heavy industrial thing.

The new stuff starts here

The first 880 acres is already zoned Heavy Industrial. The developer is applying now to get the other 1200 acres zoned heavy industrial. As you can see from that same chart:

this DOES trigger a bunch of notifications. So now the community finds out that a gigantic, 2000 acre heavy industrial wasteland is imminent, on HW 80, heading east.

At the February 14th P&Z meeting, a lot of community members showed up to citizen comment. They were angry and concerned. So P&Z postponed the vote for a month, to give the developer time to meet and build goodwill with the community.

Tuesday, March 27th P&Z meeting

Which brings us to Tuesday, almost two weeks ago. About 20 community members showed up to speak at P&Z, another 7 wrote letters, and there there was an online petition with 600+ people. The in-person comments are really notable – that’s a huge turnout! They were furious and concerned.

The cut-and-fill is going to hit their well water
the river is going to be polluted
this thing is going to basically eat Reedville and Maxwell and these other little towns.
We’re underestimating the flooding
Sure does seem like the city of San Marcos is shitting downstream! No one would want this upstream of them.

The developers had held community outreach, but as weakly and limply as possible. Basically the developers held drop-in meetings, and then answered every question as mushy, gray, non-answers. “We’ll abide by the development agreement.” “We don’t know yet.” “We’ll see what the city says.” That kind of thing.

First, I’d like to point out that P&Z grilled the developer more closely than council ever did (at least on camera). Here’s some nice comments by Jim Garber about the sheer size of this thing – how big is 2000 acres, really?

9% of the total area of San Marcos
75x larger than the outlet malls
10x larger than 6 Flags Fiesta Texas
107x bigger than Amazon
4x larger than Disneyland
4.5x larger than the Texas State Campus

Elsewhere he notes that it’s 3 miles long. That’s really long.

Next: this thing is a money pit. Fire Chief Les Stevens goes into detail on how much it will cost to supply fire coverage alone, when it’s fully built out: it’ll take two fire stations to cover this land. The developer is setting aside two 3-acre tracts for future fire stations.

So how much will it cost to build and staff these fire stations? According to Chief Stevens:

$8-13 million to construct each station
Apparatus: $1 million for a fire engine, need 2 per station.
Staffing: $2.5 million annually for 12-15 people

So basically, San Marcos is on the hook for $25 million dollars worth of fire stations, and then an extra $5 million/year to staff these. And that’s not including SMPD coverage and any utilities or anything else that we agree to. That’s laughable. The entire General Fund budget is about $90 million/year.

(We’re already massively behind in spending for Fire and EMS. Last year, Chief Stevens asked for 32 additional positions. We added 7 of them. And we have several future fire stations already in the queue to be built.)

The plan is to split the tax revenue with Martindale. And this is not accounting for police coverage and any other services they’re getting from us. It feels like this SMART Terminal is a money pit.

So how is it that P&Z approved this Heavy Industrial?

The San Marcos River Foundation (SMRF) wrote a letter to the P&Z members about this. Now, letters to P&Z are generally included in the packet. You can find seven letters to P&Z on this topic here. (Go to “Written Comments”) But the letter from Virginia Parker (the head of SMRF) is not there.

So I can’t read the letter, and I generally have a lot of respect for SMRF. But how this letter got used was disastrous.

Several P&Z members said they were voting “yes” for Heavy Industrial, because of the SMRF letter. The argument goes that if we don’t approve Heavy Industrial, then the SMART Terminal will be built anyway. But it will be built under county codes instead of city codes, which are much more lax. So if you want to protect the river, you must avoid this scenario at all costs.

In other words, “Nice river you got there. Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

It’s true that SMRF got some river protections in the Development Agreement. But it feels like a compromise level of river protection. Definitely better than nothing, yes.

But is that the choice before us? This development agreement, or the river will be polluted all to hell? If this is the threat on the table, I think the developer is bluffing, in order to threaten us into giving him whatever he wants. My guess is that the SMART Terminal would not develop under the county regulations, because insurance and utilities would be astronomical. I don’t think they’d be able to find tenants. I don’t think these are the only two options.

Jim Garber asks Chief Stevens about this: How much would fire insurance be for the developer, if they weren’t annexed into the city?

Here’s Chief Stevens’ answer:

Insurance rates are based on ratings. Most of San Marcos is rated a 2. (1 is the best). The land out there is rated a 9 or 10. (10 is the worst.)
Every time you go up one number, the insurance costs go up. If you go from a 2 to a 3, commercial rates will go up about 10%.

So their fire rates alone will go up by 1.1⁸, which is a little over double. I haven’t looked into where they’re getting water, sewer, and electricity from, but I bet at least some of that is from us, too.

Dude. You’ve already got 880 acres

Garber makes one last key point: Why not develop the 880 acres first, and then come back for the other 1200 acres? Have you looked for tenants for the current parcel?

The developer gives one of those mushy answers: It needs to be one cohesive project with all the same zoning.

Garber says: “One cohesive property? I thought the whole point was that you’re going to have a bunch of little tenants and projects. Can’t some of them move in the existing 880 acres?”

Developer: “They could! We just haven’t marketed that property yet because we’re still in process of zoning everything together.”

That is smoke and mirrors. That is a worthless non-answer. That is stone-walling.

So P&Z voted to approve Heavy Industrial.

I think this was a mistake. Those who voted “yes” seemed to just trust and believe that the developer was operating in good faith. That the developer would be open to reconsidering the development agreement. I have not seen any evidence that this developer is willing to do anything they aren’t being forced to do.

Bottom line

The developer needs to establish themselves as good neighbors. Find tenants for the original 880 acres, and then come back for rezoning the rest, once the community trusts them a little bit.

Right now we’re giving the developer an unbelievably massive blank check. We need to verify that they are:

Actually good stewards of the environment
How the property handles the first few really big storms
What are their labor practices like
How environmentally disastrous are the clients that end up building there

I don’t understand the rush to give the developer the entire massive 2000 acres. They’re not planning on building one cohesive thing there – it’s going to be subdivided among a lot of companies. So let’s let them prove themselves first.

Footnote:

The city used to have PDDs, where the city could find out and negotiate all the details of a project before it’s built. But we threw those out in 2018 with the new Land Development Code. This was a mistake, and I assume we did it because developers hated them. This kind of project should be a PDD.

Hours 0:00-2:03, 4/4/23

April 9, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Onto the actual meeting!

Citizen comment: Mostly community members talking about the SMART Terminal. None of us can stop talking about it! But I think I should go on to other topics.

Items 1-4: Quarterly financial reports and audits and investment reports, etc.

Everything looks fine.

Item 14: East McCarty and Leah.

Developers want to make something of this land:

That yellow L-shape.

This item first came up last summer. The developer applied for Heavy Commercial zoning. P&Z said yes, and then Council said no. Council was concerned about Embassy Suites and the conference center, our beautiful prized jewel of the city. (Which the city is still paying off for another 10+ years or something, by the way.)

In November, the developer applied for Light Industrial. This time, P&Z denied it. That means that it will take 6 votes at council to override P&Z.

So it went to Council in December. Rather than deny it, they formed a committee to try to work something out with the developer. And now the committee is done, and it’s back for the vote.

The committee and the developer made a lot of compromises, but they got stuck on one thing: nighttime truck traffic. Council wants Quiet Hours after 10 pm, because of the people sleeping at Embassy Suites. The developer was saying it’s too restrictive for their business model, because warehouses need to load and unload their wares overnight. Council pointed out that it’s annoying to try to sleep and hear BEEP BEEP BEEP all night long.

Finally the vote:

The vote: Should this be zoned Light Industrial?
Yes: Jude Prather, Shane Scott
No: Mayor Hughson, Mark Gleason, Alyssa Garza, Saul Gonzalez, Matthew Mendoza

So it failed. The developer can try something else, or sell it off.

Let’s just marvel at the close compassion offered to the weary travelers at Embassy Suites, shall we? What tender thoughtfulness. You can understand that a business traveler might not want to sleep next door to a 43 acre industrial site. What were you saying about the SMART Terminal again?

One final note:

At 1:25:10, the developer is trying to say that we should approve this project because no one else will want to develop it. And he says this exact quote:

“No large grocery store chain will consider this property because of the new HEB which is across the street.”

UH WHAT NEW HEB ACROSS WHICH STREET?

Across I-35? Across McCarty? Across Leah Ave (towards Amazon)? What does he know that I don’t know?

The location of a 3rd HEB has been controversial. First, constantly we’re talking about how few resources there are on the east side. The east side needs amenities.

But also, there’s history here. Back in 2016, City Council approved an HEB going in on the corner of Wonderworld and Hunter. People were furious. The main reasons:

The 2015 floods were just a year earlier, and now we were talking about paving a massive bit of land along Purgatory Creek
this would require a bunch of curb cuts on Wonderworld, which violated the agreement when the greenway was developed.

Quick digression on the Wonderworld extension. Wonderworld used to stop at Hunter Road. You took Old RR12 to go west towards Wimberly. It took decades to design and extend Wonderworld west, because it’s cutting through Purgatory Creek, which is really sensitive area. There was a complicated deal involving donation of greenbelt land and promises to take care of this area.

Given all that, this quote is hilarious:

“We couldn’t find a more environmentally sensitive area to go through,” said Sabas Avila , the city’s assistant director of public services. The area includes a flood control dam, caves, endangered species such as the golden-cheeked warbler and black-capped vireo, aquifer recharge zones and a Native American burial site, Avila said.

“Believe me, we tried! But this was the best we could do.”

(I’m being a jerk, taking the quote out of context. The speaker is probably an environmentalist.)

Anyway: it appears the proposal for the Wonderworld HEB is still on hold.

Bottom line: this developer appears to know about some new HEB, relatively close to Embassy Suites. Eeeeenteresting.

Hours 2:03-2:59, 4/4/23

April 9, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 13: Opioid settlement

Obviously there is a massive opioid crisis right now, with severe addiction, Fentanyl overdoses, and all the rest of it. I’m pretty sure anyone reading this site is pretty aware of the scope of the crisis. (Hays County made the New Yorker, even.)

If you really want to go down a dark path, read up on the Sackler family and how intentional it was that pharmaceutical companies worked to ramp up addictions, in order to make grotesque amounts of money. (Or watch the three part John Oliver version.)

But if you don’t want to go down a dark path, just know: there were eventually national lawsuits, and now there are settlements which cover a tiny fraction of the destruction of the wake of the opioid crisis.

Which brings us to:

And

So we’ll get around $300K from this settlement. Alyssa Garza makes the case that this should go towards evidence-based treatment solutions.

Will this help the opioid crisis? Yes, in the sense that jumping up and down gets you closer to the moon. There’s a lot still to be done.

…

Item 15: We are buying a Pumper, Midship, 1250 GPM, Aluminum Body, Spartan Metro Star, 4-Door, Tilt Cab, Single Axle Spartan fire truck.

Shane Scott jokes, “Wouldn’t the $300K from the opioid settlement just about cover the shortfall here?”

Haha, it’s funny because fuck those community members wrestling with addiction and overdose! Shane is a funny guy.

…

Item 19: We talked about Gateway signs before. The choices before were…questionable:

To me, they were very corporate-lobby.

Today city staff presented four new options, and I think they’re all better!

I love the heron. Easy, done. NEXT!

Council is split. They argue over the “Est 1881” for a while, because that date is wrong. It should have been 1851 but maybe 1808, and if you look on our seal, it says 1877. Or maybe tens of thousands of years ago! So that will change.

Mayor Hughson doesn’t like any of the overhang bits – the tree, the words “San Marcos”, etc. And she also wants the rock to be more horizontal and less angled.

Mark Gleason advocates, “The simpler, the better.”

In the end:
We ❤ the heron: Matthew Mendoza, Alyssa Garza, Shane Scott
We ❤ the simplicity of Option B: Jane Hughson, Mark Gleason, Saul Gonzalez
That tree, tho! Option D for Jude Prather

City manager Stephanie Reyes and Jane Hughson both worry that locals don’t actually identify those big herons with San Marcos very much. I suppose it comes down to how often you get to the river.

Here’s where the signs will go:

It’s always odd when they draw I-35 going left-right instead of up-down. (But who declared that North was oriented Up anyways? I’m not going to defend the Big North Industry. We can let North go to the right and West point up for a change.)