This is the first time I’ve attempted a retrospective summary post, and it is very rocky. I went back through my notes, but I can guarantee that I missed things. I wasn’t even consistently taking good notes! Life’s a dance you learn as you go, right?
Here are my three categories:
Major legislation from the past year, and how each councilmember voted
Oh god this was hard to carry out. Full set of caveats at the link.
Unfinished business. Lots of things feel like they got accomplished, but haven’t been formally turned into policy and can still stall out. For example: – Ending the ban on more than two unrelated people living together – Banning sales of pets from puppy mills Both of these were discussed, but not yet implemented.
Again, my list is super spotty and incomplete! It’s also possible some of these did wrap up, and I missed it.
What was the major legislation that was passed this past year, and who voted for what?
This is so hard. Sometimes major legislation is discussed privately in executive session, and the public part is brief. Sometimes it’s been cloaked in legal language, or I haven’t had the backstory, or I just didn’t realize that it was important. It’s easy for me to blog things that spark a big fight. But being controversial is not the same as being important.
For example, last December, Council passed the Development Agreement on the huge tract that runs adjacent to Redwood. I totally missed its importance. In May, Council expanded La Cima from 2,550 to 3,800 acres. I missed that, too! I don’t yet know how many other important things I missed.
Next: Knowing how councilmembers voted does not tell you the whole story. Who was an advocate who won others over? Who watered it down with stupid amendments? Who initiates legislation and who is mostly passive? Who initiates little frivolous ideas, and who initiates important ideas? I don’t know how to summarize all those sorts of details.
Also: what about things that are done yearly, like renewing a contract with GSMP or creating and approving a budget? They’re routine but they’re important, and having good councilmembers makes better outcomes. What about ARP money? Or CBDG money? It matters greatly, but it’s hard to summarize.
Here’s my attempt. (You should be able to scroll around.)
Very often Council tells staff to go research something and bring it back. I haven’t necessarily made a note of all of those. My impression is that, under Bert Lumbreras, sometimes the assignments just disappeared into the ether. Under Stephanie Reyes, I get the picture that things will eventually get done, but they’re slow due to being understaffed. But I’m not on the inside and I don’t actually know.
3. What kinds of developments were approved, and are now part of some developer’s infinite timeline?
It took me most of this past year to get a handle on how to write about zoning cases, so I don’t have a great handle on this question, either. There were conversations about gas stations that I didn’t record. This is not exhaustive.
Mayor: Jane Hughson is facing John Thomaides, the former mayor.
City Council Place 1: Max Baker vs Matt Mendoza
City Council Place 2: Saul Gonzalez vs Adam Arndt
Last day to file is Monday. I will be posting on the specifics of these candidates, but not right now. Stay tuned!
However: San Marcos City Council elections are really problematic. I decided this deserved its own post. Enjoy.
Onto the City Council meeting!
Hours 0:00 – 0:30ish: Citizen Comment Period. Let’s spend some time talking about the community in Redwood/Rancho Vista.
Hours 0:30-3:00: A small rezoning case that I was not very interested in, and city council pay raises.
Hours 3:00-3:50: Cops in schools, and what on earth is Shane Scott waving around?!
Hours 3:50-6:00: The Lobbying Ordinance dies a frustrating, fishy death. Also Boyhood Alley, and some smaller odds & ends.
Two final thoughts:
Almost every single vote taken this evening was Max Baker & Alyssa Garza against the other five councilmembers. This is why we need a progressive coalition. They can’t go it alone.
Last year, Jude Prather was elected over Zach Sambrano, and Mark Gleason was elected over Markeymoore. [Update: Jude v. Markeymoore, Zach v. Gleason. Correction from Mark Rockeymore in the comments.] If Zach and Markeymoore were on the council, we’d have a lobbying ordinance right now. We need to build a progressive coalition. It doesn’t work to consistently have two voices losing to five voices every night.
2. Mark Gleason’s conservative grandstanding is sucking the life force out of me. Every single item, he rambles on, in his particular brand of Aw Shucks Humble Everyman, Who Just Loves Cops and Capitalism. I just get weary of it.
(To be fair, Max Baker has equally many rants, but I more often agree with him.)
First, every person in the city can vote for every city council position. (In other words, they’re all at-large.) At-large elections have a very problematic, racist past. Generally, it works like this: Suppose your city is 70% white and 30% black. The white majority can elect their favorite candidate in every single council election, and so a city ends up electing a 100% white city council.
What’s the solution? Usually, single-member districts. This means dividing the city into six equal parts, and each part gets to elect one city council member. We do this for school board elections already. (Probably the mayor would still be elected at-large.) If we had single-member districts, then the candidate would have to live in the district they represented, so we would have city council members from all over San Marcos. It’s also easier on the candidate, because they can focus on a smaller region and concentrate their efforts.
So, lawsuits get filed. The SMCISD school board was sued in the mid-90s for having all at-large elections. (Could not find any record of it online, beyond #60 listed here by the lawyer who brought the lawsuit. That’s when they went to 5 single-member districts and 2 at-large positions.) Austin, San Antonio, New Braunfels, and Seguin are all single-member districts because they’ve all been sued or struggled over it. Austin here, San Antonio here. There’s a whole chapter on Seguin here. And here is a fascinating Washington Post article from 1983, on MALDEF bringing lawsuits against Lockhardt, Corpus Christi, and Lubbock. The last sentence in the article is:
Last week MALDEF filed suits affecting city council systems in Pecos and Port Lavaca, and school districts in New Braunfels, Port Lavaca and Pecos.
So there you have it: 1983. ANYWAY. Who still has all at-large districts in 2022? We do! Boo, hiss!
But wait! There’s more! We have a peculiar system of declaring places. Right now, we have four candidates for city council – Max Baker, Matt Mendoza, Saul Gonzalez, and Adam Arndt. Suppose my favorite candidates are Max and Matt, and I don’t like Saul or Adam. Well, I’m stuck, because Place 1 is Max vs Matt, and Place 2 is Saul vs Adam. I can’t vote for my favorite slate of candidates. That’s not the best way to elect a council that reflects the choice of the people.
Declaring places does not serve a purpose for elections. We could say that Max, Matt, Saul, and Adam are competing for two spots, and all the voters get to cast two votes. (We do this with judges, for example.) Then the top two candidates would win the two slots.
In my opinion, we should switch to single-member districts. (But you could easily convince me to try Ranked Choice Voting, also known as Instant Run-off Voting, or multi-member districts, or one of the other innovative electoral systems out there.)
A few people speak on renaming an alley as Boyhood Alley, in homage to the movie Boyhood, which was filmed in San Marcos.
However, the comment I want to focus in on is from a person from Rancho Vista/Redwood. She also spoke at P&Z last week, along with probably ~30 residents who wrote letters in. This deserves some extra attention. She raised two separate issues:
The proposed industrial development immediately adjacent to Redwood
The intractable health problems facing Redwood
As best I can tell, these only somewhat connected, insofar as Redwood gets generally neglected and ignored.
The proposed industrial development immediately adjacent to Redwood
Last week at P&Z, probably 30 residents from Redwood wrote letters against a developer who’s trying to put an industrial development in the bottom half of this:
It was an astonishing turnout. (Quick note: City council doesn’t read letters outloud at meetings. P&Z does. This is annoying – the public should know who took the time to communicate.)
The Development Agreement had been approved last December, which put an industrial zoning right here:
But no one noticed. (I even blogged it, and didn’t notice.)
So why didn’t anyone turn out from Redwood, last December? Because Development Agreements don’t trigger notifications the way that zoning changes do. This is insane. The community in Redwood had no way of knowing that they were now downhill of a massive industrial complex, until just before the P&Z meeting.
(I went back and watched the December meeting again. There was barely any public discussion about it, although clearly a lot had happened in Double Secret Executive Session. Max Baker and Alyssa Garza voted against it.)
So the Development Agreement is already in effect. Two weeks ago, at P&Z, the developer came forth asking for two exemptions – a block perimeter exemption and a cut-and-fill exemption. Basically, this would allow them to build a gigantic thing instead of a normal-sized thing.
But like I said, there was a giant turnout by the Redwood/Rancho Vista residents, describing the current flooding and sewage problems, and how this would exacerbate them. P&Z voted both down. This is great!
Either the developer will appeal to council, or they’ll go back and reconfigure their plans. Either way, this needs to stay on the radar of San Marcos residents who live inside city limits, because we can hold council accountable more easily than Redwood residents can.
Although it can be symptomless, Strongyloides is the deadliest of soil-transmitted parasites. If an infected person takes immune-suppressing drugs such as steroids or chemotherapeutics, or has a lowered immune system because of a disease like leukemia, the worm can rapidly multiply throughout the body and cause death.
In Rancho Vista, the 16 positive blood tests from a group of 97 residents is the highest percentage of positive blood samples found in a non-refugee population in the US, according to Singer, though the sample is relatively small. (A positive blood test can also occur in someone who was previously infected but no longer is.)
Apparently the problem is that we just should never have put septic tanks in this location – they leak and are impossible to maintain. However, the residents can’t really afford to deal with and fix the raw sewage.
There’s two things that need to happen: 1. funding needs to be acquired ( but from where? federal, state, local?), and 2. the neighborhood needs to tie in to San Marcos city sewage.
I don’t know exactly how this all will unfold, but this would be a good issue to ask about during the debates and the campaign season. It’s not okay for vulnerable community members to lack basic health and sanitation provisions.
The Riverbend Development should be structured with an eye to getting San Marcos city sewage access to Redwood. That’s not profitable, and so it won’t happen without some activism.
Items 15-18: This little development, the blue rectangle in the lower left, is up for debate:
The developers want to zone it in three parts: – the dark gray part along the railroad tracks would be heavy industrial, – the tan middle part would be light industrial, – the front pink part along I-35, heavy commercial:
I don’t know how to evaluate the merit of a project like this. To be honest, I’m not even sure what kind of information I’d want to know, in order to evaluate it.
Mark Gleason had a dumb rant about how everyone keeps shitting on the working man, and he knows dozens of people at Amazon and the HEB warehouses, and they like their jobs and deserve your respect.
Alyssa Garza responded correctly that no one is disrespecting the worker. You can support the worker and also fight for better working conditions. (In fact, some – like me – might say that’s how you support the workers! And I might also say that until he fights for specific labor reforms, Mark’s support is empty lip service.)
We have no way of ascertaining the labor conditions in these hypothetical future industrial complexes, so this is all made-up anyway.
The vote: Yes: Jane Hughson, Shane Scott, Saul Gonzalez, Jude Prather, Mark Gleason No: Max & Alyssa
Item 4: City Council pay raises
This was discussed last time. City councilmembers need to be paid a living wage. Otherwise the job is not available to all community members. Currently councilmembers earn $17,400, and this would bump them up to $22,200.
Mayor Hughson suggested compensating the mayor position based on additional duties. She was trying to be diplomatic about how much extra she works, but the general consensus was not to itemize the duties. Currently, Mayor Hughson earns $20,400/year.
Shane Scott suggests just bringing her up to $25,800/year. She probably puts in 40-50 hours a week.
The vote: Yes: Alyssa Garza, Max Baker, Shane Scott. No: Jane Hughson, Mark Gleason, Saul Gonzalez, Jude Prather
So it fails.
Mark Gleason is really worked up about the word privilege, because Max and Alyssa use it to talk about who has disposable time and money to run for city council. Mark runs on and on about how it’s a privilege to serve, and it doesn’t mean you’re privileged.
He’s both right and wrong. It is a privilege to serve. Not everyone gets to do it. But it’s also an opportunity for power, and as an opportunity, it’s not equally available to everybody.
Here’s the problem: Gleason does not come from generational wealth, and he highly aware that he has not benefited from economic privilege. But simultaneously, he is a white male and has an extremely simplistic understanding of race and gender. So he is very outspoken about his working class status, while being ignorant about how he has benefited from race and gender privilege. (Also, he understands economic privilege but still believes that we live in a meritocracy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Gleason makes a motion that no one should get any raises, and they should only adjust for travel-expenses.
The vote: Yes: Jane Hughson, Jude Prather, Saul Gonzalez, Mark Gleason No: Alyssa Garza, Max Baker, Shane Scott
So that’s that. No raises for any of them.
Jude Prather makes one point: if you earn money from the state or the county, you have to forgo your salary. He is employed by the county, so I guess he wants brownie points? For denying other people a raise that he’s ineligible for?
Here’s the central hypocrisy: Jude Prather, Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzalez, and Mark Gleason all adopt this noble stance that they’re too principled to vote themselves a raise.
You know what would be more noble? If you voted for a raise, and then say you’ll forgo it and save it for future councilmembers. That would be more principled than their entrenchment of the status quo.
I think they all deserve a raise! But if they want, they can be self-denying and still vote to facilitate more citizens running for office.
School Resource Officers are not a great concept. On the other hand, Uvalde happened three months ago, and it’s gutting to consider leaving kids unprotected. It’s time for city council to renew their contract with SMCISD for the cops in schools.
Last year, Council asked the SRO program to conduct a survey on the efficacy of the program. Does anyone feel safer? How well is it working to have cops in schools? They specifically wanted the survey to include caregivers and students, along with teachers and admin.
It just …didn’t happen. It was about to happen, back in May, and then it got sidelined due to Uvalde. But that means there was a solid six months of thumb-twiddling before May where nothing happened. Alyssa Garza and Max Baker are both furious. “That’s a really big ball to drop,” says Alyssa coldly.
Angry Alyssa is my favorite Alyssa. In general, Alyssa is preternaturally calm and patient, diplomatically providing context and backstory that her colleagues lack. That makes her icy anger during this item all the more compelling. Angry Alyssa is deployed rarely, judiciously, and with heat-seeking laser precision. It’s a special occasion when it happens.
Here are some other choice moments:
Jane: Wouldn’t we want the school board to address this? Did they? Alyssa: I don’t know. But this council has a habit of playing hot potato with responsibilities, and so I do not care what the school board did.
2. Mark Gleason being mark-gleasony:
Mark: Would this leave anyone open to lawsuits if something terrible happens, if we haven’t signed this yet? The city lawyer: No. Neither party is waiving immunity. School districts have more protection against negligence than districts. The city is responsible – whether or not there’s an agreement – to train, supervise, and control these officers. Mark: I still think it could. I really truly do. It leaves us weaker if litigation were to arise. This sets a bad precedent! A very dangerous precedent! Someone could read this and say “they have no school resource officers!” Alyssa: But they would be there. Mark: It sets a bad narrative!
(Please just remember how worried Mark is about lawsuits, because we’re about to talk about the lobbying ordinance.)
3. And Alyssa, at her most eviscerating:
Jane Hughson: Do you have any amendments? Do you have any changes? Alyssa: My hesitancy is because we didn’t engage parents. We did not consult them. Jane: So there’s not anything in this document that you would change? Alyssa: I would change the whole thing. So don’t be asking me that, Mayor. Jane: I want this closed. There’s a survey in it. Alyssa: I don’t have any changes. And I didn’t want “a survey”. I wanted the PD or the ISD to get creative and figure out some way to get perspectives given everything that went on, and it’s disappointing that they didn’t. Jane: If that was a request, we should have put that in the contract. Alyssa: It’s not a request. It’s common sense. That’s bad leadership. We didn’t have to hold their hand through it. Districts all over the state are doing it, and the nation. We don’t have to hold leadership’s hand for everything. Read the room!
(These snippets are pared down, because it’s so blisteringly dull to read actual transcribed dialogue. But I think I preserved the gist of it.)
At this point, Max has an amendment, but Shane Scott moves to call the question, and gets council to agree, 5-1, to end debate. (Jude Prather is abstaining.) So we didn’t hear Max’s amendment.
Should we renew the SRO contract?
The vote on renewing the SRO contract: Yes: Jane Hughson, Shane Scott, Mark Gleason, Saul Gonzalez No: Max & Alyssa
Alyssa Garza is primarily angry at the failure to consult parents and caregivers in designing the current contract for School Resource Officers. Max Baker is angry at twelve different things, probably all valid, but spread too thin.
Here’s my take: I’m most concerned with finding out how SROs are involved when students break rules. At one point, Alyssa asks for a breakdown of police interactions with students, by race and special needs. Chief Standridge says that we have that information in our records, but it’s not pulled out in a standalone spreadsheet.
I want to know: – what are the races and special needs of students in incidents where the SROs are involved – what are the severity of the offenses – what are the severity of the consequences
Then I want that data compared to incidents where the SROs are not involved. Here, I want to ignore minor offenses and just focus on the offenses that are matched up with the ones that do involve SROs.
Matching up by severity of offense, I want to know: – what are the races and special needs of the students in these no-SRO incidents – what are the severity of the consequences.
(I am also worried about school shootings. All my solutions are magical, and involve hearty funding of mental health initiatives and eradication of automatic weapons.)
….
Item 21: Approving the ballot for November.
We are going to take a moment to relish Shane Scott being a colossal twat:
Shane, what on god’s green earth are you holding?!
“I uh, kinda scored this, this is 3 oz of marijuana. I couldn’t put 4 in here. And this is going to be considered a low-level offense? My question is, what is considered high-level – like a pillow case? What’s the next step up, just out of curiosity?”
Here are the reasons this is idiotic:
This exact issue was discussed last time. Shane is a day late and a dollar short.
Council is not here to discuss decriminalizing marijuana today. This is a routine ballot approval for November. There’s no issue at hand.
Consider his actual question: Q: If four oz is considered low-level, then what is considered high-level? A: Anything above four oz, you dingbat.
4. So why is he actually hauling in 3 oz of pot into a city council meeting? Two opposite reasons:
To show off that he’s got access to the dank stuff, I guess
To show off that he’s so against this decriminalization measure
I would bet you four ounces of marijuana that Shane likes his weed, and that he still listens to Cypress Hill when he lights up. And I think he should be legally allowed to do so.
But as a city council stunt? Equal parts weird and inconsequential. Whatever, dillweed. (He approved the ballot, along with everyone else.)
This is literally the sixth time this has come up since I started blogging last year: here, here, here, here, and then they finally held a workshop on it here. At the workshop, the ordinance got scaled way back. Instead of catching anyone with a financial interest in city council decisions, it was pared down to only include real estate developers. There was a consensus that a majority of council would support this.
For a while, Max Baker and the city manager, Stephanie Reyes, discuss some of the finer points of implementation.
Mark Gleason makes the same points that he always makes:
Overreach
Too complicated for citizens, to hard to implement, too hard to enforce
There’s no evidence of any corruption that would necessitate this.
Unintended consequences. This will be weaponized.
The guy from the Ethics Review Commission takes these one at a time:
Overreach? We pared it down to just developers, like you all agreed you wanted during the workshop.
Weaponized? we have a specific item that states that this ordinance cannot be used as a political weapon or for personal reasons. [Note: I personally understand why this is not convincing.]
Too complicated for citizens? this is why we have a clear trigger process with so many exemptions.
No evidence of need? We have ethics complaints all the time. Someone was fired for this right before we started this process in 2020. So far this year we’ve dealt with a bunch of ethics complaints. Think of Lindsey Hill, La Cinema, etc.
You personally said you were worried about protecting the city from lawsuits. [Note: remember Mark’s School Resource Officer plea for legal protection?] This itself will protect the city, by documenting behavior along the way. This is lawsuit protection.
We’re not defining who is a “lobbyist”. We’re defining what kinds of behavior triggers need to register and disclose. It’s been disingenuous for you to persistently focus on the confusion around who is a lobbyist.
Mark is very offended at being called disingenuous, and yelps disingenuously about it.
Listen: I’m very done with Mark Gleason’s self-righteous rants. Shane Scott and Mark Gleason vote equally badly, but Mark Gleason subjects me to long, infuriating soapboxes on every single issue. Wheras at least Shane Scott occasionally waves around baggies of schwag weed for my personal entertainment.
Then the big bomb drops: Saul Gonzalez says that he will not be supporting this bill.
Everybody understands the following:
Max & Alyssa will always support this bill.
Shane & Mark will never support this bill.
Saul is probably in, and Jude is probably not in.
Jane is gettable, if she can put in some amendments.
So when Saul switches sides, he has doomed the bill. Why?
What Saul says is that he wants out-of-town developers to count as lobbyists, but not in-town developers. Since this bill catches in-town developers, he’s out.
Everything about this smells super fishy. There was a whole workshop! They built a consensus that if the lobbying ordinance were restricted to developers, it would be okay. Saul was on board. In fact, from the very beginning, Saul has been hungry to go after developers.
At this point, the mood flips. Jane Hughson drops her amendments, since there’s no longer a coalition of councilmembers who might pass the bill. And without the amendments, she’s not going to support it.
So abruptly, they vote:
The vote: Yes: Max & Alyssa No: Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzalez, Shane Scott, Mark Gleason, and Jude Prather
The whole lobbying ordinance is dead, and the whole thing is fishy as hell.
…
Item 25: There’s some federal money that was supposed to go to reimburse housing repair costs after the 2015 floods. The rules were so onerous, and the program was adopted so far after the fact, that it had exactly one recipient. It’s being shut down, and everyone is frustrated.
Still, the money must be spent by 2024, and so the money is being re-allocated towards flood-mitigation projects in midtown and Blanco Gardens.
Probably no one to blame here, but still frustrating.
…
Item 27: There will be a council workshop on protecting the Edwards Aquifer. Max opens pointing out that the river is extremely low and praising GSMP for their forward-thinking planning, which is really unexpected. He’s got a couple ideas that should be considered – partnerships with the county to look at the value of conservation easements, looking at whether setbacks around natural things like caves should count as dedicated parkland, I forget what else.
Jude Prather has several good ideas which make him sound well-informed: aquifer storage where the ecology allows it, very large rain-water recovery cisterns, one-water concept for buildings, water re-use, purple lines, etc. That we should be preparing for droughts that last decades.
I don’t know what any of those things are, but I whole-heartedly approve of preparing for droughts that could last decades!
…
Item 29: Shall we name one of the downtown alleys “Boyhood Alley” due to its use in Richard Linklater’s movie, Boyhood?
There it is! You can see the courthouse in the background:
Shane Scott and Max Baker bring the proposal forward. The idea is to celebrate our movie industry. After all, La Cinema is coming.
Apparently the Main Street Board was opposed, thinking that the public wouldn’t know what Boyhood means and might be weirded out. I find it funny that in the absence of context, “boyhood” sounds off-color and sleazy. You know boys, with their creepy childhoods. How suspect.
Jane Hughson is right there with those Main Street Boomers, asserting that “Boyhood Alley” sounds creepy. She prefers Linklater Alley. Mark Gleason, our Forever Hedger, kinda agrees with her but kinda agrees with everyone else.
Everyone else likes Boyhood Alley. After all, Linklater isn’t especially tied to San Marcos. The movie Boyhood is especially tied to San Marcos.
It passes 6-1, with Mark Gleason openly deciding to cast his vote with the majority since it was already going to pass.
…
Item 32: Should people on boards and commissions earn a small stipend? Max & Alyssa make the case that this is an equity issue: we have a very skewed pool of volunteers for boards and commissions. Maybe younger people who are juggling three jobs would see a way to contribute if they were able to offset some of the cost of missing a shift at work.
Stephanie Reyes, the interim city manager, suggests that this would be a good issue to raise with the new DEI person.
It’s funny how this plays out. First, Mayor Hughson asks everyone if they’d like to pursue this as a possible policy. Everyone (besides Max and Alyssa) skewers the idea – too expensive! Too complicated! Too un-service-minded! (Well, not Shane Scott. He already skedaddled home for the evening, with his three oz baggie of the wacky tobacky.)
Second, Mayor Hughson asks everyone how they feel about talking to the DEI person about the idea. This time, they all pause and stroke their chins in contemplation, and agree that that would be fine.
It’s like they had to be heavy-handed NOs on the topic itself, but they don’t want to sound unwilling to work with a qualified expert. So they all had to backpedal rapidly.
What’s my take? Our boards and commissions are disproportionately older, whiter, and male-r than San Marcos as a whole. Finding volunteers that match the population of San Marcos is a big problem. It’s possible that compensating board members would enable broader participation. Talking to the DEI person is a very good idea.
(I wasn’t entirely clear if they were talking about the future DEI hire or the host of the upcoming DEI council workshop. Either one will be better informed than the collective wisdom of Jane, Shane, Jude, Mark, and Saul.)
The San Marxist 