Aaugh, another meeting so soon? I was caught unprepared. Sheesh.
In which cyclists have every right to be scared of sharrows.
In which we have a small number of short items.
Author: The San Marxist
Hours 2-3, 12/15/21
A couple small items here:
- Eminent domain for two properties (or two parts of the same property?) involved in the Blanco Riverine Flood Mitigation project.
This is tricky. Eminent domain can be so exploitative, but once in a great while, it is needed for actual public safety. If public safety is truly on the line, then voting for it is more responsible. If there is another way to accomplish the goal, then voting against it is more responsible. Here we’re talking about flooding, so maybe this is a legitimate public safety issue. Eminent domain is obviously toxic in Texas, and it seemed like everyone was very uncomfortable with the idea. (Or at least performing discomfort.)
Mayor Hughson was clear that the city is still negotiating, and eminent domain may not ever be needed. My take: the city must feel that the property owner won’t ever negotiate until eminent domain is on the table. And then, once the threat of eminent domain is available, you’ve removed the property owner’s ability to freely enter or decline the contract.
In the end, everyone except for Max Baker and Alyssa Garza voted in favor of it. I just don’t know enough details to know if the city has worked hard enough to locate a workaround or not.
- This one is kind of funny. Apparently the city owns the land under the Chamber of Commerce building to the Chamber, and charges them $1/year in rent. The Chamber built and owns the building on this land.
Then city’s Main Street office rents some space inside the Chamber building. The Chamber of Commerce turns around and charges the city $28,760/year in rent.
Max and Alyssa felt this was bullshit, or at least needed to be called out. I tend to agree. I don’t remember exactly how much money that we give to the Chamber, but my memory is that it’s on the order of 250K/year? They probably do help the business community, especially during Covid, but it’s hard not to suspect that business-types running a nonprofit may run it more like a business than a nonprofit.
The upshot: Max & Alyssa voted against it, and everyone else voted for it.
- A number of items that received basically no discussion, and I don’t have enough context to evaluate: more Whisper tract things, a final vote on School Resource Officers, some Animal Advisory Committee details, and some Ethics Review Board disclosure details, and trying to locate some money for First Baptist NBC to compensate for the money that had gotten redirected PALS.
The Ethics Review Board one was regarding the financial disclosure forms that City Council and P&Z members have to fill out each year. The ERB wants more specificity. (Shane Scott balked, but it wasn’t clear that he was necessarily hiding anything. He’s generally contrarian when it comes to the ERB.)
Hour 1, 12/15/21
Let’s discuss the Transportation Master Plan. The main issue here is bikes, and whether their lanes should be protected, shared, buffered, or sharrows. Here’s a nice graphic from here:
If I were to name them, I’d call them Safe, Scary, Pleasant, and Terrifying.
There was significant discussion on whether or not sharrows are terrifying. On the one side, it appears that many studies focus on the perceived safety of sharrows and not the actual safety of sharrows. It took me about two seconds of googling to find a study that clarified this point, though. So I’m calling shenanigans on the sharrows-advocates here.
Another point of contention: Barnes Drive and Monterrey Oaks. Both have the potential to be great biking places. Barnes Drive runs parallel to I-35 and can get bikers to their jobs at the outlet mall. Monterrey Oaks connects the neighborhood to Bouie elementary and the high school. The planning department pled that neither spot can handle a bike lane, and thus both of them have to be sharrows. The city council was pretty united in their polite skepticism.
Here’s my not-so-polite skepticism: wtf, planners? Neither of those roads are high speed thoroughfares, and both are plenty wide. The planners seemed tragically dedicated to the sanctity of turn lanes. It did not seem to occur to them that Bouie elementary might want a bike lane, and might even turn over some easement without a fight to make it happen. And Barnes Drive? The road that separates giant parking lots that are never full? This seems like the least difficult needle to thread. I’M ROLLING MY EYES.
City Council was great. Max Baker was the most outspoken proponent, but Shane Scott and Mayor Hughson also advocated forcefully for traffic calming measures and general bike safety improvements. Baker amended the plan to include both Barnes and Monterrey Oaks, and the city staff acknowledged that it wasn’t impossible. It would just take time and money. The amendments passed unanimously.
Anyway, this is not the final vote. This all comes up one more time. There was reasonably good turnout among the cycling community – maybe four or five speakers? Hopefully they keep mobilizing and advocating for Less Terrifying options.
December 7th City Council Meeting
In which we have a whole lot of citizen comments on the subject of the animal shelter, and on Item 28
And in which the consent agenda is passed
And in which several gas stations are approved.
In which the developer emphasizes that Tiny Houses are not the same thing as Micro Houses, and everyone promptly forgets, because semantics are dumb.
Hour 3
Development agreements, annexation, that kind of thing.
Thoroughfare master plan. Some discussion of sharrows, a thing where you paint the main lane to indicate that bikes are sharing the lane, which ends up increasing the fatality rate. Max Baker advocates for the biking community. Not up for a vote until the next meeting.
(No separate post for this hour.)
In which we discuss puppies, Jews, and fences, but not all in the same item.
Hour 4, 12/7/21
Item 2: Shane Scott had pulled Item 2 from the consent agenda, on an interlocal agreement between the university and city on Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan.
Now, I clearly missed some workshop and they did not explain what was going on, so I’m using my context clues here. First Scott proposed postponing the agenda item until December, 2022. How is this not a jerk move? If it walks, talks, and quacks like a jerk move, then I mean…
Anyhow, nobody seconded his motion, and so he changed it to February 2022. At this point they had a meaningful conversation about some fence somewhere and some details, and it sounded like other councilmembers also had questions. So the postponement passed 5-1, with only Baker dissenting.
Item 24: A resolution against anti-semitism and hate crimes.
There really has been a disturbing amount of anti-semitism in these parts lately, as well as the chronic background static of anti-Black and anti-Hispanic racism, in different ways. This resolution is… nice? There’s nothing wrong with it? The councilmembers sort of had the giggles with how enthusiastically they were supporting this measure, which did not help it seem very substantial.
Item 28: Banning the sale of cats and dogs at pet stores.
This item was a discussion item, not a voting item. It sounds like the most promising outcome is to require that private venues source their cats and dogs from animal rescue shelters and humane societies.
Gleason was worried about the mom and pop breeders. That kind of drives me crazy – I suspect mom and pop breeders are quite capable of keeping animals in sadistic living standards. Not universally, but it’s not a group that I want to give a wholesale pass to, either.
Hour 2, 12/7/21
The bulk of this hour was spent on this little development, way out on Post Road. It looks like it’s roughly halfway to Five Mile Dam. The plan is for this to be a bunch of Tiny Homes and Tiny Duplexes, mostly for rent but maybe for sale. (The developer feels strongly that you not call these Tiny Houses, because he has some arcane specifications attached to that word. These are Micro Houses!)
Everyone was mostly fine with the plan. It’s way out of town. It would be better if it were easily accessible.
The proposal had no more than two unrelated people allowed in a rental unit. I hate this particular provision, and it’s all over the place in San Marcos. Ostensibly it’s about preventing an overflow of cars, or an overflow of students, and neither of those explanations hold up under scrutiny terribly well. All it does is:
- Enforce an outdated paradigm of who gets to live together, according to Society
- Make it more expensive to live and increase sprawl, if you were to actually abide by it
- But in fact, obviously no one worries too much about it. Which means it is only enforced arbitrarily, when someone has an axe to grind. It is a weapon to wield capriciously when there is an ulterior motive.
It only affects lower classes, and just perpetuates the stigma of living in cost-saving ways. It’s the worst.
Baker and Garza took issue with this, and made all the right points. Gleason made a nonsensical argument in favor of it: with houses so tiny, we need this rule to prevent too many people from cramming in! I will leave the disposal of this dumb point as an exercise for the reader.
The occupancy restriction was voted down, 7-1, and the development was approved.
One note: Why can’t something like this be mixed income? Why does it have to be uniformly for lower income community members, and then other developments are uniformly for UMC residents? I hate that. Developments should have housing options that span from the poor to the wealthy. Even when it occurs in San Marcos, like at La Cima, it’s done poorly, with a large apartment complex tacked on to the front end. Why not have duplexes and fourplexes and eightplexes scattered throughout?
Hour 1, 12/7/21
There were quite a few speakers on the topic of pets and the humane society. They were concerned about two things:
- the alarming deterioration of the humane society while nothing seems to progress on finding a new director. It’s been open since October 2020. Employees are quitting and it sounds like the wheels are coming off the whole operation.
I truly don’t know what the hold up is. A lack of applicants? Paying too little? Lack of urgency?
- Item 28, banning the sale of out of town cats and dogs at local pet stores. Apparently this is a widespread ordinance in towns – mandate that pet stores must sell animals from the local population, rather than import animals from puppy mills and the like. Sounds like a win-win to me.
We shall see how Hour 4 goes, however, when we get there!
Also in the first hour, we annexed land and approved two gas stations. One down 123, at Clovis Barker, towards the high school. The other on I-35, at Trace Development. Done & done.
Hour 3, 11/16/21
Holy calendar discussion, batman! That was tedious. They considered a half dozen different ideas and eventually decided to preserve the status quo, plus some extra.
- Shane Scott would like to bring back packet meetings. No one else wants to.
- Mayor Hughson would like the work sessions moved to a different day, instead of being at 3 pm before 6 pm council meetings. I am extremely sympathetic to her. Being in session from 3 pm to midnight sounds miserable. But no one else wanted to.
- They eventually added Citizen Comment and Q&A from the press and public to the work sessions, before and after respectively.
Baker threw his second major grenade of the night, when he accused the Mayor and the City Manager of keeping the agenda short leading up to an election in order to keep encumbents from having to make difficult votes.
Hughson and Lumbreras were both furious and did not mince words about it. Hugh/son called it baloney, and said the only things postponed were things that Council voted to postpone. Lumbreras told Baker to file an allegation if he thought there was wrong-doing, but not to just show up and sling rumors around. Both were spitting nails.
Here’s the thing: it really could be either way. I believe Bker when he says that every year, agendas tend to be much shorter leading up to an election. They have in fact been shorter lately.
From what I know of Hughson and Lumbreras, I doubt they’re deliberately postponing agenda items. There could however be a city-wide soft position that things should be slow-played until the new council is seated, out of general path-of-least-resistance tendencies.
This is what I mean by a grenade. Baker wasted a lot of political capital with that accusation. He’s surely correct that agendas are shorter during campaign season, but this was an insanely inflammatory way to go about addressing it.
A city does need someone willing to overstate things, drum up outrage, and shift the Overton Window towards progressive ideas. A Jordan Buckley, for example. On city council, we need Baker to help draft policy and implement these ideas. I don’t know how I feel about him drumming up outrage at the expense of actually getting good ideas implemented.
We’re in a much more precarious position with the current council, and it’s really bumming me out.
Hour 2, 11/16/21
What happened here?
- The anti-bigotry affirmation went off the rails. In fact, the theme of the night might be “Commissioner Baker is correct but hella undiplomatic about it.” Baker tied together a whole lot of different points in a long, passionate statement against racist cops, the student at Texas State who recently set synagogues on fire, the anti-semitic flyers, the Trump Train, Chief Stapp’s commets, the 911 responder’s comments, and a bunch of other things. He opened by asking if the Mayor would support holding police officers accountable for racist comments on social media. Mayor Hughson plainly interpreted this as an attack.
The problem is that Baker and Hughson were having entirely separate conversations. I believe Mayor Hughson felt like it was time to update and re-affirm the anti-bigotry statement as a matter of housekeeping. Baker is furious about police brutality, the treatment of the Biden Bus, and in general, San Marcos is a lightning rod for white supremacists to try to drum up conflict.
Baker is correct when he says that council stays quiet on these issues because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. He’s correct about all of this stuff. He also comes in with guns blazing.
Commissioner Scott made the dumbest comment of the Anight, when he said something like, “We all disapprove of this stuff, but I think the more we talk about it, the more of it there is.”
In the end, Commissioner Garza moved to postpone until after the federal case against the city for the Biden Bus incident is resolved. That passed.
- City Council voted on a ton of open committee assignments. I certainly got the impression that committee members were angry at Baker and not going to vote for him for anything. And that is how we got Jude Prather, “tough on crime”, on the homelessness committee, and Shane Scott on the sustainability committee.
The thing is: we no longer have a progressive coalition on council. There used to be three mostly reliable progressive votes. Hughson and Gonzalez have always been centrist. Now there are two progressive votes and three reliably conservative votes. Baker will kneecap himself if he continues to be a bomb-thrower, I fear.
- One other thing: archaelogical surveys. The city has a robust procedure for handling discovery of artifacts in the course of development. Private developers have zero requirements. Commissioner Baker spoke diplomatically here about the need to find some way to have our history preserved, and city staff offered up San Antonio as an example of a city that does in fact put some responsibility on private developers. Mayor Hughson and others were in favor of having city staff look into possible policies here and to bring it back.
The San Marxist 