Category: 3 pm Workshops

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 5/5/26

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Citizen Comment:

Two people spoke:

  • Stop putting up Native American creation imagery because it’s hostile to Catholics.
  • Virginia Parker, director of the San Marcos River Foundation: yay EAHCP! They put in Dog Beach, Rio Vista, Ramon Lucio stepped entries into our park.

…

Workshop 1: Incidental Take Permits

Here is the Edward’s Aquifer:

The green part catches all the rainfall. The light blue part is all the porous caves and springs, where the aquifer is right at the surface. The dark blue part is the storage tank of the aquifer.

The water only pops up in two places: the San Marcos and Comal rivers.

In 1991, the Sierra Club sued the US Fish and Wildlife Service, for not protecting the endangered species in these rivers. They won the lawsuit, and the Edwards Aquifer Authority was created with legal status to protect the flow of these two rivers. (Here is all the history you might ever want to know, and then some.)

…

So the Edwards Aquifer Authority’s job is to keep the rivers flowing. They are required to have a plan, and the plan has to get approved by the US Fish and Wildlife department.

The old plan is going to expire in 2028, and so we’re working on the new one:

“EAHCP” stands for Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan.

…

A big part of the new plan is the Incidental Take Permit:

Incidental Take Permit means “you’re going to disturb the endangered plants and fishies, so let’s plan to do it legally”. Otherwise you could get sued.

Here’s the things you might do that would be bad for endangered species:

  • swimming and playing in the river
  • Pumping water out of the Edwards Aquifer
  • Construction things that happen alongside the river

The biggest thing is pumping water out of the aquifer.

Here’s who gets permits to pump water:

  • Edwards Aquifer Authority – Total water available is about 500,000 acre-feet of water.
  • San Antonio Water System – gets allotted about 235,000 acre-feet of water/year
  • City of San Marcos – gets about 5000
  • City of New Braunfels – about 9000
  • Texas State University – about 2000

…

Next up on the ITP: making sure recreation on the San Marcos River doesn’t hurt the protected species.

Here are the specific activities we want to allow, in the EAHCP:

Here’s the type of thing EAHCP has done, so that people can swim without destroying the river:

They built the steps on the left, and fence off the stuff in the middle.

So we used to have a barren bank, very bad for the river, on the left here:

and now we have nice steps and a protected, healthy river bank. Hooray!

San Marcos is expected to also do some work:

Basically:

  • Keep people from swimming and messing with protected parts of the river, and help people have fun in designated areas.
  • Pick up a lot of litter.
  • When the river gets super low, we have to keep the habitat from getting hammered, by limiting how much people are going in the water.

…

The plan lays out how to measure whether or not the river is healthy enough for the species to survive.

They have to measure a bunch of things:

For example, here’s some of the goals for springflow:

Average flow of the San Marcos river is 175 cfs (cubic feet per second). Right now it’s about 90 cfs. It’s been about 90 cfs for the past few years.

The absolute lowest that’s okay is 45 cfs, and only if it doesn’t stay that low for very long. I can’t imagine the river only having half as much water as it does right now.

…

What’s the plan when the river gets low?

The Edwards Aquifer makes everyone cut back on pumping during a drought:

So San Marcos normally gets 5433 acre-feet per year. But if we were in a Stage 5 drought, we’d only be allowed to use 3042 acre-feet.

So that’s the blue line at the bottom of this chart: the amount of water that we’ll always be guaranteed to get from the Edwards Aquifer.

…

I might have misunderstood this next part. I think the Edward’s Aquifer Authority is going to buy back 100K acre-feet of water, and then use that to protect the river when it gets low.

….

Here’s another goal for the river:

they measure the amount of endangered plants, and plant more good plants, and remove more bad plants.

So we also have to take care of the plants:

They measure the animals:

Listen: if I hadn’t been listening to the presentation, I might have been freaked out by the photo on the top right. Doesn’t that guy look a little spooky, laying facedown like that?

They also raise the endangered species outside of the river:

in case of some natural disaster.

…

In total, here are all the conservation measures that San Marcos and Texas State University are supposed to implement:

It’s mostly things we’ve already been doing, under the old plan. They help us fund these, too.

…

So how much does this all cost?? It is expensive! About $28-30 million/year.

Cost of water rights will probably go up over the next 30 years, to pay for all this.

What does Council say?

Josh: How much does it cost to put this plan together?
Answer: Mostly staff time. About $2 million in grant money.

Amanda: Is the city already able to hold up our end of the bargain?
Answer: Yes, we contract out a lot of the conservation measures. It’s a lot of continuation of what we’ve been doing.

Jane: You say that we need to controlling access during extremely low flow events. What do you think this will look like?
Answer: There are a lot of unknowns. Could be paid access, parking access, might depend on what locations have been degraded. River hasn’t been at 45 cfs since the 1950s.

Jane: Are the fences along the banks less ugly?
Answer: Yes, they’ve been replaced with more aesthetically pleasing black fences.

Jane: We’re trying to stop promoting the river to tourists. Like the TxDot sign on 35 advertising river recreation.
Answer: It’s hard to get them to take their signs down.

Conclusion: We’re going to have a future conversation about how to downplay the river to tourists. Especially since water is such a big topic these days.

…

Workshop #2: Water and wastewater fees

We’re going to be raising impact fees later this summer. This presentation is mostly informational.

What’s an impact fee?

Great. This presentation is specifically about water and wastewater fees.

Developers only pay impact fees new developments. Nothing existing is going to have to pay any of these fees.

Here’s the past history:

Great.

There are rules for impact fees:

…

You can only charge an impact fee in your service area. So here’s where we can charge impact fees:

and here’s where we think people are going to build:

…

In order to compute impact fee rates, they need to know two things:

  • What’s the total cost of projects that need to be paid for by impact fees?
  • How many developers are going to be sharing those costs?

Let’s take those one at a time.

First: total cost of projects:

So they know where the growth is expected to happen, and so they can map out what kinds of water and wastewater projects will need to be completed so that all the new homes and buildings can get water impact.

Second: how many developers will be sharing the costs?

You want to charge them different amounts, according to how big the development is. So we go according to meter size.

Here’s how we translate meter size into number of homes:

In other words, we assume a 10-inch meter is equivalent to 350 homes.

After doing all that conversion, here’s the total number of “homes” that we’re providing water to:

…

So that would give the city what they need to compute the new impact fee rates:

Actual proposed rate hikes will come in June and July.

Council questions:

Josh: How do we compare to neighboring cities? Are we scaring off developers?
Answer: We benchmark with neighboring cities. We’re in line. It basically depends on how recently they’ve updated their impact fees. If they’re still going on 2015 rates, we’re higher.

Amanda: Do we incentivize reducing impact? Do we have reward programs for water re-use?
Answer: We’ll take this input and get back to you.

The city has a big reclaimed water facility. It doesn’t produce drinking water, but you can use it for cooling and irrigation. We run “purple pipe” to a bunch of places, like the Kissing Tree golf course, the power plant, the downtown plants, and some parts of the university.

Shane: What if they use reclaimed water. Does the purple pipe give a discount or anything?
Answer: No, it’s an entirely separate thing. This is only clean drinking water. It means they use less water, though, so that reduces their costs.

Lorenzo: Does the university pay impact fees?
Answer: Yep.

This is important, because the university skips a lot of local taxes, in general.

…

Workshop 3: Public Art Policy

In the last 20 years, we’ve put up way more public art!

There are a lot of decisions about what gets funded and where it’s located. How should we be transparent with the public on how these decisions are made? We need a Public Arts Policy.

We already have one, but it’s old:

For awhile it was just donations. Then around 2018, we commissioned the mermaids statues and Big Wavey:

Since then, we’ve gone on to do a lot more.

Some are big, like this mural behind Industry:

and some are little, like these traffic boxes:

I really love that traffic box.

…

Here’s the program that commissions and maintains these public art pieces:

So we’re trying to lock down some details and create a more formal Arts Policy. It’s going to cover things like: how do we maintain art? How do we approve things? How do we ensure these things sustain after we’re gone?

This is the planning stage.

Council questions:

Amanda: If we’re collaborating with a private organization, how are they consulted?
Shane: What about the public?
Answer: We hold lots of meetings with the collaborators, and at least one public meeting, unless it’s a super small project.

Alyssa: It’s great that we’re getting a reputation as a creative community.

Shane: What happens if someone tags a mural?
Answer: Murals actually prevent graffiti. People are less likely to tag murals. When it happens, we remove it or work with original artist to repair the mural.

Jane: What about murals on private buildings?
Answer: We go in halvsies. They have to keep it up for at least five years.

Then we get to The Big Conversation:

Jane: For major art, I want it to come to Council. I’m so embarrassed that we omitted the rattlesnake on the big mural, but we have a bobcat.

Jane is talking about this:

You see this mural as you’re driving on LBJ from I-35 towards downtown.

It makes Jane lose her mind every time, because there is a bobcat:

which obviously represents Texas State, but there is no rattlesnake in the mural, to represent SMCISD.

Jane is so upset about this mural that she wants a line-item veto on every major art piece that comes through San Marcos, because if she’d seen this design, she’d have asked, “Where’s the rattlesnake?”

I happen to totally agree with her – that mural needs a rattlesnake. However! Council should not have a line-item veto on artwork.

Listen: Edge cases make bad policy. If you have a single unusual bad situation, it’s going to have a lot of unique aspects, and you should not write general public policy with that case in mind. (And in fact, the very next time a mural came around, Jane tried to apply the lessons of the bobcat mural standard. She tried to ban a cactus painting for being prickly. It was a total mess.)

Staff: Best practices is that council and community provide the prompt up front, and give them what to go by.
Jane: That wouldn’t have saved the rattler problem. I want to see the art before it’s too expensive or too hard to change.

Shane, Matthew: YES!

Josh: We could make a list of ten principles! Artists could be required include three of ten!

(Note: oh god, this is how you end up with bland mush.)

Jane: Nope. I want to see the art and proofread it to make sure there’s a rattlesnake in it.

Amanda: Art is super subjective. We don’t want to tie the hands of the artists.

Josh: I don’t want to weigh in on art.

…

So what went wrong with that mural? Here’s the process of how murals are designed:

  • The arts commission talks with the building owner
  • Hold public meetings, get community direction and input
  • Call for qualifications to get a style
  • Pay 2-3 artists a stipend to get designs
  • Arts commission votes on 2-3 designs. Makes minor changes.

With that mural, the artist included every single thing that was mentioned in the community meeting.

City staff: And actually, it was not a Texas State bobcat. It was an actual bobcat, like a wildlife thing.

(Note: the bobcat is literally standing in front of Old Main, so I’m pretty sure it’s a Texas State bobcat.)

…

Alyssa: No. I don’t trust our judgement. Don’t you all remember our insane Gateway Sign discussions? We have terrible instincts. Leave it to the experts on the Arts Commission.

Josh: does the arts commission weigh in on highway signs?
Answer: No, that’s graphic design. It’s art but also functional.

(Apparently all the council members have gotten a lot of phone calls from community members who hate the gateway signs.)

Jane: Do you all know WHY we even have an arts commission?
Amanda: I don’t.
Jane: It was my idea!
Shane: in 1821.
Jane: it was 1998. I was on CDB, we were asked to do a lot of art design, and I was like, “I’m not qualified. We should have a commission.” Boom, you’re welcome.

Bottom line: they’re going to probably get to micromanage the art. We’ll see what the next draft of the Arts Policy looks like.

Bonus! 3 pm workshop, 4/21/26

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshop #1: The Homeless PIT count

“PIT” stands for “Point in Time”. The PIT Count is a fixed day in January, where cities nationwide try to actually figure how many people are homeless in their communities.   Each city assembles a team of people who go out into the community and try to actually count and talk to as many homeless people as they can find on that day. (PIT count 2024, PIT count 2025)

The rules are set by the Housing and Urban Development agency, (HUD). If you complete a PIT count, it helps you apply for federal funding.

For unsheltered, think people in cars, and people outside.

For sheltered, think Hays County Women’s Shelter, Southside, Marla’s Place, but not people in hotels or motels.

The PIT count is not perfect. But it gives us useful information.

The blue column is people that they saw, but didn’t get to talk to. The blue is included in the orange group.

The gray column – Sheltered – is much smaller in 2026 than in 2025. This is because in 2025, the PIT count day ended up being a “cold weather night”, where Southside was open to everyone.

(I’m not sure why the chart has those weird gaps.)

Ages of people they were able to talk to:

and gender:

and race:

Generally homeless people have significant obstacles in their lives:

Almost all the homeless people in Hays County are in San Marcos:

They drove out to Wimberley and Dripping Springs, but did not see any people there. In Wimberly, they saw evidence of encampments, but didn’t actually see any homeless people.

Here’s where we’ve landed over the past six years:

Again, PIT counts aren’t perfect. You have to be careful when you’re looking at data like this. You can’t conclude that we’re solving homelessness – it could be that people are hiding, because they’re worried about ICE.

One presenter says that whenever ICE rumors pop up on social media, the line at the Food Bank gets cut in half. (That is so deeply depressing on so many levels.)

…

We also have a second source for homeless data: the public schools.

All the school districts collect this data at the beginning of the school year:

This year’s data:

So SMCISD has an estimated 105 K-12 students who are housing insecure. This doesn’t include their parents or any baby siblings who aren’t yet in school.

One offhand comment by the presenter: Statistically, apparently babies are the age group most likely to be evicted, and children aged 2-5 are the next most likely to be evicted.

Pretty grim commentary on our society!

…

At last year’s presentation, they said there was an urgent need to include homeless people in emergency action plans. For example, if we have a winter storm, how do we keep homeless people safe? How do we prevent families from freezing in their cars?

This year: progress! Relevant groups have come together and are working on this.

This year’s ask: the Homeless Management Information System. (HMIS)

It’s extremely difficult for case managers to keep track of details of homeless people. Which doctors has this person seen? What medications are they on? Do we need to locate their birth certificate or social security card? Etc.

HMIS is the system run by the Texas Homeless Network, so that everyone can pool their data and coordinate care. It costs $450 per user.

Can San Marcos help pay for this?

Answer: You bet! We’re planning on putting $9000 towards this at the May Homeless Coalition meeting.

…

Workshop #2: Homeless Action Plan

In 2024, we gave Southside $50K to come up with a Homeless Action Plan, and then another $800K to carry it out. This came out of federal Covid money, so it all has to be spent by December 31st, 2026.

This is their report on how it went!

Here’s the overview:

They focused on families primarily. Like we saw a moment ago, there are at least 105 kids in SMCISD who are housing-insecure.

(But not exclusively – they did also help individuals.)

There are three main tentpoles to their plan:

The presentation walked through each of the tentpoles individually.

So first, Emergency Assistance:

Think: car repair so someone can get to their job, or covering a two-week gap in pay when they get a new job, or covering part of a high electric bill, etc. You don’t want a small emergency to snowball into a big emergency.

Next: Eviction Prevention

Both of those categories are where you see the most bang for the buck.

Being evicted is expensive, destabilizing, and sends families down a cascade of trauma. But preventing eviction can be quick, cheap, and help get someone through an isolated hard time. Win-win.

….

This last category morphed over time. This is for families who have lost their housing.

They started with Rapid Rehousing:

What they said was that San Marcos doesn’t yet have the infrastructure to carry out this kind of program. Also, HUD used to fund this kind of program under Biden, but of course now everything is a dumpster fire.

It was leading to staff burnout and having to turn away lots of families, and generally awful for everyone involved.

So for Phase II, they switched to Transitional Housing:

Basically, they’d have 20 families stay for 60 days at Southside, all together as a cohort. They’d work with these families really closely, bring in a ton of community partners, and try to transition them to permanent housing.

Here’s a bunch of partners they collaborate with:

So that’s an outline of the main programs they implemented.

….

But wait! There’s more! With the $800K, they also spruced up Southside:

which is good.

Some budget details:

This shows how expensive the Rapid Rehousing was in Phase 1, and how many more families they were able to serve with the second model.

And here’s some general financial breakdown:

and some general takeaways:

…

What does Council say?

The million dollar question is: what happens when the Covid money runs out? Can we keep all this going?

They are working on it! They have enough money to keep it going through January 2027, and they are pursuing grants and stuff to keep these programs going.

…

Listen, let me be a moral scold for a sec:

We know how to solve homelessness. There is no mystery. We just aren’t willing to pay for it.

Nationally, it would cost under $10 billion to end homelessness. But homeless people cost over $11 billion each year, as is! Think ER visits, untreated mental illness and addictions, and jails.

It’s more expensive to be cruel to people! Isn’t that wild?

Again, there’s no mystery here. Republicans slash funding for homelessness programs, over and over again, and here we are.

Bonus! 3 pm workshop, 4/7/26

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Citizen Comment: Five people talk.

They all talk about EMS, so I’ll put their comments down below.

…

The backstory:

There are nine different Emergency Service Districts, called ESD #1 – #9, which make up Hays County. Some are fire, some are just EMS, and some are both.

The districts with EMS are 1, 2, 3, 7 and 9:

Hays County ESD #1: Dripping Springs, Driftwood, Henly.
Hays County ESD #2: Buda
Hays County ESD #3: San Marcos
Hays County ESD #7: Wimberley.
Hays County ESD #9: Kyle and all the country bits around those towns.

This map of the districts is hard to read, but it’s the only one I could find:

In 2020, Wimberley and Buda were running their own EMS.

The other three ESDs all shared an EMS service. We all contracted out with San Marcos-Hays County EMS, (SMHC-EMS), a nonprofit EMS.

Great!

In 2022, SMHC-EMS decides to start forming a union:

It took them about 2 years, but they finally negotiated a new contracted with their board of directors which included things like this:

Great!

About 30 seconds later, ESD #1 and ESD #9 both cancel their contracts with SMHC-EMS, and vote to open their own EMS departments. Pretty much textbook union-busting.

…

So San Marcos is stuck holding the bag, by ourselves. What do we want to do? Last August, we commissioned a study with some consultants.

January 2026: The consultants give us three choices:

  1. Renew the contract with SMHC EMS and just carry on.
  2. Roll EMS into our fire department. This is called Fire-based EMS.
  3. Make a new standalone City EMS department.

There’s a long conversation about collective bargaining and labor rights, and whether a City-based EMS could be granted some form of negotiating power.

A majority of council votes for Option 3, but they ask city staff to look into the laws around collective bargaining and EMS.

…

Let’s talk about union-busting for a sec.

Forming a union is a big hassle, and so my guess is that the grievances with management were significant. (I don’t have any details, though.)

Pre-union-busting, how much did EMS cost everyone? Here’s what I found from 2022:

ESD #1: $3.3 million in taxes (here)
ESD #9: $3.84 million in taxes (here)
San Marcos: $4.22 million in taxes (here)

Total:  $11.36 million of taxpayer money to SMHC-EMS.

Post-union-busting, we now have three separate departments. Here’s what tax-payers are paying in 2026:

ESD #1: $8 million in taxes (here)
ESD #9: $10.2 million in taxes (here)
San Marcos: I can’t locate this for the life of me.  Let’s ballpark $9 million in taxes, for our City EMS, based on the consultant study from January.

Total: $27.2 million of taxpayer money, to three separate EMS departments.

Bottom line: Way to go, asshats. You’re spending $16 million extra of taxpayer dollars, but at least you’re screwing over the people who keep us alive in an emergency.

…

Which brings us to tonight! 

The point of the workshop is to update Council on how it’s going, planning for a new City EMS department.

The staff presentation

First off: city staff say there is absolutely no way to give EMS collective bargaining power under state law.

Police and Fire Departments can unionize, which is known as “Civil Service”.

But EMS doesn’t qualify as Civil Service, because San Marcos is too small:

You have to have 460K people or more. So Austin can do this, but not us.

…

The first step is to hire an EMS Chief:

After this, we’d start hiring everyone else. Current SMHC-EMS workers would have first dibs on applying, and then we’d open it up to anyone else.

There’s a whole lot of medical mumbo-jumbo about credentialing, medical directors, clinical operating guidelines, physician consultations, etc, which I honestly do not have the background to follow.

…

What do people say at Citizen Comment?

Five people speak:

  • Former SMPD commander: This is great! City EMS services are the way to go. State of Texas has bad laws around civil service, but the EMS workers are okay letting collective bargaining go.
  • Citizen rep on Hays County EMS Board: Same!
  • Two longterm field workers: This is the best of a bad situation. City EMS is the way to go.
  • Zach Philips, president of the EMS union: you don’t need to rush this process. Our contract runs until 2028. Why not finish the contract and carefully plan your new City EMS to start in 2028?

…

What does Council say?

Alyssa: How did you build the job description for the EMS Chief? What’s the timeline?
Answer: We looked at other city EMS chiefs, and based it on those. We want someone who can build an EMS department from scratch, and also build lots of partnerships. Maybe down the road, we can do mobile community healthcare or something. The hiring process will probably take two months, but it’s flexible.

Amanda: Austin uses a process called “Consultation” instead of collective bargaining. Can we do that?
Answer: Austin has a special bracketed carve out in state law. We may be able to do something called “Voluntary Consultation”.

Note: What is Voluntary Consultation?

It sounds like a soft version of collective bargaining. Here’s an explanation about how it’s used in school districts:

 

While the law explicitly prohibits collective bargaining, many school districts have adopted consultation policies allowing school boards to meet and confer with educators about educational policy and employment conditions. These consulting agreements are related to the concept of collective bargaining but constructed in such a way that the input given is considered advisory rather than legally binding, and therefore does not qualify as a collective bargaining agreement by law. The school districts are not required to act on the input received from the employees and final decisions on matters discussed through the consultation process are decided by school board members.

So it’s not binding, and it would be voluntary by the city. At best, it’s a good-faith effort to foster communication. At worst, it’s thoughts-and-prayers.

City Manager Reyes: this means that certain city employees would get a perk not offered to the rest of city employees. Something to consider.

(Note: We could offer Voluntary Consultation to everyone. Just saying.)

…

Amanda: Is it viable to keep the current contract in place to 2028?

No one really answers this, but this is the central question. Should we build an EMS department from scratch in 5 months? Or should we see whether it works to just keep our contract with SMHC-EMS?

There’s this chart:

Sorry about the screenshot. I know it’s tiny and hard to read. (It wasn’t in the packet, because it was only requested the day before.)

I think this chart is supposed to show that it saves more money to build our own EMS department by October. But it really doesn’t.

Lorenzo makes an excellent point: this chart supposedly compares City EMS and SMHC-EMS. Some of the numbers should be identical either way – for example, the amount of revenue from ambulance rides should be the same. But they’re not – they’re off by $1.3 million. (This is the first row of the chart, comparing the 1st entry and the 4th entry.)

In several places, numbers that should match don’t actually match. This is probably because nobody actually knows the real estimates, and they used different sources to get projections in the different columns.

Point being: no one can really say which will be cheaper, the current contract or a City EMS.

Amanda: This is not solely about revenue. I’m focused on the quality of care and taking care of our community, not taking the cheapest option.

But Lorenzo wasn’t arguing that we should go for the cheapest option. He was arguing that we haven’t really thought through just staying with the current contract. It is a viable option, but we’re acting like it’s off the table.

My read is that staff came in with a lot of momentum towards building a new EMS department. There just isn’t a lot of oxygen in the room to discuss continuing the current contract.

…

Josh: I value people and communication more than I value the nitty-gritty details!

Josh is both right and wrong. He’s correct that when people with power operate in good faith, and value their employees and value communication, you have the best possible scenario. But he’s also wrong: when people with power stop operating in good faith, the only leverage that employees have are the details that are spelled out. When things go sideways, the devil is in the details.

I think Josh believes “Look, I have good intentions and I like being a good boss. That’s enough to make sure we’re in the good scenario!”

…

So what’s the timeline?

If everything was put in motion today, it would take 6 months for the state license to come through. Then we’d coordinate with Medicare, Medicaid, DEA, etc etc.

Matthew: Where would we put city EMS?
Answer: We’d talk to their landlord and try to rent out their current building.

Hopefully everything would be ready to go on October 1st, but otherwise we’d have a contingency plan, which we also would build out.

Jane: How long did ESD 1 and ESD 9 take to create their own plan?
Answer: ESD 1 took 6-8 months, ESD 9 was a bit longer.

Jane: can we compare benefits plans?
Answer: We’re working on it.

Note: It’s not just benefits. At the January meeting, they also mentioned looking to make sure seniority transfers over. Otherwise you are going to lose your most experienced EMS workers.

Alyssa: This is big and complicated, and there are so many ways for it to go disastrously wrong if we rush it.

Fire Chief Les Stevens: The Medical Practitioner oversees these transitions and would not allow care to lapse for one second.

Amanda: In the next legislative session, maybe we can lobby for fixing the Civil Service rules?

….

Ok Council:

1.  Who wants to stick with City based EMS?

Yes: Matthew, Shane, Jane, Josh, Amanda
No: Lorenzo and Alyssa

Alyssa says that she is just not yet satisfied with the open questions about labor protections.

2.  Who wants to look into Voluntary Consultation as a lite-collective-bargaining?

Yes: everyone.
No: no one.

So there you have it.

…

At the very end, the union rep Zach Phillips weighs in again:

  • I still have concerns about the timeline and labor protections
  • EMS will absolutely not generate revenue. Do not look at this as a revenue source, I promise.
  • Yes on lobbying the state legislature. We think we can make progress on this by 2028, which is one reason to wait.
  • You all will be the 2nd largest city based EMS, after Austin. What’s the rush?

Alyssa: Will we put a union rep on the hiring committee for the EMS chief?
Answer: Absolutely. Yes.

…

Final notes: How are we going to pay for this? We’re already looking at a $4 million budget hole. As Zach said, this will not generate revenue.

My guess is that that will be a big, messy conversation, and so there just wasn’t time to roll that conversation into the this workshop.

What a mess! Sure do wish we hadn’t done this last year:

But here we are.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 3/3/26

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Back during the pandemic, San Marcos got a bunch of Covid money. First there was $6 million in Covid Relief, in 2020, and then $18 million from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in 2021.

By the end of 2024, it all had to be contracted out. We did that.

Here’s what the Covid Relief money went to:

(Note: For the Covid Relief money, they only mention $2.67 million of the $6 million in today’s presentation. I assume the rest got spent years ago.)

Here’s what we’ve spent the $18 million ARPA money on:

It has to all be spent by the end of 2026. So everything is wrapping up.

Which brings us to today

As projects finish up, there’s often a little bit of money left over. We’re allowed to put that towards one of the existing contracts, but you can’t start anything new.

We’ve got about $320K freed up from these projects:

What should we do with this extra money?

Here’s what staff recommends:

Operation Triage and Mission Able are both nonprofits that go in and fix houses.

In other words: suppose you’re 70 and you bought your house in 1980, and you’ve worked low-wage jobs your whole life, and now you’re in danger of being homeless because your house needs $50K in repair so that it’s not condemned. This is the kind of program that comes in, fixes your foundation and your air conditioning, so that you can safely and happily stay in your home.

The grant consultant is the person who understands all the federal rules, so that we don’t risk losing this money due to mismanagement. We were going to have to pay this $120K either way.

What does Council say?

Jane: How about $5K to buy pet food for the PALS pet food drive program? That’s allowed because we had a covid contract with them already.

Alyssa: I need way more information. What are the deliverables? What’s the selection process? What’s the socioeconomic status of the recipients? Is this equitable? Where in the city do the recipients live? Do our neighbors trust them? I have so many questions.

Amanda: I’d like the extra info, but I’m good with Mission Able and Operation Triage.

Lorenzo: How about the food bank and BR3T?

(Note: BR3T is rent assistance and homelessness prevention.)

Alyssa: Can we get info on those, too? I want info on everything. BR3T funding is evaporating.

Jane: Maybe the consultant will come in under budget, and we can find $5K for PALS pet food from there.

Josh: I’m fine with the staff recommendations.

Shane: Me too.

Matthew: Me too.

Bottom line: This will come back at a city council meeting. Staff will bring back lots of information on Mission Able, Operation Triage, PALS, the food bank, and BR3T.

Bonus! 3 pm workshop, 2/17/26

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

SMPD is a rather large chunk of the general fund. The General Fund this year is $126 million:

and SMPD is the biggest chunk of that, at 22%.

…

Obviously there’s huge disagreement within the community on this point. Maybe you think all cops are trigger-happy jerks with daddy issues, or maybe you think cops are upright citizens with a zest for being helpful. Most likely, you’re somewhere in between.

At any rate, as a community, we have to come together and make decisions.

Here’s a question: does SMPD need more staff?

(First off, yes: all of our city departments need more staffing.) But anyway, in order to answer this in an unbiased manner, we hired some consultants.

Here’s what they say:

and

You can read the whole report here (scroll down past the slides). It’s very detailed.

Here’s just a highlight of the slides:

Afternoons and late night is when they get the most calls.

The university has its own separate police force with its own rules. But they sort of overlap and cooperate around the edges:

So how long does it take for police to show up?

They do not show up to minor car crashes anymore, because of those budget cuts we’ve been talking about.

The consultants made a big deal out of “proactivity”.

It’s basically the things that get done in between crises. If you’re always swinging wildly from crisis to crisis, you can never harass brown people for broken tail lights assist the grandmothers when they have a flat tire.

Next up is Dispatch:

That seems very sympathetic.

and admin:

Ok.

And investigations:

Sure.

…

Loose, disorganized thoughts:

  • It’s good to have this information
  • This whole report is inherently pro-cop, because it is pro-status quo. This is not a conversation about how we can re-imagine safety in San Marcos. However, a majority of San Marcos does support SMPD.
  • All departments are being squeezed right now. If we conducted staffing studies on all departments, we’d get big needs across the board.

That’s all I got!

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 1/20/26

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Public comment at the 3 pm workshops:

There are three speakers:

  • President of the local EMS union. We’ll hear from him throughout the workshop.
  • Speaker in support of the current board chair of the San Marcos Housing Authority
  • Max Baker, on the SMPD staffing study. (This item was actually postponed.)

….

Workshop: San Marcos EMS

Backstory: This is a mess! It first came up on the blog, back in September.

Here’s my best attempt to reconstruct the timeline:

1983: San Marcos-Hays County EMS is formed as an independent non-profit. All the nearby towns and Hays County all contribute to funding it.

2009: We hire Fire Chief Les Stephens. When he’s hired, he’s told that the SMHC EMS is a total mess, and we want to be prepared in case we need to bail on them. So he starts making sure that all his fire fighters are trained as paramedics.

2010: Buda bails on SMHC EMS, and splits off to run their own program.

SMHC EMS gets its act together and becomes a high-quality organization. So we end up not needing to split off. But we still require that fire fighters be paramedics, because it’s best practices. A lot of times, they’re the first ones on the scene.

All that backstory was provided by the city.

This next piece was NOT provided by the city:

2022: SMHC EMS starts forming a union:

Immediately everyone starts splitting off and forming their own EMS services.

If it looks like union-busting and quacks like union busting… it’s union-busting, yeah?

This is the big theme of the night: the EMS workers are getting screwed, no matter how you slice it.

2025: San Marcos asks Kyle and Hays to give us 12-18 months to put together an EMS plan.

2026: The clock is ticking. The first ambulances will be removed in April, and they’ll all be gone by October.

…

Which brings us to today

All the partners left, and now it’s just San Marcos. We have to figure out how we want to provide EMS services to San Marcos residents.

So we commissioned a 6 month EMS study. This workshop is about that study.

These are the three choices:

  1. Renew the contract with SMHC EMS and just carry on.
  2. Roll EMS into our fire department. This is called Fire-based EMS.
  3. Make a new standalone City EMS department.

No matter what, San Marcos needs to be able to provide some basic things:

Here’s how much personnel is required under each model:

Here are the costs:

The reason City EMS is cheaper is partly because it requires less staff, but also because EMS workers would get paid less.

  • Status quo? SMHC EMS is unionized. They can demand higher wages
  • Fire-based EMS? Our fire department gets partial union perks, like collective bargaining. This is the whole “meet-and-confer” thing. So they can also arrange higher wages.
  • City EMS: they’ll get paid along with all the other city employees.

San Marcos prides itself on paying its employees pretty well, but it’s just not the same as having a union. (And in Texas, it is basically illegal for public employees besides Fire and PD to unionize.)

…

Some extra details:

Here’s the summary table:

Sorry, I know it’s small. It’s slide 15 of this presentation, or page 153 on this PDF, if you want to scroll.

The consultants are recommending that we go with City EMS.

And, of course, this is all very urgent. As the contracts dissolve, everyone will start taking their supplies.

The first ambulances will start to leave in April, and the last of the ambulances will be gone by October.

….

What does everyone say?

Zach Phillips is the president of the SMHC EMS union. He says:

  • There are inconsistencies in the EMS study. We’d like you to postpone.
  • If postponing isn’t an option, our goal is workforce continuity.
  • Our priority is providing high quality care. We can best do that by keeping the experience and expertise of our employees together. We know San Marcos really well.

What does Council say?

Amanda: I’m worried about the destabilization of the workforce. What transition process would be recommended?
Answer: The EMS workers would go through the normal city application process, but we’d work closely with them to align expectations and make it as smooth as possible.

Josh: My big concern is the transition.
– You can’t do good work without good people, but our salaries are lower.
– Taking on a whole company in-house is expensive
– We have to be fiscally responsible, but if we’re going to do this, we need it to be rock-solid.
– How would insurance and liability work?
Answer to that last bit: We get insurance through Texas Municipal League.

Shane: When Chief Stevens was hired back in 2009, the plan was to convert to Fire-based EMS. Chief, how do you feel about all of this?

Chief Stevens: Fire fighters do not want to be EMS, and EMS workers don’t want to run into burning buildings. When you talk to the people that work in these departments, they generally do not want to be merged.

Note: This is the biggest argument against fire-based EMS. Several different speakers say the same thing: Medical EMS people like doing the medical stuff, and fire fighters like doing the fire-fighting stuff. They do not want to merge.

Shane: Well, did we waste a bunch of money then preparing SMFD to be ready to convert to EMS?
Chief: No. It’s best practices to get fire-fighters trained as paramedics. We’re usually first on the scene, so we can start medical care while EMS gets here. We’re going to keep requiring paramedic certification.

…

Jane: How would the finances work out?
Answer: We’ve been paying $2.5 million to SMHC EMS. You all allocated an extra $2 million last September.

Jane: But that still leaves about $9 million?
Answer: Well, you bring in some money from patient care.

Mini-rant: the average cost of an ambulance ride is $2673. If we had socialized medicine, like the rest of the sane world, the bill to the consumer would be $0. But we pay twice as much for healthcare in the US and get significantly worse services. Ah, capitalism.

…

Alyssa: There are allegations of union-busting. I need more time before I decide.

Lorenzo: City EMS is cheaper because the workers get a worse deal. If we do Fire-based EMS, they’d get 4% raises every year, along with FD and SMPD. I’m against City EMS.

Amanda: What’s the time frame here?
Answer: We’re a little freaked out! Last July, we asked them to give us 12-18 months. But they’re going to start removing ambulances in April. The dissolution will be complete in October.

Amanda: I’m fine with the recommendation in the report.

Josh: Can I call the union president back up? Sir, what is the union’s position on transitioning to non-union jobs?

Union President Zach: One of our concerns is that all employees are able to transition, assuming they want to.
– Like Chief Stephens said, not all EMS want to be fire fighters. I personally prefer EMS and medical things, and not fire.
– We want to make sure all individuals can come over with their existing seniority.
– We’re worried about the timeline. If it drags out, you’ll lose people with a lot of local expertise because they’ll look for other jobs.

Josh: If you had a way to do it, what’s your preference on the transition? Assuming it’s options 2 or 3?
Zach: Right now, we have collective bargaining.
– The state does not allow public employees to collective bargain.
– But city councils can vote to allow meet-and-confer for City EMS.
– We just want to be able to negotiate.
– There’s no way we could go on strike, and we would not ever try to go on strike.

City Assistant Manager Anderson: I’ve been trying to figure this out. My read on state rules is that City EMS can have an employee association, but they aren’t allowed collective bargaining.

City Lawyer: I need to read up on some of these legal details. I don’t think collective bargaining is allowed. Some of the bigger cities have a similar thing to meet-and-confer between other employees. I just need to look stuff up.

City Manager Reyes: Each option carries budget consequences, so just be mindful.

…

Shane: I’m torn. I need more time, too.

Matthew: how do you transfer seniority?
Answer: We’d have to work it out. We’ve worked it out in other contexts, though.

Matthew: I’m for City EMS then. I want to explore these meet-and-confer options though.

Bottom line:

City EMS plus labor protections: Matthew, Josh, Amanda, Jane

Need more time: Alyssa, Lorenzo, Shane

So we’re going with City EMS, but city staff will bring back some details:

  • the inconsistencies in the study that Zach referenced,
  • Labor protections, whether we can do a meet-and-confer option
  • Quality of care measures.

Hopefully things will get sorted!

…

One final note, just because it’s cute.

Fire Chief Les Stephens, last year when he was inducted into the Texas Fire Service Hall of Honor:

Les Stephens, on the San Marcos city staff webpage:

Did we…. Was he 12 years old when we hired him??

…

There were supposed to be two other workshops:

  • the SMPD staffing study,
  • an update on the comprehensive plan

But we ran out of time, so both were postponed.

Bonus bonus bonus! Council workshops, 1/8/26

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

At the beginning of January, Council had some workshops. The topics were:

  1. Paid parking at the Lion’s Club
  2. Fencing and charging an entry fee at Rio Vista

Let’s dive in!

…

Workshop 1: Paid Parking at the Lion’s Club:

We started charging for parking this past summer. Do we want to keep doing it?

In theory, residents are free. But only if you’ve gone online ahead of time and register your car. (Register your car here!)

  • If you don’t register, or you don’t live in San Marcos, you’re supposed to pay at the kiosk.
  • If you don’t register and you don’t pay at the kiosk, you’re going to get a ticket in the mail.

Your license plate is scanned when you come and go, any time between 6 am and 11 pm. The ticket gets automatically processed and mailed out.

How well is it going?

Is that good or bad?

  • 3637 isn’t very many, in a town of 70,000. That’s not good.
  • It’s only been six months, though. Give it time.
  • Apparently 25% of those tickets went to San Marcos addresses. That’s bad! Locals are supposed to be free.
  • But again, patience.

If you get a ticket, you can just call the city. Staff will walk you through the registration process and then cancel the ticket. That’s good! But not everyone knows that’s something they can do.

Amanda and Alyssa are both concerned: Who is getting rejected from the system? What barriers are there to getting the permit?

Answer: We’ve had 345 applications rejected. Most were rejected because they didn’t provide a driver’s license, or the photo ID plus address.

  • Some were out-of-towners
  • Some might have gone back and completed it later

We don’t really know how many people gave up or were turned off by the process.

(Jane asks a zillion oddball, detailed questions of the form, “If a person does X and then Y happens, can the system do Z?”
The answer is always, “No, the system cannot do that.”)

Question for Council: do we want to exempt people close to San Marcos?

One of the major complaints has been from people who have come to the river for years every morning, but they live outside of town.

Council decides to exempt all of SMCISD. So all San Marcos residents and all SMCISD residents can park free at the Lion’s Club. But you do have to go register first.

…

Workshop 2: Fencing and charging admission at the river

Background: We’ve been destroying the river for the past half-dozen years.  It seems to be mostly out-of-towners taking day trips to San Marcos.  

The major problems are:

  1. Safety: People get super drunk, people get heat stroke, there are lots of rocks and lots of deep water, and the crowds are too packed and unsupervised.
  2. Cost: it’s super expensive to hire enough marshals and staff to keep things safe, and then we can’t even hire enough people to fill the slots.  The out-of-town visitors tend to just visit for the day, and leave without spending money in town.
  3. Environmental: wild amounts of litter, erosion of the banks, and destruction of the wild rice and other underwater things.  The little endangered fishies need their habitats.

In 2024, we tried a can ban.  But things were worse than ever!  Nobody enforced the can ban because staff was so overwhelmed by the safety issues. They spent all their time dealing with crises. 

This past summer, 2025, we tried fencing off the river: 

In my mind, this was a big success!

The river was still free. On weekends and holidays, staff was stationed at the entrances.  They could stop you, tell you about the styrafoam ban, make sure you’re not bringing alcohol in, and so on.   Basically, they just educated visitors on the park rules.

This seemed to help!  The crowds were a bit smaller and less out of control. 

  • The city saved money because it took way less staff.
  • The litter was less intense.
  • The crowds were less intense. 

It was partially due to the very rainy July, but also the fences.  

(My theory is kinda depressing: I think people stopped coming because they couldn’t easily bring alcohol in.)

Which brings us to this workshop.

Two main questions to deal with.

  1. Does Council want to keep having the fences?
  2. Does Council want to keep it free, or start charging out-of-towners? (Nobody is interested in charging local residents.)

Last year, the fence was ugly.

This year, they’re proposing something less ugly:

It would still be temporary! It would go up in May and come down in September. 

Here’s where the fence would go:

Basically the same as 2025. 

They’re going to add in two gates, at those blue squares by the tennis courts. But only for during the week, so that people can easily walk into the park. On the weekends, they’ll be closed, so that we don’t have to hire more staff to sit there.

It’s got some drawbacks – like taking kids to the Children’s Park is more difficult on holiday weekends – and staff is going to try to work through some of those issues.

Should we charge an entry fee?

I loathe the idea of charging money for the river.  The problem is that we’re the last free river park.  

When all the river parks in all of central Texas were free, the crowds could disperse evenly.  One by one, each park started charging entrance fees.  This increased the pressure on the remaining parks.  

If I had a magic wand, Texas would properly tax its wealthy citizens, and then we would use that money to subsidize public parks, and they would stay free.

Since that’s not going to happen, and since San Marcos just voted for candidates who ran on lower taxes, we are stuck choosing between three things:

  • Use a huge chunk of our budget keeping the river parks safe and clean
  • Let the river get destroyed and let visitors get hurt.
  • Charge out-of-towners for using the river

So here we are.

…

How much does it cost to staff the river?

A lot!

About $500K.  

How would charging people even work?

First off, it’s supposed to be free if you live in town. It would be similar to parking at the Lion’s Club:
– Register online ahead of time.
– Get a QR code on your phone to show the people at the gate.
– Or just show your ID at the gate to get in.

Note: But I don’t want to bring my phone OR my wallet to the river! This already sucks.

Out-of-town people would pay online ahead of time, and get a QR code.

Alyssa and Amanda have a lot of concerns with people having to navigate this process. It’s similar to the parking problem – every time you put friction into a system, you lose your vulnerable people.

…

How much money will this bring in?

We don’t know! It costs $30K to get the software.

We don’t really know how many out-of-towners come to the park. And we don’t know how many people will stop coming if it’s not free anymore.

…

There are a few different questions:

  • Does Council want to charge anybody?
  • If so, who counts as an out-of-towner?
  • How much do we want to charge? 

We’ll take these one at a time.

Does Council want to charge out-of-towners?

Yes: Jane, Shane, Matthew, Josh, Lorenzo

Postpone for a year to collect data: Alyssa, Amanda

So that passes.

Who should get in for free?

Everyone agrees: All of San Marcos and all of SMCISD.

How much should we charge?

Everyone wants staff bring back options.

…

Just to note: New Braunfels charges $2 to get in the river, and $25 to stop and put a blanket down on the grass.

TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS! We will not be doing that. That’s nuts.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 12/16/25

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshop #1: San Marcos Community Survey

Every three years, we run a community survey. The first one was in 2022, and so 2025 is the second.

Methods:

They try to get a random sample of people by sending mailers out to households. They also open the survey up to anyone, online.

The responses are overwhelmingly older white homeowners in Kissing Tree.

I’m really not kidding:

where “Charlie” is the blue #3 area below:

and yes, they are mostly white home-owners:

This is a well-understood phenomenon by people who run surveys – different groups of people respond to surveys with different participation rates.

So they correct for it. What you do is you take the actual composition of San Marcos, based on census data. Then you weight your survey responses until they match the actual proportions.

For example:

Loosely speaking, if you’re 18-34 and you filled out the survey, your answers will get multiplied by 3. If you’re 35-54, your answers will get multiplied by 1/2, and if you’re 55+, your answers will get multiplied by 1/3.

…

So how’d we do?

Oh, fine! It’s all fine.

and

I don’t have any big, glorious conclusions.

Full data here.

…

Workshop #2: Office of Community Support and Resource Navigation, and Participatory Budgeting.

We’ve got things in progress! Here’s two new things that Council put into this year’s budget:

  1. Office of Community Support and
    Resource Navigation
  2. Participatory Budgeting.

Office of Community Support and Resource Navigation

That name is a mouthful and doesn’t really capture the gist of it? To me, it sounds like a helpline.

This is actually about safety from a non-policing framework:

This is basically catnip for me. Yes, please, all of that.

Here’s the basics:

It’s still in the baby stages.

Keep an eye out for Town Hall meetings as this ramps up!

…

Participatory Budgeting

We’ve got $200,000 with YOUR name on it!

Here are some sample ideas:

So, y’know, look around and see what annoys you!

Some details:

So, sadly we cannot submit “Open the Activity Center on Sundays!” because that would be a recurring cost. But that’s one of my fondest wishes.

Anyway, start brainstorming! Ideas are due in February.

You don’t have to know all the details. They’ll help build your spark into a flame. You just dream big, kiddo. (Well, dream medium. It’s only $200K.)

…

Workshop #3: Airport updates

Our little airport is growing?

First off, we have a cute old air tower. Would Council mind if we move it?

Here’s the journey it will go on:

Second, there’s a new road that needs named:

We’re going to name it after this guy:

He was a POW in WWII, among other things. Sounds good to me!

Bonus! 3 pm workshop, 12/2/25

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Do we want to be sister cities with Inverness, Scotland?

No, we don’t!

…

(I’m dying to leave the post like that, full stop, but I also am physically unable to stop telling you tiny municipal details.)

Basically, Texas State approached us about forming a sister city relationship with Inverness:

We also have a dormant sister city arrangement with Monclova, Coahuila in Mexico:

Starting the one and reviving the other would cost time and money.

We’re short on both, so no.]

Bonus! 3 pm workshop, 11/18/25

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshop: Heritage Tourism and Preservation Grants

“HOT” stands for Hotel Occupancy Taxes. How shall we spend our HOT money?

The city is proposing offering some grants to nonprofits who have some kind of historical preservation project.

City staff goes through a long list of slides. Who would be eligible? What kinds of projects are okay? How much are the grants for? What’s the rubric for evaluation? What’s the timeline? It’s very detailed.

What does Council say?

“Let’s kill this whole thing and just use the money for repairing the Dunbar School Home Education Building.”

It’s not a bad idea! I felt a little bad for the presenter, though.

What’s the Dunbar School Home Education Center?

It’s this little building in Dunbar Park:

via

right behind the main Dunbar Recreation Building:

It’s the only building left from the original campus of the Dunbar School.

We just talked about the Dunbar School a moment ago – it’s the original school for black children during segregation, named for the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.

The Dunbar School was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

But then in 1986, someone deliberately burned down most of the school, leaving just this little building. (Not the only time that major buildings of the African-American community in San Marcos have been destroyed by arson.)

…

The plan is to put this HOT money into the Dunbar Home Economics Building each year. Once it’s restored, Council will revisit this whole grant idea.