The League of American Bicyclists hands out awards. We’re bronze! We’ve been bronze since 2018, actually. But we were renewed!
Overall, Texas is mid.
It takes a fair amount of work to get this designation. Along the way, we got some survey data:
They also gave us a report card:
Ouch. Hmm. Maybe I don’t know what “bronze” actually means. That we’re trying?
They included 17 recommendations. We’re a work in progress. Read ‘em all here.
Council asks a few questions: – Bike incentives? Access? (no) – Do we reach out to businesses? (no) – Demographics of survey responses? (no)
I’m being pretty negative, but the city is doing good work on a shoestring budget.
Remember: on average, it costs about $1,015/month to own a car, whereas it’s about $29/month to commute by bike. San Marcos is full of people who might prefer to bike – but only if it feels safe, and only if they actually have a bike.
You download an app, and it tells you where the closest one is, and you can rent it and ride around the Scooter Zone.
Originally they were contained to this blue area:
Last May, the Scooter People asked if they could grow. So we gave them a 9 month pilot period to extend to this region:
Also we allowed them to become 24/7. Before, they shut down overnight.
So how did the pilot program go?
There haven’t been any incidents!
Everyone is fine making that region permanent.
Would we like to fire up a new pilot region, here?
Sure.
One final note: Are these actually affordable?
It costs $1 to unlock, and then $.30 plus taxes per minute. So let’s ballpark that it costs $6 for a 15 minute commute. That means that one daily trip would cost about $360/month.
That’s actually kinda pricey. Still cheaper than owning a car, but not, like, frugal.
…
Workshop 3: Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan
Okay, this topic is always fascinating.
So back in 1991, there was a lawsuit by the Sierra Club against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Sierra Club sued for neglect under the Endangered Species Act. Their case was that if the Edwards Aquifer drops too low, then the endangered species in the Comal and San Marcos rivers could go extinct. And they won!
So the Edwards Aquifer Authority was created, and they got some legal power. This is important!
Probably some of you know all those names, but Jane’s jumped out at me. Good on her.)
Here’s the key: The EAA is allowed to cap much water gets used, and they are allowed to charge organizations to use the water. They sell credits to San Antonio, New Braunfels, San Marcos, Texas State University, Kyle, and so on. Then they use that revenue to fund conservation measures.
Today’s presentation is on the Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan, or EAHPC. This is how they actual take care of the rivers.
So what do they do?
SO MUCH! They spent about $10 million on San Marcos alone.
They do a bunch of underwater gardening, to make sure there’s enough habitat for the little endangered fishies, and also the endangered wild rice:
They fence off the spots where the bank is getting eroded and trampled to death, and nurture it back to life:
That photo is just upstream of the falls. It’s as if you’re standing on the island with the big cypress trees, looking back towards the bank.
They hire people to go spear-fishing for non-native species:
The one on the left is those little sucker-fishes that people put in their aquariums to eat the algae and keep in clean. The one on the right is tilapia.
Council asks: what happens to the fish? Answer: The guy who does the spear-fishing holds a big fish fry and serves tilapia fish tacos, down at Ivar’s river pub.
Council: What about the sucker-fish? Answer: Don’t eat those. Gross.
But also: the San Marcos Discovery Center has a fish shelter! Like they’ll take your old fish if you don’t want an aquarium any more, and if you are getting started, you can go adopt fish for free from them.
Don’t dump your old fish in the river, everybody. Take them to the fish library.
…
What else?
They pay for scuba divers and snorkelers to collect trash out of the river, twice a week, all summer long:
They keep those red bobbers around the wild rice and sensitive spots:
They put the big limestone rocks in at certain river swim spots, and then fenced off a bunch of the other spots:
In other words, they were like “Let’s contain the swimming to a few really great swimming spots, and not worry about vegetation there. Then we’ll protect the rest of the river for vegetation.”
Also the limestone rocks keep the bank from eroding.
They did a bunch of stormwater detention that keep the nasty stuff from running into the river:
and they also fixed up Sessom’s Creek:
…
I mean, let’s pause here. This is wild, right? This is the Edward’s Aquifer:
Everyone in that dark blue region would just be draining the aquifer dry, if the EAA wasn’t around. Instead there’s been this massive coordinated effort, resulting in $10 million worth of projects to protect our river?!
That’s insane and beautiful. You’ve got to cherish this and really breathe it in.
(Especially during this larger dark time. I hope this program is not dependent on federal funding.)
…
But wait, there’s more! You can’t hold these deals back!
The scientists study and monitor all the endangered critters:
They scoop them up and take them on field trips, over to McCarty Lane or down to Uvalde:
That way, if there was a massive natural disaster or chemical spill or something, they could re-introduce the species after the river was healthy and cleaned up again.
…
What’s next? The current EAHCP plan runs from 2013-2027. So it’s about to expire, and they’re mapping out the next one to run from 2028 – 2058.
They’ll do a lot of the same stuff – make sure the river stays flowing, make sure the people don’t destroy the environment, make sure the endangered species are still paddling around in healthy numbers. But they’ll also have to respond to a hotter, drier world, which makes this all harder.
There’s some technical details to the new plan, and honestly, you should just watch the whole presentation here. (Or read all the slides here.) 10/10, no notes.
Workshop #1: Update on Downtown plan Workshop #2: Privacy policy on SMPD License Plate Scanners
….
Workshop #1: Listen, this was great. I just ran out of time to write it up properly, so it’s a little short.
We approved the Downtown plan in 2023.
So now we’re implementing it:
So far, we’ve done a bunch of great stuff!
Here’s what we’re in the middle of doing:
And here’s what we’re going to do next:
And here’s what we need, to do it:
Like I said, I’m shortchanging a really enjoyable presentation. Go listen!
…
Workshop #2: License Plate Readers
In February, SMPD asked Council to approve a bunch of license plate readers.
We had literally just talked about privacy with respect to technology, and these definitely require privacy protections. So we postponed the purchase until we had an updated privacy policy.
Here we are! Policy time.
…
What is FLOCK?
So in other words, there are seventeen intersections in San Marcos that are recording your license plate every time you drive by. (And soon there will be thirty locations.)
So basically, SMPD owns the data, but it’s located on the FLOCK system. If you have a crime in mind, you log in and run a query, and then it tells you which license plates were at that location, or it tells you all places a specific car went, or whatever.
Council had three big concerns:
We’ll take these one at a time.
Retention periods: how long do they keep the data?
We’re currently 30 days, and Chief Standridge makes the case that we need to stay at 30 days.
There’s no slide for this part, but he’s basically saying, “People don’t report crimes right away. Sometimes the crime isn’t even discovered for a week or two. If you don’t have the crime reported for two weeks, that eats up a lot of your time to query the data base for the license plate.”
He had his crime analyst go back into the system and pull the average length of time people waited to report various crimes, in 2024 in San Marcos. He says:
Criminal sexual contact: average 513 days delay
Forcible rape: average 640 days delay
Credit card ATM fraud (ie, steal your wallet or purse from your car and go to the nearest ATM): delay of 103 days
Shoplifting: average 21 days delay. (This is because stores submit the theft to corporate, and corporate decides whether or not it meets the threshhold to bring in the local SMPD.)
I mean, ok. This makes the case that the cameras aren’t actually helping you solve most of these crimes, but point taken on the delay in reporting.
…
Onto 2: Privacy Concerns:
They’re proposing a bunch of amendments to current policy.
Great.
The “TBP” bit stands for “Texas Best Practices”, which is an accreditation thing.
Amanda asks if we can include “economic status” to the list of protected statuses? In other words, no targeting an intersection because it’s known that homeless people are camping near there.
Sounds great to me! Everyone is on board with this.
Next:
What the hell – until now, you didn’t need reasonable suspicion or probable cause to run a query?!
Anway, now you do.
There’s a bunch of details here!
You get regular training.
You have to supply a case number when you run a query.
Later on, someone else in SMPD will be double-checking all the queries to make sure they make sense.
SMPD will not give the data to any private entity.
These are definitely huge improvements.
…
We’re sticking with 30 days, but we’re no longer going to grant exceptions:
3. Data sharing with other organizations:
There’s going to be an MOU, or Memorandum of Understanding. Any other law agency that wants San Marcos data has to sign this MOU.
The MOU isn’t written yet. But it’s going to require that officers in other jurisdictions follow all the same rules as us. Specifically, there must be a case number. You can’t just be looking people up.
And there will be a portal with general information available to the community.
Finally, misusing the system is a crime:
and you can get punished for it:
…
One weird thing about Flock Cameras is that anyone can buy them and join in. The outlet malls probably have them, your apartment complex or HOA could have them. Anyone who cares enough about who is coming and going can buy one.
Will we share our data with any old HOA or shopping mall?
Not anymore!! (But JFC, we sure used to play fast and loose with this data. The deleted part in red is wild.)
There’s some discussion of ICE in all this. We’ve opted out of immigration tracking. But there are some laws (SB4) which may or may not make this more complicated.
…
My opinion: These are really big amendments that make the system safer. I am still wary about license plate readers and Flock Safety, but this is at least much better.
There are two workshops: one very short and one very long.
Evoke Wellness.
Back in December, Council had a lot of questions for these guys. They offer mental health and addiction treatment for people referred over by the police. We’ve allocated 150K of Covid money for this. This is a follow up discussion with the director at Evoke.
Amanda: What’s it look like if you’re receiving services?
The director gives an extremely detailed answer!
Prescreen for eligibility. Detox? Residential? Intensive Outpatient?
Say we’re starting with detox. Then there’s an evaluation and intake process.
Then you’re seen by nursing staff to get orders from the medical director on the detox protocol, medication regimen
Detox lasts 5-7 days. Completely voluntary. You’re free to leave at any point.
Residential: 21-28 days. Could be detox and then residential.
In the residential part: first there’s a biopsych-social assessment: trauma history, drug use history, family relationships, everything. You need a full picture to treat the whole person.
Clinical team and medical team working together to monitor the patient 24/7.
During the day: like school, 6 hours a day. Learn about substance abuse and mental health conditions, tools, coping skills to hopefully achieve longterm sobriety.
Breakfast, meds, 9:30-5:30 programming, community involvement with 12-step panels holding meetings with clients.
You also get a therapist and case manager. The case manager will help with the discharge process.
Therapist meets weekly and as needed.
6 hours/day of group therapy.
Longer lengths of stay produce better outcomes. Typically 28-35 days.
Discharge plans: typically clients take the clinical recommendation for a sit down placement in a PHP (partial hospital hospitalization) – lower level of care, higher level of freedom, and so own down the levels of care.
Amanda: How often is the intake the first time the person’s ever run through their trauma? Answer: Depends if they’ve ever had treatment before. Could be first time, could have relapsed.
Amanda: Typical client to staff ratio? Answer: 8:1 ratio, plus nursing staff and on-call medical director and leadership team.
Amanda: On the discharge plan: If you don’t want to go through everything, can you still get a discharge plan? Answer: Yes. And if they won’t accept the discharge plan, our case managers will help connect them with resources that work for them.
Amanda: What about people that are indigent? How does medication work upon discharge? Answer: For all clients, detox meds are covered for free, for 5-7 days. They are responsible for their medications, but if they have no resources, we will keep providing it. The discharge coordinator will work with them to find the community resources to stay on their medications.
Alyssa: Last year, I asked for info about Evoke. They were in the process of getting a mental health license – did that happen? Answer: We are licensed for co-occuring disorders. There must be substance disorder with a mental health disorder. Actually pretty rare to have a substance issue without a mental health issue, so this is pretty much all our patients. We do not currently serve clients that only have a mental health issue and no substance abuse.
Alyssa: This helps San Marcos? Chief Standridge: The goal is jail diversion. We’re using funds from both San Marcos and Hays money. If they have insurance, we use that first. If they’re indigent, we try to use our funds. But only if they’re residents of San Marcos.
Everyone is really pleased by the high quality of the answers given by the director.
Alyssa: I’m very hopeful? There’s a lot of structural root causes and obstacles that have to be overcome, and we have to think about those when it’s time to budget. And the public defenders office has been really helpful in locating resources. But I am anxious about the rise in need for support services. We’re setting people up for failure if we don’t supply resources.
Shane: I’m tickled to death! How it all came together, as a team.
(This is Covid money, so we’ll have to figure out how to fund it going forward.)
…
Workshop 2: SMPD. This is a 2 hour presentation!
This is SMPD’s opportunity to put their best foot forward. This is a description of all the trainings and guard rails in place at SMPD. Everything is couched in really positive terms – “Do we make mistakes? Sure! But we then unpack it and learn from it.”
This isn’t bad! It’s totally fine. It’s what any other department would do. However, a police department requires an extra level of skepticism, because of the sordid history leading up to this moment in time.
Usually I’d use Council questions to look for cracks in the presentation. But they ran out of time, because the council meeting starts at 6 pm.
So this is a very glowing presentation, without any opportunity to give a counter-narrative. Anyway, I’m just the messenger. Don’t shoot me.
…
Chief Standridge came here four years ago. We’re kind of summarizing the internal protocols that he’s implemented over this time.
There are five different speakers.
Speaker #1: Internal changes
“ABLE” stands for Active Bystander for Law Enforcement. This is basically like “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.” How do you create an environment where cops will tattle on each other?
The goal is for the consequences of not intervening to be bigger than the consequences of intervening. They do some training around interventions as well.
Here’s how many internal cases they’ve dealt with:
I mean, it’s absolutely impossible to interpret this. Is this a lot, or a little? How often are incidents going unreported? Would I agree with the outcomes if I knew all the details of the incidents?
There’s no way that PD could answer these questions! But it also means that we can’t really makes sense of this data.
It’s like if five people go to the doctor for measles, and the doctor treats three of them, and diagnoses one with allergies and one with mumps.
That doesn’t tell you much about the number of measles cases in the rest of the town
It also doesn’t tell you if the doctor is making correct diagnoses
Both those things would be much harder to figure out.
Here are the investigations that were found to be substantiated:
In 2021, we had one IA investigator. Now we have four. So that definitely helps have more eyes looking out for bad behavior.
…
The Event Review Board
The Event Review Board reviews every incident, use of force, pursuit, and preventable accident. They try to see what the department could change to reduce these events.
It’s a broad group of people and they’re supposed to look at any potential event, no matter how minor.
Some data:
Again, I just don’t have enough context to make sense of these numbers.
The speaker might have said given good context! But this was a three hour presentation, and if she did, I didn’t jot it down in my notes.
Also:
None of these were available last April, when Malachi Williams was killed. Alyssa brings this up.
Amanda asks about the costs of these?
Taser 10: $343K for 123 officers, or about $2789 per officer, per year. (Includes the Taser 10, body cameras, unlimited video storage, training, and software licensing.) BolaWrap: $1,299.99 each, and $38.99 each for cartridgets 40 mm foam bullet launcher thing: $1,273.50 each
I don’t know if each officer gets each thing, but that would come to $5362 per officer. With 123 officers, it’s about $660K.
Look, I want the officers to use less lethal force. I’m just pointing out that SMPD spends bigger sums of money, and they do it much more quickly and easily than any other department.
…
This next thing is actually really great.
Suppose you stop someone and they don’t speak English. You open up this Voyce app, and there’s a live translator. You pay by the minute.
Notice they can provide sign language as well. (But it only works if officers remember that people can be deaf. This would not have helped John Kelley, the deaf man that was tased in 2019 for not responding when SMPD told him to stop.)
The speaker says that there was one time that they needed a Mandarin translater at 3 am. This is pretty invaluable for that. (It was originally designed for the medical community. Seems invaluable there, too.)
This app doesn’t help you figure out what language the other person is speaking though. You have to use google or something.
That was all the first speaker!
…
Next speaker: Accreditation
So I guess not all the PDs are accredited, but now we are?
We’re not there yet, but we’re working towards it.
Basically you have to come up with policies that satisfy the agency in these areas:
You have to show compliance with 173 best practices.
(This meeting was the day when it was super windy and there was all the spooky smoke and dust hanging over the city. Everyone’s alarms kept going off for the evacuations up in Kyle.)
Anyway, it sounds like it’s a ton of work:
And then you have to stay accredited:
…
Onto the next speaker!
This one is super interesting – it’s on our 911 call center.
Basically, there’s a nationwide shortage of 911 dispatchers. We used to have 9 vacancies. We filled over half of them, and we’ve got a current batch of highers to fill the rest.
What happened is that we started paying a reasonable salary, and got a reputation as a good place to work. So we’re in a much healthier spot now.
911 callers also have language barriers. Instead of the VOYCE app, they use something called CyraCom:
Alyssa points out that this happened in the original 911 call involving Malachi Williams. The caller only spoke Spanish. While they were connecting with CyraCom, there was just this awful dead silence, where the caller had no idea whether or not they were going to get any help.
Alyssa suggests having a few pre-scripted lines like, “One moment while we connect with a translator” or something. This is a great idea.
We’re also trying a new program:
This is a program where they transfer mental health calls out to trained mental health providers, who will connect the person with local resources, or stay on the line and talk the person through whatever’s going on.
They can also transfer the call back to 911, if they think we need to send out an emergency response, after all. The responder then goes right out, because the call is already in the system.
They’ve been doing it since November. It turns out that most of the calls do come back to us, after all? And we end up sending someone out. It’s a work in progress!
…
Next speaker! The SMPD Mental Health Unit.
I don’t know what the training to be a Mental Health Officer really means. Is it a course? Is it multiple courses? Is it like a Master’s degree? Are you supervised by a mental health professional?
(I’m sure I could look it up, but I’m just trying to first get this whole entry out on time.)
It sounds like they do good things: they sit with people who are scared and nervous before testifying or going to court. They get food boxes from Hays County Food Bank if someone needs it. They’re generally problem-solving and checking in on people’s well-being. They will sometimes stay with someone for months, making regular follow ups to help manage someone’s care.
Here, have some data:
An “emergency detainment” is if someone is an immediate danger to themselves of others. They try to avoid doing that, though. It may mean taking them to an ER or a substance abuse facility. (But not jail.)
…
Next speaker! What comes next with Mental Health Officers?
Here’s what the state is doing:
It used to be that officers had two options:
Take someone to an emergency room
Take someone to jail and go through courts.
Now we’ve got more options. The state created a big Mental Health Officer framework in 2015.
Here’s what we’ve got so far:
Here’s what we’re aiming for:
…
Next speaker! Context of Crime.
We report crime in two ways:
We are transitioned in 2018/2019 from UCR to NIBRS, which is better data. But any longterm comparison requires UCR data.
This recent data also corresponds time-wise with Chief Standridge arriving in 2021. So we are simultaneously implementing new strategies:
There’s a special victims unit:
They partner with Hays-Caldwell Women’s Shelter.
…
Next up is Chief Standridge! He is very apologetic.
There is a specific Chief’s Advisory Panel. In order to get community feedback, they drew up some questions about the public’s crime-related fears.
The plan was for everyone on the panel to chat up their neighbor and get some informal feedback. Max Baker offered to digitize the survey and share it with the San Marcos Civics Club.
When staff got the responses, they threw out anything that didn’t seem relevant to the question at hand. Chief Standridge is extremely apologetic to this. He apologizes profusely and specifically to Max and the public.
Here are the remaining answers:
He promises to get the full data, including the extra answers, out as quickly as possible.
(My personal answer is car crashes on I-35. That terrifies me.)
…
By this point, it is 5:30, and the looming 6 pm meeting starts to take over the presentation.
Councilmembers have lots of questions, but there’s not really time for them.
…
Next presentation! School Resource Officers.
SROs are supposed to be three things: Counselor, educator, and law enforcement:
But not these things:
We have five total:
We’ve been doing this since Columbine, and most of the community is pretty happy with it:
…
Back to Chief Standridge:
He sums up with this program for the next year:
At this point, they are almost out of time. There are slides on the Marijuana Decriminalization Dashboard, but he doesn’t get to them. But it’s all publicly available here.
Here’s the situation: We’ve got city-owned water, electric, and wastewater. (Most of the people here are on city utilities, although some people are on Pedernales or Bluebonnet electric.)
When people can’t pay their utility bills, we offer them a two week delay. But we also give $120K to Community Action, to help pay people’s utility bills when they fall behind and can’t afford to catch up.
This has been an ongoing topic of conversation:
The problem is that most of the $120K we set aside for utility assistance isn’t getting used. There’s a ton of need out there in the community, and we’re not getting the money to the people that need it.
Why??
Community Action gets money from us. They also get grant money from the state and feds. So they use that state and federal money first, and then only use the city money if that money’s not available. That is good!
The problem is that their application process is long and a giant pain in the butt, because they’re trying to give out federal money. So people are being asked to provide all kinds of crazy paperwork documenting their employment or residence or whatever, and it takes weeks, and the person just needs their water turned back on so that they can cook dinner. This part is bad.
…
So the city is working on how to get the funds out faster. Would any other organizations like to also hand out utility assistance? (RFP means “Request for proposals”)
No one wanted to apply! They kept advertising and reaching out and extending the deadline.
Eventually they got three more applicants. Here’s what’s being recommended:
The “donated funds” bit means that San Marcos residents have an option to donate when they pay their bill. There’s about $45K in accumulated donations right now.
(Community Action spoke up on Tuesday and said their capacity is actually $30K, so that extra $10K will get re-distributed.)
Discussion points:
Question: How long will the turnaround time be for people needing assistance?
Answer: Different agencies have estimated 3-5 days. Some a little longer. We’ll nail it down for sure in the contract with each agency.
City Manager Stephanie Reyes proposes having a universal application that all the agencies could use for city funds. Everyone likes that.
…
There’s a lot of discussion about how customers can find out about utility assistance.
If your bill is overdue, you get an automatic robo-call on the 16th day.
On the 18th day, your bill is delinquent.
After that, the delinquency notice goes out.
Right now, we don’t mention the utility assistance on the phone call or on the delinquency letter. The person has to call into the city first.
Everyone wants to know, “Why don’t we tell people about the funds earlier?!”
City Manager Stephanie Reyes says tactfully, “It hasn’t always been the philosophy of Council to make this information available at this stage.”
What she means is this: Previous councils have been more obsessed with the random person who might cheat the system than they were with actually connecting people in need with assistance.
This council – thank god – is more obsessed with connecting people to assistance. They want to have the utility assistance mentioned in the robo-call, and put in the delinquency letter.
…
Late Penalties and Reconnection Fees
Suppose you can’t pay your utility bill. This would make it even harder:
In other words, if you’re $140 behind on your utilities, it will cost almost $200 to get everything turned back on. This is pretty typical.
Council looks at each of these individually.
Penalty Fees: on average, people pay about $14 in penalties – a little higher for houses, a little lower for apartments.
They debate capping it at different amounts – $10? $15? $20? – so that you’d pay either 10% or the cap, whichever is less. (This is Lorenzo’s suggestion.)
(This is for residential, not commercial.)
Reconnection Fees: This cost is based on a 2013 estimate of fuel plus labor to go to the house and turn it back on.
Staff is planning on recalculating these fees and see if they can bring it down.
…
Question: If we did away with all fees altogether, how much would rates go up?
Answer: about 0.5 %. Now, we always have rate increases, because costs go up. But if you want to do away with fees, we’ll need to tack on 0.5% on top of that.
…
Q: Can we change how many times they can get assistance per year?
Answer: Right now it’s twice per year. It might be hard to track among different agencies.
Most councilmembers want to change it to four.
Bottom line: This will come up at a future council meeting, along with some of the answers to questions that Council asked tonight.
…
Workshop #2
Update on American Rescue Plan dollars:
A few programs have a little money leftover:
Here’s where we want to re-allocate it:
Alyssa fought long and hard for us to provide rental service, and to use an agency that doesn’t take weeks and weeks in turnaround time. (Same issue as with the utility assistance – federal money comes with a wild amount of paperwork.) It’s nice that this is now becoming the norm.
Any further money that becomes available will also go to Rental Assistance.
The first workshop was an update on the budget side of the CIP projects, which is kind of weedy and wonky, so I’m skipping that. But feel free to watch here.
So basically, DEI is hard to do well. It takes time, energy, funding, and expertise. An equity cabinet is one model that the research-folk like, as a way to do it well.
Ours is studying transportation.
Here’s what I got out of it: there’s a lot of expertise about transportation by city staff, and there’s a lot of lived experience by people who don’t have cars, out in the community.
If you want to incorporate their experience into city policy, you need to do a lot of things:
Give people rides to meetings and compensate them for their time. The whole point is to focus on people with barriers to participation, so you’d better address the barriers.
Have the cabinet go into detail about what problems they face.
Have city staff give the cabinet a rundown about how city planners organize and work on transportation issues.
At this point, the cabinet has both sides of the equation: lived experience plus expertise. Then the cabinet members can really identify the sources of the problems and understand what it would take to solve them
Eventually they arrive at a set of recommendations, which the city can then incorporate into their plans.
That’s why it’s a big, drawn out process involving time, money, and energy! But it sounds like it went really well.
First: You have to know exactly what you’re aiming for, if you want a concrete, productive conversation:
The participants were giving the presentation, for what it’s worth.
Here’s their experience:
Life is really not easy in San Marcos, without a car. Like, Workforce Solutions that’s supposed to help you train and find a job, cover childcare, etc, is located way out on Posey Road.
This is the participants incorporating the expertise of city planners into their understanding of San Marcos:
So taking expertise plus lived experience together, they identified some key problems:
Those are categories.
Here’s their specific recommendations in each of those five categories:
Again, it’s a great presentation, so feel free to go listen yourself here.
Council had a few questions:
Jane asks about sidewalk priorities and bus shelter status? Answer: We have 18 sheltered bus stops already. We want more, but we’re holding off because we’re about to re-do the Transportation Master Plan, and we don’t want to put something in that we immediately have to tear out.
Amanda: Are other cities doing anything that we should start doing? Answer: Sometimes when there’s not enough space for a full shelter, they anchor two seats to the bust stop pole, with a little shade on top.
As Amanda put it, these recommendations are all so feasible! There’s nothing impractical to any of this.
There’s two big plans coming up: TXDOT is doing a transit plan, and the city is re-doing our transportation master plan. Both TXDOT and the city were involved in the Equity Cabinet, and want to incorporate the recommendations into their new plans. Hooray!
In 2018, we updated the Transportation Master Plan. We noted a bunch of dangerous intersections, and put in a bit about safe biking lanes. Since then, you’ve seen all sorts of bike lanes pop up.
Academy and Sessom was flagged as one of the dangerous spots to improve. This is the stretch we’re talking about:
It’s always seemed super dangerous to me! Drivers are so zippy through this:
wheeeee!
Here’s what was done:
Here’s a little before and after. Four skinny zippy, windy lanes, in 2021:
I worry for all the bikers!
After:
A light, bike lanes, single lanes, a left turn lane: so much safer.
Here’s another before-and-after:
Hopefully bikers don’t feel like they’re going to be run over anymore!
…
Did it work?
Looks like it worked great! (“Level of Service” means how much traffic can you handle.)
The bikers have concerns, though. What are “vertical delineators” that the cyclists want?
These things. You’ve seen them all over town.
The city was trying out different kinds, and it seems like the armadillos work best. (The other kinds require extra maintenance – they don’t pop back up after awhile, or they get torn off and leave bolts sticking up in the road, etc. The armadillos are just glued down.)
….
So this brings us to the next question! We’re going to be improving Sessom down to Aquarena:
We just completed the yellow part. We are about to work on the blue part to the right. We have some choices:
Go back and undo the bike lanes and safety measures in the yellow part.
Keep them, and extend them to the blue part.
[Updated to add: I got this part wrong – there’s no option to extend the bike lanes to the new part. They’re just deciding on the yellow part, and if they should add armadillos. Also fixed below.]
Jane Hughson reminisces about when they agreed to try bike lanes on the yellow part. (This was the very first meeting I blogged publicly, back in 2022! – Shane, Mark, and Saul all voted against the bike lanes on Sessom and Craddock. – Jane, Alyssa, Jude and Max Baker all voted to try the bike lanes out. Jane was reluctant, but she decided since it’s just paint and easily reversible, we might as well try them out.)
So what should we do?
Undo the old bike lanes: No one Keep the bike lanes and add armadillos: Everyone
Hooray! That was a test, Council, and you passed. Good job.
Until 2000, San Marcos exclusively got Edwards Aquifer water. Then we signed on to get some surface water from Canyon Lake, and in the mid 2000s, we joined ARWA water. (More on ARWA in a moment.)
“MGD” means a million gallons of water per day.
…
What is ARWA?
ARWA is kind of crazy. Basically, in 2006, San Marcos, Kyle, Buda, and the Canyon Regional Water Authority got together and tried to figure out a longterm plan. They formed ARWA, the Alliance Regional Water Authority.
The crazy part is that this started in 2006, and they knew they wouldn’t be delivering water until 2023. This was a very longterm plan! That is really good foresight by the councils that agreed to this.
There was all sorts of infrastructure that had to be built. I think this is the whole project:
So we’re getting all the water from the green oval on the far right. Then it has to be treated, at the blue dot, so that it’s drinkable. All those red lines are pipe that had to be laid down, and it gets run out to Lockhart, Buda, Kyle, San Marcos, and New Braunfels. That’s why it took so long.
But now it’s here! This is great!
….
So we’ve got all this water – Edwards, Canyon, and now ARWA. Is it enough?
It depends! How many people are trying to use this water?
This is the population projection, based on 2017 data:
In other words, the black line is the projected population, and the red part is how much water we’d need. So in 2055, we’re expecting to have 140K people and need about 16K acre-feet of water each day. (An acre-foot means take an acre of land, and fill it with water that is 1 foot deep.)
Here’s the water supply, according to when each of those sources kicked in:
So this looks great! So in 2055, when we need 16K acre-feet of water, and we’ll have access to about 27K acre-feet of water. Through 2075, we’ve always got more water than we need.
This is great!
But then…. we had to update our projections. Between 2017 and 2024, this region grew even more than expected. So we had to ramp up our projections, accordingly:
So if we’ve got the same amount of water planned, but a ton more people, the graph now looks like this:
Whoops. Now we are scheduled to run short on water in 2047.
So what do we do?
The good news is that we’ve got plenty of planning time, and we’re putting it to good use. There are basically two ways to address this:
Find more water
Use less water
We’re going to do both.
First, more water:
Apparently Buda and Kyle are even shorter on water than we are. Everyone is interested in collaborating and shoring up supplies. An ARWA Phase 3? Maybe a different source?
Second, reduce water usage:
The second two bullet points are huge: reclaiming used water. We’ve already got some reclaimed water already:
(That slide is from a 2022 presentation, here.) All that purple is where we can send reclaimed water to. We currently have about 5.5 million gallons per day of reclaimed water.
The problem is that it’s not drinkable. So you can use it to water the golf course at Kissing Tree (which they do!) but you can’t send it to people’s houses.
The holy grail will be when we can get reclaimed water clean enough to drink. Then we can really ramp up our water re-use.
(I read once that one of the grand failures of midcentury America was not double-piping all the houses, so that we weren’t mixing our toilet water with our sink water. Then we wouldn’t be watering our lawns with drinking water, and we wouldn’t be trying to clean and re-use toilet water.)
Here’s what we think we can get to:
Notice that the water supply hasn’t changed. But the red part – our water use – is smaller. The red part dips down again around 2050 because we think we’ll be able to get the reclaimed water clean enough to drink by then.
What does Council say?
Amanda asks if we have a problem with water leakage from pipes? Answer: We’re actually pretty good on this. It happens, but we’ve got one of the lowest rates in the state.
Amanda: Can we get a graph of the top ten biggest water users? Answer: Yes! We don’t have it on hand, but we’ll email it to you.
(I love this question. Amanda said she’ll send the graph over when she gets it, but she hasn’t gotten it yet.)
Amanda: Do we still do rebates for rain barrels? Answer: Yes! Details here.
The City Manager Stephanie Reyes also mentions this: San Marcos water rates are a little higher than those around us, but it’s because of all this advance planning. We are in a much more secure longterm position that most others.
You might have heard about a giant clusterfuck with vouchers and waitlists, back in September? This workshop is that. Council is attempting to figure out what the hell happened.
Background
SMHA is funded by the Housing and Urban Development Agency. (HUD). So it runs on federal dollars and doesn’t have any formal partnership with the city.
SMHA owns about 200 properties, at these sites:
as well as some individual rental houses around town. In addition, they have 251 Section 8 vouchers. This means that SMHA subsidizes your rent, so that you’re only paying according to your income.
To be eligible for a Section 8 voucher, you must earn under 30% of the median income for our region:
The median income in San Marcos is $47K/year and the poverty rate is 27%, so I’m going to ballpark that there are about 19,000 people in San Marcos who would qualify for housing assistance.
Anyway! We’ve got 451 apartments and vouchers total, to spread out over those 19,000 people. What could go wrong?
….
Naturally, there’s a super long waitlist. Once you get a voucher or an apartment, you can keep it as long as you qualify. So the waitlist moves very, very slowly.
None of this is SMHA’s fault so far. It’s basically the fault of voters and federal elected officials, who don’t properly fund HUD.
SMHA has an internal policy that everyone on the waitlist should get a voucher within 12-18 months. So they cap the waitlist. It’s very rare that they open up the waitlist and let people on.
The last time they opened up the waitlist was in 2016. They had 500 pre-applicants join the waitlist. That was too many – it took 8 years to whittle it down. Over that time, half the people dropped off the waitlist. There are still 30 people remaining, from that 2016 batch.
…
Ok, we’re getting to the September mess now.
So back in September, they finally decided to open up the waitlist. They ran this notice in the newspaper:
Nothing in that posting is faulty or misleading. But listen: it is so, so hard to get clear messages out to the public. This is not that.
Here’s how it was supposed to work:
Between Sept 9th and Sept 22nd, 250 people stop by and pick up a pre-application.
On Sept 14th, all 250 people drop off their completed pre-application, between 8:30 am-5 pm.
Those 250 people are now on the waitlist.
That’s just not a realistic plan, when it comes to guiding actual people? Organizing people to follow a game plan is really difficult! People are not good at paying attention and following detailed rules. You have to build a lot of redundancy and safeguards into systems.
Here’s what happened:
250 people did successfully pick up a pre-application.
Tons of people showed up on September 14th. They were hoping for actual vouchers. Chaos reigned and the rumor mill picked it up. People were sent away. People were incredibly frustrated and heartbroken. There was an air of chaos and disorganization.
In the end, about 180 of those original 250 got on the waitlist.
Listen: The biggest failure is having 451 subsidized housing units for 19,000 people who qualify. When you have that kind of massive scarcity, every mistake that follows takes on epic proportions. So yes, their roll-out had lots of problems, but it’s magnified because of the huge need.
…
What is Council’s take on all this?
Council takes three basic approaches:
What the hell?! How was this so poorly planned? [Jane Hughson]
Gingerly asking, “Is there any way we can help? Are there major obstacles that are preventing SMHA from running smoothly?” [Alyssa, Amanda]
There are a lot of broken elevators, broken cameras, and generally crappy living conditions in these apartments [Saul]
What the hell?! How was this so poorly planned?
Jane just cannot get over the fact that they intended to accept 250 people onto the waitlist, but then required a drop-off between 8:30-5 pm on a single Wednesday. “Why not open it up all week? You controlled the number of pre-applications that were out there! You knew for sure that you wouldn’t go over 250.”
There’s not really a good answer, no many how times Jane tries. (And she tries.)
Many towns in Texas only open their waitlist for a day.
By 3 pm, they weren’t getting people anymore.
You could also fax it in! You don’t have to come in, in person!
All of these just make Council’s head spin.
“But what if someone works? Or has childcare issues?”
“Who the hell has a fax machine in 2024?! Why can’t they email their pre-application paperwork in?”
When they ended with only 180 applications, why didn’t they give out more pre-applications to get up to 250?
Ultimately, there are not any satisfying answers. A lot of these are SMHA policy, and the speakers don’t have the power to change the policy. Only the SMHA board can change the policy.
They do plan to do things differently next time:
Give away preapplications to all
Allow online preapplications
Select people for the waitlist by lottery.
Again: Yes, the roll-out was poorly done. But the scarcity is the real problem. If we had 19,000 low-income housing options for 19,000 people, then this would be a hassle, but not a catastrophe. But 451 housing units is just crumbs.
….
“Is there any way we can help? Are there major obstacles that are preventing SMHA from running smoothly?”
Alyssa and Amanda ask variations on this several times, but never get a clear answer.
They also ask:
What’s the best way for community feedback?
What is the best way for Council and SMHA to partner? Whose lane is whose?
None of these have particularly good answers. Alyssa encourages them to put email and phone numbers on their website.
…
“There are a lot of broken elevators, broken cameras, and generally crappy living conditions in these apartments”
They have four maintenance workers for the public housing units. They try to do all repairs on vacant apartments within 30 days.
Like with everything else, they’re underfunded and understaffed. (That’s my language, not theirs. They most repeat their policies.)
…
Going forward, the plan is to have a joint meeting between City Council and the SMHA Board, probably in February, to iron all this out.
This is new! I can’t ever recall someone from the university giving this kind of presentation before.
(That said, the speaker did not supply his slides to the city, and so all I could get were crappy screenshots of the interesting slides. )
Enrollment Growth
Uh, yeah. Sorry about the quality! I bet it looked great in person!
They’re projecting to grow from 40K to 50K students, but most of that is at the Round Rock campus and online.
The green line at the bottom is Round Rock. The blue line in the middle is San Marcos. The San Marcos campus is projected to grow from 37K to 40K over the next ten years.
Housing need
They’ve got about 10K beds on campus right now.
They’re going to need about 1500 more beds by 2027. They’re building more dorms to cover that.
Construction, etc:
The dark red are new buildings that are under construction or are planned.
The light orange are getting major renovations.
So they’re not really planning to acquire any more land. Aside from those red buildings, they’re mostly going to reconfigure existing buildings to handle more capacity.
Note: This is supposed to comfort city council. The city is mad that the university purchased two downtown apartment buildings, in order to convert them into dorms:
Texas State doesn’t pay local taxes. And downtown apartment buildings are worth a lot of money. So the problem is that when Texas State bought those buildings, San Marcos lost a lot of tax revenue.
Light blue boxes might end up being parking garages. Bottom right is Thorpe Lane.
They’ve got 48 busses, 90,000 weekly ridership. It’s a pressure point for the university.
The plan is to merge the city and university bus system. This benefits San Marcos hugely. When the university started reporting their ridership to the feds, San Marcos got about $13 million in funding.
The speaker talks about having an app showing all busses, at any moment, all free for everyone in San Marcos. That sounds amazing!
Spring Lake:
There will be a lot more trails and improvements coming to Spring Lake:
but again, the slides are so murky. It’s hard for me to provide details.
Council questions:
Amanda: Is there any talk about capping growth at 40K?
Answer: That’s as much capacity as we can accommodate. But the regents want to grow all the universities to handle 60% of Texans by 2030. They tell us what they want, and they want to grow.
This is all taken from the next Master Plan, which will be approved in 2025.
Affordability: Recently, UT went free for families earning up to 100K. Can we do that?
Answer: Right now we’re free for families up to 50K. We’re asking to see if we can get funding to be free up to 100K, like UT. We expect that would be similar – 5-10% of our student body would fall in that 50K-100K range. (That is WILD. 85% of their student body comes from families making more than 100K?)
This plan has not been finalized yet. I think the master plan gets voted on next year.
Workshop #2:
Every four years, San Marcos has to review the City Charter.
Council will appoint seven people to the charter review commission. They only have six months to do a ton of work, because it has to be done in time for the fall election.
The community can also add charter amendments to the ballot, like when we outlawed fluoride in 2015. (We were RFK junior before RFK junior even had a brainworm.) Maybe we can undo that!
If you would like to be considered, they will be opening up for applications.
Council approved it, but vowed to look at the predatory leasing practices and see what could be done. So here we are!
For what it’s worth, I think Council handled this correctly. – We need physical housing to be built. – We need landlord reform.
You shouldn’t hold the former hostage in order to accomplish the second, but the second is also urgently needed.
…
So let’s dive in! The speaker was Shannon Fitzpatrick (and these are her slides). She’s been a lawyer for Texas State, working with students, for the past 25 years or so. (Go listen here! I’m not doing it justice. It’s so interesting.)
Here’s what we’re basically comparing:
This part isn’t that bad. A student might not want to be on the hook for their roommates’ share of the rent.
Installment Contracts
This is where things start to get sleazy:
First, this “installments” contract.
The point is that it’s a different legal concept than a regular lease. This lets landlords skip out on the state laws that protect renters. And listen: Texas barely has any renter protections, so if you’re finding ways to cheat those, you are seriously trying to slumlord your way to profit.
Okay, so this installments contract. The basic idea is that you could sign a contract for $11,400, and then they break it into 12 monthly payments.
They show up on campus in October, and sell students hard on these apartments:
They’re going fast! You’re not going to have a place to live next year!
Your mom will be so proud that you’re making a grown up decision by yourself!
No security deposit if you sign right now! (We’ll come back to this.)
So the kid flips through some pages (OF A 60 PAGE LEASE!) and signs.
Already, things are rotten and different than normal:
In general, you have to qualify to lease an apartment. If your income is too low to qualify, or your guarantor’s (parent, aunt, etc) income is too low to qualify, then you can’t rent the apartment.
BUT HERE, YOU’VE ALREADY SIGNED! So you can’t live there and you still owe $11K!
Next: regular leases have a “mitigation” clause. If you break your lease, you have to cover the rent until they re-rent the apartment. The landlord has to attempt to rent out the apartment.
Installment contracts do not have this clause. You break your lease, the company still gets their $11k. They can re-rent the apartment, and now they’re getting another $11K for the same room.
Also: They don’t pro-rate partial months. So you would owe rent on August 1st, even if you can’t move in until August 20th.
Next: “As-Is” Clauses
So the kid signed the lease in October.
Usually when you sign a lease, you look at the apartment. You say things like, “Are there any apartments on the second or third floor?” The leaser says, “Sure” and shows you one. You say something like, “Nah, I don’t want to be this close to the dumpster, I’ll go with the first floor apartment, after all.”
The point is that you’ve seen the actual apartment, and you know if it has mushrooms sprouting in the closets.
“As-is” clauses mean “You get the apartment in its current state, not in a pristine state.” But those are only valid if the tenant can inspect the premises. Since these kids are signing in October without seeing the actual apartment, they’ve signed all kinds of rights away.
They show up in August, see the mold, mushrooms, broken furniture, broken locks, etc, and they have no recourse. They’re not able to request a different apartment, because of the “as-is” clause.
Security Deposits
“Sign now and we’ll waive your Security Deposit! You’d be a fool not to sign!” – me, pretending to be a sleazy landlord.
So this is another scam. They waive the security deposit, and tenants lose some rights. Texas has specific laws that state that if you put down a security deposit, you’re entitled to some protections.
For example, you lose your right to a 30-day move out inspection. So they can come after you for up to four years for damages to your apartment. And they sometimes do! The speaker said that what happens is these complexes get sold every three or four years. Sometimes the new owners look at the past few years of tenants and shake them down for damages.
Also: #notallcollegekids but some college kids are little shits. Since they didn’t pay a security deposit, they don’t think they’re on the hook for damages. Chairs in the pool, trash the place, etc.
Roommate matching
In theory, this is fine. This is what happens in a conventional dorm.
But here, it’s done… maliciously? it’s pretty surreal. Here’s the understated tone from the speaker:
In practice it means that they don’t give a shit if you have allergies and the roommate has a cat, or if you are a quiet person and the roommate throws keggers.
But then it gets worse!
You can’t move to a different apartment if you need to. She told a story of a kid who found his roommate, killed, gory, awful, in the living room. They made him stay in that unit.
You can be moved even if you don’t want to! You dared to complain? Fine, you’re being moved. Pack up.
The companies are generally retaliatory and vindictive. You called us in for having cockroaches? We’re going to try to charge you for fumigating the building. Etc.
Just straight up being illegal:
For example:
Legally, they have to tell tenants who the owner is. But they don’t.
The very few protections that Texas law does offer, they can just skip out on doing them. Nobody holds them accountable. (Of course, this applies to all of San Marcos rentals! Not just students!)
What about the rest of San Marcos?
It is really important that we don’t limit this to college students! All renters need protections. San Marcos is mostly renters!
Many, many landlords are vindictive and retaliatory, or don’t provide a safe, clean environment. There’s a huge power imbalance between landlords and tenants. Tenants get exploited.
So what can be done?
Here’s what the speaker suggests:
and
The city lawyer is quick to mention that these are all uncharted territory. Most cities are not in this situation. We can research and explore these ideas further, but there’s not much in the way of precedents.
Council also discusses:
Capping security deposits so they don’t get exploitative
Publishing a list of complexes and grade them, based on complaints to Code Compliance
Making a central complaint spot, where tenants can then get directed to one of the legal aid resources or code compliance, or whatever
Requiring three months notice before forcing someone to move, or forcing companies to give choices (break your lease, stay, or move to this other unit)
The San Marxist 
.png){kind=link}