Category: 3 pm Workshops

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 11/19/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Two fantastic workshops. For real. It’s my favorite thing in the world, to be spoonfed these amazing presentations.

First up: Rent by the Bedroom

Backstory: this became a flashpoint last spring, when a developer wanted to tear down some small complexes here:

and put in a big rent-by-the-bedroom student housing complex.

There was a pretty big community outcry.

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)

Finally, Texas State is trying to do some stuff too.

Council decides that they want to look into all these ideas. This will come back around!

Bonus! Even more 3 pm workshops! 11/19/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshop #2: LIHTC projects: This stands for Low Income Housing Tax Credits.

There are two kinds:

  • Developers can get tax credits from the state
  • Sometimes they get tax credits from both the city and the state.

Both kinds have to get approved by Council.

Backstory:

Blue are the developments that get just state tax breaks. Green gets both state and local:

This past spring we approved five developments (2 blue, 3 green) and Mark Gleason panicked that we were being too generous. We can’t help this many people! It’s fiscally irresponsible!

Hence this workshop! Let’s find out if we can afford to help vulnerable residents. (Spoiler: we can.)

More Background:

San Marcos is booming!

So we’ll end up somewhere between the purple and the orange, most likely.

You can look at it this way:

The blue parts are our new sprawl.

San Marcos has a good employment rate, but high poverty rate:

This means that our jobs are not good jobs. The cure for this is raising the minimum wage. (Raising the minimum wage does not cause inflation. Paying a living wage turns a bad job into a good one!)

Anyway!

Here’s where the jobs are:

This is fascinating:

In other words:

  • Only 6700 of us actually live and work in San Marcos
  • 18K of us live in San Marcos, but we work outside of town.
  • 28K people commute into San Marcos, but live elsewhere.

In my humble opinion, this is two things:

  • people who live here can’t find good jobs here, and
  • the University has good jobs, but parents who work for Tx state are scared of SMCISD for problematic reasons. (I have lots of opinions on that. Support SMCISD!)

Anyway, those are my own conclusions. City staff did not lob those accusations.

…

So are LIHTC projects breaking our budget?

The city gets both sales tax and property tax.

When it comes to property tax, there’s a lot of tax-exempt property:

So some LIHTC projects don’t pay city taxes, but neither does city land, Texas State land, SMCISD, County land, Churches, Housing Authority, and others.

(One difference is that most of those are nonprofits. LIHTC developments aren’t necessarily nonprofits.)

So how bad is the dent in our budget??

Not very bad!

You are allowed to ask for a lump sum payout. (Payment In Lieu of Taxes = PILOT). So we do this sometimes:

LIHTC apartments are still full of people, so you still have some fire and SMPD costs. But not particularly different than any other apartment complex.

In general, apartments are much cheaper infrastructure for the city than single family housing.

This is a great illustration of why:

I want to love this graphic, but I can’t. The scale is all off.

  • A 3-4 story apartment building is about 20-30 units per acre. The diagram on the left should be 7-10 acres.
  • Single Family (ND-3/CD-3) are things like town homes and smaller lots – at most 10 units per acre. So that middle diagram is 20 acres big.
  • Single Family (SF-6/SF-4.5) are big traditional lots – at most 7 houses per acre. So that right hand diagram is over 28 acres big. That’s three times as big as the one on the left!

Fixed it:

(I am so smug and insufferable. It’s a miracle you all put up with me.)

Anyway: there are also some city costs for things like libraries and transit. Same as for any residents.

…

How much need is there in San Marcos?

More than elsewhere:

…

Onto the state requirements for their tax credits.

The state organization is TDHCA. (Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs.)

They care about:

  • Location. You can’t put your low income housing in a crappy location.
  • Clustering – you can’t put them too close together
  • Flood plain – nope
  • They must have at least 15 hours each week of an after-school learning center
  • They must supply a shuttle if they’re not on a bus route
  • Free support services, a mix of amenities
  • ADA apartments

How cheap are these apartments?

First off, “AMI” is Area Median Income. We’re in the Austin Metropolitan area, so we use Austin incomes, even though San Marcos incomes are roughly half of Austin’s. (San Marcos median household income is $47K, whereas Austin median household income is $86K.)

Here’s the key feature:

The state also monitors the complexes:

San Marcos does not get those reports, currently. It would be nice if we did.

…

If you’ll recall, we did a big Housing Needs Assessment back in 2019, and came up with a housing plan to work on housing affordability. This is great! And…. council then buried it six feet underground.

Housing affordability has not been a major priority of this council for the past five years. (Except Alyssa Garza.) In the budget we passed in October – two months ago! – our Strategic Plan Goals were:

None of those are affordable housing.

Council did not care until this election cycle, when it became clear that you could lose your election if you didn’t hear the clamor for affordable housing. It was suddenly the #1 issue.

Anyway: We’re finally doing it, five years late. The first step is updating the data for the Housing Needs Assessment, which is almost ten years out of date.

Listen: this workshop was fascinating, and councilmembers asked good questions. I’m not doing it justice. But it was a 5 hour meeting and a 2 hour workshop, and your poor little marxist is tired.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 11/6/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

We got $18 million dollars from the federal government during Covid. This is called ARPA money. It all has to be obligated by December 31st, 2024.  Not spent, but under contract.

Here’s how we spent our ARPA money:

Some of the projects have come in under budget:

The can ban came in $89K under budget?! But… but we didn’t get rid of the cans…

Anyway, we’ve rounded up all the scraps and put them back in the pot to hand out.  

(True story: my mom would collect all the slivers of bar soaps, and put them in a mesh bag to use as one big bag of bar soap.  It’s gross! You should try it some time! The connection being that we are putting all the last little ARPA slivers into a mesh bag to use as one final ARPA slushfund.)

So what should we do with this last $246K?

Here’s what City staff recommends:

Every time this comes up, over the past four years, Alyssa Garza argues for direct aid to neighbors. We should use covid money on things like rental assistance, utility assistance, emergency grants for car repairs, etc. But somehow these things never materialize.

The conversation gets bogged down.
– Is it because council doesn’t agree on the direction they give staff?
– Is it because it’s very hard to implement these direct aid measures?
– Is it because the federal restrictions make it really hard for residents to find all the correct paperwork and documentation?

It goes in circles for awhile.

Eventually Alyssa convinces everyone to try to redirect the Dunbar bathroom money towards emergency rental assistance. If staff can’t make that work, Plan B is still the Dunbar bathrooms. B is for Bathrooms.

Bonus! 3 pm Workshops, 10/15/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

This is the Mitchell Center:

It’s kind of tucked away in the Dunbar Neighborhood:

It’s got deep historical roots:

Since the 30 year lease is coming to an end, the City decided to open up for bids to nonprofits:

In the end, staff recommended the Calaboose African American History as the best choice.

I’m not exactly sure where the $400K is going to come from for the estimated repairs, but certainly the Calaboose folks will be good stewards of this property.

…

Workshop #2 was about the Utility Billing Assistance program. It’s still being hashed out; I’m going to leave this alone for now.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 9/17/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

This week’s workshop was all about the river and parks. It was both so interesting and so depressing. 

The big question is: How’d the can ban go?! 

The big answer is: We broke our river. We were so overwhelmed with record-breaking crowds that we couldn’t even get to the can ban.  The river got really damaged.

Out-of-town crowds were too big.  Bad behavior was high.  There was more trash and destruction than ever before.  We might have to fence in the river parks and start charging admission. It’s all very depressing!

Let’s dive in.

  1. Preparations. We planned on doing the can ban!  (There was a can ban plan.)

Here’s what we did ahead of time to prepare:

We tried to promote the ban every way we knew how, ahead of time.

We put these signs up in the park:

There were also sidewalk stickers, pointing towards the Go Zones and the No Zones.

You could quibble that the signs and stickers weren’t great at demarcating the Go Zones and No Zones, but this was supposed to be the trial year, where we try things and see what works. ♫ Life’s a dance you learn as you go ♪, and all that.

Generally there are both marshals and park ambassadors at the park:

And marshals:

(The can ban plan began.)

  1. But things went really badly:

The big problem is drunk people – they fight, they trip and fall and hurt themselves, they get heatstroke or other medical issues from the heat. Just lots of safety issues that preoccupy city marshal attention. No one has any bandwidth to get to the can ban.

Overparking is a problem, too. And there’s lots of litter that gets left wherever people go to find parking.

Memorial day was a particular disaster:

So in response to Memorial Day, they changed things up for 4th of July weekend and Labor Day weekend.

Mainly, they shut down Cheatham street. This helped with the drop-off and pick-up mess, and the aggressive U-turns that cars make.  They had to staff both ends of the street, so that used up more staffing.

The other big thing was contracting with off-duty police officers. We pulled $100K out of Covid money and spent it on extra staffing.

Finally, they blacked out the dates for the baseball fields, so we weren’t hosting a baseball tournament at the same time. This freed up some parking for the rivers.

…

So how bad did things go?

Deputy Marshals have a dashboard:

This is the total for the whole summer. Highlights:

  • 329 park evictions.
  • 48 citations. You can see that the most common one is alcohol, by far, and next is parking violations.
  • Only 2 arrests! But that’s because a marshal has to then leave with the person, which leaves the park even more understaffed. So ususally they just kick the person out of the parks.
  • 69 medical incidents. Most of those are drunk people who succumb to the heat.

It sounded pretty grim. They were so understaffed.  All the marshals and park ambassadors worked every single weekend, no exceptions, all summer long, no vacations. 

Staff also said that most of the behavior problems are out-of-towners. Local residents are less likely to cause problems.

This is the main reason the can ban kinda died – we were in survival mode for making sure that everyone stayed alive and safe.

3. So why???

Why is all of this happening?  What changed in the past few years?

The problem is all the other river parks. The other cities have fenced in their parks and started charging admission. We’re the only free river park left, in the San Antonio-Austin general region.

I hate all of this so much.  It pits two things I care deeply about against each other:

  1. Recreation should be available to all people.
  2. You must take care of your river. 

So who exactly uses the river parks so much? We hire these guys to track cell phone data.  Here’s what they tell us:

First:

Area A is downstream – the falls, near the baseball fields, near the children’s park. 
Area B is upstream – near the Lion’s Club and the general Sights and Sounds part of the park.
(I don’t know what Overall Destination means.)

Next, the colors:

Teal means they are San Marcos residents. 
Blue means they come from this radius:

Orange means they’re from outside of that circle.

So roughly 60% out-of-towners. I’m kinda surprised by how many people drive in from Houston:

So how many people actually are showing up on these busy weekends? It wasn’t in the presentation, so I emailed city staff to see if we knew.

They kindly answered: Nope, unfortunately, we don’t. You can’t get that data from this company, because they’re just sampling cell phone data. To know the total number of people, you’d have to have staff literally out there counting by hand.

Crowds looked a little different on the 4th of July weekend, but you get the picture:

Anecdotally, the speakers said the vast majority of the drug/alcohol/behavior problems were out-of-towners. Also depressing!

…

4. Onto the poor river.  

First up, litter:

It looks like it went through the roof. But staff said that this graph is misleading, because we doubled our clean up efforts to twice weekly instead of once a week.  Some of that is old trash from years past. 

It’s still depressing!

Also, that’s mostly volunteers out there, doing major clean ups 2x a week. (Like The Eyes of the San Marcos River and Keep San Marcos Beautiful.) So they deserve some big kudos.

We’ve also got those litter boats for tubers:

So maybe some of the tubers were bringing re-usable containers after all? And the can ban helped? Who knows.

Look at this stuff. Ugh ugh ugh.  

They said that usually on Saturdays and Sundays, they pulled about 50 old dead tubes out of the water each day.   

Apparently Lion’s Club rentals were way down, too. Two years ago, they rented 48,000 tubes. This year they rented 36,000 tubes.  Same with shuttle service. People are buying tubes from stores and walking back up to the top of the river, instead.

…

A really big problem is that people find new ways to get into the river, and then they destroy the river at these access points.  

The bank erosion looks like this:

And the wild rice, ecosystem, etc everything gets destroyed. 

I told you it was depressing.

They put lots of photos in, so I’ll pass them along:

 This presentation was a major bummer. You only get one river! 

My $0.02:

This is a classic example of a tragedy of the commons:

It just makes me very sad.

Solutions:

Staff only has one proposal:  You fence in your parks, you charge nonresidents for admission, and you use the revenue to hire more staff. 

Apparently New Braunfels brings in enough money to pay for it’s entire parks system. That’s a lot more financially sustainable than redirecting $100K of Covid money to contract out with off-duty police officers.

Here’s the thing: inevitably, it will limit access poorer people with fewer resources more than it limits access for wealthier people. Even if you make it free for residents, there will be hoops to jump through.

But what else can you do? I have no other good ideas, either.

So now we turn to Council discussion.

(Only Mark, Matthew, Saul and Jane were here.)

Mark Gleason goes first: he has serious reservations about fencing in the park and charging admission.

  • There’s no such thing as “aesthetically pleasing” perimeter fencing.
  • It might be inevitable, but it’s got such a cost associated with it.
  • Can we fully implement paid parking and the can ban first, and see if that helps?
  • Fences become dams in a flood! They clog with leaves and debris and prevent water flow.

I am really sympathetic to him here. I also want anything but blocking off the parks.

Staff responds to some of these: paid parking is not going to generate the kind of income stream we need to staff these crowds.

Jane Hughson: “Yes on managed access. This is breaking my heart.”

What would a perimeter fence and managed access look like?

There’s nothing concrete to talk about yet. Staff wanted to check with Council before beginning research. So we can’t say where the fences would go, or where the entrances would be, or anything.

How far up would it start? Texas State is having problems at Sewell and the headwaters, and so they want to coordinate with us on this.

How far down would it go? Probably to I-35, at first. Mark Gleason points out that this will drive people to over-use the river on the east side of 35. Staff responds that they’ll have more staff available to cover these other areas, once we get a stable revenue stream.

Apparently New Braunfels does have a problem with people slashing the fence, to sneak in. They have to constantly pay for repairs. So we’d probably have that problem, too.

Some possibilities to explore:

  • Free for residents
  • Free during the week

My read on the mood in the room was that this is inevitable. We will have to fence off the river parks and charge admission.

…

Top Secret Executive session: Another ridiculous code name: Project Jolly Rancher!

  • Is it a sticky factory?
  • Is it a happy rancher?
  • Is it a green giant? 

Who knows!

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 9/3/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Great workshops this week. Best part of the meeting.

We had three presentations this time:

Presentation 1: Purgatory Creek Flood Mitigation project

This is really cool. We last saw it in November 2023, when we bought land for the project.

Purgatory Creek runs from the Purgatory Natural Area over to the San Marcos river. Basically, we’re going to geo-engineer Purgatory Creek to flood less.

So that’s Wonderworld Extension on the far left, where the yellow and blue meet. Then they cross Hopkins and run behind Dunbar, along the railroad tracks, and then cross the edge of downtown, over to the river.

90 buildings are going to have to be removed, because they’re at risk for flooding:

That’s a lot of buildings! Are these houses with people living in them? Are they historic? I could have used more details here.

Correction: I’m an idiot. The structures are being removed from the floodplain. Not removed altogether. It’s safer now for the people living in them.

But on the plus side, it’s going to have a neat little hike-and-bike trail through it. 

I love that.

It’s gonna be hella expensive, and we don’t yet have the money:

We’re going to apply for a bunch of grants.

If we get grant funding, we could begin construction in 2026.  If we don’t, we could maybe begin construction in 2030.  It’ll take about two years to finish.

One last detail: On the far right, you can see where Purgatory Creek meets the San Marcos river:

There’s a pale green Spillway, for when it floods. The spillway is in between the Children’s Park and the railroad tracks, so it’s letting into the river right where the sidewalk goes under the railroad tracks.

In other words, you’d see it from here:

This photo from Google Streetview is so old that the Children’s Park is still the old wooden structure!

Awwww. Makes me a little nostalgic.

Anyway! In the original plan, they were going to use this spillway as an access point for people to easily get in and out of the river.  

But the people from the Parks Department and the river experts are all saying this is a terrible idea, please don’t do this.

There’s a big patch of endangered wild rice there and endangered species that live in the wild rice. And also it’s deep with a brisk current, so it’s not that safe for little kiddos, either.  Just leave this area alone, please.

So the spillway will still end up there, but they’ll make it uninviting for people.

….

Presentation 2: Capital Improvement Projects (CIP)

These are all the major city repairs going on around town. The Purgatory Creek project that we just heard about is one. They get approved alongside the budget. Council saw the current list of projects back in May. (I didn’t really say much about it at the time.)

There’s only one major change since May – we’re adding one new project:

What are we looking at here? Let’s back up.

…

So, I35 has been torn up around the river for years now. TXDoT redid both the access roads, they’re adding I35 lanes across the river, it’s a whole thing.

One part of that is that they removed the old underpass along the river:

TxDot photo

So on the right hand side, you can see where they’ve torn up the road that used to go under I35, along the river.

Here’s a photo I took, back in 2020, during lockdown:

So that’s what the underpass looked like at peak pandemic.

Removing it was a major bummer for the good people in the Blanco Gardens neighborhood. They lost their best connectivity across I35. Now they have to go up to Hopkins-80, or down to Guadalupe-123, and deal with a big, busy intersection.

Since then, TXDot has replaced it with a hike and bike trail.

It looks like this:

So you can easily bike from Blanco Gardens over to Riverside, and you end up by Herberts. That part is great!

So what are we doing now? Pink is the route you can currently take on your bike:

Yellow is what’s being proposed. It would connect the east and west sides of the park trails. Great!

This was not in the budget back in May. But since then, we’ve been awarded two grants to cover the cost. The total cost for that little yellow sidewalk is $2 million dollars.

TWO MILLION DOLLARS? Well, yes. Here’s why:

Blue is the main river that you swim in. But there’s this little side channel, in purple, from an old dam built in 1904:

In fact, here’s some of the machinery from the mill:

So that tiny little yellow sidewalk is $2 million dollars, because you have to build a bridge to get across this little side channel.

Now, San Marcos is not paying $2 million for that bridge. What we did was apply for a bunch of grants, and we got almost all the money covered. We just have to pay $300K for that bridge in matching funds. Great!

Mark Gleason is uncomfortable with this $2 million. He lives in Blanco Gardens and actually walks and bikes all over the place, so he’s constantly using this path. He’s just not sure if the cost justifies the increased connectivity that you get. Even though the $2 million is mostly federal money, he just feels weird about it.

I see his point. It’s such a disproportionate cost, compared to the shoestring that San Marcos usually runs on.

But then I just tell myself, “Hey, don’t forget we’re spending $1.2 million on Kissing Tree this year!” Then the $2 million bridge for everyone doesn’t seem so bad. Especially since most of it is covered with federal money.

Plus, once the east side of the river parks gets built out, the parks system will need to be connected, so we might as well do it now.

….

Presentation 3:

We’ve got a big utility assistance program in San Marcos, but it doesn’t always work very smoothly. Let’s talk about it.

How many people are we talking about?

So there are about 30,000 residential accounts, and almost 3000 accounts have been disconnected so far this year. (Some multiple times.)

Here’s how it’s supposed to go. Suppose you get a disconnect notice on your electricity or water. You call the city. The city does two things:

  1. Offers you a late payment plan
  2. Connects you with the nonprofits that offer utility assistance.

How often does it work like that?

So far this year, we’ve given 580 accounts utility assistance, but 107 of those were still disconnected anyway. There have been 1,948 accounts that have gotten extensions – some of them multiple times – and 586 have still been disconnected.

So out of the 3000 disconnections this year, most people aren’t getting into the system to get help ahead of time. For the people who get in the system, about 75% avoid disconnections.

…

Ok, so let’s talk about the assistance side of things. San Marcos kicks in $231K to utility assistance. The biggest chunk of that goes to Community Action:

But Community Action also gets some federal money, so there’s actually about $435K available for assistance:

Community Action gets $120K from the city. But when someone comes in for assistance, Community Action tries to spend federal money first. So only $14K of the $120K was spent. However, the federal water assistance program has ended, so Community Action will need to spend more city money to cover that need.

The biggest problem is that federal money is slow. You have to fill out a ton of paperwork. But people need money immediately – cars need to be repaired, babies need diapers, the lights need to stay on, etc – or else small crises spiral into giant crises. So we need a way to get money to people fast.

A few things get discussed:

  • Do we have to charge a 10% fee on late payments? Can we just make it a flat $10 fee instead?
  • Should we spread out city money among different agencies?
  • Would the other agencies actually have enough staffing to get the money out quickly?
  • What about San Marcos residents that are on Pedernales electric?
    Answer: they can get federal assistance, but agencies can’t use the credits from San Marcos electric specifically.

Here’s what we’re talking about doing:

We’re also going to look at our fees and see if we can afford to reduce them.

Here’s my two cents: It is really hard to administer programs to the public well. It’s hard to find people, get their ear, get them to respond, get them to bring in paper work, find funding, and connect all the dots to get the assistance to people.

We tend to see overhead spending as wasteful, but it’s really not. Thoughtfully designed programs that aren’t running on fumes can serve people better.

Finally: if spending $231K of tax dollars on utility assistance gives someone heartburn, just remind them that we’re spending $1.2 million dollars on Kissing Tree this year.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 8/5/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Presentation 1: Hays County Health Department

    I assume all you readers here already agree that health care should be free. Americans pay way too much for way too little, for vague reasons about “freedom”, as if anyone is excited about the freedom to be sick or die early.

    Everyone deserves affordable health care, as a basic right. Great.

    Here’s a second reason that health care should be free and universal: you need a coordinated response in order to launch the best fight against contagious diseases. Do we really want each person to get sick with tuberculosis and see if they can recover, with good old fashioned rugged individualism? Or do we want tuberculosis to actually be eradicated, for everyone, like a bunch of dirty socialists? Maybe grandma doesn’t need to hack up a lung in the first place.

    This is what we mean by public health: often it’s better for everybody when everybody gets basic health care. It’s better for rich people, when poor people aren’t sick! Seems basic, but it’s mindblowing if you’re used to punishing poor people for being poor.

    So we have a Hays County Health Department.

    What’s the need like in Hays County? Well, first, we keep growing:

    Second, we’re in need:

    Some notes:

    1. San Marcos has about 70K people, and Hays County has about 269K people. So the poverty rate is only 12.4% for all of Hays County, because there’s a lot of wealth in the north and west parts of Hays County.

    Most of the poverty is concentrated in San Marcos and Kyle. The poverty rate in San Marcos is about 27%.

    2. Let’s just note that the poverty rate is 12.4%, but unemployment is only 3%. Can you believe that we allow companies to hire people without paying them a living wage? Me neither.

    You’d think we’d be storming the castle over this kind of exploitation, but instead we all just wake up in this world every day, as usual, stressed out over our meager salaries.

    3. That housing crisis is a disaster. Spending half of your meager income on housing is no joke.

    “TVFC” is Texas Vaccines for Children. “ASN” is …American Supplemental Nutrition? American Nephrology Society? Autonomous System Number? I got nothing.

    “TB” is definitely tuberculosis, and we definitely do not want TB cases to be rising.

    The presenter stopped and talked about syphilis for a little bit. It is definitely on the rise in Hays County, across all age groups, ethnicities, and economic classes.

    Here’s statewide syphilis data:

    from here. (The linked report focuses on women, because one of the worst risks is congenital birth defects if she has a baby.)

    In conclusion: the health department does a lot on a shoestring budget, but they could do a lot more if the state funded public health like we should.

    ……………….

    Presentation 2: American Rescue Plans (ARPA) money and Covid Relief money.

    Covid money is running out. It has to all be budgeted by this December, and it has to all be spent by the end of 2025. We started with $22 million, and we’re down to about $1 million. Most of that is because of projects that came in under budget.

    Here’s how staff is recommending we spend the money:

    The LCRA tower is a bargain that came out of nowhere. It’s to give radio access to fire/EMS/etc on the southeast side of town. It was going to cost $4-5 million, but in the last moment, we looped in Guadalupe County and some other partners. So the fire chief Chief Stevens is a big advocate for that.

    Jane Hughson asks about the running list of side-projects that council keeps, to be funded whenever we stumble into some money. Staff does not have that list available.

    Alyssa Garza asks about some of the programs she’s tried to fund with ARPA money, where money never seems to materialize in a meaningful way. Specifically, funding for the Parent-Liaison SMCISD program and translation services. In both cases, money has gone to the program, but not in a way that addresses things well. Like, it’s all well and good to translate the website, but we’re not making events bilingual and bringing parity into public spaces.

    Alyssa points out that the whole Council is being steamrolled into saying yes, for the tower they’ve never heard of before. Chief Stevens pleads that the stars aligned in a special way.

    I get what Alyssa is saying: this is part of a larger pattern. Whose priorities get fast-tracked and whose priorities limp along, half-heartedly? The tower is not a bad project! It’s just a convenient example of a problematic, ongoing pattern.

    Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 7/2/24

    by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

    Presentation 1: New City Hall Project

    The city needs a new City Hall. (Discussed here and here.)

    Laurie Moyer was handling the new City Hall project, but she is retiring. The new person basically gave a presentation to introduce herself and pitch how she sees things unfolding.

    Here’s what she was handed:

    In other words, City Hall is going here:

    across the street from Old City Hall.

    So apparently this location is settled? I don’t know how I feel about this. I also have concerns about what might happen to the old site.

    However: they’ll need voter approval in 2025 to re-purpose park land as City Hall, so I guess we’ll be hearing some sales pitches. In the end, the voters will decide whether or not it sounds ok.

    The new person is imagining making a whole Hopkins Project out of it:

    Parts of this sound good to me!

    I like the idea that Hopkins could look more like CM Allen.

    P3 means “Public-Private Partnership”. This part is inevitable because the city doesn’t think that the voters would pass a bond in an election. So they want to bring in private partnerships. (More things that I feel weird about.)

    This whole thing will take forever to complete. If the stars align, it will take seven years.

    …

    Presentation #2: It’s Sidewalk Maintenance time!

    Here’s the game plan:

    Here’s what’s coming up in 2025:

    or if you prefer a chart:

    Would you like to play along at home, over the next year? Go here:

    www.sanmarcostx.gov/306/StreetsSidewalks

    Would you like YOUR pet peeve to be selected for a project in 2026?

    Would you like some more photos?

    here you go. Enjoy!

    Bonus! 3 pm workshop, 6/4/24

    by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

    How’d the city do during the May 9th storm? I’m just going to run through some of the slides.

    These are the Alert Towers. They’re being tested, but haven’t come online yet. (I think they used to be used years ago, but have been broken for a long time, and now we’re bringing them back?)

    So a ton of work was done overnight and into Friday.

    There were a ton of people without electricity:

    The last people didn’t get their power back for two full days.

    There were a lot of anecdotes about the city not knowing about different outages, and people reaching out directly to councilmembers. Staff says that often the resident is talking to a field worker who doesn’t have access to the master map of all outages. So the resident thinks the city is ignorant about an outage, but really they weren’t talking to the right person.

    Still, they conceded they need to do a better job of staying in touch with residents who call in to say they’ve lost power.

    Kind of a bummer to see all those trees down.

    Lots and lots of community volunteers.

    Some plans for what to do better, next time.

    Bonus! 3 pm workshop, 5/21/24

    by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

    Presentation 1: Our budget is not doing well. Let’s look at some slides.

    First, San Marcos keeps growing:

    And while inflation is back to a normal healthy amount, it still exists:

    So due to a larger population and 3% inflation, it will cost more to run the city more next year, even if we don’t change what we’re doing.

    But unfortunately, we took a big hit on sales tax:

    This is sort of a cumbersome chart. It’s doing a few things simultaneously.

    So you see where it says October 2023 is 6.6%? What that means is:

    1. Average all the sales tax revenue from October 2021 to October 2022.
    2. Average all the sales tax revenue from October 2022 to October 2023.
    3. Work out the percent growth from the first average to the second average. For October, the past 12 months were 6.6% bigger than the previous 12 months. Great!

    But you can see how this plays out over 2024 – we kept shrinking and then turned negative. So the average the sales tax income from April 2023 to April 2024 is smaller than it was over April 2022-April 2023. That is not good.

    Who’s coughing all this up, anyway?

    I would not have guessed that!

    (I would say it’s their customers, not the business, but you get the point.)

    No one else is having this problem. Just San Marcos:

    No one offers up an explanation, because I don’t think anyone has one? Nobody knows if this is a shortterm fluke, or if it’s the beginning of something bad. We can’t know until it plays out a little more.

    Anyway, here’s the bottom line:

    We do not have the money we thought we’d have this year.

    So we have to do two things simultaneously:

    1. Figure out how to tighten our budgets mid-year. There are established contingency plans on how to do this, but it’s not, like, fun to do.
    2. Figure out how to plan for the 2025 budget, if we’ve got more people and slightly higher prices, but less revenue.

    Can property taxes make up the difference? Basically no.

    First off, sales tax is a bigger chunk of our budget than property taxes:

    But second, even though homestead prices are going up:

    they’re not going up by as much as they had been going up.

    The blue portion is the key amount:

    So the city is expecting to collect 1.3 million more dollars next year than this year. It’s growing, but not enough to keep up with inflation and a larger population. Not like the past two jumps: from 2023 to 24, we jumped 6.8 million, and the year before that, an extra 5.8 million dollars.

    So here’s the bottom line:

    We are looking at being 2.3 million short this year, and 1.12 million short next year, if we don’t do anything different. Ouch.

    I mean, we’re going to tighten belts, etc. The city is smart, there are plans to implement. But they involve hard choices and going without good things.

    Here’s how we’re handling 2024:

    Basically, that’s how they’re handling it. And they’re working on making next year’s budget work on a shoestring, as well.

    One last thing:

    There’s a new law that caps the how much business property appraisals can increase each year. Any non-homestead can’t grow more than 20% in a year. Or rather, the appraisal can come in higher than that, but you won’t be taxed on the excess.

    Now, this only affects businesses appraised under $5 million. The problem is that we have a high number of small rental properties, and they all qualify. So we’ve lost $123 million of taxable land value, which works out to $745K from the budget.

    Bottom line: the city has to tighten the budget. Kinda a giant bummer.

    …

    Presentation 2: There was also a presentation on the 2025 Capital Improvement Plan.

    The CIP plan is all the major city projects, like re-doing the drainage for a street so it doesn’t flood anymore, or whatever. Basically it takes a lot of longterm planning. I don’t have much to say about it besides that they emphasized how much they’re trying to apply for lots of grants.