Category: Hour summaries

Hours 0:00 – 2:04, 11/18/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

There were five people who showed up to talk.

Tonight’s the night that Council determines their HSAB grants, and so almost everyone speaking was representing nonprofits – one speaker from School Fuel, and three from Southside. I’ll save it for that item.

One last speaker talked about Meet and Confer, and whether or not it was okay for Council to make recommendations to the negotiators who represent the Council in the negotiations.

…

Item 13: Rezoning a little street in Blanco Gardens

Here’s Blanco Gardens:

It’s a very cute old neighborhood with gorgeous trees.

Here’s a close-up:

Blanco Gardens has come up a lot over the years in the blog. They were ground zero for the 2015 floods, and they’ve gotten some some flood mitigation projects since then. They got some speed bumps and parking permits. Most recently, they were the first neighborhood to get its neighborhood character study. It’s also the closest neighborhood to Cape’s Dam.

For an old neighborhood, there’s a surprising amount of undeveloped land in the middle of it:

(I wondered briefly if that was because homes had been torn down after the floods. But nope, you can see on the 2014 satellite image that there’s just always been space there for years.)

Over the years, developers have occasionally tried to put something in part of it, but so far it’s always gotten nixed.

Today’s proposal is about this bit:

A developer wants to build houses on it.

They would look and feel like duplexes, but they’re technically different, because of how they can be bought and sold. The property line runs through the two halves of the house, so you can purchase one half of it, while someone else owns the other half. (It’s called a “zero lot-line house”.)

Basically it’s a good way to fit more, smaller homes onto a street, and they tend to be a little cheaper, too.

What does Council say?

Question: will fit the character of the rest of the neighborhood?
Developer answer: We have good intentions!

(One block over, there are some extremely modern houses. The neighborhood is salty about this.)

Question: Will the alley still exist?
Answer: nope.

…

Nobody really asked about flooding. The 2015 floods are starting to fade from memory for the rest of San Marcos. But not in Blanco Gardens – they were the epicenter of the floods.

I would have liked to know what the 2015 flood water line was for nearby houses – I bet it was about 3-4 feet of water deep. How elevated will these houses be? Will they be above the 2015 water line?

My memory is that, in a 100-year flood plain, you have to build 1-2 feet above the Base Flood Elevation, based on FEMA flood maps. Does that get you to 3-4 feet off the ground? I just don’t know.

…

The vote on this cute row of sorta-duplexes:

Yes:  Everyone
No:  nobody

The good news is that Council is enthusiastic about infill housing. (When I first started blogging in 2022, Council wouldn’t let a home owner build two small houses on a subdivided lot, on Lockhart street. That was crazy.) They’ve definitely gotten the message that San Marcos needs more housing.

As long as the homes are safely elevated, I’m okay with this project. But the flooding risk makes me very uneasy.

…

Item 14: HSAB Funding

HSAB stands for Human Services Advisory Board.

These are city grants to nonprofits, for things like food assistance, eviction prevention, domestic violence help, mental health services, etc. For the past few years, we’ve given out $500K in grants. This year, Council bumped it up to $750K. (Of course, federal funding has gotten slashed, so the need has also grown. THANKS OBAMA.)

It’s always a grueling process. All the nonprofits all do incredibly important work.

In the past, we kinda made non-profits cagefight against each other. [Read all the gory details for the past few years.] The process was murky. The recommendations would come to council, and council members would start horse-trading around.

It was a bad look! It always seemed very fickle – “Oh, we’ll take $20,000 from those guys and give it to these guys!” It felt like the main criteria was being friendly with council members.

We’ve been working on tightening the process. It’s a super time-intensive:

  • the HSAB board meets weekly from August to October
  • They hear presentations from all 32 applications
  • Each one gets discussed and each board member ranks them on a bunch of different criteria
  • Eventually they recommend how much of each request to fund.

Here’s the criteria:

After all the ranking and discussion, they bring it to Council.

…

Just for funsies, let’s add up how much other non-HSAB money is getting allocated in this meeting!

All this was approved in one single vote, on Tuesday:

  • “On-Call Title Research Services Contract with Hollerbach & Associates, Inc., to increase the price by up to $200,000.00, resulting in a total contract amount not to exceed $299,999.00”.
  • “RMO P.C. for legal services associated with land acquisitions to increase the price by up to $300,000.00, resulting in a total contract amount not to exceed $699,000.00”.
  • “Change in Service to the agreement with Baker Moran Doggett Ma & Dobbs, LLP for legal services associated with land acquisitions to increase the price by up to $300,000.00, resulting in a total amount not to exceed $600,000.00”.
  • “STV Incorporated to provide On-Call General Engineering Services for various projects in the amount of $900,000.00”.
  • “Halff Associates, Inc. to provide On-Call General Engineering Services for various projects in the amount of $900,000.00”.
  • “a 2025 Ford F550 Crew Cab Chassis from Rush Truck Center, through a Sourcewell Purchasing Cooperative Contract, in the amount of $82,043.63, and outfitted by E.H. Wachs, through a BuyBoard Contract, in the amount of $156,865.65, for a total purchase cost of $238,906.28”.
  • “SHI Government Solutions, through Omnia Partners, for a City of San Marcos job application tracking software system in the annual amount not to exceed $112,000.00, and up to four one-year renewals with a total amount of $560,000.00”.

It comes to about $2.95 million. I’m not saying any of those were a mistake! I trust the city officials. Most likely, those are all totally reasonable.

I’m just pointing out who gets scrutinized, in society, and who doesn’t. We approved almost $3 million without blinking, when it goes to those contracts above. But if it’s hungry kids, homelessness, mental health emergencies, etc, we rigorously grind these applications into pulp.

…

Back to the grant grind!

There were 32 applications, and the total amounts requested added up to $1.2 million.

Here’s the full list of scores and funding:

In the presentation, they went through all of them, and why the committee might not have fully funded the request.

For example:

The rest of their thoughts are on pp 435-437, here.

They were very thorough.

…

Back to Citizen Comment

Three speakers from Southside show up to talk. Here’s what they say:

Southside is in a funny position. In 2024, the city gave Southside $800K of Covid money to implement a Homeless Action Plan.

They came up with a plan and put in all the work to get it up and running. Now they’re trying to sustain it over time. They asked for $100K from HSAB, but were only granted $50K.

The $100K is for their homeless prevention program – giving families $1000-2000 to get through a one-time financial crisis, so that they don’t get evicted.

…

Let the horse-trading begin!

Matthew kicks it off. He wants to try to get Southside back up to the full $100K that they asked for, for homelessness prevention.

Matthew proposes:

  • Take $4500 from Rough Draft
  • Take $5000 from Lifelong Learning
  • Take $10,000 from Hill Country MHMR

Give that $19,500 to Southside.

Ok, what are these things?

Rough Draft:

Their funding would go to $0.

Lifelong Learning:

Ok. Their funding would go from $9000 to $4500.

Hill Country MHMR

Their funding would go from $60,000 to $50,000.

….

What does Council think?

Question: How many people would Southside be able to help, with this $19K?
Answer: About ten families. Average cost to stabilize someone after a financial emergency is $2k.

It’s actually a huge bargain. If they’d been evicted, it would cost $15-30K+ to stabilize a family once they become homeless. (Plus, y’know, becoming homeless is awful. This is way more humane for the families.)

Question: Are you all applying for other grants?
Answer: SO MANY. Funding is scarce, and federal funds have been slashed.

Alyssa: The entire premise of horse-trading these dollars is problematic. Most agencies didn’t send someone here tonight to answer questions. We don’t have context and expertise. This is haphazard. I am not on board with any of this.

Amanda: Matthew, what about moving some money from the School Age Parents Program? They said they’d be able to keep the program open on $7,500, but they’re being awarded $15K.

Matthew: How dare you. Abso-fucking-lutely not!

[I’m paraphrasing. Matthew just said something like, “They do great work!”.]

Amanda: I’m trying to throw you a bone here!

Matthew: Hard no.

Amanda: Well, I’m a no on Hill Country MHMR especially. Their work is desperately needed. We are in a mental health services desert, and this program will fund teenagers without insurance.

Alyssa: I’m a NO on all of this, but especially NO on Hill Country MHMR. Homelessness and mental health are completely intertwined. There’s so much need here.

The votes are each held individually:

  1. Move all $4500 from Rough Draft to Southside Homelessness Prevention?

Yes: Matthew, Jane, Amanda, Lorenzo, Saul

No: Alyssa, Shane

2. Move $5000 from Lifelong Learning over to Southside?

This motion dies without getting a second. So it never comes to a vote.  That kinda surprised me.

3. Move $10K from Hill Country MHMR over to Southside?

Yes:  Matthew

No:  Everyone but Matthew

4. Amanda throws in a vote on the SMCISD School Age Parents Program:

They get $15K.

Should we take $5K from them, and give it to Southside?

Yes: Amanda, Saul

No: Matthew, Lorenzo, Alyssa, Jane, Shane

So that fails.

..

Me, personally: It’s an awful decision to make. I probably would have taken money from Rough Draft, Lifelong Learning, and maybe SMCISD School Age parents. But not Hill Country MHMR.

….

So that’s where it lands. Southside picked up $4500 more, and Rough Draft went to $0.

The final official vote on HSAB funding passes 7-0.

…

One more note!

We just spent $750K on the poor and vulnerable.

But we also spend $1.1 million on tax breaks to home owners every year:

About 30% of San Marcos owns their own home. That $1.1 million is just for them.

Also, remember that Kissing Tree is keeping $46 million of San Marcos tax dollars, for nice streets and trees that are then gated off from the rest of San Marcos! You can’t go visit the tax dollars. Sorry.

This is why I get cranky about this:

People who want to slash property taxes never seem to appreciate how much of their own lifestyle is being subsidized.

….

Item 19: Dunbar Recreation Center

Dunbar was named for Paul Laurence Dunbar. He was the first black poet to get widespread recognition. (He was not from San Marcos in any way. He’s from Ohio.)

Here’s one of his poems, from 1895:

via

Originally, the Dunbar neighborhood did not have a specific name, besides being called “the colored neighborhood”. The school was called The Negro School. In 1961, that was renamed after Paul Laurence Dunbar, and then gradually the whole neighborhood came to be known as Dunbar. So the Dunbar Rec Center just got the name “Dunbar”.

Would we like to include the poet’s full name here? Everyone says yes.

Great!

Lots of interesting history on the Dunbar neighborhood here and here!

….

Item 20-21: Jorge’s Mexican Restaurant.

Jorge’s is on Hunter Road:

Separately, Miller Middle School is on Foxtail Road:

Their front doors are far apart:

…but they share a back fence.

This causes all kinds of problems for Jorge’s, because there are extra-strict rules for selling alcohol within 300 feet of a school.

This means that Jorge’s has to do a lot more:

  • Renew their alcohol permit every year, instead of every three years like everyone else.
  • Renew their distance variance every year, which grants them an exception to the 300 foot rule.

The main problem is the fees – both of those cost $750, so Jorge’s is paying $1500 every year.

Why is it so expensive?!

Mostly because of postage. The city has to notify everyone within 400 ft. The rest of the cost is to cover staff time, to process the paperwork.

Everyone wants to at least refund half of Jorge’s fees, since the city can save costs by processing both the alcohol permit and distance variance at the same time.

They’re going to try to come up with a long term solution, too.

Hours 0:00 – 2:29, 11/5/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Three people show up, plus one more at the 3 pm workshop. The basic themes are:

  • Yes on pay raises for police and fire fighters
  • What’s with the shootings and mayhem downtown?
  • If we’re so broke, why are we spending money on Kissing Alley and other frivolous things?
  • Remember, Mark Gleason got reprimanded by the Ethics Review Commission in 2023. This was because he received campaign contributions above the limit from SM fire fighters, but then didn’t recuse himself from the vote on their contract. Any council members need to recuse themselves?

That last point is exactly the problem with the PAC!

There’s also a short note from the city manager about the shootings downtown. Condolences to those grieving, thank yous to first responders, that sort of thing.

….

Items 4-5: Contract Extensions and Raises for SMPD and Fire fighters

Let’s start with some backstory!

Backstory

Unions are massively constrained in Texas. This is because:

  • Texas is a right-to-work state. You can’t make joining a union automatic. But unions are still required to represent all employees.
  • Texas allows at-will employment, so it’s easy to find a pretext to fire people

Public sector unions are especially helpless in Texas. In addition to the constraints above, there are explicit laws:

That all is a massive bummer. It means that public employees can’t speak in a coordinated, unified voice. (For a state that claims to worship freedom, it seems a bit off to outlaw employees from coordinating their actions, yes?)

Anyway, there are two exceptions: Fire fighters and police departments are allowed full strength unions! They get a special carve out! How nice for them, and no one else.

You’ll need some vocabulary:
SMPOA: San Marcos Police Officers Association, which is their union.
SMPFFA: San Marcos Professional Fire Fighters Association, the fire fighter union.

“Meet and Confer” – the collective bargaining process. This is the negotiation process to come up with new SMPD and SMFD contracts.

More backstory

In 2021, SMPD officer Ryan Hartman blew through a stop sign and killed a woman, Jennifer Miller, in Lockhart. He was treated with kid gloves. He had an open container in his car, but wasn’t given a breathalyzer test. Etc. This all happened right when Chief Standridge was first arriving at SMPD. Hartman wasn’t indicted, and got right back on the force. (Hartman was later fired for excessive force in a separate incident.)

[Updated to add correction: Hartman was later fired because he “failed to turn in incident reports under the required time limit for SMPD Officers“. That followed an incident where Hartman tased a compliant man, was lightly disciplined, and the city ended up settling with the victim for $125K. -TSM]

Mano Amiga was FURIOUS at how poorly the Hartman investigation was run. In response, they came up with five Hartman Reforms that they wanted the city to adopt:

In 2022, the SMPD contract was up, and it was time for Meet and Confer. The city ignored the Hartman Reforms and just passed a standard contract.

So Mano Amiga fired up a petition to get the Meet and Confer agreement repealed. They were successful! Council agreed to renegotiate the contract. (It was either that, or they’d have to put Repeal Meet and Confer on a ballot for voters.)

Spring 2023: Negotiations re-open. Some mild concessions are made towards the Hartman Reforms, and the contract is passed.

That’s a breezy summary, but trust me – this was a huge production. Probably hundreds of hours of citizen engagement, all told.

The 2023 contracts expire next October 2026. That means we should start Meet and Confer this spring.

Which brings us to today!

Should we sign a one year extension until October 2027? It includes a 4.5% raise for fire fighters, and a 5% raise for SMPD, effective in October 2026.

City staff needs this extension, because they need to deal with the whole EMS mess, and also to deal with the fallout of how we sabotaged our own budget.

Amanda proposes this amendment:

Discussion ensues! Let’s break down the basics.

Key points:

  • Meet and Confer meetings should be open to the public, recorded, and broadcast
  • There should be a citizen comment portion
  • Documents should be made publicly available.

Question: How is this different from the current situation?
Answer: Really, only the citizen comment would be new. We started recording and broadcasting meetings in 2023, and documents are always available under the Texas Open Records policy.

Why do this?

There are lots of good reasons!

First off, legally there is a clause in Meet & Confer laws that requires transparency and openness to the public. So this is consistent with how these things are supposed to go.

Second, this is public money! Here’s the General Fund breakdown for 2026:

Those big blue and orange slices above are SMPD and SMFD. They make up about 36.7% of the General Fund, and combined, they are about $45 million. Citizens should get to speak up, just as they do for the rest of the budget.

Third, this one-year extension is occurring with virtually no community discussion. It’s a good faith gesture by council to acknowledge the outcry in 2023, and make a move towards transparency.

Finally, Austin has a similar resolution that applies to PD, Fire, and also their labor unions. It seems to work fine.

How would this work?

This is where conversation stalls out for about an hour. I’m going to give your the super abbreviated version.

  1. What would the details of the citizen comment actually be?

Should each person who wants to speak get 1 minute? Should it be capped at 30 minutes? Should it be at the beginning and at the end of each meeting? Should it be on another night altogether, and recorded as a forum? Should there be an email address?

Amanda’s pitch: Let’s leave these details to the negotiating team. Council does not need to micromanage.

Jane is extremely uncomfortable leaving it vague. She wants to know how it will play out. She’s worried if the ground rules aren’t quite right, it will sabotage the collaborative spirit of the negotiations.

2. How exactly does the timeline work?

Does SMPOA and SMPFFA have to agree now, before the extension is approved? Or can this just be where our negotiators start, when Meet & Confer starts, in the spring of 2027?

They settle on the latter. This is the starting point for the future discussion, where they lay the ground rules for the 2027 Meet & Confer contract. It got discussed a LOT, though.

Here are the basic Council member reactions:

Jane: I’m all for transparency but I’m allergic to leaving unspecified details like this.

Saul: I’m all for it.  Sounds great.

Shane: This is government overreach. I’m tired.

Alyssa: This shows the community that we are responding to the activism of 2023. This is a good-faith gesture that makes progress towards transparency and community trust.

Lorenzo: I have a lot of detailed technical questions about the legality and timeline, but I’m not exactly opposed to the premise.

Matthew: <crickets>

…

Time to vote!

Here’s the official language they settle on:

And here’s the vote on the amendment:

Should City Representatives start negotiations with a request for transparency and citizen comment?

It sails through.

Hey look – there’s that Matthew guy! The one who was literally just re-elected the day before, with 57% of the vote. He absolutely does NOT want your input on SMPD and SMFD.

(SMPFFA and SMPOA were two separate votes, but everyone voted the same way on both.)

…

And then, the actual vote:

Yes on a one year contract extension and pay increases?

Great.

(Again, there were separate votes for SMPOA and SMPFFA, but they went the same way.)

…

That’s basically the whole meeting! There are some appointments to committees and things, but nothing big.

Hours 0:00 – 1:17, 10/21/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment: 

Just six speakers altogether. Main points made:

  • Four in favor of the Tenants’ Right to Organize ordinance.
  • But not the landlords from the Austin Apartments Associations. They want us to carve out protections for property managers.
  • Other speakers, in response: Please do not protect property managers. That would create a loophole. [Note: we didn’t.]
  • We need managed growth.
  • Update on the EMS thing?
  • You all need to stand for the pledge.
  • Excited for new City Hall proposal
  • How about making the new City Hall environmentally sustainable? Like a One Water approach?

Pretty breezy and quick.

…

Item 2: Tenant’s Right to Organize

We’ve seen this here, here, and here. This is the final stretch!

Lorenzo: Can tenant organizers go uninvited into apartment complexes?
Answer: No, organizers are required to play by vampire rules. They must be invited in. 

Lorenzo: Can we fix that?

Amanda:  I don’t think we should fix that.  

Amanda’s argument goes like so:

  • I wish this ordinance had more teeth
  • But Texas is a heavily pre-emptive state. (Meaning Texas micromanages its cities.)
  • Therefore I strongly recommend that we stick with the language that has held up so far in court.

City Lawyer: It would be weird to meddle in this way.  Some apartment complexes let in Domino’s pizza to put out fliers, and others have gates.  Organizers are held to the same rules as Domino’s pizza, and it would be weird to carve out extra privileges for them.

City Staff:  Plus, tenant organizers are not helpless. They can mail postcards to residents and see if one of the residents invites them in.

So we end up not changing anything.

The vote on Tenant’s Right to Organize:

It’s official!

Really great work by all the community activists! And I’ll single out Max Baker for kudos – he was really  the most visible driving force here.

Educational fliers for sharing: in English and in Spanish. (Via Amanda Rodriguez on FB.)

…

Item 10: Sights & Sounds

Last year we didn’t see nor hear the Sights & Sounds of San Marcos.  

But this year it’s back, baby!

And we’re spending $100,000 on it.

  • Half of that comes from Hotel Occupancy Taxes, which are supposed to be spent on tourism.  So S&S is a good fit.
  • The other half is for the lights, which are kept up all month long.

Sounds great.

Pro-tip: if you’ve got a kid who wants to win a hot chocolate, they might want to find out what year S&S was founded, how many light bulbs there are, and what most popular food is. It’s all very cute.

…

Item 17: ARWA

ARWA stands for Alliance Regional Water Authority. These are the folks trying to arrange water sources for us, for the next 50 years. It includes San Marcos, Kyle, Buda, and also Canyon Region Water Authority.

This started back in 2007, and it was a longterm plan to get water from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer. It came online this summer! So this is great. Almost 20 years of longterm planning!

Currently we are dealing with this:

That’s all I know!

(I do worry that “stress on the ARWA participating water supplies” refers to things like Kyle Bass trying to pump 16 billion gallons of water out of Carrizo-Wilcox.)

…

Item 18: New City Hall

Look, this is a super short meeting. This is the last item. So I had a little fun with it. Be prepared for an enormous number of photos.

Whaddya gonna do, go read some other local marxist city council blog?

Background:

Here’s the current City Hall location:

and here’s what it looks like:

via

It was built in the early 1970s, when San Marcos had 18K people. So cute! Little baby San Marcos. Now we have about 70K people.

Apparently in the past year, they’ve had to evacuate multiple times due to gas and water problems. And whenever something big comes up at Council, community members don’t fit in the chambers. People spill out into the lobby and listen from there.

So the old building has run its course. We’re looking to build a new one.

…

How is the Texas State Lege going to meddle?

The state won’t let cities borrow money to build city halls without voter approval. This makes everything complicated.

My pet conspiracy theory: this was done to deliberately manipulate cities into the loving arms of local private developers. This is called a Public-Private-Partnership, or P3.

So here we are, being driven.

…

The options:

Last April, Council was given the choice of Option A or Option B.

Option A:

In other words, keep it in the current location. They’d tear down the existing site and rebuild. Council would have to relocate during construction.

Option B:

ie move across the street, onto park land.

Option B was super unpopular! A lot of community members showed up to argue against it, because of this:

Both of these are heavily used and very popular!

City Council decided that they could keep the skate park where it is. They would just squeeze City Hall in immediately right up against the skate park, looming like a big shadowy Gotham City Headquarters over your rebel anarchist skater good time. (But the dog park would be relocated.)

In the end, Council went with Option B.

My $0.02: This is a terrible option and they got it wrong! Don’t use up your park land!

…

Now, what if there was a Plan C?

Intriguing! Over the summer, an unsolicited option came in.

Here’s the new proposal:

I love this location! There’s nothing particularly sentimental or historical there.

Let’s check it out!

This is the Hopkins view.

Building 1 is this:

No strong feelings from me.

Building 2 is this:

This is a cute old building! It’s been empty forever. It used to be an Ace Hardware store.

Before that, apparently it was originally Moore’s Grocery Company Building and then King Feed Co:

It’s cute! But it’s been empty for a long time.

Number 3 is an empty lot. It used to be a Mr. Gatti’s Pizza:

and then it briefly became this:

ie a fever dream of a diner, painted all black with neon flowers. Did we collectively hallucinate this?!

Anyway. Then it was food trucks:

and since then it’s just been parking:

Number 4 used to be where we had Tuesday Farmer’s Markets.

Back then it looked like this:

whereas now it looks like this:

Progress!

…

Back to why this location is great! It would be a really healthy for downtown businesses if our city employees all worked nearby.

Until around 2011, the county employees used to work here:

I liked to call it the Supermarket of Justice:

That is now where Industry etc are:

In 2011, Hays County built the new County Government building, out on Stagecoach.

All the county employees emptied out of the downtown business area. This was hard on the local downtown restaurants and stores – they no longer had a steady stream of pedestrian foot traffic during weekdays.

So moving City Hall downtown would replenish some of that.

This is all great!

….

What else?

The developers are local. They’re all graduates of either SMHS or Texas State, or both. That’s nice!

In 2020, they pitched an earlier idea to the city – a combination City Hall-hotel-workforce-housing. Jane Hughson says, “They wanted the hotel to face Hopkins and City Hall to go in the back, which was a nonstarter.”

What other projects do they have? Well, they have ideas. They have plans with Hays ISD to build some sort of workforce housing thing, and Lockhart ISD is looking at it, too. But there aren’t any lots or conceptual plans or signs of progress on their website.

As far as I can tell, they’ve never actually completed a project?

I think this is location is a great idea, though!

…

Two more bits that I want to note:

  1. We are paying them $767,970.00 for this conceptual plan. That is a hell of a lot of money for our broke government.

    Now, we’ve saved up about $12 million towards a new city hall, so that’s the source. It’s not displacing funding for something else. But it’s a lot.

2. They’re actually drawing up plans for this whole area:

Edited to add a corrected update: The map below is not the full scope of these developers. I got it wrong above! Sorry about that.

This map below is just showing the full scope of Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C, all together. The Plan C developers are strictly drawing up plans for the downtown piece. – TSM

WHAT IS GOING ON. Why is the Lion’s Club, and the stage area, the Veteran’s Memorial, the Activity Center, the library, the skate park, and the dog park all included??!

Why would these (probably very nice) bozos have any say in what happens to ANY of those public facilities? They do not have any experience in that. What the hell.

…

What does Council say?

First off, they’re only asking questions about this part:

and not the extended map above, that went through the parks and old City Hall.

Q: What about impervious cover?
A: It’s already all impervious cover. It can only get better.

Matthew: The old hardware store is historic, and I’m worried about the elevation drop.
A: Architects can handle the elevation drop.

Q: What would happen to the alleys?
A: We don’t know yet. Maybe some kind of open air space.

Alyssa: I’m having deja vu of their old proposal.
A: The 2020 proposal was much smaller.
Jane: Plus they had the hotel out front and the city hall in back. No.

Saul: I like it! But I need to see how much it costs.

Jane: Love a hometown developer!

The vote: Should we spend $768K on this conceptual plan?

I probably would have voted yes, because the location is great. I’m just wary because these guys seem inexperienced.

…

Final notes:

Somehow, this City Hall project is going to go off the rails. Really. Not because of this Plan C option, but because the math on this next slide does not make any sense.

This is from back in April:

Let me see if I’m following: we’ve saved up $12.7 million. We think we can get $15-20 million more from private developers. That adds up to ~$30 million.

But the whole project is supposed to cost $62-98 million! Where is this magical extra money going to come from?

These are the only options I see:

  • Voters will have to vote to approve a bond to borrow the rest.
  • This project ends up being about half as big as they’re hoping.
  • This project takes 25 years to complete
  • We end up selling our souls to find an extra $50 million from private businesses

In some way or another, reality is going to reassert itself.

Hours 0:00 – 1:15, 10/8/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

There were eight speakers, on diverse topics:

  • The first amendment is being trampled in the US right now.  (True!)
  • We need to be mindful of our budget and run San Marcos like a business.
  • Austin Apartments Association represents a bunch of landlords as members. They’re mixed on Tenant’s Right to Organize.
  • San Marcos Civics Club is holding their candidate forum on Thursday, and they also have their questionnaire available: Place 1 and Place 2.
  • Council candidate Chris Polanco echoes the first amendment crisis, and also talks about having a disability in San Marcos
  • Global issues – Ceasefire in Gaza and fascist tendencies of the state government.
  • The DR Horton homes in Cottonwood Creek were built so shoddily that foundations are cracking in the first three years. People up and down their street are finding themselves trapped financially because these homes are built so poorly. Can the city prevent DR Horton from building new homes until they stabilize the existing ones? Or something else?

That last one feels like lawsuit territory. This sounds awful. (Maybe this is a good candidate for participatory budgeting – see below.)

…

Item 9: Tenant’s Right to Organize

This is nearing the finish line! What should you do if you’re a tenant, and there’s mold in your bedroom, or your AC goes out, or you have no hot water, and your landlord refuses to fix it?

In Texas, you have very few options besides suing. You can talk to your landlord, of course. If they start to see you as a problem, you might be evicted. Filing a lawsuit is expensive, of course, and if you try to sue, you might be evicted anyways.

This is the point of this ordinance: tenants should be able to talk to each other about their landlord problems, and form tenant organizations, and bring issues to their landlords as a united front, without worrying that they’ll get evicted or face retaliation. (Discussed previously here and here.) 

Under the ordinance, here’s what’s protected:

(These are old slides from last month.)

Here’s what landlords are NOT allowed to do:

But they’re still allowed to do some things! Like so:

This is great! No tenant should fear eviction when they’re fighting for clean and safe housing.

…

Council Discussion

There’s one small discussion point: property managers.

Suppose property managers are the ones doing the intimidating, and the landlord lives 1000 miles away. Should the property manager be held liable? Or does it go to the landlord, since they are responsible for their employees?

Lorenzo proposes an amendment to exempt property managers. Unfortunately, this ship has sailed – employees are already held liable in similar situations. Even if we adopt Lorenzo’s amendment, it doesn’t really protect them. (The amendment fails.)

…

The vote on the Tenant’s Right to Organize ordinance: 

Hooray! (Lots of hard work on this from the San Marcos Civics Club and TAG, so thank you to both of them.)

This is just the first vote. It will come through for a final vote at the next meeting. 

…

Item 13: Participatory Budgeting

Participatory Budgeting is a specific thing. It doesn’t just loosely mean “survey the people or invite them to watch the budget process”.

It works like so: a city sets aside a pot of money, and asks for ideas from the public. The community develops proposals, and then the public votes on which project to fund.

Here’s the graphic from the website:

One of their taglines is “It gives people real power over real money.”  

Alyssa (and Max Baker, back when he was on council) have brought this up for years. It gained a little more traction at the visioning workshop back in January, and then was included in the budget that we tried to pass in September.

But then – I’m still cranky about it – Council sabotaged the budget at the last meeting.  One of the items that got axed in the carnage was $250K for participatory budgeting.

Apparently Lorenzo felt a pang of regret for driving us off the cliff? Maybe Alyssa was extra-furious about this part?  (I shouldn’t speculate, because I have no clue.) All I know is that Lorenzo went to the city manager and asked if there was any way to fix this. Can she find some money to restore funding for participatory budgeting?

And lo: she found some!  It’s displaced City Hall money.

In theory, we’re trying to sock away $1 million each year for that project.  But this year, we’re using the most of that $1 million to put an offer in on the land next to Centro. 

We’re expecting to have a little bit left over, and that’s going to be the Participatory Budgeting Pot of Money. Hooray! 

Gentle readers: this is your call. Start brainstorming ideas!

  • Is there something in your neighborhood that could be transformed?
  • Do the kids in your neighborhood need a place to play?
  • Or a community gardens?
  • What about opening up the Activity Center on Sundays, or having longer front lobby hours for the library?
  • Or hey: a coordinated lawsuit or mobilization against DR Horton?

Go think up great things! Your mom tells me you’re very clever.

….

Note #1: This was just a preliminary discussion.  Participatory Budgeting will come back around as a formal proposal.

Note #2: Since we mentioned the new city hall, let me say again that I hate this plan. They want to relocate City Hall across the street, and into our parks.

Don’t use up your park land! They’re not making more land.

…

There were a few tiny other items – scheduling the election, filling some commission vacancies, appointing a municipal judge. And that’s all! It was an extremely short meeting.

However! Keep reading, to hear about the river. The action was all in the 3 pm workshop.

Hours 0:00 – 3:25, 9/16/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment

Just three speakers!  Topics:

Nobody spoke about the budget.  Nobody complained about the tax increases being too high.  Can we just put a pin in this for later? Let’s remember this.

…

Item 22:  Hazmat Routes

You know these guys. You love these guys:

via

They live in our lovely river, but nowhere else.  It could be catastrophic if there was a crash on I-35 over the river, and a bunch of hazardous chemical were spilled into their habitat.

What cities do in this situation is design a Hazmat route.  Here’s what we’re proposing:

That’s along FM 150.  So you’d cross the San Marcos river well east of the habitats of those critters, if you were driving a truck full of something nasty.  

A few notes: 

  • This is only for thru-traffic.  If you’re delivering somewhere in San Marcos, you can head there.
  • This is going to be a long process – it’s gotta go back and forth with TxDOT a few times.

Kind of related: remember when the train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, with all those toxic chemicals?

(and they tried to get away with paying each person something like $5 for wrecking their lives?)

We also have a lot of trains crossing our river! I doubt you can re-route trains quite so easily, but I wonder how environmentalists think about and plan for these risks.

…

Items 23-25: The budget and the tax rate

I’m sorry, this item gave me whiplash. This went off the rails. Not the good kind of roller coaster.

We need a fair amount of backstory. The drama on Tuesday unfolded so fast that it will be incoherent, unless I bring you up to speed, first.

I’ll try to keep it zippy!

Background

First thing to know: we have not raised our property tax rate since 2022.

Politicians genuinely hate raising taxes. Politicians like being liked! They like being elected. I don’t know where we got this idea* that they rub their palms together and cackle about bilking tax-payers, but they don’t do this.

Polititians love short-term easy decisions that make tax-payers happy! Raising taxes is the opposite of that.

*It was Reagan.

….

The budget process

1. January-February-March-etc: they hold some giant two day workshops. Councilmembers develop their priorities for the next year. More workshops. Very slow grind.

2. May-June: The first tax estimates come in: we’re in a budget crisis. We can squeak by this year, but we’re facing a budget cliff.

Roughly speaking, this is the problem::

  1.  Our sales tax is down.
  2. Our property taxes are down (because home prices are declining)
  3. Inflation is up.
  4. We are as lean as we can go. We have already cut $100K from departments.
  5. We’ve got some big expenses looming. (Covid money ending.)
  6. The state government is trying to strangle cities.

Here’s the graphic that they showed:

It was a big Come to Jesus Moment. Council went to Jesus. They gave direction that they wanted to go with the Structurally Balanced side of that road.

Bottom line: “Structurally Balanced” means raising the tax rate modestly over multiple years (instead of one big crazy future hike.) All of council agrees with it.

…

June: In June, staff comes back with some Structurally Balanced tax estimates:

Here’s what everyone said they wanted:

Ok, great! We’re getting somewhere.

….

August: Real numbers come in. (June was just an estimate.)

By law, council has to set their own upper bound, in August. It’s a weird quirk.

So staff lays out these possibilities:

That’s in the afternoon, at the 3 pm workshop.

Matthew and Saul are all willing to go up to the middle column now. The gravity of the budget crisis is evident to everyone.

The Lorenzo changes things up: “I want to go between 64.96¢ and 70.49¢. I want to land on the number that gives a $0 in that last row. Neither a surplus or a deficit forecast for 2027.”

Everyone is intrigued by this idea. He ends up successfully getting everyone on board with this! What careful planning we’re demonstrating!

That night, at the 6 pm meeting, they vote on the tax rate cap:

So we go with the 67.69¢.

This is our max: the final tax rate cannot be higher than 67.69¢.

…

Note: In August, they also mentioned something about an EMS study. It was another potential looming cost. This is going to become a very big deal, but it didn’t jump out at me then.

…

Last background month! We’re now to September.

September 2nd meeting:

They take the first official vote on the 67.69¢ tax rate:

Now you’re all caught up.

…..

This current meeting!

Here are the three scenarios we need to have on hand for this conversation:

What would home owners actually have to pay, if we raised rates in these categories?

    • The “No New Revenue” rate, 62.78¢. (NNR)  Your tax bill goes up $0.
    • Option 1: 64.96¢.   The average tax bill goes up $72.46 per year, or $6.03 per month.
    • Option 2: 67.69¢.  The average tax bill goes up $163.21 per year, or $13.60 per month.

….

Sidenote: Those amounts are based on an average house worth $347,398 (and $15K homestead exemption).

Most of San Marcos rents! But for those who own homes, home value varies a lot.

Here’s the average home price by neighborhood in San Marcos:

The last column is the monthly increase, under 67.69¢.

That chart has 40 rows. Only the last eight rows exceed the average home value! (Blanco Vista and Kissing Tree are both way bigger than they seem.)

Point being: most neighborhoods would see smaller tax increases under these proposed hikes.

….

The public outcry:

<crickets> …. <crickets>

There was none. I mean, I’m sure Council got phone calls. But I’ve watched these meetings for years now – compared to other years, this is nothing.

Two people showed up to talk about the budget during the public hearing. They both made nuanced points about the good parts and bad parts of the budget.

Contrast that to the big items this year:

  • Tantra: 50+ speakers showed up.
  • Gaza: 125+ speakers showed up (on the day of the vote)
  • Data Center: 14 speakers on August 19th

People show up when they’re mad. This ain’t that. This is the wind at Council’s back, pushing them to make the responsible decision.

And then suddenly there is a big curve ball: EMS.

This came up in August, but it was uncertain. Now it’s certain.

So, there’s something called the San Marcos-Hays EMS.  This is who you call when you need an ambulance.  It used to be a lot bigger.  Over time, Wimberly left. Then Buda left. Then Dripping Springs left.

Since the August meeting, it’s now official: Kyle and everyone else is leaving.  So it’s just San Marcos.   (The cheese stands alone)

This is a big problem! We don’t have a city-run EMS.  We’ve got fire fighters who may be trained paramedics, but they can’t take you to the hospital. We don’t have ambulances. We don’t have a facility to store ambulances.  We don’t have the infrastructure to run another department.  But because this partnership is dissolving, we’re going to have to figure it out. 

This is going to cost about $2 million.  This will start getting dealt with in November.

Bottom line: those tax rates all need to increase by about 2.4¢ to cover EMS.

Council Discussion

Council asked a lot of questions about the EMS situation. They also were asking about Council priorities – what had to be decided on Tuesday, and what stayed flexible. It was not a very long conversation.

Lorenzo keeps acting squirrelly.

Finally he says: “I don’t like the 67.96¢ anymore. The State legislature didn’t pass those crazy laws after all. We should have more economic development! I want to go back to 64.96¢.”

Well, shit!

A few things:

1. “Economic Development”: I erased a big rant about this.  It’s not a magic bullet.

This is like walking out onto the NFL sideline and telling the coach, “Hey, you should try to score more points than the other team! Then you’d win!”   City staff really does know about economic development. They are always working on it. 

2. The State legislature will definitely do Abbott’s bidding, and Abbott wants those laws. If not 2025, then watch for them in the next session.

3. The 64.96¢ isn’t an option anymore! It doesn’t include EMS!

The City Manager responds with alarm: “Please, please don’t go with 64.96¢. That won’t even cover EMS. We need at least 65.15¢.”

….

Listen: The rug just got yanked, suddenly, and nobody is prepared. Nobody has the presence of mind to call a time-out and fix all the numbers.

Confusion reigns.

But look how helpful I am! I made you a chart!

This is what I think city staff would have put on a slide, if anyone had had advance warning.

Here’s my theory: I think Lorenzo intended to go from the 3rd row to the 2nd row. After all, he said “64.96¢”. But since we now have an EMS crisis, he didn’t even cover the first row. The City Manager is asking him to please at least get to 65.15¢ in the first row.

…

We’ve suddenly rolled back all the careful planning for the budget cliff. The budget cliff is still coming! We still did all the planning! But instead, we’re about to do this:

I’m especially flabbergasted because Lorenzo himself was the one who promoted the 67.69¢. He literally picked it to leave us with a balanced budget in 2027 – neither deficit, nor surplus.

Saul, Shane, and Matthew were always barely willing to make a difficult vote. So as soon as Lorenzo gives them permission, the coalition for 67.69¢ falls apart.

The vote on 67.69¢:

Yeah.

Let’s have a time lapse:

(Technically, I’m combining two separate votes in that last column. First they vote for 67.69, and it fails. Then separately, they vote for 62.78+EMS. This passes.)

Anyway, that’s the whole saga! We had the wind at our backs, and instead we shot ourselves in the foot. It felt like someone whispered in Lorenzo’s ear at the 11th hour, and the whole thing unraveled.

Honestly, I’m kinda salty about the whole thing. .

…

One final note: $2 million for EMS is a bargain. That works out to 2 cents. By law, Emergency services is allowed to charge a special tax of up to 10 cents. That would bring in about $8.5 million.

Nobody is trying to shake down tax payers here. They just want an ambulance to show up when your grandmother has a heart attack.

…

Item 4-5: Electric and Water Rates.

The next discussion is even goofier, if you can believe it. (But less destructive.)

Your electric bill comes in two parts:

  1. a base rate ($14.31)
  2. a usage rate. (Based on how much electricity you use.)

Usage rates are going up. (Discussed here before.)

Shane Scott speaks up:”Let’s just cancel the base rate!” He wants everyone’s bill automatically lower by $14.31 every month.

You can practically hear staff’s hearts all plummet through the floor as they try to grapple with this craziness. (Ten minutes ago, we tanked the budget over whether to raise taxes by $6 or $12 a month. And now Shane wants to throw away another $14?!)

The director of utilities tactfully explains that this would blow a $3.4 million hole in our budget. The city manager gently mentions our bond rating and debt service coverage. We could get sued by bond holders.

Shane withdraws his motion.

The vote on electric rates:

A little later, we have the vote on water rates:

So water rates will not change.

Listen: this is totally irresponsible. This is lazy, wishful thinking.

The city is not turning a profit on water. You have to cover the costs of your water utility.

If you want to save people money on their water bill, help them conserve water. Don’t strangle the department that has to fix the pipes and pay for the water rights.

…

That’s basically it for the meeting. I know barely anyone cares, but this was super big bullshit.

Hours 0:00 – 3:04, 9/2/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Some years, citizens get fired up and angry at the budget. This year was the opposite. 

Three people spoke on the budget, and they all praised council for increasing funding for the Human Services Advisory Board. (HSAB grants are how the city helps fund all the nonprofits that help kids, people in poverty, vets, the elderly, etc.)

It was pretty short!

…

Items 20-24:  Welcome to our $371 million dollar budget!

It’s budget time. So far this year, we’ve talked about this back in February, then in March, again in May, and just now in August.

We’ve got several big problems:

  1. We’re bringing in less money from sales tax and property tax.

Sales tax peaked in 2023 and hasn’t returned.  Property taxes have been flat.  Actually, they’ve gone down on existing properties, but they’ve been propped up by new builds. 

(That slide is from the May workshop.)

  1. Everything is more expensive, due to inflation.

City department budgets were flat two years ago. This past year, they cut $100K collectively.  But everything is getting more expensive, so even holding things flat means you have less purchasing power.

  1. The State Legislature is always, always trying to knee-cap cities:

This past session it was House Bill 73 and Senate Bill 10. City staff implied that there were a few others. All of these cap city spending or cap city taxes.

The concept isn’t new – we already have caps on tax hikes. But these new bills are brutal in their severity.

All these bills were still up in the air last Tuesday, when city council met. Since then, the special legislative session ended. As far as I can tell, none of these passed? But Abbott could always call a 3rd session, or these could return in 2027. So this is always looming.

(Can you imagine how relaxing it would be if our state government wasn’t so hellbent on wrecking Texas cities?)

  1. We have three HFCs that are tied up in the courts

“HFC” stands for Housing Finance Corporations. These didn’t used to be scams, but they’ve become scams. For example: “Pissed” city leaders urge lawmakers to close loophole costing millions in tax revenue.

We’ve got three apartment complexes that were purchased by HFCs, and we’re losing about $630K in tax revenue from them.  (They’re tied up in lawsuit appeals, so it could still tip our way.)

  1. There are almost $4 million worth of new expenses that are kicking in soon, over the next 1-2 years.

The ones with the checkmarks were funded from federal Covid money, which is expiring next year.

6. Council also has some new priorities, which cost money:

  • Increasing HSAB funding by $200,000
  • Increased funding for tenants rights and tenants legal support
  • Start an office of community support and resource navigation.
  • Probably more that I’m not remembering

…

Because of all this, tax rates are going up.  

I mean, we don’t really have a choice, right?

If you own a $365K house, here’s how it affects you:

If you own a smaller house – say $200K assessed value – then you’d pay like so:

Last year: $1,115 per year, or $93 per month.
This year: $1,252 per year, or $104 per month.

We always focus on home owners here, because it’s easy to compute their tax costs. But rest assured: landlords cover the cost of property taxes by passing it on to their renters.

My back-of-envelope estimate is that an average renter pays about half as much: $640 per year towards their landlord’s property tax bill, or $53 per month.

…

Your utilities are also going up:

This is mostly based on CUAB recommendations. CUAB stands for Citizens Utility Advisory Boards.

Basically, if you don’t raise rates for a few years, you’ll get into a big financial hole. Then your bond ratings tank and it gets more expensive to borrow money, and you’re in even bigger financial trouble. To get out of it, you’d have to shock the community with a giant rate hike in order to right the ship.

So the idea is that it’s better to nudge prices up gently every year, to keep up with inflation. CUAB is the one that has to figure out the new rates. This is that.

…

One funny detail: The goal is to stabilize our budget going forward. We could have scrapped by this year, but then we’d be in a big hole next year. The looming expenses will kick in, and we’d have to raise taxes a lot, or cut services significantly, to handle it.

But because we’re being proactive, we actually will have $1.3 million of breathing room in the meantime.

City staff went to all the city departments, and asked about things like deferred maintenance projects or other ongoing needs. Here’s some possible ways to spend the money:

Council will hash this out later.

…

Finally: my yearly rant about taxes.

Taxes are good! This is how we can take care of our most vulnerable people. This is how we can solve collective problems, without someone trying to extract as much profit as possible.

The problem is that our taxes are not fair:

via

So yes: you do kind of pay way too much in taxes! We don’t charge our rich Texans their fair share.

(Also we Texans turn down about $5 billion every year by refusing to expand medicaid, and we turned down $350 million this past summer that would feed hungry kids.

We do this in order to prove a point, or something? The feds can’t force us to feed our kids or get medical care when we’re sick, dadgum. )

Look, the United States can easily afford for every person to have a safe home, free healthcare, and access to healthy food and education.  This country is extremely wealthy.  Collectively, we can afford to lift everyone out of basic poverty.  We just choose not to. 

Stop electing Republicans who are in the pocket of extremely wealthy Texans.

(End of rant. Thanks for playing along!)

…

Back to council. How did the votes go?

The votes on the tax rate and the budget:

Lock step, baby!

The votes on the various utility funds:

That’s the votes on Trash & Recycling rates, Electric Utility rates, and Water and Wastewater rates, respectively.

The votes are dropping like flies! Hang in there, councilmembers! They all passed, though.

….

Saul asked some interesting questions about our water supply:

Q: How much water do we sell to other cities?
A: We sell to Kyle, to County Line, and we sell reclaimed water to Buda and others.

(I don’t know what “County Line” means, and when I try to google it, I just get a bunch of BBQ joints and maps of counties. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

[Updated to add: “County Line” is this special utility district. Thanks to Diane Insley for filling me in!]

Q: What happens if they don’t use the water they buy?
A: Our contracts are “50% take or pay”. So they have to pay for at least 50% of the water we’re setting aside for them, even if they don’t use it.

Q: Were we ever in danger of not getting our water from Canyon Lake, due to drought?
A: Both Canyon and Edwards water have tiered drought restrictions. So we always get some water, but they require us to use less water during a drought. Before the July floods, Canyon Lake was Stage 4, but now they’re Stage 1. Edwards Aquifer has been between Stages 3 – 5 all year long. They’re about to tip into Stage 5 again.

…

That’s all of the budget talk for today! The official, final vote will be at the September 16th meeting.

…

Item 25: Just one tiny rezoning!

This is 906 Chesnut St:

From the street, it looks like so:

That’s if you’re standing on Chesnut looking back towards LBJ. Vie Lofts is on the right.

The developer wants to rezone it as CD-4. (Basically, they want to tear it down and build small apartments.)

Everyone says okay.

I’m okay letting it go, as long as we take a moment to pour one out for this wallpaper:

I mean:

I’m not made of stone, people.

Also this window treatment:

and maybe this pink trim:

ok, and this built-in cabinetry and paneling:

I take it back! Save this house! It’s too pure for this fallen world.

(Enjoy the full zillow tour here.)

…

Honestly, the rest of the meeting was pretty zippy. A few quick items:

  • postponing the new development by the high school
  • funding for the new water reclamation facility
  • funding for CARTS
  • setting some dates for elections and city council meetings next year.

On CARTS, we pay about $621K, and the federal and state government combined pay about $1.75 million. That’s great! Redistribution of wealth at work.

…

One last detail: Executive Session

Finally, Council discussed this land in executive session:

That’s the land that SMCISD is selling. There’s a big petition and movement in the community for the city to purchase the land, so that they can dedicate it towards the Mexican American and Indigenous Heritage and Cultural District.

So I don’t know what happened in Executive Session (obviously), but afterwards Council directed city staff to ask SMCISD about delaying the deadline of the sale, so that the city can get its ducks in a row.

I think it all comes down to timing:

  • Can the city speed up enough to meet SMCISD’s budget crisis timeline?
  • Can SMCISD delay long enough to accommodate the city’s due diligence and bureaucracy?

Also Hays county is somewhere in the mix, too. We’ll find out the details eventually!

Hours 0:00 – 7:58, 8/19/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

There is only one topic, but there are over two hours of comments. It’s all data center, baby.

There were 14 speakers in favor. Here are the main arguments made by the people who want us to approve it:

  • These are all over the place already.
  • San Marcos needs the tax revenue.
  • I am the property owner, or I’m going to work in some way on this project, and it sounds great to me

There were 29 speakers opposed. Here are the main arguments made by the people who oppose it:

  • We’re in a drought, and data centers use a massive amount of water.
  • Data centers use a massive amount of electricity. Our rates will go up, this is bad for the environment, and the grid can’t handle it.
  • Don’t sell out the San Marcos river to greedy corporations
  • Cyrus One is secretive and unwilling to answer basic questions.
  • Anecdotally, people have stories of odd illnesses from living next to data centers.

There were another few speakers opposed at the 3 pm workshop, and then another 25 at the public hearings. (The vast majority were people speaking more than once, though.)

This will take up the vast majority of the meeting, so we’ll unpack all these points. Stay tuned.

…

Items 10-13: But first! we have the quickest little rezoning.

Have you ever been driving south on I35, towards New Braunfels, and noticed these guys?

They make concrete, and they’re here:

The owner wants to zone two little blocks of land, between Heldenfels and I-35:

He wants these to also be Heavy Industrial.

No one is fussed. Everyone says okay.

…

Items 14-16: Ok, it’s time for the AI Data Center. This is a doozy.

Background: We are talking about land here:

The property owner wants to zone this land Light Industrial, so that he can sell it to Cyrus One, a data center company.

Let’s talk about data centers

Apparently there are 300+ data centers already in Texas. Of those, 40 are in the Austin and 49 are in San Antonio:

via

Not counting the one on tonight’s agenda, there are apparently two being developed in Caldwell County and three more in Hays.

Data centers have two big problems: they use a lot of water and they use a lot of electricity. Texas makes this worse, because counties aren’t allowed to regulate use of natural resources. (Virginia Parker, director of the San Marcos River Foundation, said we’re the only state with this particular idiocy.)

So as long as data centers stay outside of cities, there is currently no way to regulate how many get built.

This specific data center

The owner is a guy named Mayberry, and the property has a funny history. (Not funny haha.)

Back in 2022, he asked the city to annex most of this land into San Marcos. He wanted to sell the land to a developer, to build single-family homes out there.

This was always a weird, terrible idea! First, the sprawl would be insane. It’s farm land out there, not close to anything.

Second, there is a massive power plant next door:

Council had endless discussions about whether it was fair to build homes next to an extremely loud, bright, flashing power plant. In the end, they settled on a mandatory disclosure to potential buyers and some fencing.

It’s been three years, and clearly no one wants to build these houses. So Mayberry has moved onto the next idea, which is this Data Center.

But since most of the land has been annexed into San Marcos, he now has to get permission from the city to rezone.

In this one data center, and only this one, we now have a say.

Back in March, Planning and Zoning denied the rezoning. (In fact, this was Jim Garber’s last meeting.) Planning and Zoning had a ton of concerns.

When P&Z votes down a rezoning, it takes a supermajority at Council to overturn them. So tonight, the data center will need 6 votes out of 7, in order to pass.

We’re going to cover these topics next:

  1. Noise and lights
  2. Water
  3. Electricity
  4. Impact on San Marcos, and the Restrictive Covenant
  5. Property taxes

Buckle up!

  1. Noise and lights:

Staff basically says, “Look, plenty of data centers are in residential areas already and everyone seems to be chill with it. Look!”

“Isn’t that so close? See?”

“And also, what if Mayberry had built those homes! Wasn’t that an even worse idea?”

(For the record, Jane, Shane, Mark Gleason, Saul, Alyssa, and Jude Prather voted yes for those homes, in 2022. Max Baker voted no.)

The comparison to the imaginary, nonexistent homes is silly. The homes don’t exist.

…

Here’s the real argument the city should have made: this data center is next door to the Hays County Power Plant.

Seriously, the noise, lights, and weird vibes that come from this data center will be dwarfed by what’s already coming from the power plant.

2. Water:

Data centers run hot, and so they use a lot of water to keep the computers from overheating. A traditional, evaporative system uses maybe 550,000 gallons/day?

Technology has gotten better, and now they use a closed loop system. You fill up the building one time, and then it keeps re-using that water for the lifespan of the building. After that, the only water needed is for employee bathrooms and kitchens.

Mayberry says that the initial fill up will require 60K-70K gallons of water per building, and there are 5 buildings. So roughly 400,000 gallons will be needed to fill the buildings, one time.

After that, he says that each building will use about 4-7K gallons of water each day. That’s pretty normal for a business:

3. Electricity:

The electricity is insane.

Mayberry says that each building will use about 75 megawatts of power. So over five buildings, they will use 375 megawatts.

City staff says that all of San Marcos, at peak usage, is about 150 megawatts. Every single one of us, on the worst day in August! That’s insane. On a typical October day, all of San Marcos uses about 25 megawatts. So these data centers really do gobble up a ton of energy.

Two questions come up:
– Will this drive up water use, indirectly?
– Will this drive up rates?

Both answer are yes, sort of.

Producing electricity requires water. But it’s not using San Marcos water – it would be from any power plant, in the entire state. All the electricity from all of the power plants gets dumped in the grids, and it gets blended around. When you draw electricity, you’re getting a random blend of all those sources.

(Also, not all energy sources require water. Gas, coal, and nuclear all do, but wind and solar don’t.)

The same is true for electric utility rates: all 300 data centers are putting a huge strain on the grid. More power needs to be generated, and that is going to cost money. But that cost is going to get spread across the entire state.

Electric rates are spiking and will continue to spike, over the entire state.

4. Impact on San Marcos and the Restrictive Covenant:

This data center will not use San Marcos water or San Marcos electric. Water would be supplied by Crystal Clear water, and they’d get electricity from Pedernales.

All data centers in central Texas are harming all of central Texas. The bad effects are distributed pretty evenly. We’re all using the same water table and tapping into the same electric grid.

This specific data center does not specifically damage San Marcos or the San Marcos river.

The Restrictive Covenant: A restrictive covenant is a legal contract of all the hoops that the developer is willing to jump through, for the city.

Since getting knocked down at P&Z, Mayberry is trying to do whatever he can to get approved. Here’s his offer:

and

5. Why even do this?! (Property taxes)

Allegedly, it would bring in an enormous amount of money.

To put that in perspective: This past year, we’ve had a budget crisis, and city departments had to make cuts. Total, across all departments, we cut $100,000, and it was a huge strain. $9 million would go a very, very long way.

My two cents

I’m out of step with my readers here, and I apologize. I think we should take the money.

Data centers are run by greedy, irresponsible corporations that do not care about local resources. They will exploit and destroy all the beauty in this state, if they can. Texas desperately needs to regulate this industry and limit the number of data centers that are being built.

And yet!! I think we should hold our nose and let them pay us lots of money. There is so much need in San Marcos, and so much poverty.

Rejecting this does not move the needle on the actual problem. Take the money.

Here is what Council says:

Matthew Mendoza goes first, and he is fired up. He says:

  • I voted against putting houses by the power plant. Terrible idea.
  • We didn’t annex SMART/Axis because of local activism, and now they’re building anyway, except unregulated. I get complaints every day from people who live in Pecan Park. Annexation means regulation, and that’s good.
  • We cannot run this city on tax income from neighborhoods. It’s not sustainable. You all don’t pay enough in taxes for how much it costs to run a city.
  • We need opportunities in this town. My blood is in the river and soil! Jim Garber was my scout leader!

Jane Hughson goes next:

  • I have a ton of water cred. I was the first chair on the board of the Edwards Aquifer Authority, senior board member of ARWA, etc.
  • I’ve got some concerns, but I also am open to negotiation.
  • Listen up: you think you hate living next to a data center, but you would really hate living next to manufacturing. I’m trying to keep that from happening to you.
  • The amount of power needed is crazy. I have a lot of questions that we’ll get to.

Saul Gonzales goes next:

  • No. I’m a hard no. I listen to my constituents, and they know more than me. Everyone knows my reasons why. No.

(Ahem… everyone knows his reasons why)

Amanda Rodriguez goes next:

  • I’m also a hard no. I’m not going to dismiss the voices of this many people.

…

Let’s pause and talk strategy:

This item needs 6 out of 7 votes to pass. Saul and Amanda are voting no. Therefore it can’t pass.

But everyone pretends like this didn’t just happen! We proceed to have a detailed discussion for the next hour. It was a little weird.

However: the ending is not black and white, so I’m going to force us to walk through all this slowly.

…

The nitty-gritty questions

Q: Can the restrictive covenant be changed?
A: Yes. This is just a first reading. Staff can bring back changes for second reading.

Q: Is the property owner willing to make the covenant permanent, instead of expiring in 20 years?
A: Sure.

Q: How can we enforce the covenant?
A: A bunch of different ways:

1. The biggest items are how buildings are built. We withhold occupancy permits until it passes inspection. We have a lot of leverage there.

2. We can require them to submit their monthly water bill to the city, and make it publicly available.

3. We have an (overworked, underfunded) code compliance division who will make the rounds out there and check for things like noise violations.

4. For any other violations, we’d take them to court and get an injunction. Court orders them to stop doing whatever they’re doing.

Q: How do you end up using 4-7K gallons of water in each building, each day?
A: That’s pretty standard for a regular office building with a bathroom and kitchen. Nothing major.

Q: If you ever had to drain the closed loop, what would you do with all that water?
A: It’s got a ton of awful chemicals in it. It would need to be disposed of as a hazardous waste. That can’t go down the drain.

Q: Can they build their own gas power plant and get around ERCOT?
A: Not if they’re in the city limits. They’d need approval from P&Z. If they’re outside the city, yes.

Q: Why does everyone have stories of how this will cause electric rates to rise?
A: Electric rates will definitely rise, because of the 300 data centers across Texas. Whenever there are new grid costs, those costs are spread across the entire state. So we’re already facing this. This particular one doesn’t affect us any more than the rest.

Q: Can you use reclaimed water on all your landscaping and stuff? Will you be sustainable?
A: Sure.

Q: Can you fill the original big amount of water using reclaimed water?
A: Probably not worth it, to run pipe across the street for a one-time use.
Q: but could we use a water truck?
A: Yes, that would solve the pipe problem. We don’t know if it’s okay for a data center.

Q: Go back over the part about how much water it takes to make electricity.
A: It does take water to make electricity, if you’re using non-renewable energy. But not for wind or solar. But all the electricity goes into a big mushpot. So data centers just draw a big blend of energy. It’s not coming from the San Marcos river or anything.

Also, if you’re starting a new power plant, you have to show ERCOT that you’ve purchased the water rights before you connect to the grid. You can’t just start using the Edwards Aquifer for your new power plant.

Q: Remember that KUT article about how we’re running out of water? It was factually incorrect and scared a lot of people.
A: I know, right?! That was crazy. It was like the author missed the part of the presentation with the good news. We reached out to them, but they ignored us.

Q: Go back over the electricity usage again.
A: Each building uses 75,000 MW of power, and there are 5 buildings. So they use 375K megawatts, altogether. On a typical day in October, San Marcos uses about 25K megawatts, and our peak usage is about 150K megawatts.

HOLY MOLY.

A: But keep in mind, they’re not on San Marcos power. But also keep in mind, the grid costs are shared by all Texans.

Q: How easy would it be for them to go through disannexation from the city, and build here anyway?
A: It’s actually pretty hard to disannex. They’d end up having to sue us.

Q: So is Cyrus One backing out of the project? Why are they not here?
A: No. They said they are “withdrawing from the zoning case.”

Translation: Cyrus One does not want to deal with San Marcos residents. To be super duper clear, they are 100% assholes who will screw over everyone and anyone. (I’m still okay taking their money.)

The vote

By this point, it’s well past midnight.

It’s finally time to vote:

So it fails! Remember, it takes 6 votes to override P&Z.

Remember an hour ago, when Saul and Amanda both said they were “no” votes? Lo! it hath come! As heralded.

The vote has failed.

…

SO IS IT DEAD???

No. This is where it gets murky.

Council dabbles in entertaining the notion to send it back to P&Z. The argument goes like this: “P&Z didn’t see the restricted covenant. Maybe they would have approved it, if they saw the current version! And if they approve it, then council only need 4 votes to pass this, and not 6 votes.”

However, Council cannot just send it back to P&Z. Either Saul or Amanda have to agree to reopen the issue. They both say no.

Amanda, in fact, is quite angry: “You lost a vote. Quit trying to find a workaround.”

(I mean, I’d be furious if I opposed the data center, as well.)

Council does not quit trying to find a workaround! They have a giant conversation about it. In fact, they break out the giant rule book of technicalities, to figure out what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. Will the developer have to wait 6 months or 12 months to re-apply? Or can they waltz in tomorrow with this exact paperwork, and re-apply, and go to P&Z for approval?

Answer: [This answer takes a while. Picture much shuffling of paper, scrutinizing all these detailed scenarios, double-checking what exact words were said. But eventually…] There is no waiting period. They can waltz in tomorrow.

So there you have it.

…

Bottom line: This application is dead. But Council left a trail of bread crumbs for the applicant to re-apply to P&Z and get a better outcome.

…

Item 19: Upcoming budget details!

We’re beginning budget season. At this meeting, Council sets an upper bound for the property tax rate for next year.

In many ways, this is a continuation of the 3 pm workshop conversation.

Normally there would be a big presentation. But it’s 1:30 am by now. I’m just going to zip through some key details.

Our property taxes are down:

If you add in newly built property, it’s a little better, but you can still see the problem:

Here are the different property tax rates that Staff proposes for Council:

and here’s what that means in terms of your property tax bill, if you’re a home owner:

Council ends up choosing ¢67.69 as their upper bound.

There is a really long discussion of how they got to this number at the 3 pm workshops. So if you’re curious, keep reading.

…

Item 20: Changes to the LDC

“LDC” stands for Land Development Code. All year long, staff makes notes about all the little improvements that anyone ever mentions. There are also things they have to change, based on the new laws passed by the legislature.

This is a big, long complicated process that will take months.

Everyone is exhausted, and they don’t go through the details. It’s going to come around a few more times, though, so we’ll unpack it before it passes.

…

The meeting was finally over at 3:11 am.

In other words, council members just spent TWELVE HOURS sitting in those chairs, up at the dais. That’s rough!

Hours 0:00 – 3:27, 8/5/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Before Citizen Comment

City Manager Reyes gives a little disclaimer about one part of Item 34, possibly purchasing the land next to El Centro.

Background:

This is El Centro:

El Centro’s full name is Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos and they put on a lot of great Hispanic arts and cultural programming.

It’s located here:

The building is the old Bonham Elementary building, and SMCISD still owns the land and leases it to El Centro. correction: and SMCISD donated that part of the property to El Centro in 2022.

I think what’s going on is that the school board wants to sell off the rest of the property:

This block sits within the Mexican American and Indigenous Heritage and Cultural District. (This district was created in 2021, and then never mentioned again. Literally, I searched.)

I don’t think there’s a map of the district anywhere. This is the closest thing I found:

Professor Ana Juarez started up a petition a few weeks ago to get the city to buy the land, so that it doesn’t become developer-bait. It’s got a lot of historical significance:

Over 900 people signed the petition so far! And a bunch of people signed up for citizen comment.

This brings us to Tuesday!

Purchasing this property got put on the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting. But the city put it in Top Secret Executive Session, so it wasn’t discussed publicly. It sounds like this choice riled up a lot of people? and city staff got an earful of complaints about this?

So Ms. Reyes issued this disclaimer: “Hey, we love this property too! But we have to put real estate discussions in Executive session. It’s not some weird scheming thing. Also if we want to move on this, we have to move fast, because it’s time-sensitive.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

So the city is trying to get on board! This is great news. But the school district and the county also have to buy in. If you’re so inclined, you can:

Now you have homework! sorry!

…

On to Citizen Comment:

Big topics:

  1. The Lions Club: ten people from a bunch of nonprofits spoke in favor of renewing their lease.
  2. Tenant’s Right to Organize: seven people spoke in favor.
  3. Buying the land next to El Centro: three people in favor

We’ll discuss the Lions Club and the Tenants’ rights items at length.

A few smaller topics:

  • three people speak against the AI data center proposal. This is supposed to be decided at the August 19th meeting
  • One candidate for council introduces himself: Brandon Oles. (Another candidate – Chase Norris – also spoke, but not about the election. He spoke on tenants rights, Lions Club, and El Centro.) They’re not running for the same place, though, so they’re not opponents.

…

Item 5: The Texas State Boutique Hotel

We saw this back in July. Almost everything is the same, but Amanda mentions a few important wins:

  • Wages will rise automatically with inflation
  • If you work 25 hours per week, you’re eligible for medical/dental/vision benefits.

Those are both really great for workers.

The vote:

My two cents: there’s not much downside for the city, but it’s hard to imagine this hotel turning a profit.

…

Item 7: Lions Club

You know these guys:

They rent all the yellow tubes on the river:

via

Here’s how it works: The city leases the building to the Lions Club, and they’re the only group that can run shuttles and rent tubes for this stretch of the river.

The Lions Club then donates all their profits to organizations around town, and also fundraises for additional money for donations. (Lions Clubs have chapters all over the world, where they fundraise and give money to nonprofits. Ours just happens to run a tubing operation.)

…

Tuesday’s question: Should we extend the Lions Club lease at the tube rental for another five years?

Alyssa has a number of questions.  Basically, she appreciates the Lions Club’s good work, but her constituents want to better understand the charitable funding decisions. How does the grant selection process work?

Answer: The Lions Club accepts grants all year long. There’s no fixed due date.

They fund grants that fit any of the eight pillars of Lions Clubs:

Sort of a hodge-podge, but all good things.

Here’s how much our local chapter has given out, over the past five years:

Here’s a list of everyone they’ve funded over the past few years:

Question: What kind of outreach do you do? How do nonprofits find out about your grants?
Answer: We reach out to any organization that we’ve worked with in the past, but we don’t have contact information beyond that.

My read on the conversation: I’m guessing that Alyssa hears complaints that grants keep going to the same agencies over and over again. And also: some of those organizations are politically touchy. Why these organizations, and not others?

Answer: these aren’t city grants. This is a city lease of a building to a private organization. City grants require transparency and oversight, but a private organization can give out grants however they want.

My two cents: Let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good. The Lions Club donates to lots of great nonprofits around town, they partner with river clean-up, and they employ lots of young people. They work hard to make San Marcos better, even if they do things slightly differently than I might.

The vote to renew the Lions Club lease:

great!

…

Item 18: $25,000 from the Department of Justice to SMPD

Ok, this is fascinating.

Last year, SMPD teamed up with Hays County, and applied for a grant from the Department of Justice. Together we were awarded $37,516. The plan is to split off $25,500.00 for San Marcos, and then Hays gets the other $12,000.

So that’s why it’s on the agenda tonight – are we okay sorting out this split with Hays County?

Everyone seems okay with this!

…

Say, what are we spending this money on, anyway?

Ok, fine. Technology, and yet another camera. (Not a flock camera, though.)

What’s a JAG grant, anyway? Is it specifically about technology? It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder about that, but Amanda went and looked them up:

Indigent defense! Crime prevention and education! Drug treatment, mental health programs, behavioral programs, crisis intervention teams! Out of all those possibilities, we landed on… some new software and a pole camera?

Amanda would like to know if we could change the scope of our funding towards something a little more aligned with council priorities? and Alyssa asks how this happened?

No one has a good answer! So let me help: this grant was written last year, and this would have been totally fine with last year’s council. They liked technology and cameras! Alyssa was the only one on council last year who would have rejected this. Everyone else would have given this a big thumb’s up.

This is a new year, with two new councilmembers, and now we have a coalition of progressive voices up there! It is making a huge difference.

Jane is fine in principle with changing the scope of the grant, but she’s worried that if we have to go back to the federal government, they’ll cancel the grant altogether and we won’t get any money. (That’s a valid concern.)

It goes in circles for a long time. But eventually, they land here: staff is going to see if we can change the scope of the grant. This will come back in September.

…

Side note: What about the other half of the grant? How is Hays County spending their $12K? Are they going to fund mental health initiatives and indigent defense? Will they crusade to a more just society?

Answer: They’re buying vests!

okay then. I hope they look dapper.

…

Item 22: 100 acres south of McCarty

We’ve seen this property here before, just in July:

Nothing important happened on Tuesday.   It’s going to be discussed on September 2nd. I’m really only bringing this up because I saw this news article and this other news article pop up.

I did thumb through the draft proposal, though.  Supposedly it will have:

  • Two big apartment complexes  (800 and 400 apartments)
  • A much smaller number of townhomes  (44 townhomes)
  • 84 houses for sale
  • 120 houses for rent
  • A hotel
  • “Live Work Play” mystery item
  • Office/retail/grocery space

Everyone keeps mentioning that there will be an indoor/outdoor recreation portion, so I assume the mystery item will be some sort of Trampoline Roller Skating Splash Pad.  Let’s all spread that rumor, anyway.

Hours 3:27-4:14, 8/5/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 32: Tenants rights to organize

The Question: Should San Marcos pass an ordinance that would protect tenants’ right to organize?
The Answer: yes! Done. Moving on!

Okay, now let’s get into it.

Backstory: What should you do if you’re a tenant, and there’s mold in your bedroom, or your AC goes out, or you have no hot water, and your landlord refuses to fix it?

In Texas, you have very few options besides suing. You can talk to your landlord, of course. If they start to see you as a problem, you might be evicted. Filing a lawsuit is expensive, of course, and if you try to sue, you might be evicted anyways.

What’s the alternative?

Basically, tenants should be able to talk to each other about their landlord problems, and form tenant organizations, and bring issues to their landlords as a united front, without worrying that they’ll get evicted or face retaliation.

It’s this kinda thing:

via

We actually already have a great tenants organization here in town! The Tenants Advocacy Group, or TAG, has been working on all this with the San Marcos Civics Club, which is why this is here before council. (It’s part of a larger Tenants Bill of Rights that they’re working on.)

How do you protect tenants?

You pass an ordinance that protects tenants from retaliation if they want to organize. There are two parts:

  1. What kinds of tenant activities need protection?
  2. What kinds of landlord retaliation or interference needs to be banned?

Amanda prepared some helpful slides:

So that covers the tenants. And for the landlords:

The penalty would be a misdemeanor.

Are there any laws that already exist, that protect tenants?

It depends on where you live! City staff made this helpful chart:

So yes: Austin has protections. The state overall has no protections. There are federal protections, but only in subsidized housing.

The idea would be to use the Austin ordinance as a jumping-off point, and then modify it to fit San Marcos.

This brings us to Council Discussion

Jane Hughson brings up a few details – what if a property manager is interfering on behalf of the landlord? Should they be included in the language? What about trained organizers and other non-tenants who might need protection? Can we avoid having the fliers become litter?

Amanda: Great ideas! We should definitely workshop this.

Lorenzo: A Class C Misdemeanor requires a police officer. I don’t want to criminalize landlords.

Note: Historically, marginalized groups are over-policed and criminalized. Fortunately, landlords are not historically marginalized! They’re pretty much the opposite. They’re the marginalizators!

Groups that have historically held outsized power – like landlords, or wealthy people, or police officers, or elected officials – are generally under-policed. In these cases, cities need to be more consistent with enforcement, and not worry about criminalization.

Lorenzo: Can we work out the details in a subcommittee? I don’t want to modify Austin’s ordinance. I want to write ours from scratch.

Jane: I agree. Let’s get a subcommittee going, and write out something homegrown.

Note: These are both bad ideas.

  1. Don’t bury something in subcommittees. As Alyssa puts it, “Council subcommittees are where dreams go to die.”
  2. Don’t reinvent the wheel. If Austin has a workable model, then let’s build on it.

Amanda points out that Austin’s ordinance has also been around for years, without being struck down by the courts. So that’s a more solid foundation to build on than if we just improvised our own thing.

City staff suggests a workshop?

Eventually everyone comes around to this idea, so it will be held on September 16th.

My dear minions: Go forth and tell Council that you think tenant protections are a great idea!

Hours 0:00 – 3:03, 7/1/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

The big topic is the Data Center. It was postponed until August, though, so it’s not actually on the agenda for the meeting.

  • 9 people showed up to talk against it. It is deeply unpopular!
  • Two people spoke in favor. They both happen to work for the developer.

Smaller topics:

  • Two people spoke in favor of Item 22, asking council for money to help fund veterans services in San Marcos
  • Two people spoke in favor of the Texas State hotel, in Item 20.
  • Two people spoke on general national and international political events. (Palestine, Trump’s BBB disaster of a bill, Adriana Smith, and more.)

…

Item 13: The Data Center proposal

It’s been postponed until August 19th.

😦

…

Items 14-15: We’re annexing and zoning 10 acres here:

They want to zone it Heavy Commercial.

A few years ago, we signed a Chapter 380 agreement with these guys. Part of the deal was that they get annexed and zoned when they’re ready to open. This is that.

…

Item 16: This is very close to the previous item!  

It’s here:

It’s supposed to be this:

I mean, that’s super vague.  But okay.

This is part of a whole bigger thing San Marcos is trying to do, called the East Village.  It’s supposed to go here:

It’s supposed to be a dense shopping/living/working urban area. Read all about it, if you’re curious.

…

Items 18-19: There is a new wastewater treatment plant going in here: 

There have been a ton of developments approved down this way lately.

We’ve talked about this one a bunch:

here and here, because of its impact on Redwood/Rancho Vista and flooding, and sewage problems.

Apparently there are a boatload more developments coming:

These areas are all contributing money to help pay for this wastewater treatment plant.

I don’t recognize most of those names! And I don’t think most of those are built yet? My guess is that they didn’t need city approval, because they’re outside city limits.  

What it really is, is a massive amount of unchecked sprawl.  That’s a big bummer.

(However, it’s not like it was caused by this wastewater treatment plant.)

…

Item 20: The university wants to build a fancy new hotel.  

They want to put it here:

In other words, if you’re standing with Mini-Target on your right, facing the university, this location will be on your left:

Here are a bunch of beautiful renderings from the presentation:

and

and

ooooooh! aaaaah!

Note: You should not trust beautiful renderings like these.  They’re pretty pictures, not promises.

Here’s what they are willing to promise:

All this sounds great! I can see why the university wants a fancy hotel.  This is also good for downtown businesses. Everything is great.

…

So why isn’t this great?

The issue is that they want a lot of tax breaks over the next ten years. 

A hotel pays 3 kinds of taxes:

  1. Property taxes
  2. Sales taxes
  3. Hotel Occupancy Taxes, or HOT Taxes.  

Category 1: Property taxes.   The actual ground under the hotel is owned by Texas State.  Texas State does not pay property taxes.   (This is why we lost $1.5 million in property taxes when Texas State bought Sanctuary Lofts and Vistas apartments.)

Texas State is going to lease the land to the hotel people.  The hotel will pay property taxes on the physical bricks-and-mortar building, but not on the dirt underneath the building.

The estimated yearly property taxes will be $241K. We’re not offering any tax rebates in this category:

Ok, great.

My guess is that if the hotel owned the land, property taxes would be closer to $750K per year. But oh well.

Category 2: Sales Tax: Here’s a big rebate.

For the first five years, they pay almost nothing.  Then it steps up a little bit, over the next five years:

Ok, fine.

Category 3: HOT Tax:  Also giving most of this category away:

Ok. This is starting to seem like a lot.  

…

Total over 10 years:

  • If there was no deal in place, they’d pay $13.76 million in taxes.
  • Under this deal, they pay $4.66 million in taxes.
  • We’re refunding them about $9.1 million.

That seems like a terrible deal?

City staff says that unless we subsidize this hotel, they don’t have a viable business model.  I think that means that… you don’t have a viable business model.  

…

Listen: every time a luxury thing attempts to come to San Marcos, it goes out of business. This feels like wishful thinking. Like this bit:

In other words: “People will tube the river and then stay overnight in this hotel!”

Sir. SIR. We just spent months trying to keep the river free and affordable, because everyone who comes to tube is broke. A luxury boutique hotel is not going to keep any of them here.

I’m sure that there will be some fancy parents who pay full price, and I’m sure the University will put up lots of people (at a discount rate). Overall, I’m guessing the hotel struggles to turn a profit.

…

What’s in it for us?

Perk #1: They’re going to bring in some maybe-good jobs:

Amanda asks if these averages wages could be nudged up to $20/hour? 

Answer: They’re open to running some numbers, and will come back with something definitive next time. 

Perk #2: We’re protected if they sell the whole thing to Texas State. Since Texas State pays no taxes, the whole deal goes belly-up, and they have to reimburse us for the rebates:

But look: they could also just straight-up go out of business.

…

My 2 cents: There’s not much downside for the city, but I’m pessimistic anyway.

If we’re going to do this, we should:

  • Make the wages rise with inflation.  Always. (We do this with every contract we sign with a vendor! This is common. We can extend this norm to low-wage workers.)
  • Get them to agree to be sustainable. Here’s some examples of sustainable University-affiliated luxury hotels.

Council votes on this, but it’s not the final vote.  That will come at the next meeting.

…

Item 22: Veterans Funding

There’s a committee, the Veteran’s Affairs Advisory Committee. They undertook a big study over the past year, and concluded that there are four big needs in San Marcos:

  • A trained case worker specializing in veteran issues
  • Help figuring out transportation, especially when vets are trying to get up to Austin or down to San Antonio to the main office
  • Some money for the Veterans Memorial
  • Also ask the county to kick in money for the memorial

This item gets discussed for about an hour.  Basically, the committee is making a very compelling case, but the city has very little money.  It goes in circles.

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Item 23: Gary Job Corps

What the hell is going on?! 

Background:  Job Corps are free job training sites, run by the federal government.  You get free room and board, and get trained in some sort of vocation. You must be between 16-24 years old. Generally you’re there from 8 months to 3 years. 

In general, the point is to give poor kids a path out of poverty, so that they can land a stable job. 

Gary Job Corps is the one here in town:

Everyone always says it’s the oldest and biggest in the country! (I couldn’t actually verify this. This says the first job corps was opened in Maryland. This says that our site is 775 acres, which is probably the biggest because it’s an old air force base, but I can’t actually find enrollment by campus.)

Here’s my take on Job Corps in general: there’s a huge need in this country to help young people get jobs that will lift them out of poverty. But conservatives have been trying to shut them down since the beginning, so it hasn’t been properly funded in decades. Since the program was broadly popular, Republicans settled on death by a thousand cuts, instead. Here’s a good article on the whole thing.

…

The current mess

On May 29th, the Trump administration announced that it was shutting down almost all of the Job Corps sites – all the ones run by contractors.  This includes Gary Job Corps here in town.  They gave everyone one month to shut everything down.

On June 5th, a judge ordered an injunction. Things are currently in limbo.  It’s extremely hard to find good information on what’s going on. This is why Mayor Hughson wanted an update from someone involved.

There’s a representative from Gary Job Corps here today. He gives some information:

  • Currently there are 480 students enrolled at Gary. 
  • When the May 29th order came, everyone was sent home.  
  • About 400 students had somewhere to go, but the other 80 did not have anywhere to go.  In other words, they were facing homelessness if Gary closed down abruptly.
  • When the June 5th injunction came out, Gary invited all the students back.  About 25% have returned so far.
  • There are 99 sites nationwide, and 77 of them are being closed.

(He also says some strange things, such as that they were told one year ago that Gary was closing.  This doesn’t seem to be true at all.  In December, Biden announced they were pausing two locations, Maryland and Kentucky, but that’s all. As best I can tell, the May announcement shocked everyone.)

Jane’s big concern is these 80-90 students and families with nowhere to go. If Gary is shut down tomorrow, will they all become homeless? Very possibly, unless we work to secure some emergency housing.

Bottom line:  they’re trying to work with the homeless emergency housing programs, in case Gary is in fact shut down, and 80 students and their families are abruptly turned on the street.