Category: Hour summaries

Hour 2, 12/7/21

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

The bulk of this hour was spent on this little development, way out on Post Road. It looks like it’s roughly halfway to Five Mile Dam. The plan is for this to be a bunch of Tiny Homes and Tiny Duplexes, mostly for rent but maybe for sale. (The developer feels strongly that you not call these Tiny Houses, because he has some arcane specifications attached to that word. These are Micro Houses!)

Everyone was mostly fine with the plan. It’s way out of town. It would be better if it were easily accessible.

The proposal had no more than two unrelated people allowed in a rental unit. I hate this particular provision, and it’s all over the place in San Marcos. Ostensibly it’s about preventing an overflow of cars, or an overflow of students, and neither of those explanations hold up under scrutiny terribly well. All it does is:

  1. Enforce an outdated paradigm of who gets to live together, according to Society
  2. Make it more expensive to live and increase sprawl, if you were to actually abide by it
  3. But in fact, obviously no one worries too much about it. Which means it is only enforced arbitrarily, when someone has an axe to grind. It is a weapon to wield capriciously when there is an ulterior motive.

It only affects lower classes, and just perpetuates the stigma of living in cost-saving ways. It’s the worst.

Baker and Garza took issue with this, and made all the right points. Gleason made a nonsensical argument in favor of it: with houses so tiny, we need this rule to prevent too many people from cramming in! I will leave the disposal of this dumb point as an exercise for the reader.

The occupancy restriction was voted down, 7-1, and the development was approved.

One note: Why can’t something like this be mixed income? Why does it have to be uniformly for lower income community members, and then other developments are uniformly for UMC residents? I hate that. Developments should have housing options that span from the poor to the wealthy. Even when it occurs in San Marcos, like at La Cima, it’s done poorly, with a large apartment complex tacked on to the front end. Why not have duplexes and fourplexes and eightplexes scattered throughout?

Hour 1, 12/7/21

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

There were quite a few speakers on the topic of pets and the humane society. They were concerned about two things:

  • the alarming deterioration of the humane society while nothing seems to progress on finding a new director. It’s been open since October 2020. Employees are quitting and it sounds like the wheels are coming off the whole operation.

    I truly don’t know what the hold up is. A lack of applicants? Paying too little? Lack of urgency?
  • Item 28, banning the sale of out of town cats and dogs at local pet stores. Apparently this is a widespread ordinance in towns – mandate that pet stores must sell animals from the local population, rather than import animals from puppy mills and the like. Sounds like a win-win to me.

    We shall see how Hour 4 goes, however, when we get there!

Also in the first hour, we annexed land and approved two gas stations. One down 123, at Clovis Barker, towards the high school. The other on I-35, at Trace Development. Done & done.

Hour 3, 11/16/21

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Holy calendar discussion, batman! That was tedious. They considered a half dozen different ideas and eventually decided to preserve the status quo, plus some extra.

  • Shane Scott would like to bring back packet meetings. No one else wants to.
  • Mayor Hughson would like the work sessions moved to a different day, instead of being at 3 pm before 6 pm council meetings. I am extremely sympathetic to her. Being in session from 3 pm to midnight sounds miserable. But no one else wanted to.
  • They eventually added Citizen Comment and Q&A from the press and public to the work sessions, before and after respectively.

Baker threw his second major grenade of the night, when he accused the Mayor and the City Manager of keeping the agenda short leading up to an election in order to keep encumbents from having to make difficult votes.

Hughson and Lumbreras were both furious and did not mince words about it. Hugh/son called it baloney, and said the only things postponed were things that Council voted to postpone. Lumbreras told Baker to file an allegation if he thought there was wrong-doing, but not to just show up and sling rumors around. Both were spitting nails.

Here’s the thing: it really could be either way. I believe Bker when he says that every year, agendas tend to be much shorter leading up to an election. They have in fact been shorter lately.

From what I know of Hughson and Lumbreras, I doubt they’re deliberately postponing agenda items. There could however be a city-wide soft position that things should be slow-played until the new council is seated, out of general path-of-least-resistance tendencies.

This is what I mean by a grenade. Baker wasted a lot of political capital with that accusation. He’s surely correct that agendas are shorter during campaign season, but this was an insanely inflammatory way to go about addressing it.

A city does need someone willing to overstate things, drum up outrage, and shift the Overton Window towards progressive ideas. A Jordan Buckley, for example. On city council, we need Baker to help draft policy and implement these ideas. I don’t know how I feel about him drumming up outrage at the expense of actually getting good ideas implemented.

We’re in a much more precarious position with the current council, and it’s really bumming me out.

Hour 2, 11/16/21

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

What happened here?

  • The anti-bigotry affirmation went off the rails. In fact, the theme of the night might be “Commissioner Baker is correct but hella undiplomatic about it.” Baker tied together a whole lot of different points in a long, passionate statement against racist cops, the student at Texas State who recently set synagogues on fire, the anti-semitic flyers, the Trump Train, Chief Stapp’s commets, the 911 responder’s comments, and a bunch of other things. He opened by asking if the Mayor would support holding police officers accountable for racist comments on social media. Mayor Hughson plainly interpreted this as an attack.

The problem is that Baker and Hughson were having entirely separate conversations. I believe Mayor Hughson felt like it was time to update and re-affirm the anti-bigotry statement as a matter of housekeeping. Baker is furious about police brutality, the treatment of the Biden Bus, and in general, San Marcos is a lightning rod for white supremacists to try to drum up conflict.

Baker is correct when he says that council stays quiet on these issues because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. He’s correct about all of this stuff. He also comes in with guns blazing.

Commissioner Scott made the dumbest comment of the Anight, when he said something like, “We all disapprove of this stuff, but I think the more we talk about it, the more of it there is.”

In the end, Commissioner Garza moved to postpone until after the federal case against the city for the Biden Bus incident is resolved. That passed.

  • City Council voted on a ton of open committee assignments. I certainly got the impression that committee members were angry at Baker and not going to vote for him for anything. And that is how we got Jude Prather, “tough on crime”, on the homelessness committee, and Shane Scott on the sustainability committee.

The thing is: we no longer have a progressive coalition on council. There used to be three mostly reliable progressive votes. Hughson and Gonzalez have always been centrist. Now there are two progressive votes and three reliably conservative votes. Baker will kneecap himself if he continues to be a bomb-thrower, I fear.

  • One other thing: archaelogical surveys. The city has a robust procedure for handling discovery of artifacts in the course of development. Private developers have zero requirements. Commissioner Baker spoke diplomatically here about the need to find some way to have our history preserved, and city staff offered up San Antonio as an example of a city that does in fact put some responsibility on private developers. Mayor Hughson and others were in favor of having city staff look into possible policies here and to bring it back.

Hour 1, 11/16/21

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen comment periods:

  • A woman from the animal shelter came back to angrily describe how shitty a job the social media director is doing. Apparently it use to be the purview of a shelter employee, and now it’s just a random city employee. She read a few descriptions of the animals that were posted online. Essentially, “This dog snapped at a police officer and was unruly during transfer to the shelter.” It was pretty ridiculously hostile to the animals and unlikely to make anyone think, “Oooh! this biter is the dog for me!”
  • Jordan Buckley talked about the anti-hate/pro-diversity statement that’s on the agenda in Hour 2. Basically, we approved a statement like this in 2017. Since then, we’ve been doused with anti-semitism, hate speech, the Trump train harassment of the Biden bus, and the recent reports about how the 911 officers and Chief Stapp laughed and mocked the panicked 911 callers, and never sent out any response. San Marcos has been one of the biggest lightening rods for this kind of racial hate across the nation, and yet the council hasn’t wanted to antagonize anyone by timidly peeping about the problem. Buckley’s point is that an empty statement that you never act on is pretty cowardly and lame. Stay tuned for Hour 2.

The rest of the hour was uneventful. There’s going to eventually be a Film/Television studio out by La Cima. Fine. I’m always vaguely annoyed by any development on the river watershed, but it was already zoned Community Commercial, so it wasn’t going to stay undeveloped anyway.