Hour summaries – Page 3 – The San Marxist

Hours 0:00 – 1:19, 4/1/25

April 6, 2025April 6, 2025 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Honestly, this was a pretty breezy meeting.

Citizen Comment:

Eight speakers. A few main topics:

Ceasefire for Palestine (two speakers)
The Teacher Re-Use Center, a non-profit that is housed in a city warehouse, and sounds kind of gigantic in scope
A potential new neighborhood: The Villages on Posey.

This had the most speakers. So, the San Pedro cemetery is right next to Trace Development. It was vandalized in 2003, possibly out of racism. Following that, some researchers at Texas State (like one of the speakers, Dr. Ana Juarez) started doing community-based research there, and the cemetery was designated historic cemetery a few years later.

Now some developers want to build a neighborhood next to it. But – plot twist! – they were good neighbors! They reached out to the cemetery board and made friends.

The developer has offered $5000 for the cemetery, to pay for restoration and damage from cars. The cemetery would be part of the plans moving forward. So these representatives from the cemetery board are here to speak in favor of the development.

Hours 0:00 – 2:50, 3/18/25

March 23, 2025March 23, 2025 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Main topics:

Malachi Williams: Seven speakers, including family members. They want justice for Malachi. Several of the speakers focus on the detail that Malachi ran because a cop pulled a gun on him. Before the videos were released, this detail wasn’t mentioned. It shows how the officer escalated the situation instead of de-escalating it, which then ended in tragedy.
Human Services Advisory Budget funding: Council is thinking about increasing HSAB funding for next year. Three speakers advocated for this.
Cape’s Dam and the Mill Race: Two people talk about how much they love the river, east of I-35 and want council to keep it. We’ll unpack all of this!
Tenants’ Bill of Rights: The San Marcos Civics Club made this a focus, and got Council to put this in their visioning statement. Now council will need to make it happen. Two speakers focus on this.
Ceasefire in Palestine: four speakers. They still want the city to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

…

Onto the meeting!

Items 1-4: A bunch of audits and investment reports.

We got the audit reports for CDBG funding and the 23-24 fiscal year. Plus the quarterly financial report and investment report.

Everything looks normal. No rude surprises. (Apparently we’ve gotten awards for excellence for the past 35 years, on our yearly fiscal audit. OH YEAH BABY.)

…

Item 18: Rezoning about 15 acres

This property is way up north:

Back in 2020, we annexed this yellow and pink bit:

The yellow was zoned Manufactured Home, and the pink was zoned Light Industrial.

There were some concerns then – do we really want to make the folks in the mobile home community live right against an industrial park? But we let it ride.

Now the pink part is coming back for a rezoning – they want to switch it from Light Industrial to Manufactured Home. In other words:

Great! Now nobody has to live near an industrial park.

…

Item 20: Budget Policy Statement

We’re working on the Fiscal Year 26 budget.

First: There was a two days Visioning workshop in January, which lead to approving the Strategic Plan.

The nex workshop was at the end of February. Today we’re approving the thing from that: the Budget Policy Statement.

What’s a Budget Policy Statement?

This is like the guard rails for building the budget over the summer. Most of it is pretty dry? Like “Do you want to budget to maintain 150 days worth of recurring operating expenses in the budget, or just 90?” “Are we okay using the General Fund for Stormwater projects over $5 million?” Etc.

There are two interesting bits:

Each year, the city sets the rate for electricity, water, sewer, trash, etc. To do this, they have to predict what their costs will be. Then they pick a rate that will cover all their costs.

From the Budget Policy Statement

What does this mean? If your utilities get turned off, you have to pay extra late fees to get your utilities back on. All of the late fees, taken together, add up to big chunk of revenue.

The question is: Suppose we are predicting that we’ll bring in $100K in late fees. (I’m making that number up.) Should we use that $100K to lower the rates for the rest of the customers?

Argument in favor: It’s more economical to include the late fees in your calculation. It allows you to set lower rates for the whole city.

Argument against: It’s kind of icky to count on late fees, for two reasons. First, you’re charging your most desperate customers – the ones who already can’t keep up – an extra fee, and then using that fee to help out all the other, less-desperate customers.

Second, it creates an incentive to creep up your late fees over time. When budgets are lean, it’s tempting to lean on late fees as an extra source of revenue you can tap, like cities that ticket their poorest residents into oblivion in order to balance their budgets.

The current council has already been going in the opposite direction. They are already trying to lower the late fees, to make it easier for residents to get their electricity turned back on.

To the original question: they decide that we are not going to use the late-fee revenue in computing utility rates. Then, when late fees come in anyway, they’ll put that money towards the Utility Assistance program.

It’s a small touch, but a good one.

2. Here’s the other one worth paying attention to:

This is what the speakers during Citizen Comment were talking about.

Last December and January, HSAB funding was a total mess. There was too little funding, and Council ended up pitting nonprofits against each other. It was clear that we need to significantly ramp up city funding of nonprofits.

Right now, HSAB gets $550K. Council sets a range of additional funding, between $50K-$200K. When we find out what kind of money we’re getting from property taxes this July, then we’ll determine where we land in that range.

This part makes me extra happy:

Yes!! Peg the HSAB budget to inflation. We do it in contracts with for-profit entities all the time. It should be universal.

(The failure to peg minimum wage to inflation was one of the greatest policy near-misses of the 20th century. Having a federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour is such a mockery.)

…

Item 21: Cut-and-fill in La Cima

Pedernales Electric wants to build a substation here:

But it’s on a hill. Like we saw last time, it’s hard to build on a hill. So they also want to do a cut-and-fill.

This time, no one is worried about flooding.

Matthew Mendoza is a little worried that the people in La Cima might have to look at a substation, though.

Staff reassures him that there is another building, and then the La Cima apartment complex, all separating the substation from the houses. So their eyes won’t be hurt by the substation.

This passes 6-0.

…

Item 5: Council Compensation

This was so weird.

Quick Recap: (Full story here.)

Councilmembers get three kinds of money:

Monthly stipend
Travel and expenses
Flex money (either)

Shane Scott proposed doubling the flex money and travel money, and he wanted it effective IMMEDIATELY. Like, something lit a fire under his butt.

Last time, they went in circles forever, but ultimately landed here:

Travel budget

There’s plenty of travel money already. The total council travel doesn’t go over budget.
Council members can lend each other travel money if one is going over.
If they STILL go over, there can be an extra $15K in a special travel fund that any of them can apply for.
AND, they each get an extra $2K for travel.

Flex budget

Double the Flex amount from $7.5K to $15K.

In other words: right now, a council member earns $24.9K a year, if they choose to take their flex pay as income. This would increase it to $32.4K.

…

The item was put on the consent agenda, which means, “Staff thinks this will sail through.” After all, they hammered out all the votes last time.

Jane said nope! and pulled it off the council agenda. She gives a speech about how none of this is needed, there’s plenty of money in the travel budget. And how we certainly shouldn’t be doing this mid-year.

Amanda agrees on the mid-year part. More responsible to start it with the next fiscal year. She makes that amendment: Delay this until next year’s budget?

The vote: Postpone changes until next year’s budget?

Ok, great.

But then Shane – who started this whole conversation back in December! – says, “Let’s just kill the whole thing, who cares. We don’t need it anymore.”

(This is when I first thought, “What the hell is happening? Was this whole thing a ploy to get some quick money?”)

Jane sees her chance and makes a motion to kill both the travel increase and flex spending increase.

On the flex spending, Amanda pleads, “But why?”

Amanda has been quite open about having to resign her state job to take this position, and the impossibility of surviving on $24.9K per year.

Jane: “We don’t need it. We already raised it in 2023.”

What she means is that before 2023, council members got $23.4K per year, if they took their flex money as pay. They gave themselves a raise of $1500 then.

Amanda: I agree on the travel. But on the living expense, who here – anyone? – can live on this little?”

Jane: “It’s not supposed to be a fulltime job.”

Amanda: “Fully agree. But we both know that it is actually a fulltime job.”

Jane: “For some people it is. Not everybody.”

Amanda: “Oh trust me, I understand that too. And I wish everybody shared full interest.”

Jane: “I do too.”

Amanda: “But again, please tell me, who can survive on this? Would anybody in this room?

Then conversation dies.

…

The key issues is this: Is being a councilmember a fulltime job? We pretend it isn’t, but in order to do it well, it definitely is.

If we pay poverty wages, then council members have three options:

Be independently wealthy or have someone who can support you.
Try not to neglect your council job as you juggle multiple jobs
Live in poverty

This is not how you get the best possible council members. This is how you get mostly wealthy and/or distracted council members.

…

But anyway, then they vote:

The vote: Should Councilmembers survive on $24.9K per year?

So yeah, no raise.

I’m so baffled. Two weeks ago, Shane and Lorenzo both thought it was reasonable to increase flex spending, and now they don’t? What the hell happened?

….

Then they vote to roll back the travel funds increase:

This one doesn’t bother me so much. There is plenty of travel money, if you allow people to donate funds to each other.

Bottom line: After all these meetings, everything is back where it started, aside from a special bonus travel fund.

Clearly I have no idea what happened, but it felt like petty bullshit, to be honest.

….

Item 24: SMCISD stormwater voucher

This is a continuation from last time. (Full backstory here.)

Super quick background:

Statewide, the legislature is intentionally starving the school districts. This is not hyperbole. Abbott is hellbent force-feeding school vouchers down everyone’s throat. He’s denying funding to the public schools is a way of increasing the pressure on the state legislature to vote for his deal.

Funding hasn’t increased since 2019, but there have been several unfunded mandates that cost a lot. Plus inflation.

SMCISD is in a $9 million budget crisis. They’ve asked for the city for a stormwater waiver, which would save them about $350K.

Which brings us to today.

First there’s a presentation about the stormwater fund:

Immediately after San Marcos created the stormwater fund, Texas State University asked the State Legislature to grant them an exemption. They were the very first university in Texas to ask for one! What go-getters.

After that, all the other universities thought it was a pretty good idea.

Here’s the total list of state-wide exemptions:

So basically, empty lots, lakes, universities, and ….El Paso school district. Who knows.

…

The state law says that stormwater fees must be equitable. They go into a fair amount of detail about how we put ours together.

Basically, if we want to help out SMCISD, here are the four options:

Option 1 would cost a lot and open the door to other nonprofits asking for a waiver, too.

Option 2 would cost some, and open the door.

Option 3 might open us up to legal challenges of being non-equitable.

Option 4 is the one that Staff clearly favors. In fact, city staff and SMCISD staff have already met, and they’re both open to this.

Option 4 is about Mendez Elementary. Mendez is located in Sunset Acres, which has terrible flooding. The city wants to build a detention pond on Mendez property, to help with the flooding.

All the council members are on board with pursuing 4.

The only thing is that Mendez Elementary is being renovated. Until SMCISD knows the new footprint of the building, they can’t donate the land.

(Now, SMCISD has already submitted the Mendez plans to the city for permitting. So the city could literally go look right now at the Mendez plans. It’s not a mystery. We can see exactly how much space there might be for a drainage pond.)

…

There’s a long, weirdly circular conversation where Lorenzo and Amanda keep saying, “We should meet occasionally with the school board, just to stay informed on what we’re each up to.”

Jane keeps responding with, “It’s no use. Alyssa and I keep trying to think of a reason that all three entities – city, county, schools – should meet, and it’s very hard to think of issues that need attention from all three groups.”

Ok? That’s a different thing? That’s not what Amanda and Lorenzo are suggesting?

Anyway, they vote for 4.

…

Item 25: Redwood/Rancho Vista

Last time, we discussed this property, immediately north of Redwood and Rancho Vista:

We were trying to figure out if that industrial portion would make flooding worse in Redwood.

Redwood and Rancho Vista have severe septic and flooding issues, which leads to a parasite living in the soil. It’s a big health issue, and it usually only happens in developing countries. But the community is quite poor and vulnerable, so it’s happening here. Any solution is going to be very expensive.

Last time Council tried to have it both ways: “We’ll let this development through, but we promise to take action on Redwood.”

So tonight is that action: A strongly worded letter to Guadalupe County about how the septic issue and parasites is a public health and safety issue, which has been going on for years and years.

Jane suggests that we let them know about the Texas Water Development Board, which has a specific Economically Distressed Areas Program. Maybe Guadalupe County could get some money from there.

City Manager Stephanie Reyes mentions looping in SMCISD – after all, these families go to our schools and are part of our community.

So staff will draw something up, and it will come back.

My two cents: this is fine as a first step, but not as a last step.

Hours 2:50 – 3:56, 3/18/25

March 23, 2025March 23, 2025 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 23: Cape’s Dam

Hooboy, CAPE’S DAM. As you know, this is a whole epic story! Let’s see if we can wade through everything.

Background:

Here’s the part of the river that we’re talking about:

(source)

Cape’s Dam is here:

Damn Dams, and the Damn Dammers who Dam them.

In general, old dams are bad for rivers.

US Fish & Wildlife generally recommends removing them, so does this other American Rivers group, and pretty much any other environmental group.

Back in the 2000s, some folks at the Meadows Center began looking at Cape’s Dam. Would removing it be good for the endangered species?

Eventually they wrote up this report for the city: Effects of changing height of Cape’s Dam on recreation, Texas wild rice and fountain darter habitat in the San Marcos River, Texas.

It is insanely thorough! I can tell that much. They look at three things: fountain darters, Texas wild rice, and recreation. They conclude that removing the dam is good for the fishies, good for the endangered wild rice, and not bad for recreation.

This is their graph on recreation:

The 45 means drought, 100 is normal river, and 173 is after a lot of rain. The bars represent how much of the river is deep enough for you to paddle on. Removing the dam doesn’t really change how much of the river you can paddle down.

In 2014, they reported all this to the Park’s Department. But before they talk to Council, we have…

The 2015 Floods

The 2015 Memorial Day floods come along. A 40 foot wall of water barreled down the Blanco River, 11 people are killed, and tons of homes are flooded.

In the course of all this, Cape’s Dam is destroyed.

Here’s what it looks like afterwards:

(From this video) and from another angle:

(source)

I hunted for awhile, but I can’t find any photos of the dam from before it was destroyed.

…

2016: Council hears all of this for the first time

Now the city is trying to cope with post-disaster San Marcos. They’re assessing damage, applying for disaster funding, and so on. For Cape’s Dam, they’ve now got a liability mess on their hands.

The issue is presented: Should Council remove the dam and fill the Mill Race?

Wait, what’s the Mill Race?

I think it’s this:

It’s this little channel that was built back when this was an actual mill. It’s very calm and smooth because it’s got dams on both sides. I think you get this nice little loop around Thompson’s Island. So there are groups, like the scouts and disabled veterans, who have used this stretch for learning to kayak and rehab and growth.

It’s great for those groups!

But as far as I can tell, this is an amazing stretch that’s been kept hidden from public use. That part irritates me. People living east of I-35 have not been able to enjoy the Mill Race or the rest of the parks on that map very easily.

Back to 2016

As far as I can tell, this is the source of all our problems:

I actually went back and listened – you’re welcome – and here’s the problem: if you remove the dam, the Mill Race won’t have enough water 85%-90% of the time. Mostly it will have stagnant mosquito water, or dry up altogether.

So removing the dam wrecks the Mill Race. You could still canoe and paddle on the real river! Just not the Mill Race part.

…

So it’s 2016, the dam is now dangerous, and Council is given this choice:

Use free money from the Army Corp of Engineers to remove the dam.
- Good for the health of the river!
- Good for the endangered species!
- Can still paddle on the regular half.
Use free money from the Army Corp of Engineers to remove the dam, and then use imaginary millions of dollars that we don’t have to rebuild the dam.
- Imaginary money is not real. We don’t have it.

In March, 2016, Council votes to remove Cape’s dam.

So now the shit hits the fan. Massive controversy.

This organization springs up to save the Mill Race. They have some sympathetic points, but they also make some crappy arguments.

It was in the news a LOT. Like, a whole lot. Like, it’s one of the biggest San Marcos controversies of the decade.

The Argument about Historical Significance:

This is the part I have the least patience for. The argument that takes hold is that Cape’s Dam is so historically significant that we’ve got to save it. For the children! For the historians!

Look: if Cape’s Dam is so sacred, how come I cannot find one single photo of it anywhere, before it was destroyed? Didn’t we love it then?

I do even think there’s interesting history here! What was engineering like a hundred years ago? That’s worth studying.

The part that makes this bullshit is when you use it to say the dam must be preserved, in the river. Want to haul the broken pieces on the bank somewhere? Put up a nice plaque commemorating the dam? Knock yourself out! But don’t pretend that the historical significance means we need a functional dam in 2025.

But this gains traction. Preservation Texas has this blurb about the dam, Hays Historical Commission weighs in, and City Council holds a workshop with the Texas Historical Commision.

Thus begins the next phase of the controversy, 2017-2024:

We begin kicking the can down the road. For the next eight years, everyone just punts. You can read a nice summary of all the dithering here!

Kick, kick, kick. We’re kicking the can. kick, kick, kick.

Two extra details from this part of the timeline:

The free disaster money to remove the dam expires. Now we’d have to apply for grant money. But like I mentioned, lots of organizations want old dams removed, so there’s money around.
In 2017, San Marcos River Foundation acquires the land on one side of the bank. They are a hard NO on rebuilding the dam.

They have always been very clear on their position: it is best for the health of the river to remove the dam. You can’t rebuild the dam unless you can access their side of the river. They will not agree to rebuilding the dam on their land. Therefore there is no dam.

So now, in 2025:

I’m no engineer, but I’m pretty sure this is the choice before us:

Find grant money to remove the dam.
- Good for the health of the river!
- Good for the endangered species!
- Can still paddle on the regular half.
- Current dam is dangerous and needs to be removed. (A recent tragedy.)
Find grant money to remove the dam.
- Then find imaginary millions of dollars more to rebuild the dam
- Find an imaginary way to get SMRF to consent to let us rebuild a dam that they are strongly opposed to.

Look, it’s not actually a choice. No matter what, it starts with removing the dam.

This brings us to Tuesday’s meeting!

The issue at hand is spending $340K on a feasibility study. The study would do this:

So this study is going to answer all our questions:
– What’s the current conditions of the dam and the whole area?
– What would it take to rebuild it? Or partially re-build it? Or just remove it?
– What’s the environmental situation? What’s the permitting process?
– Do a bunch of public outreach and get public feedback.

….

What does Council say?

There are a few things to keep in mind during the Council discussion.

We need the feasibility study, no matter what. Every outcome requires permits. You need this study to get those permits.
The east side of San Marcos has been majorly neglected for river recreation. We need to develop this. Not necessarily the Mill Race – the public couldn’t access this anyway. They definitely deserve good river access and recreation.

Most likely, you have to remove the dam, no matter what. (I’m no engineer, but look, it’s a pile of rubble.)

Council has a lot of confusion. This is understandable – it’s a big, complicated topic. But you’ve already read 1000 words on this, and trust me, you don’t want to read about them going in circles. There are a LOT of circles, and they go round and round.

Some highlights:

Q: Can we skip the study and just put the money towards re-building? (Shane)
A: No. You need it to get permits and apply for grant funding. Plus the re-building would be way more than $340K.

Saul Gonzales is quite clear-headed about keeping safety front-and-center in the conversation. Everyone is focused on this, but Saul is the one who repeatedly mentions it.

Q: What about liability, should someone get injured?
A: Yes, we are exposed. This is a man-made thing in a public space, and we’re supposed to be in charge of it, even though the state owns the river. SMRF would maybe have some liability in court, and parks get a little immunity for being outdoors, but this is not a natural outdoorsy thing. It’s a big risk.

Q: Aren’t we partnering with the county on all this?
A: Sort of, yes. They’re interested in rebuilding. Or they were, in 2021, when we last talked with them about this.

Several councilmembers point out: The east side needs some good river access!

I agree with that!

Shane, Jane, Matthew, Lorenzo, and Alyssa are all open to rebuilding the dam. They seem to be thinking that this is the way to support river access on the east side. They’re wrong about this, but it’s sympathetic.

Saul’s position: “I’d like us to make this safe, as quickly as possible. Let’s start with taking it out, and see if everyone likes it. After that, if everyone wants a dam, we can rebuild the dam.”

Amanda’s position: “Rip it out and let the river flow. Then create recreation on the East Side.”

This aligns most closely with my beliefs.

…

Jane and Amanda go off on a tangent about getting public input first. Now, the folks doing the feasibility study are already supposed to get a bunch of public input. And it’s a LOT:

But Jane and Amanda are proposing that the city get a bunch of public input, before the folks in the study get a bunch of input.

Look: No. That is just more kicking-the-can down the road.

Alyssa makes the exact right point here: “We have engaged with the public for YEARS. EVERYONE has an opinion. I know what the results will be.”

That is correct.

….

There’s discussion of partial rebuilds. Can the proposal consider that?
Answer: Yes. It’s in there.

Jane says: The main problem is that the Mill Race needs more water. Can we fill it with reclaimed water?
Answer: Uhhhhhhh…. you’re freaking us out. You want to release sewage into the Mill Race?

Jane: it’s treated, not raw sewage, and it gets released to the river downstream. So why not release it upstream?
Answer: We’re feeling woozy just trying to imagine the permitting process involved in releasing reclaimed water into a recreation area. Oh god.

I admire Jane’s problem-solving ambitions!

…

Bottom line: The study should take about 10 months. Then we will have a lot more information!

My belief is that the dam should go, and we should focus on creating recreation access for the public on the East Side. The mill race has always been treated as a fancy, restricted portion of the river, and the exclusiveness is bullshit.

…

If you’re curious:

Here’s a great read from 2000, from an old-timer named Tom Goynes, who has been paddling the river since the 1970s.

And here’s someone’s video, showing what it looks like to kayak through all this stuff we’re talking about:

It’s pretty amazing and beautiful.

Hours 0:00 – 2:16, 3/6/25

March 9, 2025March 23, 2025 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Three topics came up:

Malachi Williams:
Redwood and Riverbend Ranch
Speedbumps in Trace Development

Let’s take these one at a time.

Malachi Williams: his mother and sister both spoke about their loss. They will continue to fight for justice.

It’s always particularly heartbreaking to hear from the family, and it’s worth being grateful that they have not shied away from speaking on his behalf.

2. Redwood/Rancho Vista and Riverbend Ranch:

Basically, Riverbend Ranch will be a gigantic development that is immediately uphill from Redwood. The development agreement was approved in 2021.

Now, Redwood has huge problems with septic and flooding. Today the developers want to change up the agreement, in ways that might increase the flooding.

The two speakers are Veronica Reyes Ibarra and Monica Reyes Ibarra. Veronica is the president of both the Redwood/Rancho Vista Neighborhood Association and Water Supply Corporation, and Monica is a former resident and advisor to the organizations. They are both advocating on behalf of their community. They both explained about the flooding and challenges to Redwood/Rancho Vista, and the consequences on the people who live there.

We’ll unpack all of the details in Item 17!

Speedbumps in Trace:

Rodriguez Elementary is here:

in the middle of Trace subdivision.

The speaker wants speedbumps on Van Horn and Esplanade, due to people tearing through the main road at unsafe speeds:

I can imagine that – it feels like a nice, big wide expressway:

Ok, that is a terrible photo. In reality, it has trees and houses and people living there.

(I got that photo is from Bing maps and it is obviously very outdated, but Google maps is even worse:

But I didn’t have a chance to go photograph it in person. Oh well.)

Anyway: yes. Speed bumps are probably a good idea.

…

Item 1: HUD grant money

We get federal grant money from HUD , (the department of Housing and Urban Development). Some of these grants we get regularly, and others we’d apply for if we have another flood or natural disaster.

HUD grants require a few things:

A citizen participation plan
A five year consolidated plan

So we’re updating these.

The Citizen Participation Plan:

HUD requires you to have a plan on how citizens will be able to participate in the decision-making process for how the grant will be used. You have to update it every five years.

Here’s ours:

No one has any questions or concerns about this.

…

The Five Year Consolidated Plan:

This is a little more in-depth. Basically we need to pick some broad categories to prioritize.

Background

We generally get about $700K each year in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) money.

HUD puts some rules on it:

During the past 5 years, these were our priority categories:

And here’s what we accomplished over the past five years with the CDBG money:

…

So what do we want to prioritize for the next five years?

Here’s what HUD directs us to do:

Staff held surveys and open houses to get public opinion.

Survey results:

Feedback ranked along themes:

Based on all that, here’s what staff recommends that our priorities should be:

…

So what does Council think?

Amanda: What about sidewalks? Can we include sidewalk projects?
Answer: They’re generally too expensive, but the gap sidewalk program has smaller, cheaper projects that are a good fit.

Alyssa: What kind of survey response numbers did we get?
Answer: 86 online, and then in the 7 dream sessions we got another 50 responses.

Alyssa: Transit is clearly a big response. Can we include that as a priority?
Answer: It is included under Public Services.

The city also gives out grants to nonprofits, under the Human Services Advisory Board, or HSAB.

Jane: Can we merge the application process of CDBG and HSAB?
Answer: We’re going to align the applications in 2026, but we still have separate committees looking at the applications.

There’s some discussion of workforce skills and economic development. ACC offers HVAC courses at the library, for example, and Community Action picks up the tab using CDBG money.

Everyone is on board with these two plans.

…

Item 15: Summer Fun! And other fun.

We’re updating our Youth Programs Standards of Care for 2025. This means Summer Fun and Discovery Camp and any other kid-things that the city runs.

What is Summer Fun?

It’s a weeklong summer camp held for 8 sessions during the summer. The biggest point is that it is extremely affordable – $40 per week for city residents, including breakfast and lunch – and so it’s a real service to families who need affordable childcare. It’s hosted at different SMCISD campuses each year.

Before Covid, Summer Fun had 300 kids per week, across two different campuses. It dropped dramatically during Covid, and now we’re somewhat back, up to 120 kids per week. There’s usually a waitlist of about 50-60 kids each week, but we’re short on staffing.

There are a few questions about scholarships and residency and growing the program.

scholarships are available for anyone in SMCISD, even if you’re out of the city
City residents get priority registration, so it’s been filled with just city residents for the past few years.
They would like to grow the program and serve more families, yes.

The city also runs a discovery camp, and a spring break camp, and other helpful camps.

(The vote for the Standards of Care is 7-0.)

…

Item 17: Rancho Vista/Redwood, and Riverbend Ranch

This one is big and tricky.

Backstory:

Riverbend Ranch is an enormous piece of land that kind of wants to be its own town. It is just north of Redwood:

It’s not built yet, though.

We approved a development agreement with them back in December 2021. (This was when I was practice-blogging, and had not yet gone public. I did write up the meeting, but did not notice the importance of this item.)

…

Keep in mind: Back in 2021, development agreements did not trigger any notifications. So no one in Redwood would have been notified about this development.

This changed after SMART/Axis blew up in 2023. Now they notify people within 400 feet about an upcoming development agreement.

That’s better, but still not much. The notification radius should be proportional to the size of the development.

…

So as far as I know, no one noticed this massive tract of land was being discussed.

Just for funsies, here’s how the original vote went, back in 2021:

Yes, this looks AWESOME: Jane, Shane, Saul, and Mark Gleason and Jude Prather
No, this seems terrible: Alyssa, Max Baker

Mm-hmm.

Redwood/Rancho Vista

Just south – and downhill! – of Riverbend Ranch is the Redwood/Rancho Vista community. They’re part of SMCISD and the greater San Marcos community, but they’re also kinda their own community. The Guadalupe-Hays county line runs right between Riverbend Ranch and Redwood.

Back in 2017, a study by UT-Austin uncovered widespread parasitic infections in the residents. This is due to septic problems and flooding. The soil is terrible for septic systems, so they break down and leak almost immediately. Anything that increases flooding risks will expose this vulnerable community to more adverse health effects.

Since then, the two speakers – Veronica Reyes Ibarra and Monica Reyes Ibarra – have mobilized the community around solving the septic, flooding, and parasite issues. The three issues are all intertwined, and all expensive to fix. (Veronica is the president of both the neighborhood association and Redwood/Rancho Vista water supply corporation.)

…

In August 2022, the development agreement came back for amendments. This time I noticed. They wanted a variance for a 30 foot cut-and-fill.

What’s cut-and-fill? I drew you some pictures!

Suppose you’re trying to develop along a hill:

Now, you can’t put a foundation on a slope – you have to level it out:

(I’m sorry. I wasted a lot of time doing this.)

So this is cut-and-fill:

Developers love this because now you can fit a lot of houses, or one big industrial building:

But now you’ve destroyed the natural drainage patterns, and this is going to make flooding much worse.

So the city code requires you to take little steps, like this:

You can’t fit as many houses though:

and you definitely can’t put a giant industrial warehouse on it anymore.

Back in 2022 at least, that was exactly what the developer wanted to do:

This went to P&Z.

There was a huge outcry from the residents of Rancho Vista/Redwood. About 30 residents wrote letters, and more showed up in person, to talk about the flooding and drainage issues and health consequences.

P&Z turned the cut-and-fill down.

Then it went to Council. Council did not vote on it, but instead formed a subcommittee in January 2023. Matthew, Saul, and Alyssa are all on it.

Then two years passed? I’m not sure why?

Which brings us to the present moment

They want a bunch of amendments, but specifically they want the cut and fill. No one mentions if this is for an industrial portion anymore. (Sure do hope it’s not another AI Data Center!)

Here’s the deal they hammered out with staff:

So this is the question that’s before Council: Can they have their cut-and-fill if they agree to do all these other nice things?

….

What does Council say?

Matthew: It is shameful that Guadalupe County isn’t helping our neighbors! I dream of annexation! I am a simple man, and I like retention ponds. They’re a visual indicator that storm water is being detained. Can we have more of those?

(I’m really not trying to mock Matthew here – these are quotes! He literally said “I am a simple man!” Council members are just endearing goofballs sometimes.)

Answer: They’re going to have retention ponds. Those were already in the development agreement.

Matthew: But can we have more?

Answer: No? They’ll be there? Look at this map, there’s a lot of them:

It’s hard to see, but I believe it’s the two red hatchmark regions, on the left and lower right parts of the pond?

….

Jane is arguing hard for the deal. She keeps hammering the angle that if there were no development agreement, there’d be no protections at all. Therefore this is better than the alternative.

I am not so sure. Big cut-and-fill is generally banned for a reason. Jane doesn’t seem to be taking that into account – she’s only arguing that the mitigation strategies are great.

Shane comes out against the deal. “It’s like the Woods all over again. 15% increased retention is barely anything.”

Staff: They’ll divert the water and release it downstream of Redwood/Rancho Vista

Shane: Doesn’t matter. 15% is barely anything.

(I’m inclined to agree.)

Saul is worried about the parasites and the flooding. It floods really badly there.

Staff explains a bit: the soil is really bad for septic systems. They basically break very quickly and release sewage into the soil. The parasite lives in the sewage in the soil.

Several council members ask: Can Redwood be annexed and brought onto city sewage?

Answer: Redwood/Rancho Vista might not want this? Every home owner would have to individually request annexation. Annexation comes with lots of taxes and fees. Just the sewer would require connection fees and stormwater fees and other things. It’s not likely that Redwood would reach consensus on this.

Staff: The advantage of this development is that it will at least bring a sewer line much closer to Redwood.

Q: What’s all this about a M.U.D.?

Answer: M.U.D. stands for Municipal Utility District. This is like a city-lite. They charge taxes and have a board. They run utilities for people that live in the M.U.D, but they don’t do all the rest of the city government stuff.

(If you are curious about the insanity of the Cedar Park M.U.D, enjoy this blog which is their version of The San Marxist. Things are pretty bonkers.)

City Manager Stephanie Reyes weighs in with the following, which is worth quoting:

“That’s the hard part with a lot of decisions Council is faced with. Because, sometimes, it will look like you’re supporting a certain development, and a lot of times, it’s not about supporting the development – it’s about supporting the regulations on the development, that you would not otherwise have if you did not vote a certain way.

So that is something to contemplate, and it’s not lost on us that that is a very heavy decision… Some of the things can be developed by right, so even if you don’t vote for it, it’s still going to happen, but you lose the negotiating power to make some of these concessions and negotiations happen.”

So basically, no one likes this development any more, but we can’t stop it. (Well, I think Jane still likes it.)

…

Here’s my read: City staff and Jane Hughson are absolutely convinced of two things:

The benefits of the improvements outweigh the risks of cut-and-fill.
They will definitely develop the property anyway, if the cut-and-fill is denied.

The rest of council has to decide if they agree on those two things. Everyone feels very uneasy voting yes but also uneasy about voting no.

I will say this: Council seemed genuinely concerned about the residents of Redwood.

Jane makes one last point: This is a big environmental win, because they wanted to build a package plant, and we got them to agree to a lift station instead.

What this means is that the developer wanted to install a cheap little sewage treatment station that would then release to the river. This means it would have higher levels of phosphorous and lead to more algae blooms and other bad river outcomes. Also, package plants are not staffed, so it takes longer to notice when something malfunctions and it starts dumping untreated waste into the river.

Instead, we’ve gotten them to agree to a lift station, which brings the sewage back to San Marcos, to a higher quality treatment plant. So this is good!

(This win is independent of the welfare of the people in Redwood, though.)

The final point is that the Redwood parasite is already a problem that needs dire attention. And ultimately, Redwood is not in either San Marcos or in Hays County – it’s in Guadalupe County, which we have no jurisdiction over.

What Council decides is that they’ll to bring the issue of Redwood septics and flooding back, at a future meeting. They will discuss a resolution to send to Guadalupe County, to try to somehow get them to take action on the issue.

The vote:

Yes: Jane, Matthew, Alyssa, Saul, Amanda, Lorenzo

No: Shane Scott

My take: This is a really hard one.

I’m not convinced that the mitigation strategies will outweigh the cut-and-fill risks, but I’m also not convinced that they won’t?
The package plant thing seems like a win
Passing a resolution to get Guadalupe County to help Redwood seems likely to be empty, but maybe Council will be more persistent than that.

I felt like the current Council is sincere in their desire to help the residents of Redwood, but it’s not obvious how they should do that. It will require sustained attention and energy to help the residents out.

Hours 2:16 – 4:28, 3/4/25

March 9, 2025March 23, 2025 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 19: SMCISD is broke.

Backstory:

For the past few years, the state has been strangling the school districts out of funds, in order to get legislatures to approve Abbott’s vouchers plan. In other words, back in 2019, we received $6,160 per student. It has not been raised since. With inflation alone, it should be $7,774.18 per student now. (And since Uvalde, there’s been a massive increase in unfunded, mandatory safety measures.)

SMCISD is looking at a $4-5 million budget shortfall.

I’m sorry. I need to stop and shout for a second.

This is a huge, wealthy state with budget surpluses! We had a $32 billion surplus in 2023 and a $24 billion surplus in 2025. There is plenty of money.

The reason that funding has been frozen is that Abbott is holding the public schools hostage. He wants a school voucher program. He didn’t get it in 2023, and so public schools were punished.

Furthermore! (My god, I’m going to hyperventilate.) FURTHERMORE!

Here’s Abbott’s voucher proposal: Increase per student funding from $6160 to $6380 at public schools, while private schools get $10,000 per kid from the state, plus whatever additional tuition above that. Everybody got that? Private schools – schools that can turn away kids with disabilities, kids with trauma, kids with behavior problems, and any other kid requiring extra TLC – get a lot more money per student than public schools.

How much money will SMCISD lose if this passes? There’s a handy website here!

And what does it say?

Let’s be super clear: the villains in this whole story are Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, and the state legislature.

…

Okay, so even before the vouchers scam passes, SMCISD is looking at a $4-5 million shortfall.

This is already going to make San Marcos kids lives harder. Teachers who love them to bits are going to lose their jobs. It’s very real and it’s very awful.

In this context, SMCISD spends $372K on stormwater drainage fees to the city every year. They’re asking for a waiver from the city.

What’s the city side of the equation?

The stormwater fund is $9 million. Stormwater money gets used on two things: big drainage projects and yearly maintenance. But the big projects are covered by debts, and so we’re obligated to keep making payments.

Giving SMCISD this waiver would cut yearly maintenance by 40%. Drains wouldn’t be inspected for clogs, ditches wouldn’t have debris removed, etc. Flooding would get worse.

Do other cities exempt ISDs from stormwater money?

Some do: Austin, San Antonio, and Round Rock all do.
Some don’t: Seguin, New Braunfels, and Kyle all do not.

Remember how I said the state is the villain in this? They strike again! State buildings, federal buildings, schools, nonprofits: everyone pays stormwater fees, and your rate is based on how big your footprint is. More impervious cover means a higher stormwater fee.

But! There’s a specific state law that carves out public universities, and only public universities. So Texas State University has paved the top of San Marcos, and yet does not contribute towards the cost of the flooding, caused when it inevitably all rolls downhill.

(Sometimes I marvel at what this state could be like, if we weren’t constantly suffering from self-inflicted wounds. Stop voting for pricks, everyone.)(I am aware that readers of this site probably didn’t vote for Abbott.)

What does Council say?

First off, there’s no decision tonight. This is just testing the waters – would Council like to have a formal discussion next time?

Lorenzo: Can we look at a 2 year waiver instead of an indefinite waiver?
And can we look at a middle option – some kind of discounted rate tier for SMCISD that’s outside of residential and commercial?

Alyssa: SMCISD fills big gaps in our service. They’re the ones that take care of Redwood, for example. Let’s consider this.

Matthew Mendoza: I’m angry on behalf of Sunset Acres. We’re trying to fix the drainage there, and SMCISD is holding it hostage.

Note: here’s my understanding of what Matthew means:

In November 2022, we took a big look at the flooding in Sunset Acres. It’s really, really bad.

We came up with a semi-fast track solution to get it fixed. The fastest part of the solution hinges on enlarging a detention pond at Mendez Elementary.

The city made two offers SMCISD, in exchange for the easement – about $350K for the land, or a credit for stormwater fees. (Pretty similar to what they’re asking us for, now!)

SMCISD was interested and started to work with us. But then they realized they needed to renovate Mendez. Currently, they’re waiting on permits. Once they can see how big the footprint of the new Mendez will be, then they’ll come back and talk with us about the drainage pond.

So the “quick” solution to fix the flooding has now become yet another holding pattern, going on three years now. The neighborhood was already pessimistic about the city fixing anything, and this kind of thing makes it worse.

Amanda makes a few different points:
– I would entertain two years, but definitely not in perpetuity.
– The Texas Legislature is going to suck just as much in two years as they do now. I need to see what other cuts the school district is making, in order to balance its books on the other $4 million.
– Lots of neighborhoods have lost faith in the city to fix their flooding problems. This money is for those projects.
– If our rationale is that SMCISD covers gaps in our services, then this opens the door for every nonprofit to ask for a waiver as well. We need to be really careful with our precedents.

Jane: I don’t think we should even bring it back for discussion. But enough of you have said yes already. Definitely not just 2 years, because we’ll forget to enforce it.

So this will come back.

The most important thing to understand is that the state of Texas is the only villain here.

…

Item 22: Councilmember compensation:

(Discussed last time.) Councilmembers get three kinds of funding:

Regular (measly) paycheck
Travel and expenses (you have to submit receipts)
Flex money (you choose whether to take it as income or use it for expenses)

Right now, here’s what everyone gets:

So this is Shane Scott’s proposal, and he wants to double the travel and flex spending amounts.

Jane’s got amendments! “First,” she says, “We don’t need this. We’re not running out of travel funds. Some of us go over, some of us go under. We just need to lend each other our un-used amounts.”

Here’s what she means:

So $13,500 is the mayor last year, and $7,500 is each of the council members. (Jude is the $15K, because it includes his flex spending. He worked for the county, so he couldn’t accept a city paycheck.)

So you can see: some went over, some went under, but the total was $51,810, which was under budget.

Great! There’s no problem!

Here come the amendments

Jane Amendment 1: Keep the Flex money at $7,500, instead of doubling it to $15K.

The vote:

Keep at $7,500: Jane, Matthew, Saul
Double to $15K: Alyssa, Shane, Lorenzo, Amanda

So this fails.

…

Jane Amendment 2: Keep the Travel money at $7,500, instead of doubling it to $15K.

The vote:

Keep at $7,500: Jane, Matthew, Saul, Amanda
Double to $15K: Alyssa, Shane, Lorenzo

So this passes.

…

So now we’re looking at doubling the flex spending and leaving travel alone.

At this point, Alyssa balks at this piece-meal approach. She wants to go back and retract her yes vote for the Flex money, and instead double the Travel money.

There’s a lot of confusion around this. Flex money can be used for Travel, so why does it matter? There’s a lot of arguing about what’s easier, and whether the flexibility of Flex Money is too complicated. Ultimately there are not enough votes to reconsider the motion, so it stands.

…

Next: Shane amendment: Okay, just increase Travel money by $2K, then.

Keep at $7,500: Jane, Matthew, Saul
Increase to $9,500: Alyssa, Shane, Lorenzo, Amanda

So this passes.

…

Jane amendment 3: If you want to borrow travel money from another councilmember, you have to get council approval at a meeting:

Yes: Amanda, Jane, Matthew
No: Saul, Alyssa, Shane, Lorenzo

So this fails. Councilmembers can just lend each other money, and notify the finance committee accordingly.

…

Next: it turns out there’s a special travel fund that everyone’s forgotten about. It used to have $25K in it, for council members who went over budget. We let it drop during Covid, when no one was traveling, so now it has $5K in it.

Jane amendment 4: Increase the special travel fund to $15K, but you have to get council approval at a meeting.

Everyone is fine with this. The vote is 7-0.

…

The final vote on the whole thing:

Yes: Everyone but Matthew Mendoza
No: Matthew Mendoza

So Council members will now get:

$17,400 paycheck
$15,000 flex spending
$9,500 travel and exspenses

I am fine with this. You want your council to be able to learn about governance and write good policy. They need time and resources to be good at their jobs.

(No one brought up an amendment about waiting for the next budget cycle. So it goes into effect mid-budget, immediately.)

…

Item 23: Delinquent Apartment Complexses

This is actually great governance in action.

Generally speaking, if you don’t pay your utility bill, your water/electric/etc gets disconnected. But what if you live in an apartment complex, and you pay a flat rate to your landlord, and the landlord doesn’t pay the utility bill? Do we really want to disconnect the electricity on a bunch of renters who didn’t cause the problem?

No, we don’t! So let’s not do that.

Instead we’ll put a municipal utility lien on the property. So only the owner gets affected, and not the tenants.

Everyone likes this. 7-0.

…

Finally there are some various appointments to various boards, and futzing with small rules to some boards and commissions.

This was a very, very long meeting, and there’s still a 3 hour workshop to go, so maybe let’s stop here.

Hours 0:00 – 2:03, 2/18/24

February 23, 2025March 1, 2025 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment

Two topics today:

Nine people spoke about Malachi Williams.
Three people talked about the Data Center that might come to town.

I’ll save the Data Center comments for when we get to that item, and just focus on the Malachi Williams speakers here.

Backstory: Malachi Williams was a 22 year old who was killed by an SMPD officer last April. It was reported that he was carrying knives. Two officers started to detain him at the convenience store on Cheatham and Hopkins. (He was not holding the knives at that point.) He took off running. They chased him over to HEB, and then shot and killed him in pursuit.

Since last April, a number of activists and family members have been pursuing justice for Malachi, and fighting for a fair process for the family and some kind of consequence for the cops.

Last August, a grand jury decided not to press charges against the officer. That basically brings us up to the present day.

Why now? There was an event recently hosted by Malachi’s family. From what I gather, attendees were able to view some bystander footage for the first time.

The focus today is on inconsistencies between what Chief Standridge and SMPD have claimed, and what actually happened last April.

The biggest problem:

Chief Standridge has been asserting that a fire marshall was there and able to administer first aid in under a minute. Officers are trained in first aid, but they didn’t need to jump in, because the fire marshal is a certified paramedic.

The speakers say that is definitely not what the videos show.

Here’s what the speakers describe: Malachi doesn’t get first aid for about three minutes. During that time, SMPD got mad at him for not putting his hands behind his back. They rolled him around, so they could handcuff him. They checked his pockets. In fact, when first responders did arrive, they had to ask the cops to take the handcuffs off the guy they’d shot, who was bleeding out.

Malachi’s grandfather

I’ve mentioned before what a compelling speaker he is. In his measured way, he asks council, “Think. If what we’re hearing today is true, are you disgusted? Can I get a show of hands, please?” – and he puts his own hand up – “If we’re telling the truth, if we’re telling the truth, are you disgusted?”

Here’s who raises their hands:

That would be Amanda Rodriguez on the left, with both hands up, Alyssa Garza in pink, and Lorenzo Gonzalez on the right. (I will say that so far, Lorenzo Gonzalez is proving to be a good council member. I don’t have any complaints.)

Jane, Saul, Matthew, and Shane refuse to go along with the requested show of sympathy. (Is it performative? Sure, but I also think they genuinely just might not care.)

….

Now for an abrupt change in tone:

5. Fireworks! We put on a fireworks show every 4th of July.

The amount we spend fluctuates from year to year:

This is because some years we get donations, and other years we don’t:

For the record, it’s always a 20 minute show. As they put it, “The more donations we get, the bigger the booms.”

Jane Hughson wants to know why we have to keep making the shows bigger. If donations come in, can’t it just free up some city money that we could send over to the parks department?

Answer: People complain when it’s big one year and smaller the next.

Me personally: I’m with Jane here. I’m having a hard time caring about the size of the fireworks. I’d rather use the donations for fireworks, and free up some money for the parks department.

But then again, I’m a grouchy old tree stump. If other people care, who am I to harsh their mellow?

…

Item 10: Data Centers!

You may have seen this KXAN article, “A new AI data center is coming to San Marcos“?

This isn’t that. In fact, there’s a lot of confusion about what that article exactly is about! We’ll try to unpack it all here.

So if this isn’t that, what is this?

First off, it’s way down here:

(We’ve actually seen this property before, back in August 2nd, 2022. They wanted to put houses out there. I thought it sounded like a super terrible idea!)

Here’s a close-up of that property:

See that funny little yellow square? That’s an old cemetery. Access to the cemetery will be preserved.

Listen: I have some extremely boring confusion regarding this cemetery. I’m sticking it at the end of this page, because it’s truly too weedy to bore you with. This way you can opt out from the dumbest of my dumb shit.

What’s a data center?

Basically a giant computer that takes up an entire building, where AI can perform its massive amount of computations. So there are very few people working here, besides security and some technicians to monitor it.

What are the pros and cons?

The pros:

This is in the middle of nowhere, next to a giant power station.
The city is not going to have to spend much on infrastructure or maintenance.
The city should see some revenue from property taxes.

The cons:

Data centers take a massive amount of water.
Data centers use a massive amount of electricity.

This particular project would not be on city water or electric. They’d use Crystal Clear Water and Pedernales Electric for power. (They’d be on San Marcos wastewater, though.)

Here’s the thing: Crystal Clear Water draws from ARWA, just like we do. It might not be city water, but it’s the same underlying water table, either way.

Can this be done responsibly? Maybe!

Water is the biggest problem. The water is needed to cool the data center, because computers generate a lot of heat, which would then make them overheat and shut down otherwise.

The land-owner says that this will be a closed-loop water cooling system, which means less will be lost to evaporation. Matthew Mendoza says Google developed this technology 8 years ago. (I don’t know if this is the same as this technology, which only rolled out last year, but maybe.)

It’s great to implement the latest water-saving technology! But if quantities are still way too big, it doesn’t help you much.

Bottom line: We can’t make an informed decision unless we have a concrete gallon amount of potable water usage.

How much water does a data center use? This says an average estimate is 550K gallons per day for a hyperscale data center. (I’m pretty sure AI means a hyperscale data center). This closed-loop Microsoft system coming next year is claiming to only use 99.5K gallons per day. So we’ll probably be somewhere between those two estimates.

How much water do we have? According to the presentation in January, our current capacity is 4.8 million gallons per day.

NOTE: They would be using 550K gallons of Crystal Clear Water, not San Marcos water! But I couldn’t find a total capacity for CCW, so I just used San Marcos as a reference point. Both draw on the same underlying water table, so it’s best to still think about water conservation.

Can data centers use reclaimed water? Maybe!

This link says yes, they can, but if the water quality is bad enough, it causes corrosion and microbial growth and other problems.

We do actually have a reclaimed water line that goes very close to there. What’s the quality of the reclaimed water in that pipe? Could they use it?

I think this is the most essential question to answer.

Energy usage: Honestly, this is probably less of a concern than the water. Texas may have a shitty grid system, but we have a fairly healthy renewable energy supply, mostly because of all those windfarms out west. This is a great state for both wind and solar energy, if we’d only stop electing such counterproductive leaders.

On energy, there is something called ASHRAE guidelines for data centers:

So maybe we could ask them to achieve that.

Do we have any leverage?

Sort of! This is a tricky thing to answer.

First, they’re not asking for tax cuts. If they were, we could come back with all kinds of environmental restrictions. But they aren’t.

Second, they’re asking for a Preferred Scenario Amendment and a rezoning. There are rules around how cities make these decisions. You’re not allowed to base it on one specific project. You have to approve or deny based on all the allowed uses, and whether you like the location or not. And specifically, you can’t attach any requirements to these.

You might be able to require a Planned Development District, but I don’t know if water usage is an allowable reason to trigger one.

My opinion: If we can get them to agree to reclaimed water, then we should do this. Otherwise they’ll find another location that still uses the same water source, but isn’t within San Marcos jurisdiction.

I think many data centers will get built in Central Texas, no matter what. I would like them to be as tightly regulated as possible.

Note to Council: An ordinance requiring future data centers to be on reclaimed water might be handy to have!

…

What do citizen comments say?

Let’s go back to the beginning of the meeting. During citizen comment, one speaker had a list of extremely great questions:

What is the current noise ordinance for Light Industrial, within the city of San Marcos?
Will Dark Sky Lighting be considered for all outdoor buildings?
What will the setbacks be for both Francis Harris Road and the private Grant Harris Road?
Do we have a general idea of the size of the buildings?
What will be the estimated daily water usage?
Will it be public drinking water?
Will any measures be taken to lessen the impact of the large amount of impervious cover?
Cloudburst has stated on their website that this site will be part of their flagship data center in central Texas, and plans to aggressively grow its data center network. With a large amount of open farmland around the proposed site, should we expect further development from this company?
Since Cloudburst has already signed a longterm contract with Energy Transfer, the power plant already located on Francis Harris Lane, and KXAN reported on February 13th an AI data center is coming to San Marcos, should we assume decisions to change zoning and city limit boundaries are already confirmed?
Will Cloudburst be responsible for answering any of these questions or have to provide plans for the development, prior to the zoning change and incorporation into the city?

The very next speaker happened to be the land owner. His major points:

I’m working with the Data Center company to answer those questions above. The previous speaker submitted the questions to us in writing, after the P&Z meeting.
We have confirmed that the Data Center uses a closed loop water system. We are still working to quantify the amount of water lost to evaporation.
Hey look, we’re not going to put much wear and tear on the roads, at least!
And the biggie: We have no affiliation with Cloudburst or Energy Transfer. That is not us. The first time I ever heard of them is when that KXAN article came out.

What does Council say?

What the hell is going on with the KXAN article about Cloudburst?!

No one knows. The owner swears up and down that he’s never heard of Cloudburst until that article came out, and has no idea what’s going on.

Amanda Rodriguez has headed over to the Cloudburst website, and they have the same exact timeline posted as this project:

Are there two projects?

City staff says that it’s extremely unlikely a project of this size would operate on stealth-mode like this. Companies tend to reach out to either the city for permits, or to the Economic Development Partnership to find out more about working in the area, or whatever.

The city manager Stephanie Reyes does also say that the city has gotten approached by multiple companies about data centers. But no one else has an active application in progress.

Basically: no one knows what’s up with Cloud Center and they’re going to follow up.

….

What next? Tonight was just informational. This is going to drag out all the way to April:

So there was no vote today. Stay tuned.

…

Item 11: Council members don’t get paid much.

Shane Scott wants to double the travel budget and increase the stipend that council members get.

First off: yes, we should pay our council more. If you don’t pay your council enough, then you only get council members who are either independently wealthy, or who are willing to live in poverty in order to serve in council. That’s not a recipe for healthy representation.

Second: yes, we should increase their travel budget. Inflation has made expenses go up. We want council members to attend conferences and gain expertise, and make connections. That’s how you get stronger representation.

However, this is Shane Scott’s proposal, so it comes with a whiff of ridiculousness.

Like at 1:18:30:

Shane: “At these conferences that I go to, I even get AWARDS for doing all the classes and stuff.”

Alyssa in the background: “he does, it’s so good.”

Jane: “I don’t really care about the awards. What value have you brought back to this council?”

Shane: “If I were to pass all the writing and stuff that I’ve learned before, I’d have a whoooole book of stuff that I’ve provided to council about doing stuff.”

I am dying to know more about these awards he’s winning for participation.

That’s my blogger dream, that Shane has a whole trophy case of these things.

Back to the proposal

The total increase of his proposal is $90K.

One ridiculous thing he’s doing is saying that he wants to increase amounts halfway through this year, instead of just waiting and budgeting the increases into next year’s budget. So city staff had to scramble to figure out where to cut $45K from, in case Council approves Shane’s proposal.

The city manager was not enthusiastic at all about this, back in December, but she managed to find $45K by raiding two budgets, one called “Council- related” and the other is a Contingency fund, for when projects go over their budget.

…

Here’s how much more money Council members would get, under this proposal:

“Expenses Elected” means your travel budget. This is anything where you have to provide receipts for what you did. So Shane wants to double everyone’s travel budget.

“Compensation” isn’t changing, but “Additional Expenses” is being doubled. “Additional Expenses” is basically extra compensation. Councilmembers take it as a monthly lump sum for expenses where they don’t have to provide receipts.

Why not combine “Compensation” and “Additional Expenses”? Just call it all compensation?

There’s actually a good reason: you can’t collect two paychecks from the government. So if you work for the university, or the county, or the state, you can’t collect “Compensation”. You can still collect “Additional Expenses” though – this is what Jude Prather did, since he works for the county.

Amanda is horrified to learn this – “You mean I could have kept my job?! I took a huge paycut to accept this position. I’m struggling. I live with my mom, y’all.”

I’m kind of infuriated on her behalf: there was a better path available and she wasn’t informed??

Other council comments:

Alyssa: Our community members treat us as though we’re fulltime and have staff. Other cities pay their councilmembers to be fulltime, with staff, and they also slice their cities into districts so that you’re not answering to as many people.

Jane: Austin and Dallas pay their councilmembers fulltime and give them staff. Not Kyle, Buda, or New Braunfels. They pay zero.

Note: remember, paying $0 is strategic. If you require someone to work for free, only wealthy people can do the work. That’s not aspirational.

In the end, they move to postpone this. Everyone’s going to come back with amendments and chop it up.

…

Ok, back to the cemetery: The owner of the larger land does not own the cemetery. By state law, he will preserve access to that cemetery. At P&Z, Michele Burleson said she appreciates that – she was just there last weekend.

The owner also says, “Last time, there was some concern about the placement of the fence along the cemetery. So we did a fancy x-ray type survey. No folks beyond the perimeter of the cemetery!”

That’s reassuring! Also I remember that exact conversation. It’s here. But that’s not the same property!!

Here’s the property from the cemetery conversation:

That’s a different cemetery altogether:

Everyone is remembering a conversation about the San Pedro Cemetery, not this one! So what cemetery is in the middle of this current patch of land? I think I found it, in this list of all the cemeteries in Hays County.

I think it must be the one called York Creek Cemetery. From that link:

Those directions put it squarely in the middle of today’s project, but they also don’t make it sound like a very active cemetery that people are visiting often.

[Updated to add: I’ve been corrected by a reader – thank you! – and the graveyard in the middle of this property is the Nichols-Berry Cemetery.

So that settles one question!]

(Which one did the land owner do the x-ray survey on? Is he confused about his own property? Or did he do surveys on both cemeteries? More unimportant questions I have lingering!)

Thank you all for accompanying me on this edition of Untangling Old Cemeteries of San Marcos.

Hours 2:03 – 2:33, 2/18/25

February 23, 2025February 23, 2025 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 14: the Strategic Plan

GUYS. Guys. This one is exciting.

Background

The budget process for 2026 has already started. Back in January, Council had a two day Visioning workshop. First they listen to about five hours of presentations. Then they spend about five hours updating the Strategic Plan from last year.

Usually it’s extremely dull, and filled with mundane wordsmithing. But this year, it was exciting! Really!

Let’s dive in.

The Strategic Goals

Here are the five goals:

Each one gets about 3-4 pages of outcomes. So we’ll take them one at a time.

Goal #1: Quality of Life & Sense of Place

Here are the most exciting changes in this category:

Part iii: The Tenant’s Bill of Rights! This is courtesy of the San Marcos Civics Club, who has been meeting monthly for the past year to focus on different issues. This is great work by them. They are promoting the National Tenant’s Bill of Rights as a model for what Council should adopt.

(I think this was Lorenzo’s contribution, but everyone was on board with it.)

…

Also from that photo, note Part i, “Update housing Data and Adopt the Strategic Housing Action Plan”.

Back in 2018-2019, we carried out a huge Housing Needs Assessment, and created a Strategic Housing Action Plan. And Council just deep-sixed it. Absolutely nothing came of it. For over five years!

In 2023, City Staff held a workshop on it and said, “Hey, you should really be thinking about housing! It’s super unaffordable here!”

Council:

*Except Alyssa.

It got put on last year’s Strategic Action Plan last year, and then ignored for all of 2024.

Until election season came around! Then all the candidates realized that everyone is super broke in San Marcos and can’t afford housing. Every single candidate for every council seat said housing was our biggest issue.

It seems like it really is going to happen this year, hopefully.

….

Also from this same section:

Alyssa has been promoting this for years, and Max promoted it back when he was on Council. So this is great to officially get it in the strategic plan.

From this link:

So it’s about giving the community more input on what we prioritize in the budget.

Goal #2: Economic Vitality:

Prioritizing the needs and well-being of workers in our economic development?!? This is catnip to my marxist heart.

(I think this came from Amanda.)

Goal #3: Public Safety, Core Services, and Fiscal Excellence.

GUYS. Guys. Literally squirming in my seat over here, I’m so excited. Look at this:

That one in the middle is huge. This will be an office that is aimed at crime prevention from a non-incarceration perspective. Dallas has a version of this called the Office of Integrated Public Safety Solutions, and Austin has a version called the Office of Violence Prevention.

Importantly, this will be housed outside of SMPD. What are the actual, evidence-based strategies that reduce crime? Here’s a big list. Things like access to jobs that pay a living wage, access to mental health and addiction treatment services, programs for kids and teens, connecting people with opportunities, etc.

(You know what doesn’t reduce crime? Locking people up. And it’s super expensive!)

This definitely came from Amanda.

(To be fair, Alyssa has brought this up before, but the council then was not interested in giving her ideas any oxygen.)

….

Also, on that same slide:

Also amazing! This is exactly what we discussed last time, when Council voted to postpone the vote on SMPD license plate readers until we could clearly state how we plan on protecting the privacy of the public.

(Also from Amanda.)

…

And further down:

Part B, iv: Making all the websites easy to use. This is very hard to do well. But at least we’re trying to get better.

Part C, iv. This is mostly about HSAB funding. We outsource most of our social services to local nonprofits, and we should probably double the amount that we’re giving out in grants.

(I can’t remember who contributed these. Everyone supports them.)

Hey Council: The budget for HSAB should grow automatically with inflation! You should consider an ordinance to make this happen! Please and thank you.

Goal #4: Mobility and Connectivity

Okay, several thoughts on this:

Section A, ii: What’s this Western Loop business?

Shane Scott wants to bring it back. This is an old topic.

There is a lot of traffic going out west towards Wimberley on RR 12. Right now it all feeds straight through town, on Wonderworld, to get to I-35. Should there be a northern loop that goes around San Marcos?

This was a big point of contention when the Transportation Master Plan was adopted in 2018. My memory is that the San Marcos River Foundation came out hard against it, because it will inevitably lead to development over the aquifer. If you put a road somewhere, it drives development along that road. If you drive development over the recharge zone, you’re going to get a filthy brown river eventually, instead of a sparkly clean river.

I thought it got voted down. But you can see it here, on the thoroughfare plan:

I believe it’s that yellow loop around town.

Jane Hughson also seems to think it got nixed back then.

Shane Scott wants to resurrect the issue, and he pictures it being an overhead highway, kind of like the Wonderworld overpass.

I have a lot of questions!

Do the environmentalists still approve of the deal cut on the wonderworld overpass? Or do they have reservations about reproducing another deal like that?
How much would it cost to make a zooming overhead line like that, on a much longer stretch?
Who stands to profit from this? What are the various interests?

Anyway, the Transportation Master Plan is coming back around, so we’ll see this again.

…

Section A, iii: Alyssa Garza is interested in on-demand services until we get a better bus system. What’s this?

So, Kyle has a 3.14 program. Any uber ride in the city costs $3.14, and the city pays for the rest. Is this something we should do, at least until we get a better bus system?

I’m a little uneasy about a program like this! I found this, which seems sensible:

So it’s more expensive, and we don’t want to sabotage progress on developing a functional bus system. At the same time, maybe we can use it for high-needs community members as a temporary stop-gap.

( Also, Uber is super-shitty on worker rights, and lobbies aggressively against laws providing benefits and minimum wage to workers in the gig economy, so I kinda hate them.)

…

Goal #5: Environmental Protection

Two additions:

No issues with either of those!

…

There isn’t a bullet point about fencing off the rivers. But they did talk about it in the presentations:

Basically we’ve hired someone to do a feasibility study on fencing the parks. There’s no way it will be fenced off by this summer, though.

…

Which brings us to last Tuesday!

Amanda offers up one amendment: Remember the Transportation Equity Cabinet presentation last time? Let’s include their recommendations into Transportation and Traffic Operations.

Her amendment: “Implement Recommendations from the San Marcos Transportation Equity Cabinet.”

Jane: Weren’t we going to workshop the recommendations?

City Manager Stephanie Reyes diplomatically says that Council supported putting the suggestions in both the Transit and Transportation Master Plans.

Jane: Without further inspection?

Stephanie: Council seemed pretty amenable, yeah.

Amanda: In fact, one of the questions I posed when it was under discussion was what the next steps were to be taken, if all of us agreed. We all said we agreed.

The vote on Amanda’s amendment:

Everyone likes it!

Finally, the vote on the entire strategic plan:

Everyone likes it. INCLUDING ME!!

(Read the whole draft here, if you’re so inclined.)

…

There are a few other items:

Council appointed a Comp Plan Oversight Committee
There’s a bond process for various construction projects around town
There are more committee and board appointments

but this meeting is super long, and we still have the workshops to go. So I’m skipping these.

Hours 0:00 – 2:73, 2/4/25

February 9, 2025March 23, 2025 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment

No one spoke this week.

Moving on!

…

Item 9: Rezoning some land.

A developer wants to develop this stretch:

and turn it into townhomes.

Up close, it looks like this:

It includes the old Bismark filling station:

I went hunting for photos of the old Bismark Filling Station back in its heyday, but came up empty handed. I did find this deep dive on the history it, though.

…

Q: Are there any concerns about flooding?

Answer: It’s partially in the floodplain, and it is near the headwaters, which is very sensitive. But the land is actually angled so that the water runs away from the sensitive stuff. The water runs away from other houses on Post Road, and towards the stadium.

Q: Are there any concerns about buried gas tanks?

Answer: no, the station is too old. They checked the records. They didn’t bury tanks back then.

Q: Are you going to preserve the gas station?

Answer: We are working with the Historical Preservation Committee on this! Hoping to save the facade and columns, and put it somewhere where it can be memorialized.

Note: This is how you make best friends with Council. Who knows if it will actually happen or not, but Old San Marcos is happy to hear this guy say the right things.

One other note:

The developer is asking for CD-4 zoning. He’s saying he wants to build townhomes:

Ok, maybe not quite that beautiful. But maybe like these, near Wonderworld:

which are also pretty cute. (via)

But CD-4 zoning can also mean large scale apartment complexes like so:

When you zone land, you don’t get to pick and choose which use the developer ends up doing. The developer can do anything included in the zoning.

Now, this particular lot isn’t very big:

So my guess is that he will probably build townhomes or condos. But he is allowed to sell it to someone else, and that other person can do anything allowed under CD-4 zoning.

The vote:

Great! That’s how I would have voted, too.

…

Item 6: License plate recognition cameras.

Should the city spend $124K for SMPD to have cameras that read license plates for one year?

Maybe! We need to unpack some stuff first.

Backstory:

Budgets get approved in September. But the planning starts nine months earlier. So at the end of January, Council had a two day workshop where they started laying out big ideas.

They go into great detail on the strategic goals:

Under each goal, Council decides what they want to prioritize for the next year.

On Day 2, they tackled Public Safety. Amanda proposed the following outcome:

Establish clear guidelines and protections governing the use of technology to ensure transparency, accountability, and respect for the personal privacy and civil rights of the public.

(Around 3:05 if you want to watch.)

Everyone was in favor of this! It sounds great!

Next: let’s talk about license-plate cameras:

So these cameras that SMPD wants to buy. They are Automatic License Plate Readers, and they read your license plate when you drive by.

The ACLU does not like them one bit:

A little-noticed surveillance technology designed to track the movements of every passing driver is fast proliferating on America’s streets. Automatic license plate readers—mounted on police cars or on objects like road signs and bridges—use small high-speed cameras to photograph thousands of plates per minute.

The information captured by the readers—including the license plate number and the date, time, and location of every scan—is being collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information are growing rapidly. This information is often retained for years, or even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights.

Although they do say there are some appropriate uses:

We don’t find every use of ALPRs objectionable. For example, we do not generally object to using them to check license plates against lists of stolen cars, for AMBER Alerts, or for toll collection, provided they are deployed and used fairly and subject to proper checks and balances, such as ensuring devices are not disproportionately deployed in low-income communities and communities of color, and that the “hot lists” they are run against are legitimate and up to date.

Now, what the ACLU really doesn’t like is this particular company, Flock Safety:

Unlike a targeted ALPR camera system that is designed to take pictures of license plates, check the plates against local hot lists, and then flush the data if there’s no hit, Flock is building a giant camera network that records people’s comings and goings across the nation, and then makes that data available for search by any of its law enforcement customers. Such a system provides even small-town sheriffs access to a sweeping and powerful mass-surveillance tool, and allows big actors like federal agencies and large urban police departments to access the comings and goings of vehicles in even the smallest of towns.

And yes, Flock is exactly the company we’re buying cameras from. And it’s not just the ACLU: other folks also don’t like Flock Safety one bit.

Look, ICE raids have already started. (Not as intensely as Trump would like, but they’ve started.) Do we really think this universal surveillance data will be off-limits? It wasn’t off-limits back in 2019.

Sure might be nice to have a clear policy! Maybe we should “Establish clear guidelines and protections governing the use of technology to ensure transparency, accountability, and respect for the personal privacy and civil rights of the public.”

This brings us to Tuesday’s meeting

Amanda makes a motion: Postpone the purchase of the cameras until we’ve established the policy that focuses on privacy and civil rights when it comes to the public. (After all, it was literally five days earlier that Council agreed this is a priority!)

Chief Standridge says, “No worries! We already have such a policy! It’s four pages long and follows all the best practices in Texas! This is what all the departments across Texas are doing.”

I think he’s referring to this: Policy 5.4: Automated License Plate Readers.

Amanda: “I’ve read the policy. Those may be the best practices in Texas, but they’re not the best practices nationwide. Things like data usage, data retention, data sharing – we should address those things, and then we can bring back the vote on the cameras.”

They get into it a little bit, over how long data should be stored. Is 30 days too long? Just right? (That same article on Flock Safety has recommended legal language specifically for this kind of situation.)

“Furthermore,” Chief Standridge says, “this is already underway. We got the first batch of cameras in 2022, and then we got a grant for some more…” he kind of trails off.

Amanda: “The cameras have already been purchased? The cameras that require council approval?”

Chief Standridge: “The Flock representative is here online, they can confirm or deny if the cameras have been purchased.”

Jane tries to smooth it over: “It was probably something like it was initiated because they thought they’d be under 100K, and then it turned out to be over 100K, so they need needed approval!”

Standridge: “Close enough!”

Note: I think it was because of this:

The original contract was not discussed when Council approved it, in April, 2022. Later on, SMPD applied for some grants, and Council didn’t discuss those, either. My guess is that since the grants were in motion, SMPD assumed it was fine to move forward with the cameras.

(This also happened with the Total Bullet Containment System. It had been purchased before Council actually authorized the purchase.)

…

Back to the conversation:

Jane: I’m game to have a work session on this policy, but I don’t want to hold up the purchase of the cameras in the meantime.

No one else (besides Alyssa) weighs in.

The Vote: Should we postpone the purchase of these cameras?

WHOA! I was not expecting that, but I’m thrilled to see it!

…

Items 10-13: An enormous number of appointments.

The vast majority of the meeting was spent making appointments:

Those are all boards where they appoint community members.

The most public of these is P&Z. P&Z had three open spots. David Case and Maraya Dunn were both re-upped for a second term, and “Rodney” got the last spot.

No one in the meeting ever used Rodney’s last name, and I don’t have access to the applications, so I guess we’ll all find out which Rodney in a few weeks, when he starts attending the meetings.

…

Item 14: Attendance on External Boards

There are a bunch of committees in the city and county that have a representative from city council.

Sometimes you have one of these external boards with a city council rep, but that council member never shows up to any of the meetings, and sometimes his name is Shane Scott.

(Specifically at the January 7th council meeting, where Shane found out that he’s been on the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau Board for the past year, and had missed all of the meetings. Shane was kind of sheepish about the whole thing.)(Around 4:18 in this video. It’s pretty funny.)

Jane: Do we want some sort of attendance policy for these situations? Like you can’t have more than three unexcused absences in a row? That’s the policy for the rest of our boards and commissions.

Everyone is on board. So this will come back around.

Hours 0:00 – 0:24, 1/21/25

January 26, 2025 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

There were ZERO people at Citizen Comment on Tuesday! Probably because of this:

and the freezing temperatures.

Hope you all stayed warm!

….

Item 1: Blanco Gardens Area Plan

This is basically the only item of the meeting.

What is an Area Plan?

An area plan is a big study of your neighborhood. It’s supposed to document what makes your neighborhood feel special, so that it will keep feeling special over the next few decades. This is a really complicated topic, because there are both good reasons and dangers here.

(We’ve discussed these before, when the Dunbar/Heritage plan got split into two separate plans.)

Good reasons: Does your neighborhood need more sidewalks? Better safety? Park improvements? Community space? These are great things to put in the plan.

(Also, historically, developers have seen low-income neighborhoods as cheap real estate to plunder. Low-income neighborhoods get gentrified, or bulldozed for a highway. Area plans can deter this by encoding the current vibe.)

Bad reasons: Are you trying to micromanage everyone’s home appearance? Are you trying to prevent affordable housing by nixing things like small-scale apartment complexes, small houses, subdividing big houses into smaller rentals, condos, townhomes, 4-plexes, etc? These are bad things to put in a plan!

(Really, these rules already exist. They’re generally built into a city’s zoning rules and HOAs. An area plan can just lock down the class segregation for another generation.)

In addition, if you nix all the affordable housing, you’re left with only big, spread-out houses. This is sprawl. It’s bad for traffic, bad for the environment, and makes it way more expensive for the city to maintain pipes and roads and telephone lines.

…

So the planners have to thread the needle here: let’s capture what’s special, but without preventing affordable housing from being built in city limits ever again.

This is a really nice presentation about the San Marcos area plans. It’s got this map that shows how vulnerable each neighborhood is:

I know that’s tiny, but you can zoom in on the map to anywhere you want:

(There are a ton of interesting maps in that presentation – maps of rental houses vs. home owners, maps of area of stability vs change, maps of historic districts and maps of environmental sensitivity, etc. It’s worth a scroll.)

…

First up is Blanco Gardens!

Blanco Gardens is a great choice for an area plan, because of The Woods apartments:

(Now it’s called Redpoint.)

In 2012 the city had to decide whether to allow this apartment complex to be built. Blanco Gardens was furious.

In November 2012, there was a non-binding referendum on the issue:

Wow, 75% of the city wanted us to purchase the park land! Nevertheless, P&Z and Council greenlighted the apartment complex.

Then Blanco Gardens was massively flooded in 2015. Tons of residents lost their homes. At this point, the apartment complex was half-built. The widespread belief is that the apartments made the flooding much worse. (The flood also destroyed Cape’s Dam, which lead to a whole ‘nother saga.)

Bottom line: Blanco Gardens has gone through it, and deserves an area plan.

…

So how do you do an area plan?

They form a committee of eight residents, and then also do a ton of outreach:

One note: At P&Z, one of the commissioners (Lupe Costilla) said, “I live in this neighborhood, and I had no idea that any of this was going on.” And she’s very plugged in to the city.

This is what I mean when I say that outreach is really, really hard. Even when you do all of those things, even people who are paying attention still fall through the cracks. You’ve got to dedicate time to relationship-building with community leaders.

….

So what’s actually in the plan?

Here’s the actual plan draft. In the presentation on Tuesday, they gave a few examples of actual Blanco Gardens content, but mostly they talked more generally about what area plans are.

Examples:

If you want to read all the recommendations, by each topic, you should go to pages 17-72 here.

Final notes: There’s not any automatic funding that comes with all these recommendations. It’s just guidelines for the future. So if the city has money, they’ll follow the recommendations, and if a developer wants to build something, it has to be compatible.

….

Here’s the timeline for approval:

…

One final note: Who gets an area plan?

Here are the first five plans:

In Blanco Gardens, here’s one recommendation under “Building types”:

I think that’s really great! But notice who does NOT get an area plan:

Nobody is ever going to go to Willow Creek or La Cima and say, “Consider and support gentle density”. Those neighborhoods have entrenched protections that make sure that affordable housing will not be mixed in. This drives me batty.

…

Literally nothing else happened at the 6 pm meeting. It was only 24 minutes long!

(We were supposed to discuss the Kissing Tree TIRZ and Downtown TIRZ, but those got postponed until February.)

Keep going for the workshops!

Hours 0:00-2:25, 1/7/25

January 12, 2025 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Two issues dominate:

The Human Services Advisory Board grant money. (HSAB)
Demolition of a little blue building at 734 Valley Street

Let’s take these one at a time.

HSAB grants: These are San Marcos city grants to nonprofits. Back in December, there was a bit of a stand-off between councilmembers supporting Salvation Army and councilmembers supporting HOME Center. Yes, it’s totally weird to pit nonprofits against each other.

It was postponed without resolution. So people showed up to this meeting, to advocate for their nonprofit. By the numbers:

Advocates for Salvation Army: 2 speakers
Advocates for HOME Center: 9 speakers
Nosotros la Gente, ACCEYSS, School Fuel: 1 each

The chair of HSAB (Yancy Arevalo) also spoke. She made the most important point: $550K is peanuts for social services. There were over $1 million requested in the applications, and the need in the community is far greater than that. We need to be allocating far more money to this cause.

(She is exactly right. This is the heart of all these problems. We should not be pitting HOME Center against Salvation Army – we should be increasing the size of the pie.)

If you want the most compelling speaker of the meeting, you want to listen to the man speaking at 17:48 here. He is a formerly homeless man on the brink of death, who was helped by HOME Center and now is in a stable home. It’s really incredible.

The other big issue is the demolition of a house at 734 Valley Street.

A speaker from the Historical Preservation Commission (HPC) talks in favor of delaying the demolition
The owner speaks against the delay
A representative from the Calaboose Museum says, “Please don’t use our name as a reason to delay the ordinance. We are fine with whatever the owner wants to do.”

We’ll unpack all this when we get there.

One final comment worth noting from the 3 pm workshop:

3. At the workshop, Max Baker spoke about the San Marcos Civics Club: they’re putting together a Tenants Bill of Rights.

They want to collaborate widely on this, so if you’re interested, let them know. And they want Council to incorporate this into their upcoming Visioning sessions.

…

Item 12: The HSAB Grant Money Saga

Brief background:

HSAB stands for Human Services Advisory Board. This is a committee that meets weekly for four months, and scrutinizes nonprofits who are applying for grant money from the city.

In December, council got the HSAB recommendations and started tinkering. First, they moved $10K from ACCEYSS to Salvation Army.

Then Jane Hughson tried to move all of HOME Center’s funding away. She reduced this to 75% of their funding. This was the issue that blew up.

The whole thing looked really, really bad. It looked partisan. (Full details here.)

This meeting:

Jane drops her motion about changing HOME Center’s funding.

She justifies the attempt like so: “I went back and watched the HSAB meetings. Originally Salvation Army was given $10K, and that was moved over to HOME Center since they were local. My feeling is that our local chapter of Salvation Army is also local, so I wanted to move that back.”

Amanda responds: “I also watched the meetings. You’re oversimplifying what they said. They didn’t just give it to HOME Center because they’re local. They noted that HOME Center has a 90% success rate and is one of the few organizations doing high quality longterm casework.”

There’s some more discussion, but things fizzle out pretty quick. So the only amendment that stuck is the one from last meeting, to move $10K from ACCEYSS to Salvation Army.

There will be a discussion about the HSAB grant process in the future, where Council can do some more tinkering. It’s a work in progress.

…

I want to highlight one thing Amanda says (at 1:38, if you’re so inclined):

Amanda: If you want to get to the root, we – as a city – have created a system that relies on nonprofits to provide critical social services, right? We created that.

Jane: I don’t know that I agree that we created it, but I’ll agree that we have it.

Amanda: I mean, thank god someone’s doing it, to the level that they’re doing it. But I think all of the “thank yous”, the “we’ll work on the criteria”, and all of that – it’s really empty. One of the things that has been reiterated both in this meeting and in the previous one is that $550,000 was never going to be enough. If so, if we really want to address the issue to its core, we know budget season is coming up.

I mean we’re about to – probably later in this meeting! – approve $684,000 for something probably with no discussion, no pushback. That to me is a shame. And so if we really want to address the issue, it needs more money. They need capital.

Jane interjects about Covid money – one year we were able to double the HSAB budget, but only because we could use Covid money.

Amanda: That’s great. But we can find the money. We can find the money because we’ve found the money for so many other things. I don’t think it’s a plausibility issue. If we wanted to do it tomorrow, we could fund it. But it’s a matter of desire.

All I’m saying is if we want to really address the issue, this is the conversation we should have in budget season. We should put our money where our mouths are.

(lightly edited for clarity)

I AM SO EXCITED!! This is my new battle cry: “$550,000 was never going to be enough.” Rally the troops, we’ve got budget season coming up!

The vote:

$550,000 WAS NEVER GOING TO BE ENOUGH!

…

Item 3: The lease with Ruben Becerra

Back again to talk about this cute little building!

on LBJ, at the railroad tracks, across from Toma Taco.

Background:

Like we said last time, Council bought the property from Union Pacific in 2013, in order to maybe put a railstop there someday.

Ruben Becerra owns the building, but not the land. The building sits half on city land, and half on Union Pacific land. It’s very confusing!

You can see the little building there – it’s half on red land (San Marcos) and half on blue land (Union Pacific Rail Road).

Last time, I wasn’t clear on the full backstory of why there is tension, but this time, city staff had a presentation that sheds some light on it:

Staff recommends tightening up the lease terms a bit:

In addition, Jane Hughson reads a carefully scripted main motion and amendment:

That is legalese for “We met behind closed doors and are scrupulously following the advice of our lawyer.”

The vote:

Lorenzo is our brand new councilmember! The rumor mill generally holds that Lorenzo is Becerra’s candidate, in case you were looking askance at that vote.

But wait! There’s more!

The San Antonio Express-News has an article from Friday:

On Thursday, Becerra sent a written statement to the Express-News accusing the city of “targeted interference,” and said that litigation is “the course that will likely be pursued.”

“This project seems to be unjustly targeted due to political motivations,” he wrote. “The city’s refusal to honor prior agreements or pursue reasonable business solutions underscores a deliberate effort by political adversaries to obstruct progress.”

So Becerra might sue the city over this? That linked article has way more details than I was able to find, so you should trust them over me.

…

Item 5: The SMPD shooting range

Here’s SMPD, located on I35:

SMPD has a shooting range. It was built in 1991.

I’m guessing it is here?

because they described it as a sand berm, and when I zoom in, it looks like this:

Which looks like a sand berm to me!

Here’s what it looks like on the inside:

That was built in 1991. Back then, they needed to be able to shoot pistols at 25 yards.

Since then, you now have to be able to shoot rifles at 50 yards. So officers were going offsite to shoot at ALERRT Shooting range at Texas State. That is free, but it’s often busy.

In 2021, they converted the SMPD range from 25 yards to 50 yards. They also put a roof overhead, to keep the sand from getting washed out and to prevent bits of projectiles from going all over the place. Great!

But the roof also contained all the dust, which has a lot of lead in it, from the bullets. So it’s now super toxic. Also, they have to mine the sand for the bullets every now and then, or else fragments start to bounce back at the officers.

So what’s the solution?

Enter the Total Bullet Containment Trap by Action Target!

[Cue jaunty action music]

Basically you shoot into these deflection plates:

And then the bullets get trapped in that round drum on the right:

Plus there’s a whole HVAC thing to help control the toxic dust.

How much does this thing cost?

The unit is $643,800.00. The total installation will be around $800K.

So what’s the issue?

This item was on the consent agenda. This means no discussion was planned. The only reason we’re discussing it is because Amanda requested that we pull this item off the Consent Agenda.

Remember how 15 people showed up to plead with Council on whether Salvation Army or HOME Center is more deserving of $10K? And ten minutes later, we are green-lighting $643K for a bullet containment system.

It’s even worse than that: it’s already been approved. The whole $800K was buried in the CIP list that got approved in 2023. There was a workshop in June of 2023, which covered the entire CIP list, and then the CIP list got approved in September 2023, along with the rest of the budget. Today is just authorizing the actual purchase.

It just happened automatically! There was literally never any discussion about this $800K, because of the sheer number of projects being addressed. No one single person is the bad guy – this is how systems operate on auto-pilot. But the outcome is unjust.

Look: officers should not be breathing lead-dust. Of course we want them to be safe! The point is the contrast: we greenlight $800K for SMPD without noticing it, and wring our hands over $10K for the homeless.

[Council has some dull side conversations on whether or not the lead and brass can turn a profit, when scrapped for resale.]

Amanda makes her key point: This is her fourth meeting. Over those four meetings, we’ve spent $1 million on SMPD. We can afford to double the HSAB budget – the money is there. We just have to choose to do so. Even people who are paying attention – like herself! – had no idea that $800K got set aside for this TOTAL BULLET CONTAINMENT SYSTEM last summer. It just happens invisibly.

The vote:

C’mon, Lorenzo. I’m rooting for you here, but this isn’t knocking my socks off.