Category: Hour summaries

Hours 0:00 – 2:16, 3/6/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Three topics came up:

  1. Malachi Williams:
  2. Redwood and Riverbend Ranch
  3. Speedbumps in Trace Development

Let’s take these one at a time.

  1. 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!

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(I got that photo is from Bing maps and it is obviously very outdated, but Google maps is even worse: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

  1. A citizen participation plan 
  2. 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:

  1. The benefits of the improvements outweigh the risks of cut-and-fill.
  2. 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

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:

  1. Regular (measly) paycheck
  2. Travel and expenses (you have to submit receipts)
  3. 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, 2/18/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment

Two topics today:

  1. Nine people spoke about Malachi Williams. 
  2. 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

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

      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

      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

      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.

      1. 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.

      1. 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.

      Hours 2:25 – 4:24, 1/7/25

      by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

      Item 13: Demolition time. 

      This is 734 Valley Street:

      It’s tucked behind Dunbar Park.

      It’s really impossible to see from the street, but it’s this blue L-shaped building:

      At least, it used to be blue. This is what the building looked like in 2019:

      I’m unclear on the following order of events:

      • Squatters moved in and were kinda trashing the place
      • The owners purchased it and began demolition without getting proper permits.

      In some way, we end up with it looking like this now:

      Definitely not blue anymore. Not much left.

      How does demolition work in San Marcos?

      In order to know what’s going on, you have to know a little about demolitions of historic buildings in San Marcos.

      In 2019, the old telephone building was demolished:

      to make way for The Parlor apartments.

      People were told 3 days ahead of demolition, and they were upset. Protests, etc.

      (I personally think the little telephone building was extremely cute, and felt sad over the whole thing.)

      After that, the city put a demolition ordinance in place. The ordinance builds in delay and notification, but it doesn’t really prevent anything from being demolished:

      • For buildings with potential historical significance, there is now a 90 day demolition delay.  This gives people time to research the building and figure out if it can be moved, or saved somehow.
      • If someone is trying to save the building, the Historical Preservation Commission can delay for another 90 days.  But that’s it. After that, the owner can go through with the demolition.

      “Saving the building” means making a deal with the owner. The owner can say no.

      Basically, Texas state law means the city’s hands are mostly tied. There’s usually not much way to actually prevent a demolition. You can just stall a little bit.

      …

      So the owner applied for demolition, and the first 90 day clock started.

      Here is the historical merit, as far as we know:

      So this blue building was probably barracks from Gary Air Force base? It sounds like it was moved to Dunbar by the Armstead family to rent out as apartments.

      It went to the Historical Preservation Commission, and HPC decided to extend the demo delay for another 90 days.

      Which brings us up to speed!

      The owners are appealing the demolition extension.  They’d like to tear it down now, instead of waiting until April.  They plan on building a small apartment building there, maybe 4 or 8 units. 

      Matthew Mendoza had some useful points. First, he reached out to Ms. Armstead. Apparently her parents are the ones that brought the barracks over from Gary Air Force? He asked her about the historical significance of the building.

      She very clearly told me she does not feel that this particular complex needs to be associated with that family. In the last six years that they were in possession of this, they were only able to rent out a third of the rooms there, because they were so dilapidated…She feels that that her mom and dad bought this property just for making money. She made that very clear. They didn’t purchase it for any historical significance. They bought this because they wanted to make some money off it, and that’s also why they sold it. They got so far into debt as far as being able to replace the flooring, be able to add sprinkler systems, to make it up to code, which is when they said “We can’t do this.” And again, we all know the Armstead family and how strongly respected they are in this city of San Marcos. And for them to say “hey we don’t want this property” and not wanted it associated with their name says a lot. She was insistent that there is no historical value at all to this building and no historical value at all to this property.

      (lightly edited for clarity)

      And then Matthew gets to the best part:

      And I can tell you: I partied in that place for like ten years back in the early 2000s. I fell on my fat ass right through that floor. I’m sorry to say it, but I fell through that bathroom floor in that place, and now I’m not the smallest guy in the world, but I shouldn’t be falling through there.

      Honestly, that’s the most endearing thing I’ve ever heard Matthew say. He even lowered his voice and half-whispered “fat ass”, and I melted a bit.

      He went on for awhile more, but that’s the gist of it. At the end, he said, “I will sit here and say that I am a huge preserver of historical anything here in this city, but this unfortunately this is something the owners are telling me we don’t want it. And that’s the reason why I was on the fence until I spoke with her.”

      Overall, I basically agree with Jane Hughson on this one:

      As much as I like historical preservation, I’m going to vote to not extend and let these folks who are trying to do something with the property move ahead. If this were something with a more historic appearance and in a place that people could actually see and appreciate, but in this particular case, I’m not seeing that there’s an upside to 90 more days. There’s been 90, and you say there’s not been any activity, nobody has come in with the superman cape to save the day, so that’s why I’m going to support not extending the delay.

      The vote:

      The argument for voting no – Amanda and Lorenzo – is that it doesn’t hurt anything to wait three months and let the local community get their due process to save the building.

      In this particular case, I’m with the pro-demolition folks.

      …

      Item 15: Charter Review Commission

      Every four years, council appoints a committee to go over the City Charter with a fine tooth comb.  This is that magical night!

      First off,  do any council members have any pet topics that they want the committee to discuss?

      Note: none of these are guaranteed. Council is just asking the committee to discuss these items.

      1.  Jane: drop the minimum required number of council meetings from 22 per year to 20 per year. 

      Sometimes it gets hairy trying to have meetings working during election week and New Year’s Day – this would build in some flexibility.

      Everyone likes this.

      1. Shane Scott: You should have to be a resident for at least five years to be on council.

      (Saul, Jane, and Matthew are all enthusiastic about this.)

      Look, this is clearly about newbie Lorenzo Gonzalez. Seems a little rude to me!

      But more importantly, it is super undemocratic. The whole point of an election is to let voters choose! If they don’t want a newbie, they don’t have to vote for that person. 

      I do not like this one!

      1. Alyssa: We should have single member council districts.

      This is a complicated topic.  How should voters elect councilmembers? Right now, every council seat is an at-large seat. Should we carve up the city into sections, and have each section vote for its own single representative?

      There are arguments for and against this.

      For:  

      • It takes fewer resources to run a campaign in a district than in the entire city.  This means that more people can afford to run for council.
      • Historically, at-large council districts have been used to block minority groups from having representation on city councils.  If a city is 30% black, for example, and if white people won’t vote for a black candidate, then a black candidate can never win a city-wide election.

        Historically, single-member districts have been the solution.  Lawsuits would be filed and judges would force towns to switch from at-large seats to single-member seats. (This is what happened to SMCISD in the 90s.) The idea is that you must draw minority-majority districts, and then within that district, minority groups form a majority and can elect a candidate of choice.

      Against:

      • Single-member districts only somewhat solve the problem of underrepresented minority groups.  Drawing the boundaries becomes a politically contentious issue, with people weaponizing it to work in favor of specific groups.
      • At times, there can be issues that pit a district against the whole city. Amanda reports this happening at the state level:  representatives vote against a program that is good for the entire state, because their district doesn’t want to pay the taxes for other people to benefit. Right now, all councilmembers answer to all of San Marcos.

      I’m pretty torn. I wrote a whole thing in favor of single-member districts in San Marcos, back in 2022. But I’m also sympathetic to the idea that single member districts can pit parts of the city against each other.

      Council floats the idea of having a non-binding referendum on the ballot, so that they could find out what people think.

      1.  Amanda: Suppose council passes a shitty ordinance, and you’d like to petition to repeal it. Right now you have 30 days.  Let’s extend this to 60 or 90 days, so that people have a little more time to organize.

      Sounds great!! Would this only apply to ordinances, or also things like Chapter 380 agreements? (I’m thinking of things like the SMART Terminal/Axis developer agreement.)

      5. I think Saul brings up rolling back the drinking hours in San Marcos again.  It’s very hard to hear him.

      Backstory: it used to be that bars closed at midnight in San Marcos. This means that all the kids got drunk here, and then at 11:30, drove up to Austin, and drank for two more hours on 6th Street. Then at 2 am, they all drove home.  This always seemed like a terrible policy for keeping kids alive!

      It got changed in 2009.  Now bars can stay open until 2 am, and hopefully fewer kids are driving drunk on I-35.  Great! (I’m sure the local bars prefer it this way, too.)

      I think Saul wants to change it back to midnight?  What a terrible idea!  Keep kids alive.  Don’t give them reasons to drive drunk.

      This is not a charter item, so it will come back as a discussion item. Stay tuned.

      6. Lorenzo: the language around petitions is inconsistent between initiatives and referendums.

      Jane Hughson reminisces about the Great Fluoride Debacle of 2015, when the good citizens of San Marcos got a little muddled on the science, and voted to stop adding fluoride to the water. 

      The citizen wrote the initiative in a way that made it impossible for the city to carry out. Something like “no fluoride in the water!” when there’s some level of fluoride that occurs naturally in all water. The city had to negotiate in court with the author to get better wording.  (They settled on “no added fluoride”.)

      Basically it’s really difficult to write clear ordinances. This makes things tricky.

      7. Amanda mentions reversing the fluoride charter amendment in passing, but no one stops and weighs in.

      But guys: the ban on adding fluoride to the water is terrible. The science is really clear. We’ve got a lot of people in this town who can’t afford to see the dentist, and we could be helping save their teeth.

      8. Shane: Mayor and council should move to 4 year terms, and council elections should be held in odd years, so that they’re not drowned out by presidential and governor elections.

      This is about who your base is. Are your voters the old guard in town, who will reliably show up to vote when nothing else is on the ballot? These are the voters that have held the power in San Marcos since always.

      Or are your voters less plugged in, because they are younger, or newer, or less well-connected, or generally low-information? These are the voters that generally don’t have power, and are less likely to show up to vote in odd years.

      9. Amanda: Right now, P&Z terms are 3 years long. After two terms, you have to take a year off. Amanda proposes reducing P&Z to 2 year terms, and extending the length of the break before you can come back again. The goal is to increase turnover.

      The rest of council does not buy into this. Part of the problem is that all the boards and commissions are on the same set of rules.

      10. Matthew: zoom and attendance options for all boards and commissions

      This gets ditched due to not being a charter issue. Also, Amanda and Alyssa are hard NOs, due to accessibility issues.

      11. Amanda: Right now, P&Z gets the final vote on plats.  A plat is the paperwork where a developer carves up a neighborhood, and says where the streets will go and where the boundaries of the properties will go. Amanda wants people to be able to appeal the decision to Council.

      We’re kinda stuck with the current system, for a few reasons:

      • State law mandates 30 day approval for plats. If you add in City Council as a second appeals procedure, you’re going to run out of time.
      • There’s not actually any decision or judgement when it comes to platting. Legally, you’re not allowed to deny a plat, if it checks all the boxes. It’s not like zoning, where you’re allowed to make a judgement call. This is more black and white. So it doesn’t matter very much.

      So this did not get traction.

      12. Revoke or suspend CUP may not be appealed: remove this.

      Yes: Shane, Jane, Lorenzo,

      [I wrote this down in my notes, and now I can’t find it in the meeting anymore. So I can’t remember who proposed it or any other details. whoops]

      Final note: These are all just suggestions for the Charter Review Commission. Nothing is binding here.

      …

      Item 16:  Each councilmember picks their special person for the Charter Review Commission.

      The picks: Michelle Burleson, Jim Garber, Rob Roark, Daniel Ayala, John Thomaides, Yancy Arevalo, Amy Meeks

      I will just note that three of those – Michelle Burleson, Jim Garber, and Amy Meeks – are on P&Z. There’s nothing exactly wrong with that, but it’s most likely going to preserve the status quo.

      …

      Item 17: Boards and commissions

      Now that Jude Prather and Mark Gleason are off council, there are a bunch of vacancies to fill. I’m not going to go through this, because it’s tedious and you can find most of the subcomittee memberships here.

      I mostly just want to include this bit:

      Jane: I’m going to volunteer to be on the Alcohol Committee. The reason being that I’ve got more experience with this than probably all y’all put together. I was on one once before, and I think I can provide a lot of benefit to this committee.

      Shane: Plus you’re a solid drinker.

      The room erupted into giggles. Jane didn’t sweat it, and just said mildly quipped “Yeah. That’s the important part.”

      I mostly include it because it made me laugh. The vibe of this new council is much lighter and jokier than the last one. I’m here for it.

      Hours 0:00 – 1:56, 12/17/24

      by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

      Citizen Comment

      These were very interesting! 

      Topic 1: Two speakers (Noah Brock and Annie Donovan) unpack part of Item #16 for us. 

      Item #16 is about the Texas State Legislature. San Marcos lobbies the state government on various municipal issues. So we have a list of guiding principles.  

      Here’s one of those items on the list:

      I’m going to start with quoting Noah, because this is gold. First he reads that bullet point above. Then he says:

      “This is a very specific location that’s called out in this guiding document.  The wording sounded familiar.  So I looked up what the last principles document said, in November 2022:

      link

      “They just replaced the words “SMART Terminal” with the location. So I went a little bit further, back to 2020. The document said the following:

      link

      “Then I went even further, to 2018, where I found the origin statement:

      link

      “Is it the city’s goal to develop an intermodal freight facility at this location? It appears that the original idea was to support light industrial manufacturing with a connection to the airport. Now we have a heavy industrial park that can stack containers 80 ft high, with no connection to the airport. 

      Why does the wording keep changing to fit a developer’s current project? Isn’t a guiding principle supposed to come from the city, and not a developer?  

      Do you remember when the city council voted unanimously to approach the developer of this project and change the development agreement, because the people did not support it, on May 2, 2023?   I would like to see a motion to remove this item from the document in its entirety. Thank you.”

      So yes! In our packet of “what’s best for the city” we have a line item which is carved out specifically to be “what’s best for SMART/Axis Logistics”.  Verrrrrrry interesting. Stay tuned.

      Topic 2: HSAB is the Human Services Advisory Board. The city allocates $550K in grants to nonprofits, and the HSAB awards the amounts.  There are a few comments here:
      – The chair of the HSAB pleading that this amount of money is nowhere close to the need in the community
      – A speaker on behalf of the Salvation Army, about how they weren’t funded as they’ve been in the past.

      This will be unpacked in Item 15.

      Topic 3: This place:

      It’s on LBJ, at the train tracks, across from Toma Taco.

      The city leases the property to Ruben Becerra, the Hays County Judge (which is not a “judge” so much as being like the mayor of Hays County.)  This speaker is super angry about this! 

      We’ll get to the backstory on this property – Item 10 – but I still have questions.

      …

      Item 5:  Return of Evoke Wellness, for the final $50K of Covid Money.

      This last bit of Covid money is going to the mental health program partnership between SMPD and Evoke Wellness, for people needing substance abuse treatment. (The county also works with Evoke Wellness.  This is part of a larger, semi-coordinated program to keep people with mental health crises and/or substance abuse out of jail.) We discussed this last time, too.

      Amanda: How does this program work? Walk me through it. 

      She basically wants to know all three parts:
      1. how do people in crisis end up at Evoke Wellness?
      2. What happens when you’re there?
      3. What happens after discharge?

      Part 1: how do people in crisis end up at Evoke Wellness?

      First, SMPD responds to a call for someone in crisis. First, if they need medical help, SMPD will take them to the hospital. (Probably Christa Rosa).

      If the person is stabilized but having a mental health crisis, SMPD tries to try to find out if the person has insurance or not. If so, then we try to find a facility that accepts their insurance. They’ll take the person to the treatment facility.  It might not be in San Marcos – could be Austin or San Antonio.

      If they have no insurance or financial means, then once they’re stabilized, we give a mental health evaluation, and figure out what they need. Then we take the person to Evoke Wellness (for substance abuse) or Hill Country Mental Health.

      Part 2: They’re at Evoke Wellness

      No one from Evoke Wellness was on the line at the meeting, to talk about the services they offer there.  Amanda asked if we could have a workshop from them to hear about what their services are.  Everyone is on board with this.

      Part 3: Discharge after Evoke Wellness

      When they get to the treatment center, they start meeting with a case manager. They’re working on a discharge plan from day 1.

      There are a few options for after they’re discharged:

      • Reconnect with safe support system, if that exists. Either the center, family, or mental health officer will give them a ride there.
      • Longterm treatment: may discharge to Sober Living, they may go to partial in-patient, several different places to go.

      Amanda asks: What if someone has zero support services and zero resources? 

      Answer: Then the case manager has to get to work.  Find shelters available. For example, Hill Country has an in-patient crisis stabilization unit in Kerrville. They’re in-house and have a big list of resources.  We make sure there’s a bed available at a destination shelter. The case manager is going to put together a plan to try to make sure the person does not end up homeless.

      …

      How many people are we helping?

      Total, San Marcos is putting $150K towards Evoke Wellness, and Evoke Wellness is also providing 5 scholarships this year.

      Chief Standridge says that costs vary wildly, depending if the person needs in-patient or out-patient treatment. But on average, $17K/person is a reasonable estimate.

      So we can ballpark this: $150K plus the 5 scholarships helps about 10-15 people per year.

      Alyssa asks: What kind of metrics do we have to assess how this is working?

      Answer: We’ve got tons of internal statistics, but we’re not yet coordinating well on the county level, in order to get stats on the full scope of the issue. This is one of our big goals, though.

      ….

      Just a quick soapbox: It is a moral obligation to help the most vulnerable people in society.  It does not matter if they made bad choices. Someone living on the streets with mental illness and/or substance abuse problems is being failed by society. And big problems cost a lot. 

      But big problems can also be prevented! If we invested more heavily in prevention – early childhood support, family support, increase the living wage, increase housing, effective addiction prevention programs – it would be cheaper than working to solve big problems once they take root, on an individual basis. (And that’s not even counting the value added to people’s lives, for not being derailed by catastrophe.)

      Can San Marcos afford to do all this properly on our own? Of course not.  But the state could! Texas had a $33 billion dollar surplus in 2023, and we’re projected to have a $20 billion surplus this coming year.  

      Will Texas spend it on making a fair and just society??? (no.) Stay tuned!

      …

      Item 10:  We’re back to this cutie little place:

      I think right now it’s called Las Dos Fridas.

      Before that, it was Katz’s On the Go Cafe:

      Before that, it was Santi’s Tacos:

      And before that, Dixie Cream Donuts:

      Ok.  Back in 2013, Union Pacific railroad offered to sell San Marcos four properties:

      We agreed. (We hoped this property might someday be a good train station on the Lonestar Light Rail connecting San Antonio to Austin.  That’s what I dream about at night, at least.)

      Now, Union Pacific sold the land to San Marcos in 2013, but not the physical little building.  The building was owned by Dixie Cream Donuts.  

      Furthermore, look at that red border – the border runs right through the building!  So weird. They carved the Dixie Cream Donuts building, half on Union Pacific land, and half on San Marcos land.   (We even asked them about it at the time: “why not run the border around the building? It can be all UP, or all SM. We don’t care.”  

      Union Pacific said, “nope.  We do this all the time.”  Okay then!)

      At some point, Dixie Cream Donuts sold the building to Ruben Becerra.  So Becerra now owns the building, and leases the land underneath it from both Union Pacific and San Marcos.  He then sublets it to Las Dos Fridas.

      …

      No one is very excited about extending this lease to Becerra. This would just be a mini-extension, to match the sublease to Las Dos Fridas. It would expire in January 2026.

      Council decides this is very thorny, what with Becerra being the Hays County Judge and all.  Council says cryptic things like, “I need to be able to give an answer when my constituents ask me what on earth is going on.” 

      They decide to postpone until January. 

      What happens if we don’t renew this lease? It’s not clear! Becerra still owns the building, he could in theory move it, although it’s probably not structurally sound.

      The vote:

      Yes, postpone until January: Everyone except Matthew Mendoza.

      No! Let’s settle this now! Matthew.

      I have no idea why Matthew wanted to settle it now. I don’t even know which way he wants it to go!

      …

      Item 14: New flood maps.

      Ok, FEMA has been working on our flood maps since the 2015 floods. The old flood maps were based on 1990 data, so this is very much needed. The new maps are called Atlas 14.

      Here’s how much city land is now in a flood plain:

      So about 800 new acres of San Marcos are now in the floodplain. We don’t know how many homes and businesses that is, though.

      So if you’re now in the floodplain, what changes? There are two main things:

      1. Building codes: the city has stricter ordinances if you’re building in a flood plain.

      Old buildings don’t have to be retrofitted, but any new buildings or additions have to meet flood plain standards. (Like being raised off the ground.)

      This isn’t actually a new change – the city has been using the Atlas-14 data since 2017 in our ordinances.

      2. Flood insurance rates for home owners.

      This is part of a much bigger, larger problem. “Flooding is the most frequent severe weather threat and the costliest natural disaster facing the nation.” Even when insurance providers pull out of high risk places like Florida and California, everyone can get insurance because there’s a federal program called the National Flood Insurance Program.

      The problem is that floods are really, really expensive. So flood insurance rates for people in a flood plain are very expensive. Many people can’t afford it, and go without. This causes two more problems:

      • Rates go up even more for everyone else
      • NFIP still doesn’t have enough money to give out in case of flooding.

      It’s a giant mess. It’s even worse when you think of the historical context in a place like San Marcos: wealthy people built their homes uphill, and left the downhill places for poorer neighborhoods. So it’s the people in Blanco Gardens and Victor Gardens and Dunbar that live in floodplains and have to debate flood insurance, not the University or the Historic District.

      So how much are rates going up?

      Amanda Rodriguez cites a study from Rice University about flood rates rising.  (I think it’s this one.)

      So rates in Hays County are projected to go up 137% increase. (Legally, the increase is capped at 18% per year. So over the next 5-10 years, your premiums would step up to cover the increased risk.)

      Mark Gleason weighs in.  He has a lot of lived experience with floods, particularly because he got hit hard in Blanco Gardens in 2015.  

      His main points:

      1. The National Flood Insurance Program is broken.
        • San Marcos is a member. This gets us a 15% discount, but subjects us to FEMA rules about rebuilding.
        • Premiums are unaffordable so people go without. Then disaster hits and they can’t afford to rebuild, and sell at low prices, and fancier housing gets built. (Yes.)
      2. If you’re in the floodplain now, you don’t have to retrofit your current home or business. But anything new, or an addition, has to conform to floodplain development standards
      3. If you own your home outright, you’re not required to purchase flood insurance. 
      4. But everybody SHOULD get flood insurance. It’s very cheap if you’re not in the flood zone

      Mark’s solution: Feds need to come in and fix the Blanco River. It needs some sort of flood control. It’s cheaper to fix the Blanco than it is to raise homes. 

      Jane: What about the San Marcos river and Purgatory Creek? Historically, those flood, too. It’s not just the Blanco.

      Basically, no one could possibly have any good answers. Mark certainly doesn’t know what it might take to fix the Blanco. None of us know what it would take to fix the flooding. None of us know the extent to which climate change will make things worse. We are all just kind of holding our breath and hoping.

      Hours 1:56 – 3:47, 12/17/24

      by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

      Item 15: The Human Services Advisory Board (HSAB)

      Every year, we give money to nonprofits. The HSAB sorts through the applications and gives out money.

      This year, they are giving out $550K.

      HSAB has a tumultuous past.  In addition, they used to have a bunch of Covid money to give away in 2022 and 2023, and now they don’t.   So this is a tough spot to be in.

      This year, they got 37 applications for a total of $1.1 million dollars requested. So that’s also a tough spot to be in!

      The HSAB Process

      First, some useful guiding principles:

      The whole decision process takes months. 

      Here’s how they evaluate the applications:

      (“Council priorities” always drives me fucking nuts.  It’s all about Council ego, and not what’s best for those in need.)

      Here’s how HSAB ranked the applications:

      (I know that’s tiny, but I think you can click on it and make it bigger.) Green is highest score, yellow is medium, pink is lowest.

      Then the board discusses each application individually.  They consider:

      1. Rankings
      2. Amount of money requested
      3. Need in San Marcos

      At the end of all that, here’s what the board recommends:

      They talk a little bit about why they chose not to fund the agencies at the bottom. Some of them are hard to measure, and they wanted programs that can measure results. Some of them were not aligned with which needs the board wanted to focus on this year. Some are not local.

      Summary by category:

      What does Council have to say?

      OH LORD, YOU GUYS, THIS WILL GET INTERESTING.

      Matthew Mendoza kicks things off. He wants to remove $10K from ACCEYSS, and give it to the Salvation Army. 

      What is ACCEYSS?

      Ok, summer camps and after school programming in Dunbar. They were awarded $20,000 to do this.

      Here’s what the Salvation Army wants to do:

      They were awarded no money.

      Jane asks why? The answer is that one of Council’s priorities is to support locally grown organizations. Since Salvation Army isn’t local, they lost points for that. [Jane deeply sighed, “Ok.”]

      Jane explains this away: this is a local chapter of the Salvation Army. They are extremely local.

      Note: Roland Saucedo – the council candidate that Jane campaigned for and supports – shows up to speak on behalf of the Salvation Army. That’s how local they are!

      Council talks to the Salvation Army representative for a long time, about the Salvation Army budget, and whether or not we could partner with the Salvation Army on utility assistance, which is also an ongoing conversation. Maybe we could direct some utility assistance money over to them?

      The vote:

      Move $10K from ACCEYSS to Salvation Army: everyone

      Keep things as they are: No one

      So that money is shifted over.

      …

      Next, Jane brings up the HOME Center.

      HOME Center is these guys. They do individual case management with homeless people to get them into stable, longterm housing. It is exceedingly difficult work and they do an outstanding job.

      I frankly don’t know how to sugarcoat this: the city has a history of being vindictive and retaliatory towards HOME Center. This is because historically, the city has not always been on the up-and-up regarding the homeless community, and HOME Center advocates on behalf of the homeless people who have gotten the raw end of things.

      Jane proposes moving $15K from HOME Center, and giving $10K to Salvation Army, $5K to Nosotros La Gente. This would bring the Salvation Army up to $20K, and put HOME Center down to $5k. (Actually, her first proposal is to bring HOME down to zero. Matthew gently chides her to leave HOME Center with $5K.)

      Keep in mind that Jane openly endorsed and campaigned for Roland Saucedo, who is loosely affiliated with the Salvation Army. He was present at Tuesday’s meeting and advocated for the Salvation Army.

      I like to stick to cut-and-dried facts, but you absolutely have to know that this is a very tense topic. Jane is not a neutral party here, and her proposal feels like a shot across the bow.

      Jane’s stated reason is that HOME Center is requesting money for a case manager salary. She says, “We don’t want to fund salaries, because we don’t want someone to be laid off if we don’t fund them.”

      The staff member says, “In the application, we said Board can allocate up to 20% of a fulltime position or fully fund a part-time app.”

      Jane argues this point, but she is wrong here. Here is the policy from January 2023:

      And in the actual discussion, they settled on 20% of a fulltime position is okay, and funding a parttime position is okay.

      So first, Jane is technically wrong. But more important, she’s morally wrong. The staff, Alyssa, and Amanda all point out to her that many of these applications asked for staff funding, and yet she’s singling out HOME Center to slash.

      Jane: We have given a LOT of money to Southside. They are hiring.  So that’s an issue that I have with HOME Center in particular.  

      She is referring to the $800k of Covid money that the city recently gave Southside Community Center, to implement our Homeless Action Plan. She is somehow making the case that Southside’s funding works against HOME Center?

      Alyssa comes in hard: Absolutely not.  We gave Southside an obscene amount of money. Initially, there were community concerns and Council concerns about Southside’s capacity. We had grace and did a trust fall.   We need to extend that to HOME Center.  They do boots on the ground hard work. The service and case management they do is unmatched.

      She continues: “I know this is not your intention, Mayor, but I need to name this.  Within different groups that do homeless outreach, there is a perception that HOME Center continues to face retaliation because they use their platform to bring to light some historic concerns and trends regarding homeless outreach in general in our community.  And so I  know that’s not your intention, but the community had a very thorough process with feedback and open meetings. It is not a good look, without any process or notification, to be making these moves.”

      There’s some continued hectoring from Mark and Jane – they could have asked for money for different costs! They could have shown up to this meeting and defended themselves!

      Amanda is furious: “This is not the only organization that asked for staff funding! So many of these organizations are funding staff! I’ll be honest: I’m losing my patience, because as someone who has volunteered with HOME center, as someone who has spoken to the clients that receive what they do: our community benefits in ways that we will never understand…. The reasons you’re giving are not strong enough for me, and this just feels wrong.”

      Jane, sweetly, “Then you can vote against it!” 

      Amanda, coldly: “I will.”

      Jane: “I just wish they’d asked for money for something else!”

      Alyssa, “Well, I wish you weren’t nitpicking, but sometimes we don’t get our wishes granted. We need to meet the moment where it’s at.”

      (I’m abbreviating all this hugely. Feel free to listen yourself. HSAB item starts at 2:00, and Council discussion starts at 2:19ish.)

      Eventually Alyssa makes a motion to postpone. She says, “We need space for community feedback.  We’re overstepping and moving things around without rhyme or reason.  We need to let our neighbors know.” 

      The vote to postpone:

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

      So the postponement squeaks through. This will come back around in January.

      …

      Let’s zoom out for a moment on the HSAB funding:

      The committee spends months on these applications. All of the agencies provide metrics and ample documentation of how they spent previous money – literally over 2000 pages of applications in the Council packet this week. Council argues passionately about whether $5000 is better spent on kids in Dunbar, or emergency funding from the Salvation Army.

      Here is a list of things that received zero discussion on Tuesday:

      • $45,000.00 to McKimm & Creed, for Leak Detection Services
      • $241,036.36 to Cunningham Recreation, for various playground and outdoor fitness equipment
      • $573,458.79 to Nueces Power Equipment, for the purchase of a Wirtgen Asphalt Milling Machine
      • $2 million (annually) for McCoy Tree Surgery Company, for tree trimming
      • $6 million for Techline, Inc, for materials and supplies for San Marcos Electric Utility
      • $8.6 million for the Lower Colorado River Authority, for various goods and services concerning electrical transmission, control and substation facilities
      • $765 reimbursement to Tantra

      Was Jane Hughson worried about us paying someone’s whole salary at McKimm & Creed? Was she worried that the company might become too dependent on us?

      Did a committee meet for months, and have a scoring system? Why do we scrutinize $20,000 to HOME Center, and not $6 million to Techline, Inc?

      We also give homestead exemptions of $15,000 to all homeowners, and $35,000 to seniors and people with disabilities. We have an estimated 10,295 owner-occupied homes in San Marcos. The tax rate is 60.3 cents per $100. So ballpark, we’re giving homeowners $904,500 yearly in homestead exemptions.

      Why don’t we include this $900K in an application to HSAB? We could call it “Subsidies to Home-owners Program” and see if it scores higher than ACCEYSS on the evaluation criteria. We don’t think of this as charity, but we should. And we don’t even make the home owners provide metrics, measurable outcomes, nor turn in performance reports for how they spend their extra charity dollars each year. Isn’t that nice?

      (And finally, I will never get sick of reminding you that we’re giving $1.2 million yearly to Kissing Tree. No metrics, no scrutiny, no gnashing of teeth. Just a nice, gated community that’s not for you.)

      …

      Item 16: Guiding Principles to lobby the Texas Legislature.

      The Texas legislature only meets once every two years, for 140 days. This is to minimize the damage that they can do. 

      Or as Molly Ivins put it, “The Texas Legislature consists of 181 people who meet for 140 days every two years. This catastrophe has now occurred 63 times.”

      Or, as the old joke goes: “The Texas legislature meets every two years for 140 days. Many citizens believe that the law was incorrectly transcribed and that the legislature was meant to meet for two days every 140 years.”

      Anyway! San Marcos lobbies the state legislature on behalf of our interests. So we have a Guiding Principles document, to determine what we’ll lobby.

      Amanda comes in with a ton of amendments.  Keep in mind that she’s worked with the state legislature for the past few years. It quickly becomes clear how much expertise she’s bringing to the table.

      The first batch is all under the mental health section. Here’s the original:

      Amanda #1: Suggested add: Support legislative action to establish a school mental health allotment fund. 

      Why? The Legislature passed a School Safety Bill last time, but it doesn’t fund mental health. So this asks the state to create line item funding to address mental health funding. 

      Everyone loves this. The vote:  7-0

      Amanda #2:  Support legislative action to increase in funding for Local Mental Health Authorities (LMHAs) to provide early intervention services to prevent crises.

      The vote: 7-0

      Matthew Mendoza is so happy. He says, “Yes, because it will go to SMPD!!” when he casts his vote.

      Amanda #3:  Support legislative action to expand access to maternal mental health support throughout pregnancy and the post-partum period. 

      The vote:  7-0

      Amanda’s on a roll! Everyone loves these!

      Amanda #4:  Support legislative action that expands eligibility for Medicaid.

      Texas turns down $5 billion in federal money every year for Medicaid. About 19% of Texans are uninsured, which is far and beyond the worst in the country. This is because we never expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

      Mark has finally had enough of this nonsense! “I’m going to be a no on this. Those are conversations for the state and federal government to have.”

      He has a deep moral conviction about staying neutral on healthcare coverage. Should uninsured diabetics die for lack of insulin? Mark refuses to have an opinion, and you can’t make him!

      The vote:

      Yes, the state should accept Medicaid funding: Everyone but Mark
      No, this is none of my business: Mark

      Amanda #5: Support legislative action to increase funding for permanent supportive housing programs.  (Housing First programs.)

      There is a fake-debate among homelessness experts. Should you provide housing and then treat the mental illness and/or substance abuse? This is Housing First. Or, should you withhold permanent housing until the person gets their issues solved? This is Treatment First.

      I’ll give you a hint: in Trump’s first term, his housing guy was a strong Treatment First guy. (And then we hired him as a consultant.)

      Mark: I’m a no. Housing First isn’t always the best! 

      Mark is wrong. (If that link gets scrubbed under Trump, then we can use this one.) Housing First works better, and it’s more humane. It’s better all around.

      The vote:

      We support Housing First: Amanda, Alyssa, Jane, Shane, Saul

      We don’t: Mark, Matthew

      Amanda #6: There is no section on Housing in our Guiding Principles.  We should have a Housing section.

      In the Housing Section, Amanda recommends:

      • That we support legislative action that prevents unnecessary evictions
      • To promote housing stability and protecting tenants from undue hardships

      The vote: 7-0

      Mark is deeply suspicious, though.

      Amanda #7: Support legislative action that seals a tenants eviction records in the event that a court rules in their favor

      Mark and Matthew are both gobsmacked that this is not already the case. A tenant can win in court, but landlords can still use their eviction against them? Yes, currently.

      The vote: 7-0

      Mark is so suspicious! He literally says, “How is this not already the case?! WHATEVER. Yes.”

      Amanda #8:  Support budgetary measures to increase state funding for low income housing in Texas, especially for the most cost-burdened households that are at or below 50% of the AMI. 

      The vote: 7-0.

      Amanda #9: Remove the whole carve-out for SMART/Axis. 

      This brings us back around to the Citizen Comment, four hours ago! (Backstory on the SMART/Axis development here.)

      Mark: Hard no. We have to increase and diversify our tax base! People don’t realize what that development could mean to this community! All the jobs! This is PRIME for development! I-10, Toll road, railroad, and airport!  JOBS! JOBS! Major mistake! In 50 years, this will be the most important bullet point in this whole document!

      Matthew: We just postponed due to second-guessing HSAB board and here we are, second-guessing this board!  There aren’t smokestacks. This is environmental protection! Do you really want SMART/Axis to go to Caldwell county?  Plus Gary Job Corp is right there.

      (This is the weakest argument I’ve ever heard.)

      Amanda: I’m not opposed to diversifying and growing our tax base. This is a very specific major development that arose through shady means. The entire city is not behind this development. Nowhere else in this document are we so specific.

      Mark: Because it’s 3000 acres! Nowhere else in the COUNTRY has this opportunity! DC wants to hear how we’re diversifying. This is amazeballs! 

      The vote:

      Remove the carve-out for SMART/Axis:  Alyssa, Amanda
      Keep it:  Jane, Shane, Mark, Matthew, and Saul

      So that stays.

      That’s all of the amendments!

      …

      After this, we have a series of little items:

      • the $2 million on tree-trimming
      • the $6 million to the LCRA
      • we officially the money back to Tantra
      • an appointment to the Animal Shelter Advisory Committee

      But Council zips through these, and so will I.