Category: Hour summaries

Hours 1:39 – 2:48, 11/6/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 5:  The police department wants to buy 70 BolaWraps, at a cost of $112k. 

A BolaWrap is this surreal Spiderman thing:

You aim your gadget at the bad guy, and shoot out this Y-shaped thread.  The outstretched parts whip around your dude, and lasso him up tight. 

BAD GUY CONTAINED! You saved the princess!

So should we buy 70 of these 7.5 foot Kevlar lassos for our cops?

Alyssa Garza is a hard no.  She is the one pulled this item off the consent agenda for discussion, saying that purchases like this need some scrutiny and public attention. 

  • She read a bunch of cop message boards, and found cops laughing at how terrible they are
  • She also notes that other communities hold big studies and have well-thought-out policies on new implements like this.

Chief Standridge is present.  He comes up to talk.

  • The point of the BolaWrap is that it’s a nonlethal remote restraint.
  • It’s used to de-escalate situations where someone is having a mental health crisis, drug psychosis, or some other criminal behavior
  • Does not rely on pain compliance

“Non-lethal de-escalation” emerges as a major talking point. I’ll grant you non-lethal. But de-escalation?

Let’s meditate on the word de-escalation for a second. That means that tempers have escalated, and you’re trying to calm everyone down, so that the situation can resolve peacefully.

Lassoing someone’s legs may buy you a couple seconds while you slap some handcuffs on them, but it sure as shit does not calm anyone down.

So no, this does not actually count as de-escalation.  It’s absurd for Chief Standridge to toss around that word so much. He’s just grabbed it as a useful buzzword du jour.  Restraining someone with a bug-zapper so that you can slap handcuffs on them may be less violent, but that’s a gross misinterpretation of de-escalation.  

Are BolaWraps the worst thing ever, then? No, of course not.  Let’s do some ranking:

  1. Shooting someone: the actual worst thing
  2. Tazing someone: quite dangerous and possibly lethal
  3. Bolawraps: not likely to hurt anyone, aside from making them trip and fall. 

If you are happy with cops enforcing the current criminal justice system, BolaWraps are pretty neutral. If you are trying to dismantle the status quo and change the criminal justice system, then things that are neutral are bad.

To Alyssa’s questions, Chief Standridge says: “These are 80% effective. Not 100%. Just another tool in our toolbelt.”

Alyssa asks, “Where did you get the 80% number from?”

Chief Standridge says, “The BoloWrap website!”

Alyssa says, “So the people who are selling it? Who have a profit motive?”

Chief Standridge: “Yep!!”

Chase Stapp, the assistant city manager, steps up and says, “It costs more if we use excessive force.” In other words, if we taze or shoot someone and get sued, the lawsuit is more expensive than a BolaWrap.

[Side note: The reason you shouldn’t taze someone or shoot someone is because you are injuring their body. Cops are not judges nor juries, and so that bad guy is legally an innocent person, and you just injured or killed them. (But yes, lawsuits are expensive.)]

Chief Standridge says, “When you have a mental health crisis, you have a choice. You can use force, or you can use bolaWrap.”

Alyssa says, “Maaaaaybe mental health shouldn’t be under SMPD.”

Chief Standridge quips back, “Maaaaaaybe your police chief would completely agree with you! But until that system is built out, people still call 911 for mental health crises. We send out PD and an embedded mental health clinician, when she’s on duty. We’re working on your solution, but we’re not there yet.”

Another Sidebar:

This sounds like an invitation to create a new system, yes? Chief Standridge just explicitly says he’d like to see mental health first responders separated from SMPD.

In order to separate out mental health crises responders from SMPD, you’d need a few things:
– Public buy-in. If you think that a person having a mental health crisis should get a mental health expert responder instead of getting BolaWrapped, you should reach out and let city council know.

– City Council buy-in: they will only support something like this if they think it will affect their election chances. (Aside from Alyssa.)

– Staff buy-in: My read is that the city manager and assistant city manager don’t approve of progressive revisions of policing. That would have to be overcome.

– Chief Standridge is on record here voicing support for separating off mental health crises from the current police system. But I don’t know what he’s like behind the scenes, and how actively he’d advocate for this.

To me, this seems like something worth pursuing.

…

Some other facts get tossed around:

  • Seguin has purchased these. (yay?)
  • In 2022, SMPD had 65,000 interactions with citizens, and 59 required use of force.  In other words, about once a week, they use force.  

Saul: I need a demonstration.

Chief Standridge: I mean, it’s still a firearm. We shouldn’t just be discharging it indoors. But here’s a video!

Here’s the video they watched:

Next up, Matthew Mendoza chimes in.

I’m going to quote Matthew fully, because this is starting to be a trend. Clearly he’s done something like research, but whatever he found is total nonsense.  He says, at 1:57:

Columbia County, in Oregon – it’s where Portland actually sits, in the center of that county. Let’s be honest, that tends to be an area where they are very observant of… they want a lot of visibility and interactions with our first responders and authority. As of 6 hours ago, their Fox station released a report saying that Columbia County sheriff’s department has been using this for the last two weeks. And it’s been successful!  If Columbia County, Oregon finds this to be suitable…

Alyssa: For how long, now?

Matthew: For six days now! But I’m sure they’ve taken months to, I mean, this is Oregon. This isn’t someone I would imagine would just be jumping in, or tossing it up there. I’m seeing everywhere that people are trying this! 

His argument seems to be: “We all know Portland is a bunch of liberal mushy-hearted saps, and even they love this technology! We know Portland would vet it thoroughly. If they’re in, I’m in!” 

Just to be clear:

First, Portland is not in Columbia County, although I’m sure there are suburbs that spill over out that far.

Second, here’s the map for the 2020 presidential election.

via

Columbia County is Trump Country, by a margin of 53% to 42%. Whereas Hays County broke for Biden, 54% to 44%.  So let’s not hold them up as a standard for anything, okay?

I’m editing things down significantly. There’s lots more repetition of:
– the nonlethal de-escalation bit
– how they are only 80% effective
– how they’re cheaper than lawsuits

Alyssa: We have a Use of Force Policy for the department.  Where can we find policy and procedures document for this?

Chief Standridge: That would be backwards! The order goes:

  1. First I get permission from you all to buy them.
  2. Buy them.
  3. Get all the training done.
  4. Then we’ll know enough to write a good policy about them.

This is cousin to “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.” Chief Standridge could have easily showed up today with a few policies that other police departments use, as possible rough drafts. But once you already have the BolaWraps in officers’ hands, you’re going to write the policy framed by eagerness to get out there and get going. You would have gotten a much more cautious and measured policy if they weren’t already holding their new toys.

Alyssa: A bunch of people say it sounds like a gunshot. Doesn’t that make a situation more dangerous?

Chief Standridge: I always wear hearing protection around guns, and I did not use hearing protection with these.

Alyssa: I’m a no. There are much better uses of this money. 

Saul: How long do batteries last?

Chief: I don’t know! 

Saul: Who gets the 70 units?

Chief: Patrol, School Resource Officers, Mental Health Unit, and Traffic Stops.

Matthew Mendoza asks if officers also carry lethal weapons. 

Answer: Yes. Cops have guns.

Finally, Chief Standridge ends with a speech: “We act like officers are the impediment to change. But we’re all stakeholders in this community!  The people, the city council, and the department. If we want to change the system, let’s do it!”

With all due respect, the community got enough signatures to repeal the police contract, and the city basically negotiated a nearly-identical one to replace it.  From where I’m sitting, the city council, staff and SMPD are all impediments to change.  (Also many regular people are content with the status quo. But they’re wrong!) 

The Vote:

Yay, Bolawraps!  Jude, Shane, Jane, Matthew, Saul

No to zapping and wrapping: Alyssa

There you go. The zappings will continue until morale improves.

…

Item 10: We saw this at the workshops last month:

Old vacant buildings look sad:

and scary:

We don’t want to make the opossums and raccoons live somewhere so sad.

But we can give them a quick glow up:

by requiring that boarded up doors and windows be painted to look like regular doors and windows.

Hooray!

In fact, we already have a version of this downtown:

and

So there you have it. Coming soon to a derelict property near you!

…

Item 11: I know “Sunset Acres” sounds like a retirement village, but it’s actually this neighborhood:

Mendez Elementary is right in the middle of it.

At Council one year ago, Sunset Acres came up because they’ve got a disastrous flooding situation happening. (And it sounds like it’s been going on for decades, and has just been chronically neglected by the city.) 

The city is finally working on it:

Phase 1 costs $1,642,910.00. With that kind of money, you could buy 1,027 BolaWraps! So you can tell this is important. We’re starting Phase 1 now.

Saul asks: What happens if they take too long?

Answer: Contracts have timeline clauses. They get fined $800-$1K per day if their time runs out. 

Sounds great! But also sounds like the kind of fine that never quite gets enforced.

(That’s a fine of about half a BolaWrap per day.)

…..

Item 13:  Remember this, from last month?  Shannon Mattingly was head of the Planning Department from 2015 to 2022.  Then she resigned, started working for a developer, and showed up recently to advocate for some new student housing.

Apparently Jane Hughson has been getting an earful from people who are pissed off about this.  It certainly looks shady.

It’s not technically a violation of our current code:

(Yes, it’s a screen shot because it’s not in the packet.) She showed up at Council meetings, not P&Z meetings, and so she is fine under the current policy.

So the point is: maybe our conflict-of-interest statement needs to be strengthened? Council is sending it over to the Ethics Review Committee to look it over.

…

Item 14:  Let’s summarize all these Comprehensive and Area Plans:

  1. VisionSMTX++: punted till January.
  2. Downtown Area Plan: passed, minus CM Allen district.
  3. All the other Area Plans: still to come, over the next few years.

The current plan is that each Area Plan gets seen by Council at one meeting: there’s a presentation, a discussion, and a final vote. All wrapped up in one night.

Jane Hughson wants each Area Plan to come before Council twice, instead of once. In other words, the first meeting would have a hearing and a discussion. Two weeks later, at the second meeting, you’d get any fall-out from the first meeting, more discussion, and the final vote.

This is an example of Jane’s best skill as mayor: she’s looking ahead to upcoming issues, and figuring out that the community will care a lot, and that it may blow up if they don’t have enough opportunity to weigh in.  She’s very thorough and thoughtful in detail-oriented ways like this.

City Staff says that the area plans will:

  1. Go through Neighborhood Commissions
  2. Go through P&Z
  3. Then come to Council
  4. And now, come back to Council a second time.

All this is to make sure that no one feels blindsided by things.  

Bonus! 3 pm Workshops, 11/6/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Parts of the 3 pm workshops were interesting!

  1. The first one was on San Marcos Tourism:

How does it compare to other industries in the city? How does it compare to other cities? I have no idea! So those numbers are kind of meaningless without context, unfortunately.

  • We have 29 hotels and 50 short term rentals
  • We have a hotel occupancy tax, and we use it on the various festivals, mural arts, Sights & Sounds, and things around town.

Apparently we advertise outside of San Marcos, like so:

Whatever works, man. I guess Marketing knows best.

As a marxist, I’m mostly not a marketing and business person. But then they started talking about the river, which is more interesting to me.

So, who goes to the river?

They hired some consultants to track our cell phones, and see where we sleep at night. 

So after we tube the river, where do we sleep?

This year, about a quarter were local, half were regional, and 20% were more than 50 miles away. Last year, 40% were local, a third were regional, and a quarter were from further away.

It would be nice to have some absolute numbers here, by the way.  It was implied that we had more users this year, due to the drought, but you can’t tell that from the percents.

2. The second presentation was on Summer 2023 at the River Parks

We tried a new Park Ambassador program this year. We hired 8 staff members to wander through the river parks all summer long, and try to be helpful.

It sounds like they told a lot of people to put their glass bottles away, put their charcoal grills away, put their dog on a leash, and put their trash bags in the right places.

You can see those spikes right at the 4th of July weekend, and the weekend before school starts.

Apparently park use is up this year. In the first presentation, they speculated that it was because of the drought: local watering holes dried up and were closed, to preserve them, and so people came here instead.

This photo was taken by Christopher Paul Cardoza:

(I got it from the slide show, though.)  It’s 5 pm on the 4th of July. 

There’s a serious problem here:

  1. How else are you going to escape the heat on the 4th of July, unless you find some water? In our shitty world of capitalism, we’ve eliminated almost all free ways to have recreation and a little joy in people’s lives. 
  2. But the river is super overused. This is extremely bad for the health of the river.

(Might I suggest overthrowing our capitalist overlords and breaking free from the chains that bind? No? Ah well.)

One of the biggest problems is the litter:

Pretty much every weekend, the river parks are trashed. It’s one of the biggest problems the parks department faces, and they have a ton of clean up efforts going simultaneously. 

They spend $191K each summer on litter abatement alone. (That’s enough to buy 120 BolaWraps, for those of you keeping track.)

 Anyway, the Parks Department has some suggestions:

My opinions:

  • Single-Use Container Ban: yes. You’ve got to get the trash under control.
  • Tube size limitation: yes. It’s super dangerous when these giant 8 person contraptions go over the falls and over people swimming. 
  • Paid Parking and Picnic Permits: The idea is to charge non-residents. It’ll be a headache for residents, though – you probably have to download some app and verify your address. 
  • Managed Access Points: I think this means that the park gets fenced in?  That feels sort of sad.  Maybe it’s inevitable.

Alyssa Garza asks about the ban on charcoal grills.  What’s the history here? Why is propane okay, but charcoal not?

Answer: Until 2013, you could bring charcoal grills.  We just could not get people to properly dispose of their charcoal.  People dump it on the ground, other people burn their feet. People dump it at the base of the tree, the tree starts on fire:

The photo on the right is offered up as evidence that people dump hot charcoal on tree stumps and start fires, which is really pretty wild.

In 2013, we adopted the Habitat Conservation Plan, and banning charcoal grilling was part of that.  Allowing propane grills was the compromise position. 

These are going to go to the Parks Board, and then on to City Council very soon.

Hours 0:00 – 1:58, 10/17/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment

Here are the main things people care about:

  • CM Allen district – we want Option 2! There’s too much student housing and not enough parking. Last riverfront property.
  • CM Allen district – we do not want Option 2! There’s not enough housing and not enough parking, and there’s better ways to spend money.
  • CM Allen district Option 2 was conceived in the dead of night behind closed doors, and we object to being locked out of the process.
  • Big $36 million grant available for river restoration.  Letter of intent deadline is coming quick. Could use this to study Cape’s Dam? (SMRF)
  • San Marcos does a miserable job of making this city accessible for people in wheelchairs.
  • San Marcos does a miserable job of taking care of our heritage trees. You all recently cut down a big one on the town square, and another one across from the Veterans Memorial.
  • We’re going to sue you if you pass those airport rezonings.

We’ll get to the Great Option 2 Debate when we discuss the Downtown Master Plan. The rest of the topics raised don’t really show up again this evening.

(The airport rezoning passed with the Consent Agenda.)

….

Item 13: The bus.

Everyone loves the Austin Powerplant sign for using that Gotham City font, but may I humbly submit that the San Marcos Station font is a serious contender for charming font choices?

(I think it’s actually the same font, but we don’t go making such a fuss about it.)

Anyway, good news: Buses are free in San Marcos! Paratransit services are free, too! These have all been free since the beginning of Covid, actually. Maybe there’s a route that suits your needs?

This is all very good! No changes are coming.

All they did on Tuesday was set up a procedure so that someday, if service or fares do need to change, there’s a procedure in place, which includes a public hearing. Also good!

The vote: 7-0. Good job, Council!

Item 14: VisionSMTX++

We are almost to the sad end to an excruciating process.

Background:
VisionSMTX++ is the Comprehensive Plan, the big vague guiding document for how we want the city to grow and change over the next ten years. Or rather: growth is coming regardless of whether or not we want it, so let’s have a plan for where to put it.

A 30-person citizen steering committee met with consultants for two years to produce VisionSMTX. Tons of extra community input was solicited.

Mayor Hughson and P&Z read it and got mad about it. So they formed a subcommittee and made 74 pages worth of changes to a 300 page document. Given that a lot of the 300 page document is fluff and filler – pretty pictures, etc – you can see that they really dug in and tore it apart. (We first discussed this here.)

A lot of the committee – including me! – got mad about it. P&Z held a workshop and approved the new version. (Discussed here.)

City staff adds an extra “+” to pour one out for their homies, each time P&Z wrecks something important. So by now, it’s become VisionSMTX++.

Public Hearing:

It is almost entirely people mad about the subcommittee changes.

  • P&Z subcommittee destroyed all the community input that was solicited for original plan.
  • Original is the right version, not the P&Z shadow version
  • In their effort to protect the Historic district, they’ve now hamstrung all the other neighborhoods from getting basic services
  • Support for a second city center on the east side, but please be sure to commemorate the El Camino Real trail running through it.

(Guys. GUYS! You know how our whole thing is “A River Runs Through Us”? We could have a companion piece, “This Historic Trail Also Runs Through Us.” Yes, yes?)

  • More people saying the original Vision SMTX is better
  • Rosie Ray reiterating her two main points from last time:
    1. please remove “vehicle” from the definition that’s meant to deal with reducing car dependency.
    2. Please add “multiplexes/duplexes/condos” to the things that are currently found in neighborhoods where they currently exist.

What exactly are the substantial changes?

There are roughly three camps:

1. People passionate about the Historic District. We love Belvin and San Antonio street.
2. Developers who want to maximize profit.
3. Lefties who are worried about sprawl, the environment, and unaffordable housing. Hi!

Group 1 holds all the power in this discussion. They have a majority on P&Z and Council. The P&Z subcommittee, plus Jane Hughson, was overwhelmingly Group 1.

Group 1’s perspective:
– They are extremely worried about Group 2 destroying cute old houses and putting up giant apartment complexes in the middle of neighborhoods. To be fair, this is a thing that Group 2 would cheerfully do, if allowed.
– They think Group 3 is kind-hearted idiots who will do inadvertently the bidding of Group 2.

In order to prevent this, they locked down the Historic District into carbonite and said, “We hereby declare that nothing shall ever change!”

However, they actually locked down all single family neighborhoods. This was not an accident. They see a black and white world, where the only two options are this:

  1. For The Haves:

The Haves get massive sprawl, high prices, and car-dependency

and 2. For the Have-Nots:

The Have-Nots get massive utilitarian apartment complexes.

Group one believes there is absolutely no other possibility. (Weirdly though, you need a lot of rules to pretend this.)

The problem is that there is a 3rd possibility: gently densify your neighborhoods.
– Allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs)
– Allow housing that the have-nots can afford, like duplexes, triplexes, or other smallscale affordable housing. You want the neighborhood to still feel like a quiet neighborhood, but just not be such a jerk about keeping poor people out.
– Focus on ways to reduce car-dependency, by providing necessities nearby. In other words, people like having a corner store where you can pick up some groceries or a sandwich.

So: Is Group 3 actually a bunch of well-intentioned idiots? Is that fantasy impossible?

No! It’s very, very possible! It’s the Historic District. There are actually a ton of mini-complexes hidden throughout. Pretty much every single house along Belvin has an ADU. Isn’t that great? And they can quickly reach little HEB and all of downtown without driving.

It is great for them! Just not for anyone else.

Here are the specific major changes from the subcommittee:
– Remove ADUs from being allowed in single family neighborhoods.
– Remove smallscale multiplex from being in low intensity areas.
– Measure “walkability” by what you can drive to. Like, in your car.
– Declare that all existing low-intensity neighborhoods only contain houses. They don’t, but we’re declaring it!
– Infill must match existing housing types. In other words, if there are only houses as far as the eye can see, then that’s what you’re stuck with. Forever and ever.
– Remove language that helps people bike around town for transportation. (Seriously, what are you, a grinch? You can’t enjoy yourself if someone else is able to bike to work?)

The list of changes is 74 pages long. Just the changes!! Many of them are minor, but it’s a nightmare to wade through. ( I got to page 26 and gave up.)

But now I’m going to step back and try to see things from a bird’s eye view:

How much does a comprehensive plan matter? I don’t know. I can see it both ways:

1. Not that much: Developers will continue to build single-family sprawl and massive complexes, because fundamentally they’re not in it for social change and progressive rallying cries. They play it safe, because they want profits to be safe.

2. Matters a whole lot: Incremental change adds up over time. These little nudges towards affordable housing and against car-dependency wouldn’t solve problems, but they’d help keep us from making things worse as quickly as possible.

Ultimately I think it matter quite a lot, or else I wouldn’t spend my Saturdays writing all this out, over and over again.

The Council Debate:

Jane starts off with her apology tour, which I found wholly unconvincing. Basically:

  • The shadow P&Z committee was supposed to be a good thing! The point was transparency! If she’d saved her concerns for Council, fewer people would have had a chance to see all the changes.
  • She just wanted to protect existing neighborhoods.  (She seems to think this is an unassailable good thing, instead of the utter heart of the issue.)
  • She talked to a wise person who explained the accusation of “watering it down”: the issue was this word swap from “objectives” to “considerations” and so Jane has changed it back. 

Jane is truly missing the point.  She’s unable to consider that the content of her changes is why people are mad. 

…

Side note: I don’t know if city council reads this blog.  They are all aware of it, because I’ve emailed them as The San Marxist, and included a link (and also because San Marcos is small and gossipy).

If a councilmember claims they want as much community input as possible, then they should be reading this blog. 

If a councilmember chooses not to read this blog, I am going to infer that they don’t actually want to maximize the amount of community input that they hear. 

Jane seems wholly unaware of the arguments I’ve made over and over and over.  In fairness, she also seems unaware of the public comments that were made 10 feet away from where she’s sitting, 15 minutes earlier. So who knows.

…

Let’s dive in!

Jude: So how big are these changes exactly?  Why are we taking out ADUs? Why not incentivize diverse housing types? Why so many 4th quarter changes?

Answer from staff: We were focused on transparency! 

Jude: I feel uncomfortable with making all these changes by the seat of our pants. We should respect the process.

Jane: I made these changes back in March. Hardly the seat of our pants.

Alyssa: You’re saying the subcommittee rewrite was justified because it was open to the public and transparent. But look, the subcommittee really does not reflect our community. When considering these issues, I try to use two questions as guideposts:

  1. Who is this leaving behind?
  2. Are we doing something that we’ll have to undo later?

People feel like they’ve been dismissed. We can see who we’re leaving behind based on the composition of P&Z. When we are taking suggestions from a tiny body, we can expect to have to rewrite things.  I support the original plan.

[Note: I like these two questions. We are leaving behind most of San Marcos. We will definitely end up having to undo this comp plan eventually. ]

Shane: I’m not ready to vote on this tonight. More research is needed.

Mark Gleason: I don’t have a problem with the changes, philosophically. I’m ready to move forward.

Saul: I’m okay moving forward.

Matthew Mendoza didn’t weigh in at this point, but he’s so obviously pro-neighborhoods-in-carbonite that it’s unnecessary. 

…

So at this point, the game is over. The new plan has the four votes it needs.  Its fate is sealed. Here is the status of all the existing neighborhoods now:

The thing that’s absolutely wild is how little time Council spends discussing any of this.

  • The original community group spent 2 years on this.
  • P&Z took eight months and a workshop, and a re-write to wade through all of this.  
  • The above conversation takes about 20 minutes.

After this, Jane has a bunch of worthwhile amendments on other issues – after all, the entire thing is 300 pages long. But they’re on new and different details.

All those changes described above? ADUs, walkability, definitions, etc? Just absolute radio silence.

Why not take these large issues one at a time, and discuss them? Why not offer up an amendment, or hunt for a compromise, or at least make the majority defend their reasons? Why not do something? 

Obviously Jane, Mark, Saul, and Matthew all like the new plan. (I disagree with all of them.)

But Shane, Jude, and Alyssa all don’t like the new plan! My dudes. You could dig in and try to repair it. You’ve been spoonfed two mild, palatable amendments by Dr. Rosie Ray, on two separate occasions! The very least you could do is offer those up.

Jude even explicitly asked about ADUs and diverse housing types, but then lets it go! (Which is his signature dance move, of course.) And Shane – “I need to do more research” – Scott is also being absurd.  He was on the actual steering committee for two years! Be a councilmember, make an amendment, hammer out a compromise. 

The actual final vote is next meeting. Maybe one of them will surprise me.

Should LBJ and Guadalupe Stay 1-Way Streets?

Next Jane makes a series of amendments.  Most of them are minor and fine.  The one that’s more notable is about LBJ and Guadalupe downtown. In the Comp Plan Appendix, they bring up converting them to be two-way.

Jane’s take:  Over the years, we’ve debated this thing until we were blue in the face. We voted and laid this issue to rest. Plus, the price tag to reverse course now is super steep, and it would mess up the bike lanes.

Saul: It used to be 2 way.

Jane: I remember! It switched in 1971, right before I got my license.

Jude: Longterm, we all know they will have to be 2 way.

Note: We do? Why is it a foregone conclusion that eventually we’ll have to have two way streets? 

I do remember the debates on this, but I wasn’t paying close attention.  My memory is:

  • Businesses prefer two-way because it’s easier for people to locate their store
  • People seem to like one-way out of preference for the status quo
  • Possibly traffic moves better with one-way?

I personally am used to one-way and it seems to work pretty smoothly, and so I stand with those who prefer the status quo. Plus, I don’t want to undo the bike lanes. But I’m open to hearing the arguments for two-way, especially if it’s supposedly “inevitable” and all.

The vote on one-way streets:

Keep ‘en one-way: Jane, Saul, Matthew, Mark

Two way is the future! Shane, Jude, Alyssa

Alyssa stated earlier that she’s a “no” on all of this, protesting the process. So she is not necessarily weighing in on 1-way vs 2-way streets here.  

… 

Jude ends by saying he’s still super concerned about the process. Not concerned enough to make any actual amendment.  Just concerned, y’know, in general.

The first vote on the whole VisionSMTX++:

Lock down the sprawl! Jane, Mark, Saul, Matthew, and Jude

I’m protesting the process! Shane and Alyssa

Like I said, this will come back one more time, in November. (Feel free to read the whole thing yourself – all the versions, and the summary table of changes. Go nuts.)

Hours 1:58 – 4:01, 10/17/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 15: The Downtown Area Plan

The Downtown Area Plan is more than just the CM Allen District, but that’s definitely the part that sucks up all the oxygen in the room.  (Discussed here last time.)

Still, let’s take a moment to pay attention to the rest:

And here are the major points:

The thing is: downtown is already owned and zoned. You can’t demand or legislate hardly anything. All you can do is entice and form partnerships and collaborate with the people who run the things located there.

So let’s move onto the CM Allen District, which we discussed last time:

There was a Downtown Area Plan committee, who came up with Option 1:

Option 1:

Five Story Loaves of Bread:

Similarly to VisionSMTX, the shadow subcommittee of P&Z plus Jane Hughson was horrified, and rewrote it.

Hence Option 2:

Given that the city doesn’t actually own all that land, the Planning Department tried to thread the needle and come up with a compromise option:

Option 3:

Colorful, vibrant, smaller loaves of bread:

At P&Z, we heard about the unaffordability of Option 2. P&Z voted for Option 2 anyway.

This time the staff presentation spends even longer on the complete unaffordability of it:

  • Basically, downtown land is worth much more than anywhere else in town. 
  • Right now, the 6.25 acres are mostly undeveloped, but they bring in this much taxable revenue:

The whole thing is 6.25 acres, so I’m going to ballpark the yearly revenue at $456K for the three lots marked.  A community member says that if they were developed, they’d pull in $3 million/year for the city.  Maybe?

No one can really say how much it would cost to acquire the parks, but if we had to say, staff puts the market value at $27 million dollars.

The city staff are always so professional, and so they presented all options neutrally, but I definitely got whiffs of Springfield Monorail from Option B:

Besides the magical thinking of the price tag, there’s also serious equity issues here.

Here is how the current parks are distributed throughout the city:

You may notice that there’s barely anything east of 35. People who live east of 35 have noticed this too, and are not amused. (They’ve also noticed a bunch of other patterns of systematic disregard. Isn’t that something!)

So what does the public think?

MO-NO-RAIL! MO-NO-RAIL!  Ahem.

  • Giant student housing will make parking way worse downtown.
  • There’s a shallow water table under CM Allen, and drilling into the rock wil fracture it.
  • If Texas State buys this land, we’re hosed.
  • The procedure was not democratic. Option 2 preys on emotions.
  • There are serious accessibility issues downtown for people in wheelchairs. This plan doesn’t address any of that.
  • The college students run downtown and grown ups don’t feel welcome.
  • We can find much better ways to spend $27 million dollars than this.
  • Car dependency is bad, it’s better to put more housing in walkable areas like downtown.

In actuality: there are three in favor of Option 2, five opposed, and one speaking on accessibility issues.

Council discussion:

Mark Gleason goes first:

  • He loves the vision of #2. He wishes we could afford it.
  • There’s absolutely no way he can go face constituents on the East Side and tell them he voted to spend $27 million on more West side parks.
  • It’s already zoned, it’s not undeveloped like the Woods
  • This won’t stop flooding.
  • Not ideal, but #3 is best. We must to something to help the rest of town.

I certainly agree with all of that! He also talks about how there’s going to be a trail around the whole city, which is a reference to the Elsik Tract.

(I can see the marketing now! “A River Runs Through Us, That Historic Trail Also Runs Through Us, and a Loop Runs Around Us.” Practically a spaghetti bowl of significance!)

Jane goes next: She literally says “I need to do some ‘splaining,” which is endearing.

  • Her ‘splaining: The graphics freaked her out, and she wanted some green space. Never pictured golf course style mock up. Never said “Eminent Domain” or millions of city money. 
  • The idea was that if you don’t explicitly ask for green space, you’ll get zero. If you do ask, maybe you’ll get a little.

Jude: There are better places to turn into parks than this. Could City Hall move here? Hotel, civic space?

Alyssa: I don’t like any of them, but I agree with Jude and Mark. 

Shane: What about a splash pad downtown? I’m here for families! Families first! These are the last tracts along the river. Option 2!

Saul: I’m born and raised in San Marcos. There were no skyscrapers back then. Whenever I talk to anyone, they say “Why are there so many skyscrapers downtown? Why is there so much student housing?” That’s not San Marcos. Plus, it’s a slippery slope. What’s next, high rises all the way to 35? What if Texas State buys it? They don’t pay taxes or fees!  It’s for the kids. Bring back how it was!

[Side Note: “Why is there so much student housing?” Because the town loses their goddamn minds if students live anywhere else. Students are actually people, and they’re entitled to live in this town.

Sometimes students act like jerks! But so do rich people, and also middle-class people, and also poor people. People are jerks.]

Matthew: I had been a big fan of #2. Rio Vista Relief! But paid parking is coming. Where would this park’s parking be? 

We had a community meeting with Blanco Gardens on crime. Wasn’t well attended, and just me and Mark. They kept saying, “Why does the west get EVERYTHING?” Park distribution is not fair. East side is always neglected.

Matthew gave this huge impassioned speech about the plight of the east side, and then finished by saying, “And that’s why I’m on the fence!” which made me laugh. Way to undercut your own passion. 

Saul: Cape’s Dam is coming to the east side!

Matthew: But not, like, anytime soon.

The Vote on the CM Allen District:


Love me some Option 3!: Mark Gleason, Jane Hughson, Alyssa Garza, Matthew Mendoza, Jude Prather

Option 3 Gives Me a Sad: Shane Scott, Saul Gonzales

So there you have it.

The entire downtown plan will get revised to incorporate Option 3, and then will come back on November 6th for a final vote.

…

Item 12: Sights & Sounds

Apparently people ask Alyssa every year to keep an eye on S&S.  The former city manager gave her the runaround when she asked for documentation.  She asks if she could please get some straight answers. She’s told “no problem!”

…

Item 16: Land Development Code:

Last meeting, we were going to kick this back for two months, to give committees a chance to meet.  Now the planning department is asking if we could please just pass it, since it’s holding up a bunch of stuff, and they promise the committees will all meet promptly.

Sure: 7-0. So that’s that.

Hours 1:55 -2:55, 10/2/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Next up! 

Item 9: Updates to the Land Development Code.

We discussed this in August and in September. There are just a few remaining issues to hash out. Here we go:

  1. Should staff be able to approve the most mild, least controversial restaurant alcohol permits, or should they all go to P&Z?

For now, all restaurants and all bars will go through P&Z to get their permit. (Discussed here before.)

A subcommittee will look at carving out some exceptions. For example, hotel bars generally aren’t close to neighborhoods, and aren’t generally rowdy. Maybe City Staff can just renew those on their own.

2. Developers have to donate land for parks, or pay a fee instead. If you’ve got just a little infill development of 4 to 8 units, should you have to pay a fee towards the park system?

No one on council really felt strongly about this. They compromised at 6 units: if you’re building a little development with 6 or more units, you need to pay a fee towards the park system.

3. If houses are only allowed to be 2 stories in your neighborhood, and you’ve got a little rooftop patio, does that count as an extra story?

It used to be 25%. If 25% of your roof has a structure on it, it counted as an extra story. Now it’s any structure at all counts as an extra story.

(Discussed here and here before. I accused them of being killjoys.)

4. Should we continue beating a dead horse on this occupancy restriction thing?

Yes, yes we should.

Quick background: San Marcos has restrictions on how many unrelated people can live together.  It’s been two. Back in May 2022, Council agreed to loosen them from 2 to 3.  

Matthew Mendoza balked at this in August, and then tried to roll it back to 2 in September.  The vote failed 4-3.  But he’s still all heated up about it, and makes another motion to amend it back to 2.

So first, some facts:

  • In San Marcos, it’s only certain housing that has occupancy restrictions. Basically, single family neighborhoods. 
  • In these neighborhoods, you can have any number of people, but only up to two unrelated people.  
  • Here’s how we define unrelated: “A family is defined in the Land Development Code as any number of individuals living as a single housekeeping unit who are related by blood, legal adoption, marriage, or conservatorship.” 

Here’s what city staff say:

Whenever neighbors complain, they’re not actually mad about the number of unrelated people.  It’s always noise, or parking, or the trash, or yard not being kept up.   We can deal with the noise/parking/yard complaint.  It’s not literally the marital status of any of the tenants that’s the issue, so this ordinance is not needed.

Here’s what Matthew and Jane Hughson say:

Landlords want to be able to rent to three tenants. So if you increase this, landlords will buy up housing stock and let it crumble into shitty, ill-maintained housing that exploits tenants.  It’s bad for renters, and decreases the available housing stock for people who want to purchase a home. 

Here’s what I say:

Actually, I want to say two things. I want to refute Matthew’s argument, and I also want to make a separate argument on why you should get rid of occupancy restrictions all together.

Look at Matthew’s argument:

When your chain of cause and effect becomes really long and stretched out, that is often a sign that you are writing bad policy.

If you’re worried about those Bad Consequences – low housing stock and shitty landlords – this would not make it onto the top 100 of effective things to do. 

What you’d do is:

  1. Build more housing. (All sorts.)
  2. Hold landlords accountable. Enforce code violations and fund a city lawyer to send letters to landlords on behalf of tenants. 

Furthermore, his facts aren’t right.  Letting bedrooms go unfilled reduces available housing.  Occupancy restrictions decrease housing, which is the opposite of Matt’s Bad Consequence #1. 

So I have yet to see a compelling argument for these restrictions. 

Arguments against – and here’s where I get pissed off:

  1. Why is the city meddling with whether people are married or not?  A married couple can take in a tenant, but an unmarried couple cannot?  Three friends can’t rent a house? This is gross.
  2. There is a serious housing shortage.  You should be able to put people in bedrooms. You should be able to flexibly problem-solve to provide housing on the fly, when someone you care about is in a pinch. 
  3. We just talked at length for two meetings about the burden of property taxes on Grandma.  Grandma should be allowed to take in her friend’s grandkids as tenants.  Grandma’s primary asset is her house, and she doesn’t want to move, but it’s more house than one person needs. Let her share.

The common thread is non-traditional living situations.  Why should non-traditional living situations be banned?  A few people want to live together, and they can’t, because the city can’t crack down on shitty landlords? That’s dumb as fuck.

Bottom line:

  1. Hold landlords accountable for providing safe, well-maintained housing.
  2. Build a variety of housing in neighborhoods, not just 3- and 4-bedroom houses. Build four-plexes alongside houses so that people can rent apartments in quiet neighborhoods.
  3. Stop micromanaging who is married and who isn’t.

One final point: Yes, landlords buy up housing stock. But listen: being a good landlord is a lot of work. Make bad landlords be good landlords, and some of them will decide it’s not worth it. Hold landlords accountable for maintaining safe and well-maintained properties, and their profit margins will go down, and they’ll be less likely to buy up your housing stock, and it’s better for tenants, and neighbors.  Win-win-win.

Here’s how the conversation goes, after Matthew makes his basic argument:

  • Shane Scott points out that letting someone rent a room may help them afford their property taxes.
  • No one knows the occupancy restrictions in other cities more generally, but College Station sets it at 4 unrelated people.

(I went hunting, and couldn’t find much. Austin puts it at 6 unrelated people.)

  • Jude Prather: I’ve been in this situation. I know plenty of respectable, good neighbors who have had three unrelated people living together at various times. How do you tell people they can’t do this, when housing is unaffordable?
  • Matthew: but Minneapolis got rid of their occupancy restrictions and they went to hell in a handbasket!!
  • Jude: Actually, Minneapolis went the other way. Their housing costs actually resisted inflation. What about a compromise, where you can take in extra tenants if it’s owner-occupied?
  • Alyssa: Let’s remember that occupancy restrictions are rooted in racism and classism.
  • Jane Hughson: NOT IN SAN MARCOS, IT’S NOT! The history here is NOT racist!

 In San Marcos, its origins are mostly anti-college students. But the folks in power did not shed a tear that it was also disproportionately impacting poor and non-white community members.

Also, confidential to Jane: I wouldn’t go betting the farm on San Marcos being a bastion of anti-racism.

  • Matt: I’m trying to protect renters!

(Ahem. Establish a tenant’s council, then.)

  • Mark Gleason: My worry is keeping people in their homes. So I’m in favor. I think people should be able to rent out a room or two.  I don’t think it affects whether or not investors buy up houses.  I’m okay with owner-occupied only, though.
  • Jane: Let’s postpone the whole thing for two weeks!
  • Matthew: I’m just sad about the historic district.
  • Jude: San Marcos is clearly an outlier. We’re not trying to get rid of the rule altogether. 3 unrelated people seems like a good compromise.

The vote:

Jane keeps talking about creating a subcommittee and postponing it for two weeks.  It feels like she’s just unwilling to recognize that she’s lost this vote.  Both Jude and Alyssa gently say that they would be fine just letting it go.  

She forms a committee anyway – Matthew Mendoza, Alyssa Garza, and Mark Gleason – and Alyssa says if there’s a committee, she at leasts wants to be on it.  

When actually forced, 6-1 vote in favor of committee.  The committee will consider whether three unrelated people should only be allowed when one of them owns the house. (We really only want to micromanage the marital status of renters, I guess.)

…

5. Should the notification radius for a giant ungodly thing like the SMART Terminal be bigger than for a dinky little development?

Yes. The notification radius should be proportional to the size of the development. We’ve been over this multiple times.

Staff says no, and gives this as their reason why not: “If we made the cutoff at 500 acres, then developers will just come it at 499 acres!”

In other words: it can’t be done because developers will game the system.

Give me a fucking break. How about this: “For every 25 acres, you have to notify 400 ft out.” Not to brag, but that took me all of ten seconds to write down. I bet someone can spend 10 more seconds and come up with something even better.

Thankfully, Jane is also not satisfied with staff’s lame evasion, and says, “I don’t know the best way to do it, but there’s gotta be a way.”

So this will go to committee.

…

In the end, the whole set of revisions will be postponed until December 5th, to give all these committees time to meet

Hours 2:55 – 3:36, 10/2/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 13:  Special Events Permitting 

Right now, if you’re wanting to hold a special event, you have to go to a bunch of different departments to figure out what permitting you need.

Potentially any of these:

Now they’re going to put together a single front-end, tacked onto MyPermitNow and walks you through getting the permits you need.

Everyone is stoked about this.

….

Item 17: Lindsay Street apartments. Ooooh, this one is interesting.

So, Shannon Mattingly was the director of the San Marcos planning department from 2015 to 2022.  Then she went to work for the Drenner Group, which are some Austin developers.

Tuesday’s item is just informational. It turns out that developers are allowed to do this – request an informational item at a council meeting.  Who knew? (Shannon Mattingly would know!)  So you can come in and give a presentation about your exciting new venture.  

Here’s where they want to do iti:

And here’s what they want to do:

That is, make it student housing.

I think they said that they want it to be 7 stories and rent-by-the-bedroom student housing. 

There are a couple problems, and a couple things that are fine with it. It’s not actually entirely bad.

  1.  The left hand part, in the red dotted area, has some historic houses that people think are cute, like this one:

I think it’s pretty cute!  Maybe it can be saved.

Jude Prather speaks up about maybe finding a way to put commercial in a little historic house like this. Maybe it can be made into a restaurant or something.  (I think we all miss Cool Mint Cafe.)

  1. Three people from the newly-formed Tenants Advocacy Group came to speak against it.  Their argument went “Rent-by-the-bedroom apartments are predatory and there is plenty of student housing.  We don’t want this at all.”

I am so thrilled that they’ve formed this group.  This is outstanding. 

Their argument against rent-by-the-bedroom is that these leases are more exploitative than regular leases:

  • You can get stuck with someone awful and have no recourse.
  • Making students rent “as is” without having seen their actual unit, and then units have broken furniture, mold, etc.
  • Not having a clause allowing for a way to break the lease

The only thing that I’d quibble is that plenty of regular leases are also exploitative. But a Tenant’s Advocacy Group is exactly the right place to start! Next I’d like to see the city fund a lawyer who will send letters to landlords and argue for fairer leases. 

Side note: Rent-by-the-bedroom itself is very weird, and I can’t decide how I feel about it. Without it, you get an apartment with your friends, and if one friend falls behind on their rent or moves out abruptly, the rest of the group is financially liable for the whole rent.  So there really is a sense in which students are protected by signing individual leases. 

The usual argument against them is they allow rents to skyrocket. But I can’t see how it’s the lease structure that does that. Landlords are always going to charge the maximum that they think people will pay, and if you have insufficient housing, then people are forced to pay it.

Rental companies definitely act in predatory ways. Tenants need protection. It’s just not obvious to me that this one detail of the lease structure is the heart of the problem.

The students in TAG were against the entire complex, full stop. They argued that we have enough student housing and we don’t need any more.

I don’t buy this part of their argument. Housing is like musical chairs: if you add more student housing, students who like fancy new complexes will move into it, and free up their old housing, and whoever moves into that frees up their old housing, and so on. There is not a bright firewall between student housing and non-student housing when complexes get old enough.

  1. Is 7 stories too high?  Jane Hughson thinks so, especially for the portion in red. She’d like to see it be a transition area, so maybe 3 stories?

Honestly, I think 3 stories is fine as well. This town does not like high-rises, and I don’t see any need to antagonize people.

So what are the good parts? Well, it’s housing, and it’s not sprawl. Those are good things!

But again, this was just informational. It will come back.

Item 18: Tightening up the rules of city council meetings.

Most of these are codifying the way we currently do things.  There’s one change that’s mentioned explicitly: changing “Citizen Comment” to “Community Perspectives”.

This is a good change! I’ve definitely felt weird writing this blog, trying to avoid the word “citizen” when I don’t actually care about someone’s immigration status. 

To Any City Staff Who Read This: I have two suggestions!

  1.  Sometimes letters from the public are included in the packet, other times not. I want to know what people care about! It is helpful to me to see what the community is mad about! I’d like a consistent practice of including letters to council in the packet.
  1. Often when someone goes up for Q&A, the answer is, “Staff will get back to you.” I’d like to know these answers, too! They should get posted to the message board, please! 

….

Item 20: Top Secret Executive Session

Two interesting items:

  1. “receive advice of legal counsel regarding pending litigation concerning the title to an alleyway located near the intersection of University Drive and CM Allen Parkway”

I wouldn’t have noticed this if it hadn’t been brought up during Citizen Comment. The speaker (Kama Davis) said that the company is called SM Block 21, and that they had renderings online.  So I looked it up.

Lo and behold, they are!

The lot:

The rendering:

The alley in question:

At least, that’s the only alley I see.

What makes this an EXTREMELY hot potato is the backdrop of last week’s P&Z meeting.  So, remember the Comp Plan?  It has splinter parts, and in particular there is a Downtown Area Plan.

This hasn’t passed yet, but it’s cooking. It involves this part of town:

Here’s the part that everyone’s worked up about:

They call this part the CM Allen District.

It’s pretty big.  And notice that the one in the back is the same thing we were talking about above!

The Downtown Plan Committee said:

  • We want people walking back and forth between downtown and the park
  • Right now, it’s all parking lots. Those are the worst: smelly, hot, dangerous. Parking lots shut down walking. (This is borne out by data.)
  • Businesses can’t survive there (clearly)
  • So what’s remaining? We should put some housing there.

Staff provided a visual of what it might look like if giant buildings were made out of sliced bread:

Pretty unappealing! They called this option 1.

Jane Hughson and the P&Z subcommittee kinda lost their minds looking at that photo.  It’s pretty atrocious!   Here’s what they counter-proposed:

The city staff cringed and squirmed and said, “There’s no way in hell you can afford that.  That land is super expensive and you’d lose especially valuable tax base.” They proposed option 3:

Those photos are apparently from El Paso. It does look appealing!

But there’s also the “smaller loaves of bread” visual for Option 3:

A ton of people heard about this, and the community came out heavily for Option 2. P&Z recommended option 2 for the Downtown area plan, on the premise that you might as well swing for the fences, even if it’s a long shot.

My two cents:

I’m mostly neutral. A park sounds super lovely, I see the appeal of it. At the same time, those lots are never going to be used very heavily. They’re kidding themselves. The river gets used very heavily, but the parts of the river parks that aren’t close to the river do not. Like, the land along CM Allen between the tennis courts and the railroad tracks – people don’t want to be that far away from the river. And here, you’re on the far side of CM Allen. Are you going to lay down a picnic blanket with a busy street blocking your kids from the river?

Maybe this is a good place for targeted park space – move the baseball fields, or tennis courts, put pick-up soccer fields there. Free up the land that is actually close to the river.

But again, it’s wildly expensive, there’s no obvious way to acquire it, and we’d lose a high-revenue tax base right now. So given the hand-wringing over property taxes last time, it seems kinda counterproductive to take this on. 

At the same time, you never get a second chance to grow your parks. I love the river parks so much, I can’t bring myself to be mad about the idea of growing them. Maybe in 50 years, the grandkids will be really glad if we set that land aside.

Bottom line: 

Clearly these two things are incompatible:

So when Council debates what to do with the alley that the developer wants, they’re inevitably also saying something about the green fields on the right.

  1. The second interesting item is this:

 “[T]o receive advice of legal counsel regarding pending litigation regarding Eric Cervini, et al. vs. Chase Stapp, Brandon Winkenwerder, Matthew Danzer, and City of San Marcos; Civil Action No. 1:21-CV-00568-RP; In the United States District Court, Western District of Texas; Austin Division.”

That would be your Biden Bus incident.  It is still simmering along, making its way through the court system. The San Marcos lawsuit is mentioned at the end of this article, but mostly I can’t find anything current about it.

Bonus! Council Workshop, 10/2/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Workshops!  These were just too fun to omit.  

Right now, if you have a vacant structure, you have to board up all the doors and windows, to keep people from getting in.  

It looks sad.

And kinda trashy.

The raccoons have definitely taken over.

But what if we made people paint doors and windows on the wooden plywood?

Better! Maybe!

It’s a thing cities do, apparently!

It kind of reminds me of when the stadiums put fake fans in the audience during Covid.

via

Sure, why not.

You can even get all trompe l’oeil about the whole thing:

Council liked this, so staff is going to draft some policy and bring it back.

…

But wait! There’s more!

We already partner with ACC to give workforce training courses.  Think things like HVAC training, plumbing and electric, etc, where you can get out and immediately start earning a decent income. 

Right now we offer courses at the library, but if we had more space, we could offer even more.  So we’re going to renovate some city buildings for this:

So the city is proposing using $240K of the Covid money to renovate and create some classrooms.

Everyone’s stoked about this. It’ll come back in some form to council.

Hours 3:19-4:07, 9/19/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Rally the troops. We’ve got to keep going. This meeting is just so densely packed with important information.

Next up:

Item 19: VISION SMTX.  

We’ve talked about Vision SMTX a lot.  It’s the new comprehensive plan. (What is a comprehensive plan? It’s the vague, conceptual plan for how we want San Marcos to grow over the next 30 years.) 

Quick background:
There was a 30 member citizen committee that met with a consultant over two years and came up with a plan. Then P&Z looked at it and said “fuck no!” Mayor Hughson and three P&Z members rewrote large parts of it, and that’s basically what’s before council now.

It now comes up three times before council:
– This current meeting: informational, with public comment
– First vote on October 17th, where the public can give feedback again
– Final vote on November 6th , (with no public comment)

Comments from the community:

  • we should tax businesses instead of giving them tax breaks
  • “Low Intensity” shouldn’t allow for heavy industrial. (In other words, SMART Terminal should never have been taken up for consideration out in a bunch of cow fields.)

Some philosophical ramblings

The comp plan does not end single-family zoning. San Marcos is not wading into that debate. But it’s simmering in the background.

The problem with single family zoning is that it’s very sparse. That means you’re building a lot of roads and utility pipes and lines, and increasing coverage of fire and police, without covering many people. That’s all very expensive to maintain over time. Single family zoning does not bring in enough money to pay for itself. If you live in a house, you are subsidized by apartments and businesses. In most cities, 70% of the land is zoned single-family.

Why has our city budget swollen to $315 million dollars? Because San Marcos has to run services Whisper Tract up north, Trace down south, La Cima out west, and Riverbend Ranch out east. All sprawl.

On top of that, we pretend there are only two ways to live:
1. sprawling single family neighborhoods, or
2. gigantic apartment complexes.

That’s it! Only two choices! Sorry! But that’s just super not true. The idea is to allow slow, incremental change, where now and then you can put a small four-plex on a single lot. It still feels like a neighborhood, but there’s housing for people who don’t need 3+ bedrooms in a house.

(In fact, it would feel like the goddamn Historic District, which was built before single family zoning was a thing, and now weeps piteously about it’s own demise any time you try to discuss any other neighborhood in the city.)

Then you can spread the tax burden across more units per acre, without driving up costs for the city. This actually reduces taxes!

Listen, council just spent THREE HOURS talking about the budget. The community seems to care a LOT about property taxes.

You want to know why the city struggles to balance it’s budget? Single family zoning.  You want to know why traffic keeps getting worse? Single family zoning.  You know who benefits from single family zoning? Anyone who got their house early or who can afford to pay a lot.  Fuck everyone else. 

If you want taxes to go down, you’ve got to spread the costs of government over more people, without creating more work for the city.  In other words: less sparse. More dense.

  • Allow people to rent rooms in their houses to others. (End occupancy restrictions!)
  • Allow people to build ADUs in their backyards
  • Allow 2, 3 and 4-plexes throughout any neighborhood. 

And my personal beef with single family zoning: stop segregating by wealth. It’s toxic and destructive. We are all part of the same community. 

I agree with Max about taxing businesses. But you also need more people to share the tax burden.

End of philosophical rant. Back to Vision SMTX.

Dr. Rosie Ray is probably the smartest person in town on this stuff. She spoke about Vision SMTX, back at the beginning of the meeting, but I saved it till now. She’s advocating for two small tweaks:

  1. City planners have a concept of a 15 minute city.

Here’s what wikipedia says about it:

The 15-minute city (FMC or 15mC)[1][2][3][4][5][6] is an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk or bike ride from any point in the city.[7] This approach aims to reduce car dependency, promote healthy and sustainable living, and improve wellbeing and quality of life for city dwellers.[8][9]

But the P&Z/Jane Hughson subcommittee put the phrase “or vehicles” into the definition for San Marcos. In other words “15-minute walk, bike ride, or car ride”. You can understand how that makes the whole “reduce car dependency” thing totally worthless, yes/yes?

So Dr. Ray (diplomatically) suggests we use the actual definition that the rest of the world uses. She’s much friendlier about it than I am.

2. P&Z/Jane Hughson created something called “Neighborhood Low – Existing” in the Preferred Scenario Map. The idea here was to freeze all existing neighborhoods in carbon, like Hans Solo, and prevent any of that gentle densification like ADUs, townhomes, or four-plexes that I talked about earlier. So they said that all existing neighborhoods are single family.

The problem – which Dr. Ray points out – is that a lot of current neighborhoods are not strictly single family. She herself lives in a condo! So they’ve made a lot of existing neighborhoods out-of-conformance with being existing neighborhoods. If you don’t allow multiplexes – that are already there! – from being part of existing neighborhoods, then the people who live in them will have much more trouble making changes to their property. Dr. Ray asks that they restore the multi-plex housing type to existing neighborhoods.

These are the least possible asks. Dr. Ray is wise and I’ll just go with banging the drum in support of her asks. 

…

There’s not much discussion, because the night is so blisteringly long already. Just one important comment, from Mayor Jane Hughson, regarding the P&Z/Jane rewrite:

“Everybody keeps saying that we watered down the plan, when me and P&Z got together and rewrote it.  For the longest time, I didn’t know what they meant. Watered down? What did we water down?

“Then I realized what they meant! They didn’t like the word swap of objectives to considerations! That’s all! So I’m going to go through and change it back!”

NO. No. Jesus, Jane, that is not at all what we’re saying.  How on earth did you get that impression? Dr. Ray literally said:

  • Remove the word “vehicle” in the definition of 15-minute City
  • Allow townhomes and other existing multiplexes in the definition of Neighborhood Low – Existing.

Those are actual meaningful changes. This is not a case of “What a wacky misunderstanding! We meant the same thing all along.”

One final note: No city council member made a peep about either of Dr. Ray’s suggestions. There are still two more opportunities, but I have a bad feeling about this.

…

Item 22:  Kyle is running out of water.  Specifically, they’ve used up all their Edward’s Aquifer alottment.  They want to buy our unused Edward’s Aquifer water from us. This also happened last year!

Recall that during citizen comment, most people said, “Yes, give Kyle the water, because they’re our neighbors. But for the love of god, attach some strings to it! They shouldn’t waste their water and then just dip into ours!” 

Here’s how the city presentation goes:

1. Kyle will take the water either way.  They will either pay someone else, or they will default on their contract, but the water is going to be used, for sure. So the aquifer will be depleted by the same amount, regardless of our decision

2. Kyle uses different water conservation stages than we do. So yes, they just entered Stage 3, but that’s pretty similar to our Stage 4.

3. As part of this deal, they have to match San Marcos water conservation efforts.

4. We stand to make $344K off this deal-io.

So first: are Kyle’s water restrictions similar to ours? It’s surprisingly hard to tell.

Ours has a handy graphic with all our stages: 

We’re Stage 4.

Their website has their current stage, but not all the stages:

But they only entered this stage last week. Before that, they were Stage 2, and I can only find all their stages in this cumbersome, unreadable thing.

So has Kyle been irresponsible with their water usage? It depends. It could be that they’ve been watering golf courses all summer, while Rome burns. It could be Tesla or other new businesses. It could be that they’ve approved a bunch of housing developments without thinking about the water issues.

And yes: approving too many housing developments or signing unsustainable development agreements with Tesla would be totally irresponsible. But it’s the kind of irresponsible that Texas does unconsciously. We don’t think through the ramifications of sprawl or corporate resource abuse very well. Like, at all.

Jude Prather speaks up on behalf of the public speakers: What about the next year? Can we put something in there about conservation in the future, so that they don’t need to borrow more water next year?

Answer: Kyle is just waiting for ARWA water to show up! Then this won’t be an issue!

The Kyle representative clarifies: Actually, ARWA water won’t show up to the west side of town until December 2025! Those are the folks that need this water.

But Jude does the thing that Council always does:
– Asks about an issue that is a real problem
– Gets told “yes, it is a problem”
– Does nothing. Ta-da!

Yes, Kyle will have to use our water next year. Whatever they did this year was not enough, and they’ll do the same exact thing next year. The new water will not be here in time. La la la la la.

The vote: It passes 7-0.

Hours 4:07-5:45, 9/19/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 20: Updates to the Land Development Code. 

We went over the proposed updates last month.

Public Comment

  • We relaxed parking restrictions downtown and it is having unintended consequences – The Parlor has bought up several private parking lots.
  • Several speakers talk about the development agreement notification radius again. They use that the radius needs to be “proportional to the size of the project”, and my little blogger heart swelled three sizes.

Council Discussion

One of the changes being proposed is to increase the occupancy restriction from 2 to 3 unrelated people.

(What does this mean? In San Marcos, in single-family zonings, you get only one roommate. You cannot have three unrelated people living together. This is a great way to maintain wealth segregation. And yes, this is totally unenforceable but we do it anyway.)

Matthew Mendoza starts off with a rousing cry against it.

You guys: the speech Matthew gave made my little blogger heart shrivel back down to the size of a blackened pea.  I could not disagree more with him.  

Matthew’s basic claim: if we let three unrelated people live together, then we’re on a slippery slope to ending single family zoning.  He claims that Minneapolis tried this, and it failed so hard that they’re undoing it.

For what it’s worth, it looks like he got every detail of the Minneapolis example wrong. They ended their occupancy restrictions, and then liked it so much that they doubled down.

And then, Minneapolis did exactly what Matthew is scared of – in 2019, they were the first major city to end single-family zoning. So far it’s providing gentle, incremental densification, the way it’s supposed to. (But rents and housing prices are actually falling there for an entirely different reason – elimination of parking minimums.  But yowza, we cannot handle a topic that spicy on this particularly epic-length entry.) Since then, several states and many cities have ended single-family zoning.

Matthew!! Why are you micromanaging everyone’s lifestyle? Let people have a goddamn roommate.

But also: YOU ALL JUST BEMOANED HOW EXPENSIVE TAXES ARE. LET GRANDMA RENT OUT AN ADU, FOR GOD’S SAKE! Let people live with their friends!

See how crazy-making this meeting was? The cognitive dissonance fried my wee brain.

(Alyssa does respond to Matthew, wearily: Who are we to dictate what counts as family, anyway?)

Here we go:

The vote on occupancy restrictions:

Restrict back to 2: Matthew Mendoza, Saul Gonzalez, Jane Hughson
Relax it to 3: Shane Scott, Jude Prather, Mark Gleason, Alyssa Garza

So it barely passed.

A stray thought: Jane voted 6th in line. She was a reluctant yes when this was discussed 18 months ago. I think she switched her vote mid-stream, because she could see it would pass either way. If Mark had voted after Jane, he might have switched his vote to match hers, and the whole thing might have failed.

Bottom line: It should never have taken 18 months after extensive discussion to bring this to a vote. It almost undid all that hard work.

But whatever: it passed.

…

Still on the Land Development Code: Businesses that serve alcohol have to get a Conditional Use Permit. (CUP). These get renewed by P&Z every three years. Should we separate out bars from restaurants, and only make the bars go to P&Z? Staff is proposing this, because it would save time and effort.

Jane Hughson makes a motion to say no, and stick with the current situation – all CUPs, both restaurants and bars – should go to P&Z for renewal.

The reasoning goes like this: sometimes restaurants are jerks, and are bad neighbors to nearby residents. Noise complaints aren’t addressed by the police. But at P&Z, neighbors can state their case and the restaurant owner will actually pay attention because they don’t want to lose their CUP. Then P&Z can attach conditions to the CUP – make the restaurant come back for renewal in one year instead of three, put quiet hours on the restaurant, that kind of thing.

I agree with Jane here. And sometimes you do get a lot of people from a single street, all pissed off about the same restaurant. This is a really important opportunity for community input, and we shouldn’t take this power away from community members.

As Jane puts it, “Sometimes our biggest problem child is a restaurant.”

One extra thought: It’s already a thing where bars try to pretend that they’re restaurants in order to get more relaxed treatment. If you let restaurants skip P&Z approval, even more bars will try to get reclassified as restaurants, to avoid scrutiny.

The vote:

Restaurants have to go to P&Z: Matthew Mendoza, Mark Gleason, Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzalez
Let restaurants skip all that: Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Alyssa Garza

So it passes 4-3.

Finally, Mayor Hughson has a few issues that are queued up for next time:

  • In the new (poorly named) “business park” zoning, Jane just doesn’t want truck bays for 18 wheelers. Little delivery trucks are fine, but she doesn’t want semis.

    The point of this new zone is to be “good neighbor industrial” (which is what I’d name it). I agree that 18 wheelers are less neighborly than delivery trucks. Staff is worried that no one will apply for this zoning if you rule out 18 wheelers.
  • Notification radius for development agreements: Jane is listening. She agrees that it should be larger for larger projects.

    She also wants you to know that the city already goes above and beyond the notifications that are required by state law. (Sure, kudos. But state laws are mostly written by jerks, so that’s a low bar to clear.)

    At any rate, getting her on board here is a huge win, because no one else was responding.
  • A month ago, Mark Gleason got really mad about some house on Sturgeon with a rooftop patio. In response, staff is proposing that rooftop patios count as a “story” if they cover 25% of the roof.

    Jane wants it to be much lower: any rooftop structure counts as an extra story.

    My opinion: stop being a bunch of killjoys. Let people have their rooftop patios. Quit harshing my mellow, man.
  • Developers have to either donate parkland, or pay a fee. We’re updating the calculations to be more fair. If you’re only developing 4-8 lots, you can skip the fee.

    Jane: Why wouldn’t people in the 4 or 8 houses use our parks? Why exempt them from park fee? I’ll bring this back next time, too.

So there are a lot of fiddly details still to hash out.

The first vote, which is not the final vote:

Yes, let’s update the code: Everyone besides Matthew
No, I’m still mad about occupancy restrictions: Matthew

…

Item 21: SMPD body cams.

We rent them from this company called Axon. The company’s prices are going up. If we renew early, we can stay at the old rates. Save a million dollars.

We have 10 drones, btw. 

Alyssa: There are multiple grants available for body worn cameras. Did we seek any of these opportunities? 

Chief Standridge: We do not have an Equal Employment Opportunity Plan (EEOP) so we can’t apply for grants. We are aware and trying to fix that.

This is an interesting point. It turns out that we can’t apply for a lot of federal funding until we have an EEOP. It includes any Department of Justice or SAFER grants. We are definitely taking this seriously and working on one.

The vote to re-up on the body cams:
Yes: Everyone but Alyssa
No: (no one)
Abstain: Alyssa Garza

Alyssa explains that she hasn’t reviewed our SMPD body cam policy since it was last updated, and she can’t in good conscience vote on these in the meantime.

…

Item 23: Single use container ban!!

You guys. It’s been SUCH a long meeting. This last item is so popular and great – it’s a shame that I’m just now getting to it.

If you’ll recall, five hours earlier we had boatloads of community members show up to speak in favor of banning single-use containers from the river and parks. Volunteers pull out epic tons of trash from the river as often as possible, and we just can’t keep up. It flows down river and to the gulf. It’s bad for the river itself. 

So what happens tonight?

This is just the very beginning of the process. Mark Gleason and Matthew Mendoza are bringing it up to see if council is interested in moving forward with this.

So who’s in?

Mark is a hard yes. 

Jude: let’s do it!

Saul: Me too!

Matthew Mendoza: I live in Rio Vista! I’m desperate to see this pass.

Alyssa: Let’s focus on the education piece, and secure the buy-in of the community. Lean on park ambassadors instead of marshalls. Best practices. No unnecessary policing of our neighbors.

Jane: I’m in to move forward.

So everyone is enthusiastic! It’ll take some time and work.  I definitely want to give Mark and Matthew props for initiating the issue, though.

…

Q&A from the Press and Public

Listen, Max Baker spoke as many times as possible this evening, and he has a tendency to pack ten ideas into a three minute speech. So I’m cherry-picking, because this was entertaining.

First, Axon is the company that makes the body cams. Max accuses, “Are you all aware that there is a SUPREME COURT CASE against them for antitrust issues? Do your homework!!”

He’s right but he’s wrong: It’s exactly that – some anti-monopoly wonky lawsuit brought against them by the Federal Trade Commision. But I can’t see how that’s a big scandal.

Max also says, “This same company wants to design TASER DRONES. Lotta concerns about civil liberties in that regard.”

Max is entirely correct – they are batshit crazy and they definitely wanted to design m-f-ing taser drones. But also, shortly thereafter “Axon halts its plans for a Taser drone as 9 on ethics board resign over the project.” So at this point we can just marvel at the human capacity for inventing really, really bad ideas.

I’m not saying this company is any good. But given that they’re involved in an anti-trust lawsuit, I’m guessing we don’t have terribly many choices either way. Have fun dreaming about TASER DRONES!

Hours 0:00-2:36, 9/5/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

The main topic of the night is the budget, so the main complaint during citizen comment is that taxes are too high. Taxes are too high, and also the city isn’t solving all our problems, which is basically the municipal equivalent of “the food was terrible and the portions were too small!”

(And also, people hating on the bike lanes.  Everyone loves to hate the bike lanes.  If you love bike lanes, I suggest you let City Council know, because the anti-bike lane people are kicking up dust.)

Confidential to city council: I like the bike lanes. Let’s keep bikers alive.

Back to taxes. I’m going to tell you a little parable of my cat: 

I had a lovely tomcat who was scared of the vacuum cleaner. Whenever I ran the vacuum cleaner, he would lose his mind and attack my shoes.  He would just beat my poor shoe all to hell. (I tried not to vacuum very often.)

That’s the end of the story!

Here’s the thinly veiled moral: Being mad about taxes is like my cat attacking my shoe.  Don’t be mad at taxes for your justifiable economic woes.  You are neck-deep in capitalism! Be mad at that! You are right to feel worried that a medical disaster could undo everything you’re working for, or that you might be destitute in your old age, or unable to help out your kids.  The real crime is that someone can work fulltime and not be able to cover their basic needs.

If you know, if you truly 100% trust, that you’ll always have clean safe housing, healthy food, and free medical care readily available, then your life is much freer.  That’s the paradox: we pretend this is freedom while paralyzing ourselves with anxiety.  We’re such a mess.

Anyway, hooray for taxes.  Hooray for a social safety net, and if only it were much stronger. We’ll talk more about who gets tax breaks, and what kind of charity that is, a little later on. In the meantime, if you’re still mad about taxes, scroll through this little demo on the scale of economic inequality and get back to me. 

One comment that’s not about taxes: Virginia Parker spoke on behalf of the San Marcos River Foundation. Basically:

  • Everyone is freaked out by the river and parks right now
  • The summer was so hot, the river is so low, the parks are so overused
  • We desperately need more park staff and marshalls.  (These are her words. I’m not totally clear on what the marshalls do.)
  • We should have paid parking with free passes for residents to help offset costs
  • Only remaining vegetation are those fenced off Habitat Protection areas, and keeping that vegetation is crucial to keeping the river clear
  • We’re spending a bunch of money to promote tourism, but with the river in its current state, that’s kinda irresponsible. 

Item 13: The 2024 $315 million dollar city budget.

It takes 9 months to birth a budget. Here’s the basic timeline:

At the workshop last January, Council came up with their goals that are supposed to shape the whole process: 

They are all important, but public safety was the one that council really hammered, over and over again.  “Public safety” can mean so many different things to different people!  Do we mean lifting people out of poverty? Do we mean vocational training for ex-offenders as they transition to private life? Do we mean hiring more cops? (We definitely mean hiring more cops.)

The budget has a ton of moving parts, obviously.  Here’s the bird’s eye view of the whole thing:

Here are the major points that were emphasized:

Note:

  • The compensation study is to help us retain city staff. This is important – high turnover is incredibly expensive. Also, it’s just good manners to compensate people fairly.
  • The Human Services Advisory Board money is the money that the city gives to local nonprofits.
  • New city hall: there’s a state law that you can’t borrow money for a city hall building. (It’s wild what the state legislature will micro-manage.) So if your city hall was built in 1975 and you’ve outgrown it, you have to sock money away under a mattress until 2075, when you’ll be able to afford your new city hall.
  • Capital Improvements Program: this just means city projects and repairs. Fix the stormwater drainage in this neighborhood, add in sidewalks over there, etc.

So is this a good budget? Does it achieve those five goals? I don’t know!

Last year, city staff presented Council with 2 similar plans, and they debated them. Would we go with 59.3¢ or 60.3¢ tax rate? Would we use the extra $700K on cops and firefighters?  Last year, Chief Stephens and Chief Standridge came in person to plea for personnel. This made it easier for me to understand those aspects of the budget being discussed.

This year, there was just one budget and just one tax rate proposed. No debates. No lingering questions posed.  City council basically didn’t say anything besides thanking staff for their hard work. (And I listened to most of the workshops, and never heard much arguing there, either.)  There are two possibilities:

  1. Staff is just great.  They’re producing top notch budgets, and there’s not much to argue about.
  2. No one on council has strong feelings about these things, and no one has an angle to dig in and get heated up about anything.

Probably both are true? It’s very hard to figure out what people are thinking when no one says anything substantive.  

Here is the actual budget. It’s pretty readable!  It’s just hard to evaluate.

Item 14: the tax rate

We’ve been over the different tax rates before, so I’m going to save my pixels and just use the city’s slide:

The 60.3¢ rate is the same as last year.  Of course, inflation’s been a thing.  So how much are taxes going up? 

The average home went from $294K to $338K, so the average homeowner’s city property taxes are going from $1,686 in 2023 to $1,949 in 2024. 

Details:

(Now, this is only part of your tax bill. You also pay SMCISD and Hays property taxes.)

Let’s talk about the (15,000). That’s the homestead exemption.  In other words, you get a 15K discount before we charge you property tax.  This was created in 2022. It also gave seniors and people with disabilities a 35K deduction. 

Was this a big deal? Yes and no:

It costs us about $1.1 million dollars, out of $315 million budget, to do so.  Every home owner in San Marcos gets to evenly split $1.1 million dollars. None of them think that they just got a $90 bonus check from the city, but they did.

Here’s the thing:  We spend $550K on funding various nonprofits around town.  (This is the whole Human Services Advisory Board thing.)  We hem and haw and dole out $15K here and $25K there, and make nonprofits put in a ton of work for little amounts of money.  

At the same time, we spend twice as much on charity to people who own their own homes as we spend on all other nonprofits, combined. San Marcos is 75% renters! That handout is only going to 25% of the population!

Some home owners are rich. Others are definitely not. Being house-poor is definitely a real thing, and we need to help house-poor home owners. All I want is for the homestead exemption to feel like the city sent you a physical $90 check. It should not be invisible.

If I had a magic wand, I’d say that everyone must pay their full tax bill – federal and local – and then any deductions would get mailed back as a refund.  Subsidizing the rich should feel as tangible as subsidizing the poor. 

(Why not just cure poverty with your magic wand? oh hush.)

…

Items 15-18: Your utility and water rates are going up.  I’m sorry.  Sort of.  Channel your anger towards structural inequality.

For electric, we’re still the cheapest around:

Don’t let anyone ever talk about privatizing public utilities.  

Here’s our water rate:

Well, it’s mid, as the kids say.

Staff says that one of our biggest water expenses is a $1.4 million contract with Alliance Regional Water Authority.

I can’t actually find the contract in the budget, so I don’t know what we’re paying yearly:

I see Alliance Water Revenue, but not an expense. (I must be looking in the wrong place, idk.)

What is this contract? Basically, in 2007 we got some funding from the state to build this organization with Kyle, Buda, and the Canyon Regional Water Authority.  We drilled 4 wells, and we’re laying a bunch of segments of pipes, and some storage tanks, and a water treatment plant.

The water looks like it comes from the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, which is here:

So not TOO far away.  

Carrizo water needs to be treated – it’s got more minerals and salt in it than surface water or Edwards Aquifer water.  But it sounds like there’s a LOT of it.  During the Council meeting, staff says that this is supposed to be a 40 year plan for getting us water.  I can’t find that promise written down anywhere though.

Either way: water rights are going to be a big, messy fight coming up in the future.  It’s good that we’ve got at least somewhat of a plan. 

…

Along with water and electric, there’s also garbage and recycling:

and also a Community Enhancement Fee:

So if I’m ballparking all that, your rates for all these services is going from:

58.20+49.27+28.80+1.5 = $137.77

to

59.43+51.71+29.66+2.35 = $143.15

So your monthly bill is going up $5.38.

(This isn’t exactly right, because I don’t know how much electricity and water the average household uses each month. I have to assume the city gave us monthly quantities.)(They actually mentioned the total increase at one point, but I missed it, and now I can’t find it.)

San Marcos is not rich. If you are struggling, consider the Utility Assistance Program, why doncha? (That’s Community Action, but the city partners with them.)

Full disclosure: the Utility Assistance application form is a little intimidating, at least to me. It is not Community Action’s fault that their application is cumbersome. It’s the culmination of a maze-like system of scrabbling for peanuts that we impose on nonprofits.

When I say my fantasy is a strong social safety net, my fantasy is also that it will be very easy to use.

…

There were two moments that I want to share:

  1. The vote to raise the utility rate by 5%:

Yes: Jane Hughson, Mark Gleason, Jude Prather
No: Shane Scott and Saul Gonzalez
Absent: Matthew Mendoza, Alyssa Garza.

WHOOPS. It takes four votes to pass. So since Matthew Mendoza and Alyssa Garza were absent, it failed. 

You could practically hear City Manager Stephanie Reyes’ stomach plummet through the floor, although she is the most poised person on the planet. She politely explained that we’ve now blown a giant hole in the budget, and we’ll need to revise it, and that we may need a special session in order to get everything passed by October 1st.

With that, Shane Scott offered to switch his vote, which I’m sure was a massive relief.  He explained that he just reflexively is a “no” on rate hikes, but didn’t actually want all those consequences to come crashing down.

The re-vote:

Yes: Jane Hughson, Mark Gleason, Jude Prather, Shane Scott
No: Saul Gonzalez
Absent: Matthew Mendoza, Alyssa Garza.

Phew.

  1. Matthew Mendoza was absent during the utilities conversation, but he arrived in time for the Community Enhancement Fee conversation. This is small, but it irritated me: 

Matthew asked, “What if an evicted person decides to throw all their stuff all over their front yard? Can this fee help with that kind of thing?”

Listen: don’t phrase it like that. A yard full of possessions is mostly a sign that someone’s problems are too big for them, and I don’t mean the landlord.

Also, it’s just plain wrong. Evicted people don’t throw all their stuff all over their front yard.  Evicted people just left their stuff exactly where it was, and did not move it one inch. Someone else got mad – like an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend – and threw out their stuff, or the landlord moved it all to the curb.

(The answer was no, Matthew, you cannot use this money for that purpose, why would public money be used to help landlords clean up after tenants.)