Category: Hour summaries

Hours 1:20-2:37, 12/19/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 4: ”Citizen Comment” vs. “Community Perspectives”

Shane pulled this item from the Consent Agenda. 

Backstory

Mayor Hughson decided to clean up the city ordinances on committee meetings. She flagged a bunch of things that were inconsistent or unclear. One thing she noticed is that “Citizen Comment” is a terrible phrase, because you don’t actually have to be a citizen in order to comment. It sends a bad message.

We’ve discussed this here and here. Jane suggested “Community Perspectives” and in the past two months, no one ever protested it.

Here we go:

Shane says that he doesn’t like “Community Perspectives” because it implies that each speaker represents the entire community, instead of their own individual opinion.

Look, clearly “Community Perspectives” is a bit dippy. It sounds like a church bulletin board. But Shane’s complaint is also silly. No one is going to think that some rando speaker is supposed to represent everyone in town. It’s not “Community Spokesperson.”  

Jane, wearily: We’ve talked about this on a bunch of occasions.

Shane: I’ll just vote against it.

Jane: The entire list of all the changes?!

Shane: No, just this one. 

Jane: You can’t just vote against one.

Shane: Oh right. 

So Shane makes a motion: Keep it “Citizen Comment” after all. Alyssa seconds it.

Saul: I’m fine the way it is. Citizen Comment.

Matthew: I don’t care either way.

Jane: Honestly, I was concerned about changing it, because it’s been called “Citizen Comment” for years. Everyone is used to that. But I just don’t want anyone to feel excluded.

Alyssa: I appreciate that. But maybe we can just say something on the website.

Mark: I’m on the fence. Everyone knows it as Citizen Comment. 

The vote to amend:

Keep calling it Citizen Comment: All seven councilmembers

Change to Community Perspectives: no one.

On a scale of 1-10 of importance, this is maybe a 2. Nevertheless, they got it wrong! “Citizen Comment” is bad because “citizen” is exclusive. Jane is exactly right here. 

Off the top of my head, they could have gone with:
– Community Comment
– Open Comment
– Civic Comment
– Citizens-and-Not-Citizens Comment (okay, now I’m getting punchy)

I know they’re worried that changing the name would up-end years of familiarity. But that’s tunnel vision from being in the center of the action for too long.  Most of San Marcos is not paying any attention to City Council at all! Those who know the phrase “Citizen Comment” are not emotionally attached to it. You can switch to “Open Comment” and we’ll all be okay.

They didn’t want to go with “Public Comment” because it sounds very similar to “Public Hearing,” which is a specific different thing. 

Oh well!

The vote on all the little changes that Jane proposed:

Yes: Everyone.
No: No one.

….

Item 21:  Gary Softball Sports Complex is getting renovated.

We’re spending $1,238,000.22 on the following:

  • Roadway, drainage, parking, water/wastewater improvements.
  • Parts of the fields are 20+ years old

There were no slides or pictures for me to nab for you.

….

Item 23: Human Services Advisory Board (HSAB) Funding Policy

We’re going to spend some time on this item, because it drove me batty.

Backstory

Earlier in December, we allocated $650K in grant money to local nonprofits. There were 34 applications. Each nonprofit got between $5K and $34K, except for the Hays-Caldwell Women’s Shelter and the Hays County Food Bank, which got $50K and $80K respectively.

I griped last time that Council makes these nonprofits jump through a lot of hoops, while we just hand out other money seamlessly and invisibly. 

Guys. guys. We are about to get SO MUCH MORE micromanaging of this whole mess. We are going to nitpick this thing to death.

The current issue

Recall that the HSAB committee assigned points according to this rubric:

Jane is mad about Council Priorities being neglected. It’s only 15 points! Nevermind that people with nonprofit experience developed priorities 1-4, and that Council Priorities are somewhat redundant.

Here are the things that Jane’s mad about:

  • It’s not punitive enough if performance reports are late.
  • The Council priorities should add up to 25 or more points!
  • We want to know where the board members live. Do they live in San Marcos? Do they live in Kyle? In Austin?
  • They should spell out all acronyms. No unclear abbreviations. (I acknowledge this one. They really should.)

Complaint #1: Those Pesky Performance Reports:

Because last year was so weird, the money wasn’t approved until March. So the whole calendar was up-ended. The nonprofits were supposed to turn in mid-year reports when they re-applied for new funding in August. One nonprofit was late by one day, due to turnover in staffing. One other nonprofit was later, but ended up withdrawing altogether. 

So there is not really a problem here: nearly everyone turned in their mid-year reports on time. Final reports will be due at the end of January.

First off, everyone seemed really confused about the calendar. It is legitimately confusing, because it was never spelled out clearly up front.

Here’s the normal situation:

A funding cycle is three years:

Year A: You apply and get your money. (Applications are due in August, money awarded in December.)
Year B: You spend your money. (It’s a calendar year, Jan-December)
Year C: You turn in your final report. (It’s due by January 31st)

If you are re-applying for funding, you’d apply again in Year B. So your final report from the previous cycle isn’t available yet, because you’re still spending that money.

Jane is acting like it’s a two year cycle, and that it’s just incompetence that keeps nonprofits from having their final report on time. The staff member gently tried to explain, but Jane kept misinterpreting the explanation. (Jane kept acting like the issue was nonprofits that skipped an application cycle, and she’s say things like “If they didn’t apply for a year, then they should just turn in the most recent report.”)

Alyssa: Working for a nonprofit, you are constantly dealing with so many grants, and this is a small amount of money. These are good people, overworked on a shoestring budget, and we’re offering them 50¢. Can’t we have just have grace for our neighbors? Let them work it out on a case-by-case basis with staff?

I’m going to skip about 20 minutes of haggling between councilmembers, but suffice it to say: No. We cannot have grace for our neighbors. Matthew Mendoza is the biggest hard-ass of all, harping on how everything needs to be promptly on time, no exceptions. 

Jane: How about this: the report is due in August. We’ll accept late reports, as long as the final report is in before the committee needs to consider applications. 

The staff member tries to explain again: this year, only half-year reports were due Oct 15th. The Board considers applications in November. So the nonprofits really can’t get final reports in by decision time. They can submit final reports eventually though. 

Jane: We’re going to need to see the final report!

Answer: The final reports are due January 31st. So they could easily submit that for the following cycle, in August?

Jane: Yes. Have them print it out again.Thank you.

Bottom line: if you’re funded in Year A, you’ll submit that report two years later, when you re-apply for funding August of Year C. No one could possibly be late with their final report, because it was due seven months earlier, in January.

Alyssa, “This is really insulting, because it’s not actually a problem. Bigger granting agencies handle extenuating circumstances with grace all the time. We’re the ones treating nonprofits like they can’t handle being professional.”

Alyssa is right. The whole tone of this conversation is that nonprofits are naughty wayward children, and if they carry on, they shan’t have any figgy pudding. 

Such naughty, naughty non-profits.

Complaint #2: Council priorities should add up to more points!

We’re talking about this slide again. Jane suggests that the points allocated should be:

2 years San Marcos Service (5 points 10 points)
Office in San Marcos (5 points 10 points)
Funding creates increase in service (5 points)

Everyone nods compliantly. 

Alyssa:  What’s the rationale behind increasing the first two and leaving the third the same?

Jane: No reason! We could do 10/10/10, make it 30 total!  

This is exactly how haphazard this all is. She’s not actually making a claim about the relative merits of the bullet points. Council just felt neglected, since their priorities were only worth 15 points. (I think they settled on 10/10/10.)

Complaints #s…: Other Things

  • Jane would like to know which cities the board members live in. She doesn’t need to know their address, but she is interested to know if they live in San Marcos, or Kyle, or Austin, or what.
  • Jane wants to require them to spell out acronyms. (One application didn’t.) 

No one objects to these two criterion, although I assume Alyssa rolled her eyes. I mean, it’s good manners to spell out your acronyms, but I wouldn’t make it a rule.

Matthew: Can we ask them what percentage this grant is of their total budget? 
Answer: We already know this, based on the information provided.

Jane: Could they could have a coversheet that divided the applications, with the organization’s name and their San Marcos address with their requested amount?
Answer: no problem.

(I actually find this one quite reasonable. It’s just about improving the readability of the applications. And staff can implement this without inconveniencing the nonprofits.)

Jane: Will Council be able to review and vote on the final draft of the application and rules?
Answer: No problem.

Alyssa has one final comment. “Can we see this level of accountability and reports when we talk about the police department, or the fire department, or public works? We give the police $322 per resident. We give the fire department $218 per resident. And we give public works $141 per resident. Yet we are wasting all of this time over the HSAB board, which works out to… $7 per resident. Can we carry this energy when we talk about budgets in general?”

Jane responds: That’s different. Those are all city departments with department heads that report to us.

Let’s analyze this last bit. Who gets micromanaged, and who doesn’t?

  • It is true that micromanaging city departments is different than micromanaging contracts and grants to external groups. 
  • However, all of those departments have many external contracts that run between $5K and $35K, and those contracts do not get scrutinized by council. We just trust the department.

In fact, immediately before this item, we approved a contract for $1 million, for improvements at Gary Softball Complex. We did not check whether the contractor was a local company. (They are not local.) We did not ask the private company to explain what all the acronyms meant! We did not second-guess how council priorities were weighted in the selection criteria. We just voted yes, because we trusted the city staff that recommended the construction agency.

Furthermore, there are at least two Very Special Nonprofits that the city negotiates with directly.
1. The Greater San Marcos Partnership, or GSMP.

Back in 2021, we signed a three year contract with them for $400,000 each year. They get $1.2 million dollars! Isn’t that something. 

GSMP has to submit a yearly report card. The last – and only! – time they gave an update to City Council was back in May 2022. I can’t find any yearly report cards on on the San Marcos website, so transparency is nonexistent there. From the GSMP website, here’s their yearly report from 2022. It reads more like a promotional brochure than a detailed report, though. Is that the same as a yearly report card? I have no idea!

Things no one on Council cared about:

  • Where the board members live. Do the GSMP board members live in Wimberly? In Austin? Who knows. Because no one cares.
  • The exact date that the report was submitted, or whether yearly reports are happening at all. City Council has not hyperventilated about this yet.
  • Whether all the acronyms were spelled out precisely. In fact, there are a lot of abbreviations!
  • What percent the San Marcos money is of their total budgets.

What a funny thing, right? (I actually wrote about the contract with GSMP here, but I was a newbie blogger and was still trying to get the hang of it.)

2. San Marcos Chamber of Commerce

We give the Chamber of Commerce $28K/year. They get two automatic yearly renewals. We got some details because we gave them more money this past fall, reallocated from Covid money.

There has not been any discussion that I can see about this money since a work session in 2020. I did not watch the work session, but the powerpoint slides are very vague and uninformative. 

Here’s the thing: I don’t think we should micromanage GSMP or Chamber of Commerce, either! We could have a philosophical conversation about how they benefit the community, but I think they basically do what they say they’re doing. (I’m not opposed to the idea supporting small, locally owned businesses. We can quibble about dollar amounts some other time.)

The point is that we treat these groups like professional adults. If they’re late, we pick up the phone and give them a call. If there’s a confusing acronym, we shoot them an email. We don’t act like a grumpy school principal who posts an additional rule on the bulletin board every time someone misbehaves.

Finally: it helps small locally-owned businesses if we lift people out of poverty. Middle class people can eat out downtown more than poor people can! Supporting the most vulnerable members of our community is actually best for everyone.

…

Item 24: Should we postpone VisionSMTX?

Right now, VisionSMTX is supposed to come around on January 16th for a final vote. In the meantime, a subcommittee had been meeting, and they’re recommending that we do more community outreach.

There’s a brief discussion, and Jane checks with everyone informally. It’s really hard to hear who is a “yes” and who is a “no”, but I think this is how it goes:

Check-in on January 16th, but not the final vote: Everyone except Matthew Mendoza
Final vote should be Jan 16th: Matthew Mendoza

I’m not sure what Matthew is hung up on. He clearly has some strong opinions about this process, but didn’t quite say what’s bugging him.

Hours 0:00 – 1:51, 12/5/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen comment: The two main topics are the Can Ban and HSAB grants.

Can Ban:
– A bunch of people speak in favor, many who have spent years cleaning up the river
– Can it be a restriction on single-use beverages but not single-use food containers? Texas Water Safari folks need some single-use food containers,
– City Council member from Martindale describes how well their can ban has worked.
– The Eyes of the San Marcos River does regular clean ups just past where city contractors stop picking up trash. It’s a lot.

Speakers promoting their nonprofits for HSAB Grants:
– Outsiders Anonymous representative describes their free addiction recovery program.
– PALS for free spay/neutering and low cost pet care

All these things in due time!

…

Item 9:  We are rezoning about 1 acre here:

Currently it looks like this:

That is the restaurant Sakura.

Sakura is staying, but it’s gaining a bunch of little apartments behind it.  They can put up to 9 apartments there.  This seems like a good place for apartments!  Infill does not need to be scary.

…

Item 10:   There’s a little road you’ve never heard of here:

called Flustern Road.  It’s up in Whisper Tract:

Whisper tract is gigantic, and slowly getting built out.

Flustern Road has exactly one resident, a company called Manifest Commerce. They asked if they could get the name changed from Flustern Road to Manifest Way.  

However, Flustern Road will eventually cross Opportunity Blvd, and connect with Celebration Way: 

 From the POV of the fire department and EMS, it’s better to have roads that don’t change names.  So as long as we’re changing the name anyway, we’re going to go with Celebration way. 

Also, don’t the names all sound like someone from the 1960s was dreaming of a brighter tomorrow? Celebration Way, Opportunity Blvd, Technology Way, Manifest Way… Flustern never really fit in, did it.

Nevertheless: would you like to know what Flustern means? [drum roll] ….it means “to whisper.” And it was in Whisper Tract. Aww, very cute. But over!

…

Item 11: Consolidated CBDG funding report.

All of our CBDG money originates with the Federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) department. We have to regularly write reports to them, documenting that we’re using the money according to the rules.

Alyssa Garza feels like the report isn’t widely circulated enough. Maybe fewer neighbors would harass her about wasting money if they saw how meticulously nonprofits have to account for every last nickel.

I’m more cynical than she is. People just like to gripe.

…

Item 5: We’re buying a generator, for $445K:

Technically, we’re buying a 600-kilowatt diesel generator, automatic transfer switch, electrical installation, and associated engineering services.

Technically, it’s Covid money that’s paying for it.

And technically, it will be located in San Marcos High School, so that the high school can serve as an emergency shelter in the future.

…

Item 12: Citizen Comment will now be called Community Perspectives.  (Mentioned before here.)

  • We’re getting rid of “Citizen” because you do not have to be a citizen to have a comment. This is good!
  • We didn’t want to name it “Public comment” because we already have “public hearings”, and those might sound too similar.
  • Not sure why we didn’t go with “Community Comment”. “Community Perspectives” sounds a little bit like a hokey small town newspaper op-ed column, but hey, sometimes we are a hokey small town. Did you have a chance to stop by Sights & Sounds this weekend?

…

Item 13: Human Services Advisory Board  (HSAB) Grants.

We put $550,000 of our city budget towards grants to nonprofits. This year, we also have $100,000 of the last bit of Covid money to distribute as well.  HSAB is the committee that meets, looks over applications, and recommends to council who should get money.

Last year – for reasons I was never quite clear on – the process was deemed a shitshow. Council made HSAB go back and do it all over again. Then Council tinkered with the results anyway.   After all that, HSAB thoroughly revised their process for evaluating grant applications. 

It seems everyone likes the new process! You can read all the applications yourself here, as well as a bunch of other reports and information.

So this year:

  • 34 nonprofits applied.
  • 5 board members rated them independently on a huge matrix of things:
    • All the nonprofits pass the Risk Assessment
    • One nonprofit needed to get their nonprofit status back
    •  They were ranked according to some evaluation criteria

Here’s the evaluation criteria:

The committee met weekly, all fall long, and discussed all of the nonprofits individually. They heard presentations from all the nonprofits. It sounds like a massive amount of work.

Here’s the full scoring matrix on the Evaluation Criteria, if you’re so inclined:

Evaluation Score DetailsDownload

(I know it’s tiny, but you should be able to zoom in and scroll around.)

And here’s the summary table of the scores:

(scores were re-centered across committee members, for consistency.)

Finally, here’s HSAB’s complete funding recommendations:

Scoring matrixDownload

So what does Council think? Let’s dive in.

Council Discussion

Alyssa Garza: Last year, Council deviated from the recommended HSAB funding in a really haphazard way.  I’m glad to see a really systematic process. This is good work, I support the recommendations. 

Matthew Mendoza: Great job! But I want to tinker with it.  Any Baby Can is centered out of Austin.  Let’s deduct $7K from them and give it to the San Marcos Youth Services Board, because that’s centered in San Marcos.

Jane Hughson: Any Baby Can has an office here in San Marcos. Make it $5K and I’ll support it.

The Vote:  Should we take $5K from Any Baby Can and give it to SMYSB?

Yes: Shane Scott, Mark Gleason, Jane Hughson, Matthew Mendoza
No: Alyssa Garza (who explains that she just wants to stick with HSAB process)

Abstain: Jude Prather, because his wife serves on the board of the food bank.

So now:
– Any Baby Can requested $30K, recommended $25K, and will get $20,000.
– SMYSB requested $39K, was recommended $20K, and will get $25,000.

This is a good example of haphazard meddling. They’re both good organizations!

But let’s take a moment anyway:

Any Baby Can is providing early childhood intervention for birth-3 year olds, for kids with medical diagnoses, developmental delays, or any impairments.  (Getting interventions in early is huge.  This majorly redirects the trajectory of kids’ lives.)  According to their application, they served 159 children and families in San Marcos last year, over 29,600 hours. They expect to serve 165 children in San Marcos this next year.

SMYSB is an afterschool program for 11-17 year olds in San Marcos. They’re asking for rent for their new facilities, which is $2700/month.  Their application doesn’t say how many kids they’ve served, but looking at their progress report from last year, SMYSB got $10,000, and served 16 kids in the spring and summer.  They used to be located at Southside Community center, so I’m guessing that they’re working with kids dealing with housing instability or homelessness. This is a super vulnerable population! They need this kind of one-on-one care to navigate what they’ve gotten handed to them.

Both are good programs, staffed by hard-working, underfunded organizations!   But the committee took their job seriously when they evaluated the benefit to San Marcos.

I guess I’m harping on this because it’s, well, haphazard. It didn’t feel like Matthew Mendoza read all the applications super closely and then felt compelled to shift this money around. It felt like someone from SMYSB picked up the phone and asked him if he couldn’t find a few more dollars for them. He did, but it comes out of someone else’s funding.

The vote on the entire thing:
Yes: Everyone but Jude
No: No one
Abstain: Jude Prather

…

Because I’m an insufferable prig, may I make a comparison?  

  • Just now, we generously gave out HSAB grants which cost the city $550,000.
  • We also give all homeowners a $15,000 homestead exemption on their property tax.

How much does that cost the city?

Basically, the city is donating of $1,100,000 towards the worthy charity of home owners.

  • The elderly and disabled people get a tax exemption of $35,000. This works out to a $211 discount on their tax bill.
  • Everyone else gets a $15,000 tax exemption. This works out to a $90 discount on their tax bill.

This is fine! I’m not mad about this. But it’s invisible. And we don’t call it “charity”, we call it a tax break.

Bear with me for a moment more:

  • We’ve got about 7000 owner-occupied houses (as of 2021) who get to share that $1.1 million. There’s a tiny bit of paperwork, but that’s it. Each person gets either $211 or $90, no strings attached.
  • There are 22,219 people below the poverty line (as of 2021). The HSAB money isn’t exclusively for poor people, but it’s a good place to start.  That works out to $25 per person.

And there are SO MANY STRINGS attached. Thirty-four nonprofits fill out extensive paperwork. A six person committee meets for weeks and scrutinizes the applications. Council scrutinizes the recommendations further. Afterwards, each nonprofit writes ongoing grant reports on each person they helped. It’s an extremely labor-intensive, highly visible process. Someone has to maintain the website charting all these details.

To recap:

  • $1,100,000 on charity for 7000 homeowners.
  • $550,000 on charity for at least 22,000 people in poverty.

Haha, weird, right!  [hard stare at city council.]

Hours 1:51-3:03, 12/5/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 14:  We’re converting some of City Hall to be ACC classrooms. (Discussed here before.)

This will be where the classrooms go:

I love city staff.  But they are crap at selecting useful maps.  Like, would it kill you to include Hopkins as a reference point, on a map of City Hall?

Here’s my supplemental map:

[smugly waits for applause. You’re welcome.]

The idea is that ACC will provide workforce training.  Some people will get free tuition, but they didn’t give much details about who.

…

Item 15: $2 million dollars on vehicles.

You know how I like to try to find photos of the fire trucks or back hoes that we’re buying. But this was a little vague:

“Consider approval of Resolution 2023-198R, approving an agreement with Enterprise Fleet Management, Inc., through the Texas Interlocal Purchasing System (TIPS), to provide for the lease and maintenance of one hundred and eight (108) vehicles for use by several city departments and the purchase of miscellaneous equipment in the estimated amount of $2,115,083.00; authorizing the City Manager, or her designee, to execute the agreement; and declaring an effective date.”

This is 108 vehicles, across a bunch of departments.

Jane Hughson said, “I hadn’t been on board with this, but I suppose I’ve come around.”   But she never said what it is!

Good thing I’ve got mad reading skills. In the packet there’s a link to “Feasibility and Implications of Electric Vehicle (EV) Deployment and Infrastructure Development”.  So I guess we’re upgrading a bunch of city vehicles to be electric. That’s good!

…

One day over the summer, I had some friends down from Austin. They needed to charge their electric car while they were in San Marcos. 

Let me tell you: it was a royal pain in the ass to find a working charger. We tried the library chargers, we tried some near the town square, and finally ended up at Embassy Suites an hour later.  

So maybe increasing the number of electric vehicles in San Marcos will spur investment in some charging stations?  That would also be a good thing.

…

Item 16: IPAWS: Integratred Public Alert & Warning System

This is FEMA’s emergency alert system. Hays County is on it. We’re joining in onto their system.

…

Item 19:  CAN BAN TIME! Or rather, SINGLE USE CONTAINER BAN TIME!

Council discussed a possible can ban back here, or rather a ban on single-use containers, because there’s so much trash in the river. 

We’ve also discussed how badly the river got beat up over the summer. Since then, the Parks & Rec Board came up with their formal recommendation for Council.

Parks Board Recommendation:

  • Ban single use beverage containers
  • Limit cooler size to one 30 quart cooler per person.

Council discussion:

First, Jude Prather weighs in: San Marcos should adopt rules that match New Braunfel’s single-use container ban. It’s really important that the central Texas rivers all have uniform policies.  (At the beginning, Jude’s position seems totally reasonable. By the end, his uniformity shtick starts to seem a little silly.)

One big question is whether or not we can regulate containers on the river. The state says that we can’t.  But New Braunfels and Martindale both have river regulations that are currently upheld by the courts. New Braunfels passed their ban in 2011, but then the courts overturned it in 2014. But then in 2017, a different court reversed the earlier court decision. And Martindale passed theirs in 2018.

Shane Scott:  Can we use the endangered species somehow? Like to get federal protection to regulate containers on the river?

Matthew Mendoza: I was thinking that too! Also we can charge out of town users to use the river.

Alyssa Garza:
– The river is big with large working-class Hispanic families. There are not a lot of free ways to get your family together in San Marcos and cool off, in the summer.
– Public buy-in is going to be very important.
– The equity coordinator needs to be involved in this. The cultural piece needs to be handled well.
– I know what la gente will say: “First they came for our charcoal grills, and now the giant coolers?”

A word on the giant coolers, because I also found it odd. This is a 30 quart cooler:

So the proposed rule is that each person can bring in one of those.

Why is it better for a big family to bring four of those, instead of one of these:

?

It did not make sense to me, and we’ll get back to this point. Sit tight.

Jane Hughson: There are a few questions that we need consensus on.
1. Should this be just beverage containers, or also include single-use food containers?
2. Should this be enforced on the river, in the parks, or both?

Let’s take these one at a time.

Should we also ban single-use food containers?

  • The parks board didn’t want to stomp on birthday parties and the Texas Water Safari, where people are going to bring plastic forks and plates and so on.
  • Anecdotally, the vast amount of trash is beverage-related

So that’s why they recommended only beverage containers.

Shane Scott: What about vape cartridges? Can we ban those?

Answer: We already ban vaping in the parks, so there’s no good way to make it even MORE not allowed.

Mark Gleason: Could single-use food containers only be allowed on rented pavilions? Maybe with a permit?

Alyssa: Come on, parents are tired. No one wants to do the dishes after a park hang. You all should come down for some carne asadas, though. 

Jane: I’m also not on board with restricting single-use food items to permitted uses. That’s just a barrier to many. And the logistics of enforcement would be impossible.

Staff says again that the majority of trash is beverage-related – beer cans, straw wrappers from Capri Suns, etc. So even just ban on single-use beverages alone would reduce a lot of litter from the river.

The consensus seems to be tipping towards just beverage containers.

Should the ban be enforced on the river, or in the parks, or both?

  • As I mentioned above, there’s legal concerns that the state will override a river ban.
  • Everyone agrees that without the river, it will be a little futile.  So we want to regulate what happens on the river.
  • Does anyone want it to be just the river? And not the parks?

Jude does! Because of uniformity.

Jude Prather: You know how passionate I am about UNIFORMITY!!  New Braunfels only regulates the river and not the park. So we should do that, too.  Also, New Braunfels charges $25 per picnic space, and there’s a waiver for residents.  UNIFORMITY!!

Jane Hughson: Yes, but they have restricted river access.

Jude’s being silly, and fortunately no one else agrees with him.

Here’s the thing: New Braunfels parks are used very differently from San Marcos parks.  In New Braunfels, there are a ton of businesses making money off tubers. (In fact, the business owners were the ones who took it to court to get the ban overturned.) Tubing is more separated from hanging out in the parks. (Honestly, I haven’t spent a ton of time in the New Braunfels parks, but this is my impression.)

Whereas here, it’s much more blurred.  There’s the Lion’s Club, but tubing the San Marcos river just doesn’t take very long, unlike the New Braunfels rivers. Large families set up giant day-long picnics, and everyone is in and out of the water to cool off.  Lots of people skip tubing altogether.

Regulating big family picnics on the bank of the San Marcos river is very different than regulating the massive tubing industry of New Braunfels. 

Which brings us to the coolers issue. What’s wrong with these?

It turns out that New Braunfels bans them, so we’re proposing to ban them, out of UNIFORMITY!! Jude must be so pleased.

The reasons that New Braunfels bans coolers over 30 quarts:

  1. They cause traffic jams of tubers when it’s time to get in and out of the river, because they’re big and awkward.
  2. They capsize sometimes and make a giant mess.

And that’s why uniformity is stupid.  We don’t have river traffic jams the way New Braunfels does.  And basically no one takes giant coolers like that on the river, because the tube ride isn’t long enough to need it.  

Anyone who is tubing and has a cooler that size has some family or friends camped out by the falls who is hanging out with the coolers, the babies, and grilling the food.  You just don’t need a giant cooler on the river. In San Marcos, a ban on giant coolers would be nonsensical.

Some final thoughts:

New Braunfels only bans the river and not the parks. We really need to contemplate Alyssa’s point about what it means to ban single-use beverage containers on the river banks, and how a large family spending the day on the river is going to avoid single-use beverages containers. It’s a really big ask for them, much bigger than asking college kids to switch from beer to a hydroflask of spiked Hawaiian Punch.

If I’m planning an all-day picnic for a big family, without using single-use beverages…I guess one of those giant Gatorade dispenser things with water or juice for kids? It means keeping track of a bunch of water bottles, though, because you can’t use dixie cups. But the adults are presumably going to want a beer at some point, and I’m not sure how that part works. A little party ball keg? Into what kind of cup? You’re not bringing Solo cups.

It’s just tricky to ask people to incorporate a lot of changes into their life.

But at the same time:

(photo by Christopher Paul Cardoza, taken from here)

You can’t destroy your only river. There are not infinite resources. Anyone who wants to use the river needs to do their part not to destroy it.

Finally: everyone wants to collaborate with Texas State on this, and get Sewell Park operating under the same rules.  We have no power over Texas State, so it can only happen by building relationships and goodwill.

Here’s what happens from here:

  • Council is going to have a workshop in January, to hammer out some details, and the legality of regulating what happens in the river.
  • Council passes a policy
  • Staff figures out funding and enforcement
  • Finally, implementation, hopefully by summer 2024.

Hours 0:00 – 0:55, 11/14/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Hello all! Short meeting this week. But still interesting! 

Item 5: We are purchasing 6.28 acres on the corner of Hunter and Dixon, here:

This is exactly where Hopkins turns into Hunter, by the way. We’re talking about the field opposite the VFW:

It sometimes has horses in it.

This is part of a giant $60 million dollar project to address Purgatory Creek flooding.  (We don’t yet have the $60 million. That part will take a while.)

It’s hard to find a map of Purgatory Creek, because everything online refers to the natural area at Hunter and Wonderworld:

via

But we’re talking here about the actual creek, which starts at Purgatory Creek Natural Area and flows up towards Belvin, then cuts across Hopkins to Dunbar, and then keeps going toward the river, meeting the river near the Children’s Park:

(This slide wasn’t in the packet, so it’s a low-quality screenshot. Sorry!)

About a decade ago, I had a random conversation with an old-timer, and they told me that Purgatory Creek was re-routed at some point in history – like some hair-brained engineering scheme conceived in a honky-tonk and made real. The idea was that this had caused some of our current flooding problems.

They didn’t provide enough details for me to make sense of the whole thing, so consider this an open invitation: can someone fill me in on how we’ve meddled with Purgatory Creek over the years? I am very curious!

Here’s another view of the whole thing:

(Also low quality! Sorry.) It’s going from Wonderworld over to Dunbar, and then from Dunbar over to the river.

So what is the project? What are they doing?

(More screenshots, sorry.) Basically it’s going to be a giant channel to catch stormwater and take it to the river.

Phase 1 is supposed to start in 2026, going roughly from Dunbar Park to the river:

Phase 2 is still 5-10 years out.  (We move slowly.) This part is Phase 2, Dunbar out to Wonderworld:

It’s also supposed to eventually have some trails and nice features for people to use.

… 

It occurs to me that if they put paved bike trails alongside it, this would be an incredibly handy bike path for getting around town safely.  

Biking directly from the river to Wonderworld, skipping all of downtown and Hopkins? That could be really convenient.

Along these lines, I’ve long thought that we should put bike paths along the railroads – why should bikes be constrained to car-paths when we’ve already got these giant rail lines cutting directly across the city?   

Just look at these railroad lines!

Imagine if there was a little side path that allowed you to use the railroad bridges to get across the river. You could take the future Purgatory Creek path from Wonderworld all the way to the river, and then take the railroad-adjacent path across the river, over to Aquarena, and north up to Blanco Vista. You could avoid all the cars on Post Road, Aquarena, and Hopkins!

And then you could bike directly from Aquarena Springs down to Target! After all, the trains go right along I-35, behind Target. If you work at the Outlet Malls, it would take you almost all the way there. If you live on the northeast side of town, you could easily get back and forth across I-35!

(I didn’t make this up! It’s a real thing, called Rails-with-Trails.

via

There are a ton of resources at the Rails-with-Trails link.)

…

Back to our little patch of land, across from the VFW.

Saul asks, “Will this help the flooding on Bishop?”

Answer: Not really, no.  There’s a separate project, the Bishop-Belvin project, that is aiming specifically at that.   

….

Item 6:  Each year, Hays County gives San Marcos $85,000 to provide library services to county residents.  The other local libraries – Wimberly, Buda, Kyle, Dripping Springs – all get $35,000 to serve the county.  

The per capita funding has gone down dramatically in the past 20 years.  Our funding has grown, but not as fast as the population of Hays County.

The presenter did mention this: “As the population has grown in Hays County, the percentage of users outside the city has actually gone down.  As these other towns build new libraries, people go to their home library.” But I wasn’t clear if she was referring to the entire 20 year span, or just the past 2-3 years.  

They also get $120,000 from Friends of the Library each year, which is also helpful. (For comparison, the library gets a little over $2 million from the city budget.)

Let’s just take a moment to appreciate how much our library does:

It really warms a crabby marxist’s heart.

…

Item 12:  We’re going to purchase a Smeal aerial fire apparatus for the Fire Department for $2,300,000.00.

via

That’s my best guess as to what we’re getting.  I’m not a fire truck expert.

…

Item 17: LIHTC Projects. I feel deeply ambivalent about this item. 

LIHTC stands for  “Low-Income Housing Tax Credit”.

Say you’re a developer and you’re going to build some apartment complexes. The city offers some incentives for you to include some low-income housing. LIHTC is a federal program that helps us give tax credits to developers, in exchange for a certain number of below-market-rate apartments being built. (Another one is a density bonus – you can build more apartments per acre – if you agree to keep a certain number at a cheaper price.)

Here’s what we require from the developer: you have to offer 5 of these 8:

What kind of tax breaks do you get for doing this? I’m not actually sure. This line is on the LIHTC application:

So I suppose you get a 4% discount or a 9% discount on your property taxes.

Here’s the key line for this meeting:

  • A minimum of 25% of all units within the project shall be affordable to households at or below 30% percent of the AMI for the duration of the tax exemption

What does this mean? First, AMI is Area Median Income.  Now, San Marcos gets lumped in with Austin for this computation, so:

  • Median Income for a 4-person household: $122,300
  • Median Income for a 1-person household: $85,600

This is obviously a little ridiculous for San Marcos – our single-household median income was $42,500 from 2017-2021. But still, legally we’re going to use Austin’s $122,300 number as the reference point.

Ok, next: “households at or below 30% percent of the AMI”. In other words:

  • 30% below Austin’s median income for a 4-person household: $35,050
  • 30% below Austin’s median income for a 1-person household: $24,550

These are the people we’re trying to help with these LIHTC projects. This includes roughly 30% of San Marcos, or 21,512 people.

Last time with this key sentence again: “ A minimum of 25% of all units within the project shall be affordable to households at or below 30% percent of the AMI for the duration of the tax exemption”

In other words, if you want the tax breaks, then you need to make 25% percent of your units affordable to people earning less than $35,000.    Let’s say a big apartment complex has 200 units.  So then San Marcos gets 50 units that are affordable to people in poverty, from that one LIHTC project.

Here’s an important question: what’s the current situation? We say there’s a housing shortage, but by how much exactly? How many more apartments need to exist for those 21,512 people, so that everyone can find affordable housing?

We did an excellent Housing Needs Assessment, but it’s out of date – it uses 2017 data.  It desperately needs to be updated yearly. But still, in 2017, this was the situation:  

Adding up the first six rows, we had 9935 total rental households (in 2017) that earned less than $35,000 a year, and we had a shortfall of 4233 rental units.

Since then:

  • Prices have surged
  • A lot has been built (but at what rental price?)
  • A lot more people have moved to San Marcos

So it’s really impossible to speculate. But my read is that we have an increasingly severe housing shortage for the poorest third of San Marcos.  Let’s say we need 4,250 rental units for people earning under $35,000, just because it’s the next nice even number.

To achieve 4,250 affordable units, we only need to build 85 more LIHTC apartment complexes around San Marcos! Right now we have eleven LIHTC projects, and five more that are in the works. This is an excruciatingly slow way to chip away at those 4,250 units.

One last detail on the 25% number: that number was set in March of 2022. Before that, you only had to set aside 10% of your units. So that 200-unit apartment complex would only bring 20 newly affordable units to the table. Only 212 more apartment complexes needed at this rate!

[I’m being a teeny bit of a jerk. This one mechanism is not supposed to solve the housing crisis all by itself. It’s just one tool among many. But in practice, we have very few other ways of generating affordable housing.]

So here was the question being debated on Tuesday: should we stick with requiring that 25% of units be affordable? Should we go back to 10%? Or should we settle somewhere in the middle?

Council quickly settles on 15%: it should only take 15% of your units to qualify for tax breaks. 

So what’s the rationale? What’s wrong with 25%?  Basically, developers have stopped applying for the program at all. The tax credits aren’t enough to offset the cost of setting aside 25% of their units for low-income housing. The math doesn’t math, as the kids say.

Are developers the bad guys? Eh, not really. They’re not here to solve housing affordability.  This is not their problem.

What does this mean then?  It means that this is a terrible way to create enough affordable housing. 

The honest truth is that this is too big a problem for San Marcos.  Poor towns and big cities have high needs and rich towns and rich suburbs have very small needs. Making cities solve their own individual housing crises is idiotic.  We actually live in a wealthy state!  Texas could meaningfully reduce housing unaffordability, if this state cared about anything besides outlawing trans kids and punishing refugees.  

Given that there’s no real solution anywhere in sight, should we:

  1. Require builders provide 25% low-income housing, and have fewer applications? or
  2. Allow builders to only provide 15% low-income housing, and have more applications?

Answer: poor residents lose either way.

…

One final note: Other places build a lot more public housing than we do. For example, Vienna was written up in the NYT recently. (Gifted link – shouldn’t be paywalled).

Given that the US doesn’t have much appetite for building a lot of high-quality public housing, the best way to bring down housing prices is to build an excess of housing that is close to people’s jobs and schools. Put guardrails on what kind of dense housing developers can build, and then let them build it. (My preference for the guardrails is to allow more condos, duplexes, 4-plexes and 8-plexes in quiet neighborhoods, and then some large scale apartment complexes as their own standalone thing. Clearly the Old Guard in town prefers strictly single family housing and massive apartment complexes. But I digress.)

This is actually something that Texas has done better than California. It’s easier there for a few people to gum up the process for a developer indefinitely, and so you end up only building out in the middle of nowhere. Hence the enormous sprawl and wild housing prices.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 11/14/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Workshop:

You may have heard that we carried out a compensation study?  I think it’s a good idea to pay people a healthy salary, so this seems fine to me. 

First off: not everyone is included.  Specifically, appointees, SMPD, and Firefighters are not excluded. (SMPD and firefighters are the only public employees that Texas allows to have unions that negotiate for higher salaries.)

So for everyone else, we brought in some consultants. Here’s the process:

So when you get to that pentagon in the middle, you need some way to quantify the importance of a job.  Here’s how they do it:

Magically, those factors turn into some number of points between 0 and 3000.  

So are we currently paying people fairly?

The thing about this graphic is that all those dots hug the line fairly closely.  That means that roughly speaking, if two people are doing comparable jobs, they’re getting paid a comparable amount.  This is good!

If you trust the point system, then we’re internally consistent with that.

So how do we compare to other cities? We picked 107 of our job descriptions to compare.  

So Austin pays much better than we do, and we pay a little better than New Braunfels. 

Sidenote: this slide is total gibberish. First off, “variance” is how spread out your data is. I’m pretty sure they’re not trying to convey that Austin is 20% less spread out than San Marcos, and New Braunfels is 4% more spread out, because that would be a silly thing to emphasize. So I think they’re actually comparing the averages, or maybe the average trend line.

Second, the left hand side is an even bigger mess. Did they actually measure different things in 2023 and 2024? how did they measure 2024 anyway? And then for total variance… they added together 2023 and 2024? What would that even mean?!

Back to the presentation.

Finally, they took seven of those cities, and inferred what their scatter plot lines would be.  Then they compared our trend line to these other cities:

This means we pay a little better for anyone earning up to $50,000, and we pay a little worse if you’re earning 50K-200K. 

They tactfully didn’t specify how much the folks on the top will be getting, and I actually don’t care.  None of this is the kind of obscene amounts of wealth that actually offends me.  

On the lower end, increasing the hourly pay from $16 to $17.42 translates into a yearly income going from $32,000 to $34,840.

Still living in poverty! Still eligible for those low-income LIHTC apartments we just talked about.   But moving in the right direction, I suppose.

…

There was also a nice presentation on our grants development process and grant activity.  The grants coordinator seems to be coordinating a lot.  It seems like an awfully wonky topic even for a blog like this, though, so I’m letting it go.

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