Category: Hour summaries

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

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the end of the story!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the major points that were emphasized:

Note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Item 14: the tax rate

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

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

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

Details:

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

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

Was this a big deal? Yes and no:

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

For electric, we’re still the cheapest around:

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

Here’s our water rate:

Well, it’s mid, as the kids say.

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

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

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

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

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

So not TOO far away.  

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

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

…

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

and also a Community Enhancement Fee:

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

58.20+49.27+28.80+1.5 = $137.77

to

59.43+51.71+29.66+2.35 = $143.15

So your monthly bill is going up $5.38.

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

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

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

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

…

There were two moments that I want to share:

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

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

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

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

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

The re-vote:

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

Phew.

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

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

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

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

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

Hours 2:36 – 3:14, 9/5/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Items 10-12:  This spot seems to come up a lot at Council and P&Z meetings:

Here’s a close up of the section we mean, today:

In this case, three little roads are being demolished, and a new one being added in:

Now you know.

…

Item 20: Speed Cushions!

You know that phenomenon where you hear something for the first time, and then you hear it a bunch more in quick succession? (I’ve heard this called the plate of shrimp theory, from the movie Repo Man.)  

I’m having Plate of Shrimp phenomenon with Horace Howard Drive right now.  Here’s Horace Howard Drive:

It’s a little circular road that goes around a tiny lake:

Two weeks ago, a developer wanted to put a bunch of mobile homes on Horace Howard Drive, here:

P&Z gave this a very forceful NO, mostly because the neighbors all showed up, fearing the increase in traffic.  

Then this week, Horace Howard comes up again! Council granted them some new speed cushions, to complement the old ones:

How nice!

Coincidence? Why is Horace Howard showing up twice in two weeks? Is it in the ether?  I have no idea.

…

Item 22: Ending the five day hold for cats at the shelter.

This is a big deal, I think, and I almost missed it.   (The volume on the recording was really lousy this week.)

Last year, after many meetings and postponements, we banned puppy mills and implemented Trap/Neuter/Release for cats.  One of the recommendations from the animal folks was “Do not keep cats in the shelter, unless they are microchipped or have ID on them.”  Spay or neuter the cat and then just release them where they’re found, and let them find their way back to their familiar setting.

The problem is that cats without ID are almost never reconnected with their owners, and it’s really stressful for cats to be in shelters, and their health suffers. Whereas they do just fine if you put them back where you found them – they’ll either re-join their cat colony or find their way home.  So rather than holding them for five days and then letting someone adopt them, you should just spay or neuter the cat, and then return it to wherever you picked it up. This is Trap/Neuter/Release.

But Council debated this endlessly.  Mark Gleason was particularly nervous about lost cats.  Ultimately they kept the 5 day hold, and decided to revisit the issue six months later.

Lo and behold, six months passed. And in all of 30 seconds, they ended the 5 day hold and fully implemented Trap/Neuter/Release. What good councilmembers.

…

Item 25: Yearly CARTS contract

It costs $2.26 million to run CARTS for a year.  The city of San Marcos pays $515K of that, so a little under a quarter of it.  The rest of it gets covered by state and federal funding.

Shane Scott asked the hard-hitting questions: “How well utilized is this? What if we just had everyone take an uber instead? Wouldn’t it create jobs if we had uber drivers? Would that be more cost-effective?”

Jane Hughson says, “Buses have drivers.”

Shane falters and admits that buses do have drivers. He persists: “But would it be cheaper?”

The staff member said, “We have about 90K riders annually. But that would be a whole different transit model. This is a routes-based transit system. That would be on-demand, point-to-point system.  We do currently have an on-demand component to our system.”

Shane Scott mumbled thanks.  

You know I love public transportation.  I believe in public transportation.  So it hurts me to point out that the math here looks awful:  if CARTS costs $2.26 million for 90K riders, that rings in at $25 per ride. Of that, San Marcos is covering $5.73 of each ride.  

I am probably missing something basic here. The actual contract just says we pay $86 per bus-hour of operation, which seems reasonable. (And that all works out if there’s ~15 people on the bus at any point, which also seems reasonable.) Still, I must be missing something.

I am really hoping this partnership with Texas State boosts ridership, and helps get us momentum towards a system which is used by more people.  Let’s make my public transit dreams come true.

Update: posted by Rosalie Ray, on FB, in response:

Re: transit. You’re correct that $25 a ride is not great. The issue is that the city operates a coverage model, where we prioritize giving most neighborhoods access to a bus over giving some neighborhoods access to a bus that comes frequently. This approach makes sense if you view transit as a lifeline service and assume that your riders have a lot of spare time and a few essential appointments in their week. We can see the alternative approach with Texas State, where they will deny service to student housing complexes if doing so compromises their ability to maintain 10-15 minute frequencies. Ideally, you want a balance of the two approaches-some level of service to all communities and investment in high frequency service on key corridors. In general, Uber-style service can rarely be provided for less than $15 a ride cost to the city, and it doesn’t have economies of scale-that is, more riders mean more cost, whereas with a bus, more riders (up to a point) means cheaper cost per ride. It’s also currently somewhat unclear if you can use federal funding for an Uber-style service-you can if it’s serving folks who are physically or mentally unable to use buses and live within a quarter mile of a bus route, but beyond that is murky. Tl;dr the CARTS contract is not a bad deal given the current structure, but if we want to build ridership, our next transit plan needs to prioritize certain corridors to improve frequency, while finding a solution for those neighborhoods that might lose coverage.

Including this here because it’s worth sharing, but also so that I’m more likely to retain this information and remember it the next time I’m talking about this stuff.

…

Item 26:  More cats! This one is less about five day holds at the shelter, and more about renting your mini-excavator from Holt Cat, LTD.

York Creek Road meets S. Old Bastrop road way down south:

It’s even further south than Horace Howard Drive, by about five miles.

These Holt Cat guys want to do this to it:

That is, turn a bunch of it into heavy industrial.  

There’s going to be some sort of development agreement coming around. In the past few years, Council has gotten into hot water with development agreements – La Cinema, SMART – where it passes them quietly and then everyone gets angry when they find out. Some day in the future, the city will send out notifications to residents within a 400 yard radius when a big development agreement is in the works. But that day is not yet here.

Council has not yet signed anything. Council just formed a committee with Jane Hughson, Mark Gleason, and Matthew Mendoza to look into it. So direct your Cat hopes and dreams to them.

Hours 0:00 – 1:26, 8/15/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment: Max Baker was the only speaker. He showed up to comment on several things:

  • Damage to the river at Sewell park – litter, wild rice.
  • Working with Chief Standridge: do our cops run unnecessary background checks?
  • Upcoming elections: will the student center be properly staffed?

All good points!

Item 17: Platinum Drive

First, Leah Ave is one of those streets that you know you’ve been on a million times, but you may be vaguely confused about. That’s because there are two parts to Leah Ave, and they don’t currently connect:

The top half starts behind the hospital, crosses Wonderworld, and ends after Lowe’s and Petsmart and Marshalls.

The other half picks up again by Amazon:

I assume at some point the plan is to connect the two Leahs. But not today!

Today we’re talking about this little street that never got a name:

The solid part is the unnamed street, the dotted part is private. There’s a company, PGM, down that road and no one can find them, because their address is on I-35.  

So that little road is now getting christened “Platinum Drive”.

According to the Transportation Master Plan, that road may some day hook up with Rattler Road:

The transportation master plan is tiny and detailed, but someday Rattler Road will in fact cross McCarty, head over to Leah Ave and connect with Platinum Drive. But not any time in the next decade or so.

So for now, the fire marshalls did not want to name it Rattler Road, lest there be confusion in an emergency.  I guess the folks on Leah Ave can just deal with a disconnected street.

…

Item 18: Cut and Fill

This is a development going in next to the Hills of Hays neighborhood:

They want an exemption for cut-and-fill. Cut-and-fill means you’re building on a hill and you need it to be flat. So you want turn it into level pieces. If you have just a few large stair steps, then each riser is taller. If you have more stair steps, then each riser is smaller.

The problem with cut-and-fill is that this affects how water flows. You don’t want to cause someone else to flood. The code places a limit on how big the riser can be. You’re not allowed to cut-and-fill more than eight feet. Here, they want to cut to 22 feet and fill to 18 feet.

The Hills of Hays neighborhood is right next door:

That neighborhood has a lot of drainage and flooding problems with stormwater. This is exactly the type of thing that can get worse if some developer does a bunch of cut-and-fill uphill from you.

Back in May, the cut-and-fill permit came to P&Z. Several residents from Hills of Hays showed up and talked about their constant flooding problems. P&Z voted unanimously to recommend denial to City Council.

Now, there is a big city project to fix the flooding in Hills of Hays, and in fact it got started this summer. So this is what city staff tells council on Tuesday: hey, we met with the residents of Hills of Hays. Construction on their drainage project got started since the P&Z meeting. Things are different now!

No one from Hills of Hays showed up to comment on Tuesday, but Saul Gonzalez asked a good question – Did they think the issue was settled when P&Z voted it down? Staff said that they’d sent out more notices for this hearing, so probably not? (Only the back street of Hills will be in the 400′ notification radius, though. Not the entire neighborhood.)

Here’s my question: the drainage project for Hills of Hays has been planned for years. Did the engineers re-tool the stormwater drainage models to account for this cut-and-fill? How much excess capacity is being built into the new drainage system?

The vote:

Yes: Mayor Hughson, Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Matthew Mendoza

No:  Alyssa Garza, Saul Gonzalez

I probably would have voted “no”, because developers can follow the goddamn rules. But I do think that Jane at least was torn.

…

(The items go out of order because the Items 17 and 18 were Public Hearings, and so those go first.)

…

Item 8: the Interlocal Agreement (ILA) with the university over the river.

The city and the university have an agreement on river management. It’s not new, and they’re just minorly updating it this time around.

The city pays Texas State $276K a year, and the university does things like:
– non-native plant removal
– planting more Texas Wild Rice
– managing recreation and educating river users
– removing floating plant mats and any litter that’s part of them.

This isn’t changing much. I just bring this up because the river is incredibly low right now, and it’s upsetting.

Here’s the water level over the past year, compared to the previous 27 years:

via

The speaker at City Council said it’s the lowest in 25-30 years. This article from June said that the June level was the lowest in 70 years.

It’s all very anxiety-provoking!

…

Item 19: Property tax rate for the new year.

Last year, the city tax rate was 60.3 ¢ on every $100 of property value.

The budget isn’t decided yet, but the city sets an upper limit on the tax rate. 

There’s a couple possible property tax rates that get discussed:

  1. Last year’s rate: 60.3 ¢ on every $100.
  2. “No New Revenue Rate”: 53.05 ¢ per $100.  This is the rate that undoes the effect of inflation.  If you lowered the tax rate to 53.05 ¢, then you’d get the same amount of money from the properties that were taxed in both years, even though the value of those properties have gone up.
  3. “Voter approval rate”: 68.87 ¢ per $100: By state law, the is the highest you can go without having to hold a citizen vote on it.

Every penny increase brings in about $800K in tax revenue to the city.  So Option 2 is about $6 million lower than Option 1, and Option 3 is about $7 million higher than Option 1.

Here’s an interesting chart from the presentation:

Hence everyone complaining that their property taxes are going up, even when the rate doesn’t change.

Useful things I feel compelled to remind everyone about:

  • We have no state income tax! Wealthy people benefit the most from this. 
  • Property taxes are somewhat regressive.
  • Sales taxes are really regressive.

Today’s task is just to set an upper limit on the tax rate. I’m not sure exactly why Texas requires city council to do this, but here we are. 

City staff has proposed a budget based on a 60.3 ¢ tax rate, so Council sets 60.3 ¢ as their upper bound.  I’m also not sure why they wouldn’t give themselves a little wiggle room on this vote. Why not set your upper bound at 61 ¢, and then approve the lower amount when the budget actually gets approved?

….

Item 20: Public transit is a great thing.  But only when it works well. When it doesn’t work well, nobody uses it unless they’re in a bind. 

What makes public transportation easy to use?

  • Frequency.  If you don’t need to consult a schedule because busses come every 15 minutes, it’s easier to use.
  • Lots of stops: no one wants to walk very far in this heat.
  • Range: it has to get you where you’re going, preferably without too many changes

There is federal money available for all this, if you can demonstrate ridership.  This is the tricky part – how do you demonstrate demand, if your system is underfunded?  It’s a little bit of a catch-22.

ENTER: THE INTERLOCAL AGREEMENT WITH TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY! 

A few years ago, Texas State started reporting its ridership numbers to the federal agency that keeps track of these things. Now we’re going to pool our systems. So we get a giant boon because Texas State has high ridership. 

This opens up a lot of funding and growth opportunities! This is great!  Hooray!

Hours 0:00-1:29, 8/1/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen comment:

Several people from the SMART protest community showed up to talk about Item 18, the revision to the San Marcos Development Codes. We’ll get to this.

A few people talked about different good projects for the CBDG money.

Item 10: CBDG money for 2023-24.

This is $712K of federal money from HUD that’s intended to help community programs for low-income folk.

Here’s the requested amounts, and what ends up being awarded:

The “rec” amounts end up being approved by council.

On the Habitat House Counselling program: The federal department, HUD, requires housing counselling in certain situations. Habitat offers an online course and then individual counselling thereafter. A rep from Habitat for Humanity shows up to explain all this. But it wasn’t persuasive, because the cost is wild: Last year, Habitat charged San Marcos $13,000, and only 11 San Marcos households participated.

HUD offers a free online house counselling course. Sso we’re going with that. (We still work with Habitat on housing construction. Just not counseling.)

Shane Scott asks if we can boost CASA to $60K. The problem is that HUD has categories for this money, so you can’t dip into any project you want to move funds around. They decide that they’ll just boost CASA from the other money they dole out – the city money (HSAB) or the last bit of Covid money (ARP).

Item 11: Running wastewater from Whisper Tract down through Blanco Shoals natural area, to connect with the city wastewater system.

I’m only including this item because it annoyed me. LMC spoke during the public hearing, and asked if this involved tree removal. Would the city hold itself to the standards that it holds its citizens?

Mark Gleason follows up: Will this require tree removal?
Answer: It could!
Mark: Is there a remediation procedure?
Answer: nope!
Jane Hughson: Can we add a remediation procedure in?
Answer: It’s not in the development agreement with Whisper. [Translation: you can’t make the developer pay for tree remediation.]

Ok, fine, but we can certainly pay for tree remediation. But it just gets dropped, exasperatingly.

This is the Council Dance:
– Here, we identified a problem.
– Let’s all sit uncomfortably for a sec
– Rather than fix it, just pat it on the head and go on our merry way.

Also: Add in tree remediation to your goddamn development agreements, Council!

Item 12: Issuing $3.7 million dollars in bond debt.  I didn’t really follow the details, but our AA bond rating was affirmed by Standard & Poors, which was presented as a thing we should feel good about.

Item 14: CURFEWS ARE BACK. This is delicious.

If you’ll remember, there was a three part giant shitstorm over renewing the curfew, last year.  Mark Gleason decried the roving gangs of minors in his neighborhood.  Mano Amiga turned out a large number of people speaking out against it. I myself made the case that curfews are dumb and wrong. 

The final vote on curfews, back on 12/14/22:

So it passed. (I miss the clickers.) In theory, the Criminal Justice Reform committee was going to study the issue and bring it back.

However, the good hypocrites at the state level, in their quest to micromanage cities, felt differently!

H.B. 1819 seeks to ensure that all young Texans have opportunities to succeed without the burden of a criminal record early in life by eliminating the authority of political subdivisions to adopt or enforce juvenile curfews.

It’s really an oddly specific thing for the State Legislature to care about. Based on this flyer, it was supported by a real mix of groups: a conservative think tank, homeschoolers, youth services and racial and social justice organizations.

The common thread seems to be anti-authoritarianism. Works for me.

Upshot: in order to comply with the new state law, the curfew has now been repealed. Hooray!

Item 15: Ending the contractor test requirement to pull a permit.  This came up before as a discussion item, and now it’s happening.  This is a good thing. Anyone can pull a building permit now.

Item 16:  Firefighter Meet & Confer. 

Meet & Confer came up a lot last year, but for SMPD. It was approved, then Mano Amiga filed a petition, council voted to reopen negotiations, the proposed changes were very weak, and ultimately it became clear that the city sand-bagged the whole process. (Everyone but Alyssa Garza voted to ratify the new contract.)

Firefighters also get to unionize and collectively bargain for their contracts. The firefighter’s union is SMPFFA. Since firefighters aren’t known for systematically stopping, harassing, and abusing people of color, SMPFFA gets a lot less attention than the police. 

Here’s the summary:

It didn’t get much in the way of comments from the Council peanut gallery, and I don’t have much to say, either.

Hours 1:29-2:57, 8/1/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 18: Updating the San Marcos Development Code

This is big and interesting. It has four parts:

  1. Compliance with State Laws
  2. Business Park Zoning
  3. Process Improvements
  4. Clarification and Corrections

Part 1: Compliance with State Laws

The state just passed a bunch of laws, like repealing all curfews. What else do we need to fix to be legal?

  • Plats: A plat is the drawing that shows things like roads, bus stops, parks, parking lots, and things like that. Everything but the details of the actual building.

    Right now plats get approved by P&Z. But P&Z is legally not allowed to make a judgement call. They’re only allowed to consider if the plat meets the conditions in the land development code.

    In the future, plats won’t go to P&Z anymore. City staff will approve them. We’re told this is because the state legislature tightened the shot clock, so we have less time to approve applications. We need to streamline processes to comply. They will publish the plats on a website

Okay: this is a small thing, but city staff is mildly bullshitting their case to City Council here. The shot clock was tightened back in 2019 to 30 days. This most recent bill says it’s okay to skip P&Z approval. So P&Z approval used to be required by the state, but now we’re allowed to let staff approve plats.

What else?

  • More appeals procedures added in to land at City Council, and we modified the timeline
  • Private schools must be zoned just like public schools.

City staff is misleading us a teeny bit here, too. This says “Municipalities will be required to treat charters as they would an independent school district for the purposes of permitting, zoning, etc.” It does not say private schools. Just charter schools. We’re allowed to zone private schools however we want, but don’t pretend that the state is making us do this.

Listen: the city staff work hard and they’re good people. I’m just being persnickety here.

Part 2: A new zoning district, called “Business Park”.

To me, this is a business park:

via

That’s not what we’re talking about. What Jane Hughson means is, “Hey, if you want to put industrial next to residential, it has to be super mild and chill.”

I think she actually means little warehouses, like this:

via

I would call it “Good Neighbor Industrial”.

Either way, it’s going to be capped at 35′ high, and excludes a lot of bad neighbor uses. If you wanted it higher than 35′ or to include warehouse and delivery, you’d have to get a Conditional Use Permit from P&Z.

Part 3: Process improvements

City council keeps getting bit in the butt over Development Agreements. They pass something in the dead of night, and then when everyone finds out the details, they’re furious.

In recent memory:

  • La Cinema. Council modified the Development Agreement with La Cima to allow for movie studios back in December 2021. There were no notifications sent out and no one noticed. Then it came time to negotiate tax credits, and everyone got super mad that movie studios were allowed over the aquifer. But it was too late.
  • The SMART Terminal. They doubled the size of the SMART Terminal back in January. But there were no notifications to the public. Afterwards, everyone was furious. I would have to link to every single meeting from the past six months to flesh this out.

Clearly we need to mail out notifications for Development Agreements and for amendments. We’re finally going to start doing this.

How many people should get notified? They’re proposing a 400 foot radius – everyone who lives within 400′ gets mailed a notification. That matches what we do for zoning changes.

Listen: It should not be 400′. It should be proportional to the size of the project. Tiny projects get a tiny notification radius. Giant projects need a larger notification radius.

If you’re looking at the 2000 acre SMART/Logistics park, 400 feet is a tiny sliver around it. If you’re talking about a little 4-plex, 400 feet is plenty.

Note to Council: Since you’re tinkering with Development Agreements, why not also add in tree remediation?

Other changes

  • Historical Preservation Commission (HPC) can postpone things now.
  • Timeline for Demolition by Neglect is increased from 30 to 45 days
  • Park land dedication – this one is a bit weird. Let’s spend a moment here.

Right now, if you want to build anything residential, you have to set aside some land for parks. The equation is 5.7 acres per 1000 people.

The old code says this: “A minimum of 50% of the parkland required under this ordinance shall be dedicated to the City of San Marcos as a neighborhood or regional park under Section 3.10.2.1. The remaining 50% may be owned and managed by one of the entities under Section 3.10.1.6.”. Those entities are the city, a land conservancy or land trust, an HOA, or a public easement.

The new code says: “Appropriate plat notes describing the ownership and maintenance of all proposed parks are provided on the plat.”

In other words, maintenance is expensive and we want to pawn it off onto HOAs. But then the city doesn’t actually own the land. We could just make the developers and HOAs cover the costs, but we still own the land. But that’s not what’s proposed.

Jane Hughson asks: Will the park still be open to the public?
Answer: Yes, dedicated parkland is required to be open to the public.

Mark Gleason asks: What can we do if it’s not maintained?
Answer: We withhold their final permits until the park looks good.
Mark: No, I mean like five years later. What if the bathrooms are all broken and there’s garbage all over the place? What can we do?
Answer: [squirming in the uncomfortable silence]

Looking in the code, I see this bit:

That doesn’t quite apply here.

No one offers a motion and the motion passes.

See? This is the Council Dance again:
– Here, we identified a problem.
– Let’s all sit uncomfortably for a sec
– Rather than fix it, just pat it on the head and go on our merry way.

  • Occupancy restrictions: let’s dish on this.

We have an occupancy ban in San Marcos. No more than two unrelated people can live in the same house. This is an extremely shitty policy that punishes poor people, out of fear that college students will throw wild keggers next door. There is a housing crisis, and people need to be able to move in with each other. (Furthermore, this dumb policy is totally unenforceable, so it only gets trotted out when someone has an axe to grind. It’s the worst!)

Listen: you cannot govern San Marcos solely out of fear of beer cans from college kids. That is a code compliance issue. That is not the basis for good policy.

Back in April ’22, Alyssa Garza fought hard to get everyone to consider relaxing the occupancy ban. Eventually she built consensus: council asked city staff to bring back a policy loosening the restriction to 3 unrelated people. Hooray, sort of.

Somehow it took city staff 15 months to bring it back, so here we are. However, during that 15 months, Max Baker was voted out and Matthew Mendoza was voted in. And Matthew Mendoza is very salty on this issue.

The more he talks, the more conservative Matthew seems. He sees this all the time in his neighborhood: a bunch of unrelated people live together, and it reduces home values for families in his neighborhood, which is how you buld generational wealth. He was calling this New Urbanism and claiming this was a gateway for big apartment complexes. It was kind of unhinged.

Everyone reassured him that there’d been a big conversation. Matthew did not get any traction re-opening the topic. But it was still a weird rant.

  • Awnings can be now be 7′ clearance instead of 9′ minimum clearance. This is in response to the owner of Chances R Bar downtown, who pointed out that the building literally isn’t tall enough for a 9′ awning.
  • Mark Gleason is super mad at his neighbor.

Apparently there’s a house in Mark’s neighborhood which is lifted off the ground and is two stories high. It’s got a flat roof, and they made a little patio up there. Mark is livid that they can see into other people’s backyards, but you can’t really legislate that, so instead he is livid that there is a structure up there – “with shingles!” – that allows them to hang out and see into people’s backyards.

Shane Scott says, “Our house in Mexico is like that. It sounds pretty cool.”

This is the Shane I like best, when he needles Mark for being a prig. You can practically see them in the same high school cafeteria, circa 1991: Shane wearing a Metallica t-shirt and black jeans, Mark wearing the same khakis and golf shirts that he wears to city council meetings. Shane leaves his lunch trash behind on the table when he leaves, and Mark urgently flags down the teacher to let them know that it was Shane.

Amanda Hernandez, the planning department director, strongly suspects that this house is probably already violating city code. The top of a house can’t be more than 35′ off the ground. If this is elevated and two stories already, you’ve got to be pretty close. Mezzanine structures count if they’re at least 30% of the area.

Mark makes a motion to measure height from the ground to top of rooftop structures.

Yes: Everyone besides Shane Scott.  
No: Shane Scott
(Jude Prather is absent.)

I prefer to live in a world that facilitates rooftop patios and rejects Mark’s killjoy tendencies. So I’m a “no”, if anyone asks.

Bonus! Council Workshop 8/1/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

3 pm Workshop: This is very interesting! 

The city acquired three derelict properties in 2020.  It’s these three:

You can totally see it from the town square. It’s very close.

It looks like this from ground:

That is The Rooftop to the right, and to the left is Solid Gold used to be. (Let’s have a moment of silence for the closure of that store.)

The city bought it because there were a bunch of contaminants in the ground.  It had been a dry cleaners for years and years. From the late 1940s-1980s, they were dumping some awful stuff into the ground. 

So what do you do with a bunch of toxic shit in the ground? There are procedures, it turns out.  You need some information:

  • What contaminants exactly got dumped?
  • How far underground has it spread? How deep is it, and how far north/east/west/south?
  • Is it staying put? Or is it moving?
  • How exactly do you clean up these chemicals?
  • If you don’t clean up these chemicals, what do they decompose into, and how long does it take for it to decompose?

It turns out we have answers to all these questions! 

  1. The chemicals: 
    Tetrachloroethene (PERC)
    Trichloroethene (TCE)
    Vinyl Chloride (VC)

Chlorinated solvents are synthetic chlorinated chemicals, I’m told. Bacteria won’t touch them, but they’ll break down on their own over time.

I have no background in chemistry, but if the chemists tell me to stay away from these, I’m going to believe them.

  1. Where are these nasty chemicals currently?

We dug a bunch of different types of wells:

I’ll explain the “MSD” acronym in a bit.  

So here’s what you find when you drill down: 

  • The normal soil or whatever on top. Very dense silt and clay. No moisture.
  • About 22’-23’ down, you get fine sand.  It’s got groundwater in it. That’s called silten clay.
  • Below that, you get Navarro Clay.  The Navarro Clay is super thick and water doesn’t pass through it.  (The vocabulary word is aquitard, which sounds like an insult but isn’t.)

The Navarro Clay is a shield, and then below is the aquifer water.  

So the contaminants – the PERCs, the TCEs, and the VCs – they are all heavier than water, and they sink through all that wet sand and puddle on top of the Navarro Clay.  That tells us how deep these things are.

Note: the geologists made it sound like the aquifer was hundreds of feet further below the Navarro Clay, so far away that we should sleep easy at night.

But this makes it look not-so-far-away:

via

So we are really trusting the aquitardiness of that Navarro Clay.

What about how far north/east/south/west?

The skinny red line is the boundary of the PERC plume:

And here the TCE plume:

And the VC plume:

  1. Is it staying put? Or is it moving? 

It is moving incredibly slowly in this direction:

Because it’s resting on the Navarro Clay, and it’s all gunked up in there, it’s moving incredibly slowly. It won’t reach Purgatory Creek for another 89-8900 years. It won’t reach the San Marcos River for another 188-18,800 years.  

  1. How exactly would you clean this up? 

They didn’t actually answer this. They basically said it would be impossible, because of all the sand in the way, and the gunkiness of the Navarro Clay.

  1. What would it decompose to?  

The PERC is the stuff that was dumped by the drycleaners. The PERC breaks down into the TCE, which is also nasty. The TCE breaks down into two dichloroethylenes, also bad. That breaks down into VC, still bad. But then after that you get carbon dioxide, a little chlorine, and water, which is not nasty anymore.  This process will happen over the next 50-100 years. 

Listen: I am sharing what was presented. I am not a scientist. If you are a scientist, and we are being told an overly optimistic picture, please fill me in.

So what do we do?

So if the PERCs and TCEs and VCs will all break down before they reach anything sensitive, what do we do?

You declare an MSD: Municipal Settings Designation. 

Back to this slide, which has the perimeter of the MSD:

This means that within these borders, no one is allowed to drink well water.  Everyone has to be on city water.  

It also means that within a few years, we can “achieve regulatory clearance”. 

Congratulations! You have nasty stuff in the ground, but your regulatory conscience is clear!

… 

So what happens up top, where people wander around? This was the second half of the presentation.

Again, this is what it looks like:

It’s fine, as long as you don’t dig up that concrete.

We’re proposing a short term plan: the left and right would be city parking, and the middle will be a little public area. Shade, seating, bathrooms, bike and scooter parking. Room for extra booths for the farmer’s market or Art Squared.

Council was nervous about having a stage there, but liked the rest of it. So this will come back around as an agenda item in the future.

Hours 0:00-1:21, 7/3/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

The SMART/Axis Logistics Semi-Unsatisfying-Partial-Resolution

We were scheduled to have the big vote for zoning the SMART/Axis Logistics 2000 acre monstrosity to Heavy Industrial. But instead: they withdrew their application. So this chapter of the story lurches to its anticlimactic conclusion.  (Backstory: here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

This isn’t exactly a bad thing – a bad thing would be if the Heavy Industrial zoning had passed. But it doesn’t mean that the community can let their guard down, either.

Here’s what I imagine: city councilmembers were squirming under the pressure to deny, and told the developers that a denial was likely. It’s better for the developer to withdraw and regroup, rather than get the denial. If they had gotten denied on the zoning request, they’d have to wait a year to re-apply.  This way they can play their cards close to their vest and figure out what they want to do. 

Besides: the developer still has the original 880 acres zoned Heavy Industrial and ready to go.

Citizen Comment: Mostly frustrated citizens who want answers to the current state of the SMART terminal.  Which development agreement is currently in effect? What’s the future hold?

…

Items 11-13:  La Cinema, the La Cima Film Studio.  (Background on La Cima here.)(La Cima is controversial because it is over Edwards Aquifer. More background.)

Here is the current version of La Cima:

That’s RR 12 going through up through the middle of the pink part. (Everything to the right of RR 12 was added in May 2022.)

Back in November 2021, Council said that La Cima could have movie studios in their commercial zoning areas.  Just like with revising the SMART development agreement, this passed on a single reading, and no one in the community got wind of it. 

Then in June 2022, it was time to decide what kind of tax credits the studio should get. (Me, in my tiny voice: why should they get any?) This is when the community first heard about the movie studio. Everyone got mad, because we really should not be building on the aquifer.  But it was too late: that ship had sailed the previous November.

This past Tuesday, it got annexed and zoned. The film studio is the dangly part of the pink land in the picture above:

That’s about 147 acres.

The inner part is film studio, and the outer part has to stay natural:

So there you have it. It’s been annexed and zoned. In ten years, we’ll know if this was an extremely bad idea, a moderately bad idea, or if it worked out pretty well, after all.

Passes 7-0.

…

Item 14:  Universal Gas Franchise.

Apparently in Texas, any gas company can demand to have access to dig up your streets and put their pipes in so that they can sell gas to the people of your town, and you have to let them.  More accurately, you have to give them the same contract as the other gas companies have. 

In this case, it’s someone called Universal Gas Ltd. The city gets 5% of their profits, and in exchange, they’re allowed to dig up our roads and put pipeline in and whatever else.  It sounds like they’re aiming for Riverbend Ranch, but it wasn’t entirely clear. 

I got annoyed with the Universal Gas lawyer, who kept answering questions that were directed at city staff.  For example, Saul Gonzalez asked if 5% was typical for the cut that the city gets.  The Universal Gas lawyer hopped right in and said, “Oh yes! If anything, it’s too high!  Usually they’re 2-5%.  You wouldn’t want us to have to pass those costs on to the consumer, would you?” [waggles eyebrows in threatening corporate-speak.]

The city manager, Stephanie Reyes, said that every few years we conduct a rate study, and then implement new rates across the board. 

Passes 7-0.

…

Item 15: The city is taking over Southside’s home repair project. This has been in the works for awhile.

…

Item 16: The animal shelter has hired a vet, and they’ll be joining the Animal Services Committee.

…

Items 17-18: Top Secret Executive Session about wastewater plants going up way out on 123.  I’m guessing this is also related to Riverbend Ranch.

And that’s the whole meeting! It was weirdly short. But the workshops were very interesting, so go read about those next.

P&Z Comprehensive PlanWorkshop, 6/21/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries, P&Z Meetings

Note: I mostly try not to call out P&Z members by name, because they’re not public officials the way that City Council members are. But there are nine of them, and they’re not all equally frustrating. Last time, I gave William Agnew a hard time, and I give Jim Garber a hard time in this post. What can I say? They’re staking out positions that I disagree with, hard.

Markeymoore does the best job of gently pushing back against the crap that I’m describing below. Griffen Spell sometimes does, as well. #notallp&zcommissioners

Quick Timeline:
– 2020-December 2022: Team of community members plus consultants and city staff spend two years putting together a comp plan. A huge amount of community input goes into it.
– February 2023: P&Z says, “This plan is an utter disaster. We will form a subcommittee to rewrite it.”
– May 2023: Now there are two versions of the Comprehensive Plan. The changes are so extensive that they need a workshop to get through them

This workshop was so exasperating.   It was aggravating for the exact same reasons that the previous P&Z comp plan discussion was aggravating.

More background: There’s an area of condos called Sagewood. It’s roughly here:

on the edge of an older, beautiful neighborhood.

The landlords of Sagewood have let Sagewood get really rundown: buildings seem to slant, broken fences don’t get fixed very quickly, trash cans get knocked over and trash stays strewn about, etc.

Here’s what Google Streetview has to say about the matter:

(It actually looks fine in that photo.) It’s mostly college students living here.

The point is: many of your older San Marcos NIMBYs close their eyes at night, and dream of Sagewood taking over their own neighborhood, and presumably wake up screaming.

In the 2000s, tons of new giant apartment complexes were approved: The Retreat, The Cottages, Redwood/The Woods, and probably some I’m forgetting. This angered a lot of citizens, including me! I think it was criminal to build The Woods on the river. (Here’s some backstory if you’re curious.) Many NIMBY types feared that Sagewood was taking over the city.

This is what you must understand, if you want to understand fights over the comp plan: many P&Z members are stuck in 2010, fighting against The Cottages, and suffering from Sagewood night terrors when they try to close their eyes and rest.

What else was 2010 like? I did my best to find some data:

  • Median rent in 2009: $741/month. (Median is more useful than average – this means that half the units rented for less than $741, and half for more than $741.)
  • In 2011, the median house in San Marcos sold for $140K.
  • There were 165 total listings for houses on the market
  • the 2010 census puts San Marcos at 44K people.
  • Median household income in 2009: $26,357

So that’s the world that most of P&Z believes we’re living in: 44K people in San Marcos, many houses cost less than $140K, and median rent is around $700/month.

Here’s the most current numbers I could find:

This is a wildly different world! Rent has almost doubled, home prices have more than doubled, and there are fewer houses on the market.

The comp plan has got to deal with the actual San Marcos in 2023:

  • we need affordable housing,
  • we need public transit and safe biking options, and
  • we have a moral obligation to give a shit that the world is quickly overheating.

The way you do this is by controlling sprawl and increasing density, in small-scale ways. Build 3- and 4-plexes throughout single family neighborhoods. Increase public transit options. Put commerce near where people live, so you can drive less.

This is why the Comp Plan discussions are so frustrating. There are three main coalitions:

  • Old San Marcos, fighting the battles of 2010.
  • Developers, who would still love to build those giant apartment complexes that piss everyone off
  • Progressives, trying to wrangle developers into building small scale, dense housing, and simultaneously trying to convince Old San Marcos not to sabotage it.

I’m really not exaggerating. The chair, Jim Garber, literally states that this is his position at roughly 0:43:00:

  • The apartment complexes approved in the 2000s drove him to local politics: he got involved in the last Comp plan, in order to save San Marcos neighborhoods from giant student apartment complexes.  
  • This last Comp plan was approved in 2012. In order to get it passed, the Planning Department promised to conduct Neighborhood Character Studies. Every neighborhood was going to get to come together and declare what its personality is. Your personality is things like “no duplexes” and “no carports”. In other words, it’s mostly class-based.  The goal is to enshrine these wealth signifiers for all eternity. 
  • However, the neighborhood character studies were never carried out.  Jim Garber has been steamed up about this ever since; the planning department cannot be trusted; etc etc.
  • He just doesn’t understand why “protection of existing neighborhoods” is not in this plan.
  • He wants to divide all neighborhoods into “existing” and “new”. Once a brand new patch of land has been platted, it switches from “new” to “existing”, and then it’s personality is enshrined, never to be touched again. 
  • What’s the difference? Existing neighborhoods should not have duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and condominiums.  In other words, no small-scale, dense, affordable housing.

Jim Garber is so mad about The Retreat, The Cottages, and other gigantic apartment complexes that he is fighting tooth-and-nail against small-scale affordable housing that would blend in to a neighborhood.   He is stuck fighting the battles of 2012, and can’t empathize with 30 year olds in 2023 who can’t afford to live in a little residential neighborhood.

Amanda Hernandez is the planning department director.  She responds thoroughly to his points:

  • First off, she has only been the director for three months. Most of his complaints span previous admins.
  • She wrote most of the comp plan in 2012, and she now thinks it’s a terrible plan.  They started the neighborhood character studies and spent a year or two on them, and then she was told to abandon them and to switch and work on the new Code Development.
  • But! Now! They are now finally doing character studies. Blanco Gardens and Dunbar are underway.  Victory Gardens and north of campus are coming up next.
  • You know the Cottages, the Retreat, Sagewood, and The Woods? Big complexes in residential areas? Those have not been approved since 2012. The old Comp Plan worked. Those were all passed under the even-older comp plan, two comp plans ago.

Bottom line: we have effective mechanisms to prevent giant apartment complexes from being built in residential neighborhoods.  This is no longer happening.  The fight against giant apartment complexes is going to sabotage efforts to bring small-scale affordable housing into neighborhoods.

Finally, I’m going to be blunt: the utter narcissism of the Historic District is exhausting.  To hear P&Z speak, there is no neighborhood that could merit planning, besides this one. All Historic District, all the time.  It’s extremely tiresome and means that nothing else ever gets considered. 

At the public comments, speakers try to explain that no one wants to change the Historic District. The Historic District is actually the gold standard of a neighborhood!  It’s got small scale tri-plexes and four-plexes sprinkled around, it’s got neighborhood commercial, and nearly every house has an ADU – a mini-house in the back.  It is the dream of small scale, dense living!

One of the speakers, Rosie Ray, made some handouts for P&Z, to try to convey this point. She was kind enough to share them with me:

Cottonwood Creek does not have diversity of housing. The residents keep telling the city that they want some stores nearby. The Historic District is chock full of different kinds of functionality. It works great.

When this is brought up, the P&Z folks say, “Yes, but the Historic District happened naturally.”

Basically: Historic Districts usually are older than land use codes. Single-family zoning originated to make sure white, wealthy neighborhoods stayed that way. So along with red-lining, you wanted to make sure there was nothing affordable. Hence you specify that lots have to be big, and houses have to be big and spread out. This is the problematic origin of single-family zoning.

So sure, the Historic district happened naturally, because it’s older than single-family zoning.  And now we will prevent that from happening anywhere else. 

Bottom line:

  • P&Z wants to separate all existing neighborhoods and freeze them in carbon, like Hans Solo. Future neighborhoods, in a galaxy far far away, can be built like the Historic District.
  • Developers will not build future neighborhoods like the Historic District, because the way you maximize profit is to build yet another sprawling single family neighborhood or a giant apartment complex. (Good link on how to get builders to fill in these missing middle housing types. The problem really is single-family zoning.)
  • In ten years, we’ll have another comp plan, and we’ll beg and plead for this all over again.

I’m struggling to avoid making “OK Boomer” jokes about P&Z, but gerontocracy is a real thing in the US, and in San Marcos. The members of P&Z do not seem attuned to the idea that the financial hurdles of 30 year olds in 2023 are wildly different than the financial hurdles of 30 year olds in 1990.

(I didn’t have a good place to put it, but Rosie also passed out this map:

It’s pretty stark!)

City Council workshop, 7/3/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

City Council Workshops were fascinating. There were two topics:

  1. Homeless Action Plan
  2. Housing Action Plan  

First, the Homeless Action Plan. 

San Marcos hired a guy named Robert Marbut for five months, to write a report about what we should do to help homeless people in San Marcos. He gave the presentation on Tuesday.

First off, Max Baker is very wary of him. And rightly so: the Wikipedia entry on Marbut is pretty awful: 

According to The Huffington Post, Marbut’s advice to most communities was to limit food handouts and build a large shelter that stays open all day and doesn’t turn anyone away. He called his approach “The Velvet Hammer”; since then he has said he prefers the phrase “The Velvet Gavel”.[11]

Marbut’s methods were criticized by housing activists who preferred a policy widely adopted since the 1990s called “Housing First,” which finds apartments and houses instead of shelters for homeless people.[11][12][13] Some activists called Marbut’s approach outdated, punitive and patronizing to homeless people, and more effective at hiding them from downtowns than at solving homelessness.[13][2][10]

In response, Marbut said, “I believe in Housing Fourth” — awarding permanent housing after residents have shown their personal lives are in order.[11] “I often say, ‘Having a home is not the problem for the homeless,'” Marbut told the magazine Next City. “It’s maintaining a financial stability that allows you to maintain your homestead.”[14]

In Pinellas County, Florida, Marbut consulted on a 470-bed shelter called Safe Harbor, which opened in 2011 in a former jail building next to the current jail outside of St. Petersburg. It was run by the sheriff’s department and included a “penalty box” in a fenced-in area of the parking lot where residents who broke rules would sleep. Most residents stayed for less than a month, according to sheriff’s department data, and few were known to have found permanent housing afterward. Between 2011 and 2013, 7 percent of those leaving the shelter found permanent housing, 3 percent went to another shelter or a friend or relative, and 67 percent headed for an “unknown” destination.[11][12]

His presentation on San Marcos was mixed.  Parts of it were really good! For example, he stated several times that criminalizing homelessness does not work.  Arresting homeless people does not work.  He was clear and emphatic on this point. 

But parts of it were total garbage. For example, he believes that “handouts promote homelessness”. He can fuck right off with that bullshit.  You know who gets a lot of handouts? Wealthy people! They get the mortgage interest deduction for big houses and second homes, the estate tax, the social security earnings limit, and many, many more. They get legacy admit assistance for college. Robert Marbut himself gets handouts, and yet he is not homeless! It’s a Christmas miracle.

He criticized “housing first” policies, but his evidence against them was dishonest.  He implied that “Housing First” policies have been tried in San Francisco, LA, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle, and Austin, and consequently, homelessness has skyrocketed in all of them.  It’s a bad-faith argument, and he should know better.  Their homeless populations haven’t skyrocketed because of a housing first policy; they’ve skyrocketed due to the wildly rising rental costs and the shrinking supply of affordable housing. The fact that he gave an intellectually dishonest characterization of the other side makes me suspicious of a lot of what he says. 

His argument goes: If you don’t treat the addiction, domestic violence, mental illness, and so on, then the homeless will be right back on the street in six months. (I don’t think that’s how Housing First policies work? I don’t really know.)

But his counter-proposal isn’t entirely bad, either. He says, “Treat your way out.”  Give people shelter while connecting them with help for addiction, domestic violence, mental illness, and so on. I’m not disputing the need for services.

I’m just very worried about the part where you withhold housing in the meantime. How long does it take people to “earn” a key to an apartment or some sort of permanent housing?  And what do you do with someone who will never overcome their addiction or mental illness? Is your plan that they live their life in a shelter forever?

Anyway, here’s his five major points:

  1. “Stop the Growth”

    Marbut wants us to only help locals.  “The worst thing you can do is convert out-of-towners to in-towners!” he quips. He claims we get lots of homeless traffic from the I-35 corridor, and we can’t give handouts to everyone.
    • This is fine if you’re talking about homeless people from Austin.  It is absolutely true that San Marcos cannot afford to take care of an Austin-sized population.
    • This is cruel and inhumane if you’re talking about refugees from Central America.  

What exactly does this mean? How would it be implemented?  

He is clear about a few details that sound reasonable:

  • Only ship someone to their hometown in conjunction with a coordinated care team.  (But will we actually do this?)
  • Do not send domestic violence victims home under any circumstances.

I can believe that – sometimes – connecting people with their family can be the path to stability. But it just depends on how humanely it’s implemented.

  1. “Improve the Overall System Through Increased Effectiveness and Efficiencies”

It sounds like he wants a team of people to go break up homeless camps, and connect them to resources. 

Again, he stresses that arresting homeless people (for anything short of violent felonies) does not work.   And it sounds like we already have a HOTeam that goes out and does this sort of thing, and it includes officers, and they supposedly don’t arrest people for being homeless. 

It’s hard to sell me on the idea that cops should go and break up homeless camps. You need to do some work to convince me that they won’t just destroy homeless people’s possessions and make them scatter and start all over.

  1. Expand Capacity

There’s a court case, Martin vs. Boise, where six homeless people were kicked out when a shelter closed, and then promptly arrested.  The courts ruled against the city of Boise: you can’t arrest people for being homeless unless there are enough beds for them.

Currently we are not Boise-compliant.  We need more shelter space. We should partner with Southside and the Salvation Army. (Updated to clarify: Those are Marbut’s recommendations. Salvation Army has a problematic past.)

Once we’re Boise-compliant, he wants us to have “zero-tolerance of encampments.” What is he picturing, besides arrests? He already said not to arrest non-violent homeless people. How is he imagining forcing people into compliance? (Again, my mind goes directly to things like making homeless people give up their pets and come with you, or else destroying their possessions and making them scatter and start over.)

We should also be partnering with some of the SMCISD and Hays ISD employees who focus on homeless families. We also need a LOT more affordable housing.  Both of those sound good.

  1. In the future, build a right-sized Homelessness Assistance Center.

So that’s the spiel. I’m very skeptical of parts of it, but other parts of it are okay, if they’re implemented well.

Mostly City Council has very little to say, aside from some bland platitudes.

Alyssa Garza asks a key question: where did he get his data on San Marcos homelessness? he says he collected it himself, by going out on multiple occasions and talking to people. He’s implicitly claiming that he collected data using sound statistical sampling methods, and didn’t just wing it.

This article is extremely critical of his data claims. It sounds like he does, in fact, just make shit up. (In fact, Marbut claimed on Tuesday that he reduced homelessness in San Antonio by 80% in the 2010s. The linked article points out that homelessness actually grew in San Antonio during that time.)

From here, staff will bring forth a possible plan for City Council to adopt, to help homeless people in a coordinated, effective way.

Housing Action Plan

In 2018-2019, we carried out a big housing action plan.  Then City Council just… didn’t approve it.  They just shrugged it away.  It’s really insane. It’s just been collecting dust here, ever since.

Now we’re waking up the slumbering giant, and bringing it around again! The numbers are now out of date.  City staff will update the numbers, and get the ball rolling. (Incidentally, these are the numbers I’m always crabbing about not having, whenever we’re considering new zoning! I’m very pleased right now.)

It did go to P&Z last time, and P&Z passed a number of amendments. Most of these are focused on wealthy, secure people.  Those redlines are still in effect. We shall see.

Hours 0:00-1:39, 6/6/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment: We’re going to focus on the SMART/Axis Terminal here.  (It’s not otherwise on the agenda today.) There’s a group, Citizens Against SMART/Axis, which is holding a public meeting at the library on Sunday (6/11) at 3 pm.  Here’s their flyer, off Facebook:

Ie, if you’re reading this on Sunday morning and you’re free this afternoon, why not head on over? They seem like nice people.

The big day will be July 3rd, when City Council votes on the Heavy Industrial zoning.  If it passes, then we’ve given a massive blank check to a jerk who will then decide which industries come to San Marcos.  Right now, there’s a lot of money in batteries and tech fabrication plants and things involving toxic rare metals and lots of water, and Texas has very lax environmental restrictions.  That’s the kind of scenario that I’m particularly worried about.  (I also think the sheer scale of it is bonkers.)

And if the zoning doesn’t pass? My guess is that there’s a contingency clause in the development agreement – if the zoning doesn’t pass, it invalidates the contract. Then the company could either develop under county regulations, or walk away for a year, or come up with a different proposal. 

Have you all seen the yard signs around town?

I think they’re pretty effective. Partly because they put council members on notice that the community is willing to launch a public campaign: vote down Heavy Industrial, or the next public campaign may be against you.

Bottom line: Council shat the bed. It’s really astonishing how they passed this development agreement under so much quiet and stealth.  It’s 2000 acres, for god’s sake!

…

Item 6: Community Development Block Grant money.  (CDBG) The city gets federal money to spend on nonprofits. This year, we’ve got about $700K to distribute.  

Here’s the criteria that staff uses to assess projects:

And here are staff recommendations:

Saul Gonzales asked about Habitat getting $0 for Housing Counseling.
The answer: Habitat is really good at lots of things, but counseling ain’t one of them. Plus they’ve still got leftover money from last year. In general, we’re still partnering with Habitat, but just not for counseling. 

As for the Housing Rehab program getting $0: somehow this is good for the city, for reasons I didn’t quite follow.  

Alyssa Garza mentions that she hears a lack of trust in the nonprofit community about how these funds get allocated, and that increased transparency would help. I don’t have the expertise to read between the lines! But transparency generally sounds good to me.

…

Item 7:  P&Z is going to gain some new powers: the powers of AIRPORTATION.  Specifically, some height hazard zone regulations and compatible land use zonings.  A lot of this is regulated by the FAA, but P&Z will get to weigh in on the remaining bits.

Whenever the airport comes up, everyone speaks cryptically about scandals that I’m uninformed on.  We saw a snippet of it here. Even LMC weighed in on some convoluted past event from ten years ago. Frankly, I’m pretty sure I’m not capable of fully understanding whatever the hell went down.

….

Item 8: The city has a lot of 2 hour parking downtown.  Now some of those sites will be relaxed, to 4 hour parking.  Here’s where it will go:

Take your time! Shop around! You’ve got four hours now.

Council members asked some worried, nonsensical questions, as though we were tightening up restrictions instead of loosening them.  Everything will be fine.

…

Item 9:  We’re pretty terrible at paying parking tickets:

So the city is going to start putting boots on cars, if you have 3 or more unpaid tickets.

(We discussed this before, but now we mean it.)

The point is to force the worst offenders to get in touch with the city and come up with a payment plan (or maybe schedule some volunteer hours instead – more on this later.) The plan is not to turn the screws on someone who is teetering on the edge of economic catastrophe. Of course, it always just depends if the program is implemented in good faith or not.

Stay tuned! There is a lot more discussion of parking coming up at the end of the meeting. 

….

Item 10: This is the Oak Heights neighborhood:

via

The top left and top right roads are Craddock and Old 12, where The Retreat is. This is the Crockett elementary neighborhood. The speed limit used to be 30 mph.

Now it will have a new, lower speed limit of 25 mph in on these streets:

Good for them! Drive like a grandma, everyone. Your car is lethal.

….

This is Uhland Road: 

It runs from Post Road to I35, and then jumps north, and runs east to Harris Hill road.

Here we’re only looking at the part west of 35.  These lucky folks are getting some speed cushions here:

Good job! Drive safe.

Jane Hughson wraps up by saying, “All right! We do listen to our residents! …um …when we’re talking about speed cushions. And changing however many miles per hour you can go in a neighborhood.”

That is hilariously self-aware of Jane Hughson.  And it’s true: sometimes we listen to our residents.  Other times, we don’t.

…

Item 13: $250K more to GSMP to fund a small business program.  Seems fine, as far as capitalism goes. The only reason I noticed it was because Matthew Mendoza made a special point of praising this accomplishment.