Category: P&Z Meetings

Bonus! Feb 27th P&Z meeting

by The San Marxist, posted in P&Z Meetings

We have to unpack this.  The center of gravity has shifted on P&Z.

Let’s start with the end of the meeting:  the committee voted on their new chair.

Jim Garber has been the chair of P&Z since 2016 (aside from one year when he cycled off P&Z).  He’s literally been elected seven times.  It’s been quite a run.  Jim Garber was the main driving force behind the re-write of VisionSMTX.

But at this meeting, Garber lost re-election to David Case.

David Case is [updated: used to be] on the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce, and is the local VP for Schertz Bank. So it’s safe to say he’s pro-business. The pendulum has officially swung from anti-development towards pro-development. 

Is this good or bad?

It depends!

I am Goldilocks! I want us to land in the middle. I want us to have calm quiet neighborhoods, but they must include affordable apartments for lower income folks.  I want us to have gentle densification and to have nearby stores, so that you don’t have to drive a long way for your basic needs. Jim Garber was blocking a lot of this with the VisionSMTX re-write.

However, back in the early 2000s, we were haphazardly approving all kinds of giant apartments complexes. The danger is that P&Z will start recklessly greenlighting every proposal again.

How do I feel about giant apartment complexes? They should be carefully scrutinized on a case-by-case basis. 

There are good parts: they do not contribute to sprawl, they are more environmentally efficient than houses, you get some economy of scale, you can have amenities like pools and exercise rooms, and it’s easier to include wraparound services for low-income housing. 

But they are also a mechanism to enforce segregation by wealth, which makes me very cranky. And the scale matters: it’s jarring to put a giant complex immediately alongside a quiet neighborhood. Location is a major consideration.

Anyway: the NIMBY old guard was voted out, and a new tide has taken hold.  It’s just too early to know exactly how far it’s going to swing.

There was also one big, complicated zoning case:

Should we build student housing here?

This came up back in October. It was memorable because Shannon Mattingly was the director of the San Marcos Planning Department until 2022, and then jumped over to this developer. It’s a pretty clear conflict of interest.

Here is a close-up:

One more background issue:

The university recently purchased Sanctuary Lofts and Vistas Apartments, which are very close to this:

They are going to turn them into dorms. The city is pissed off, because we used to get a lot of property tax from those apartments, and the university doesn’t have to pay local taxes.

So this looms on everyone’s minds: in five years, will the university just buy this, too?

Onto the issues

There were a lot of citizen concerns, which I’ll categorize:

  1. Complaints that student housing is exploitative:
  • Aspire (13 stories) charges $1k/bedroom
  • Rent by the Bedroom (RBB) means inadequate/subpar living conditions
  • Roommate matching is not legally binding
  • All roommates share liability for damages to common areas.
  • RBB is predatory
  • Student housing means subpar construction and craftsmanship

I find these complaints mystifying. Do these people think that the rest of the landlords are glorious noblesmen? All tenants need protection. Plenty of non-student apartment complexes are unsafe and unsanitary. All roommates always share liability for damages to common areas! All landlords will try to extract the highest rent they can.

I just am not clear why student housing is especially bad. Why not build a broader coalition across all renters?

2. Complaints about San Marcos housing in general:

  • We need diverse housing options
  • Downtown housing is solely being built for students, serious lack of other housing.
  • There is plenty of student housing available: 40 RBB complexes in San Marcos, with over 20K bedrooms.

We do need diverse housing options. Developers are not our friends, and they will not build diverse options unless it’s in their financial interests. This means simplifying the approval process and creating incentives for small-scale apartments and condos.

But those are all larger issues than this one complex.

3. Mostly legitimate concerns that are specific to this project:

  • This will make downtown encroach on nearby neighborhoods.
  • This will be a large corporate structure on an already congested street
  • The smalltown feel and skyline is being eaten up by big developments. 
  • They should provide regular leases alongside RBB.
  • We will be tearing down existing affordable housing and displacing people in order to build more expensive housing.

I find most of these compelling.

4. Concerns that I don’t know how to categorize:

  • we should not destroy this town for the convenience of students!

It was a LOT.  

So what did P&Z do? They basically landed somewhere in the middle. I thought they handled it well.

The request has four parts:

  1. Extend “Downtown” to include the west side of their property, that pentagon piece west of North Street.
  2. Change a mishmash of old zonings – multifamily 12, multifamily 18, multifamily 24 – to all match the standard downtown zoning, CD-5D.
  3. Get a permit to have Purpose Built Student Housing.
  4. Get an alternative compliance to go up to 7 stories.

Here we go:

  1. Extend “Downtown” to include the bit west of North Street.

In terms of this picture:

we’re talking about the pentagon on the left hand side. Should that be part of the designated official Downtown District?

The vote: All 9 vote to deny. West of North Street is not downtown.

2. Change a mishmash of old zonings – multifamily 12, multifamily 18, multifamily 24 – to all match the standard downtown zoning, CD-5D.

First, the lefthand pentagon, west of North Street: No. This passes 9-0.

Next, the right and middle bits, east of North Street: there’s some good discussion.

  • Will this make flooding worse? CD-5D zoning is 100% impervious cover, like downtown. Currently they’re allowed up to 75% impervious cover.

Probably not: it’s actually 100% impervious already, because there’s a parking lot covering all the land. It pre-dates the 75% regulation.

  • What about the affordable housing already there? It would be torn down.

The vote: 5-4 in favor of changing the zoning to CD-5D.

(This is the first pro-development vote.)

3. Get a Conditional Use Permit to have Purpose Built Student Housing.

Important: this is not the same as Rent by the Bedroom. They can already do RBB leasing if they want. Purpose Built Student Housing lets them go up to 5 stories and have four bedrooms per unit, instead of 4 stories and up to three bedrooms per unit.

Arguments: We just passed the Downtown Area Plan. The Downtown Area Plan calls for no student housing downtown. We need to set a precedent of respecting the area plans.

The counterargument comes from William Agnew, who says, “I was on the Downtown Area Plan committee. I thought it was absurd to pretend we don’t want student housing downtown. That’s who lives downtown! I’m in favor of this CUP.” I love his bluntness.

The developer says they will offer regular leases alongside RBBs. For what that’s worth.

The vote: 7-2 in favor.

4. Get an alternative compliance to go up to 7 stories.

It gets pointed out that this is already uphill of Sanctuary Lofts, which is 5 stories. So if this were seven stories, it would loom even higher, due to the hill.

The vote: 8-1 opposed. They will have to stop at five stories.

In conclusion…

Approving this apartment complex has its negative trade-offs. It does make the area more congested. It does destroy some cheaper housing in exchange for more expensive housing.

That said, I think that overall, P&Z landed in a reasonable spot on the four items.

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!)

P&Z meeting, 5/9/23

by The San Marxist, posted in P&Z Meetings

We’re going to start with a P&Z blog post, because I think the topic is important. This is nearly two weeks ago, when P&Z discussed the Comprehensive Plan, aka VisionSMTX.

Background

The Comprehensive Plan is the most high level vision of the city, which says things like, “We want more business here, we want to protect the river, we want more housing here,” etc.  It’s big, general, and vague.  Then when you go to draw up specific master plans – Land Development Code, Transportation Master plan, Housing plan, Environment, etc – you have to be consistent with the Comprehensive Plan.  So it drives a lot of choices that get made down the line.

It’s going badly.  

Back in 2020, City Council selected a group of 31 citizens, including several city council members and P&Z commissioners.  This group met with consultants for two years. City staff also held outreach events every month or two, and sent out online surveys, and generally worked hard to solicit a wide range of community input.  All this was drawn up into the VisionSMTX draft. 

This draft went to P&Z in February, and the chair, Jim Garber said, “Oh dear. This is such a train wreck that there’s too much to discuss in one meeting.  Let’s form a subcommittee.” 

So four P&Z members and Mayor Hughson met a dozen times. They had so many revisions that staff just said, “We need to call it an alternate plan, VisionSMTX+.”  This subcommittee ends up being so influential that I need to refer to them as “The P&Z Subcommittee”. 

So now there are two drafts:

  • VisionSMTX, which took two years, $350K+ worth of consultants, and thousands of community hours, and
  • VisionSMTX+, which took five people about a month. (Ie, they added a little plus sign to this one.)

They are substantially different from each other. They’re so different that the staff created a comparison table to help us sort through the differences, and the comparison table is 74 pages long.

….

Listen: I have been struggling to write this up for the past two weeks. It’s really difficult to explain, because the various sides are not all having the same conversation. It’s a total mess.

…

The subcommittee read VisionSMTX and thought, “This document is going to let developers destroy our beautiful neighbohoods. People who live in the historic neighborhood, Dunbar, Barrio Pescado, San Antonio street, and so on, do NOT want their neighborhoods changed!”

What do they fear? Their fears are very slippery.

  • Giant apartment complexes, like the Cottages or the Woods. Developers are assholes!
  • Increased density in the form of smaller housing – ADUs, which are the tiny house-behind-a-house. Duplexes, triplexes, 4-plexes
  • Anything that threatens the “genteel” character of their neighborhoods.

So their fears range from the reasonable (large scale apartment complexes) to the jerky (fear of low income people being able to live near wealthy people).

…

Here are my personal beliefs on increasing the density of housing:

  • Cars and suburban sprawl are super convenient! I can drive to Target, get exactly what I want, and drive home in 30 minutes.  I do not have to plan, or consult a bus schedule, or get sweaty riding my bike.
     
  • Literally, cars should never go away.  There are plenty of people with mobility issues and resource constraints, and we have to take care of them, as a community.  I will fight for your right to drive to work.
  • That said, we are currently gorging ourselves on cars and sprawl.  This is a disaster.

    On the global scale, the oceans are rising and extreme weather events are escalating.  Sprawl and car-centric communities are not sustainable. Younger people are looking at 50 years of climate change. I worry about future generations.

    On the local level, San Marcos literally can’t pay for enough cops and firefighters to cover the distant, sprawling developments.   Plus, we’re prone to flooding, and we have a river which is one of the most special things on the planet.  We’ve got to take this seriously.

    And on the individual level it costs $7K-10Kish per year, to have a car-centric life, but centrally located housing is very expensive. That’s a losing combo for younger or poorer people.
  • I believe that wealth segregation is immoral. Giant apartment complexes are a way of keeping poor people all housed together. In my opinion, duplexes, triplexes, and 4-plexes should be scattered throughout every housing development. They can even be built to look like beautiful houses!

We are predicted to need 50K homes for people moving to San Marcos over the next 20ish years. It’s irresponsible to put all the housing in relentless swaths of single family housing. So what’s the alternative?

The way you take it seriously is that you create a world where it’s more convenient for people to live close to where they need to go.  If it’s sufficiently easy for you to walk to work, you might choose to do so 2-3x per week.  Smart people have worked hard to figure out charming, small-scale ways to create this.  In fact, it should feel like our historic district! It should feel like San Antonio street.

Finally: I personally adore old homes and the historic district. I am not going to advocate for any plan that puts a large scale apartment complex in a charming historic neighborhood.  But any plan that pretends “only wealthy people” is an essential ingredient to a charming neighborhood can fuck right off.

…

This meeting is too big and sprawling, and would be its own multi-part post for me to do it justice. I’ve struggled for two weeks now to write it up. So I’m going to massively shortchange it.

There is one key moment, at 3:30, that I want to zoom in on. William Agnew reads this sentence from the comp plan out loud:

Many of San Marcos’ original neighborhoods, especially those closest to Downtown, benefit from access to shops, restaurants, cultural amenities, employment opportunities, civic offerings, and recreation. The streets are well connected and for the most part, daily needs can be obtained on foot, by bike, or by car. New development can benefit from modeling and drawing inspiration from the treasured Historic character of these neighborhoods.

Then he says:

I live in one of San Marcos’s original neighborhoods. This paragraph’s just not true! I don’t have better access to all these amenities than most other neighborhoods in San Marcos! It just isn’t true. And on top of it, I don’t know how new development can somehow duplicate what it is that you all think I have that I don’t have.

The only place I can really walk from my house that would be considered goods and services is the Little HEB. It’s about 3 blocks from where I live. That’s great if I come back with one sack, but that’s only if I go to the grocery store each and every day. But you can’t walk back with your big shopping trip of the week and 8 or 10 sacks walking down Hutchison. It’s just not true! Other than that, there’s nothing I’m particularly close to anything. I love my neighborhood. It doesn’t bother me to drive to big HEB , Lowe’s, PetSmart, Target. So I don’t think this sentence is true. That’s why I’d like to get it out of there.

This is…delusional. Like, this is astonishingly delusional.

If you can walk 3 blocks to HEB, you are immediately nearby:

  • multiple churches,
  • laundromats,
  • bars and restaurants,
  • hair salons,
  • Shipley’s, Mink’s, Zelicks, North Street, Tantra (if it ever reopens)
  • You’re only another block from the literal town square.
  • The entire university is only a few more blocks away!
  • And right past that is the river itself!

Like, Bill Agnew literally thinks that he lives here:

when he is three blocks from this:

Staff continuously tries to explain that people who live in places like Cottonwood Creek complain that they have to drive long distances to get to stores or any other amenities. The “Complete streets” discussion is about places like Cottonwood creek.

But the P&Z subcommittee is on an entirely different planet. The existential threat to Belvin Street is the only conversation to be had. It sucks up all the oxygen in the room, and it will trample anything that the people in Cottonwood Creek might like to have.

…

What are the problems with VisionSMTX+? What was changed from VisionSMTX, without the plus sign?

1. ADUs. “Accessory Dwelling Units” are the little house-behind-a-house. You may have noticed that the Historical District is absolutely chock full of them. This is the gentlest way to increase density as people move to San Marcos.

The original draft, VisionSMTX, is pretty positive towards ADUs. The subcommittee version, VisionSMTX+, removes a lot of this encouragement.

2. “15 minute streets” This is a measure that professional urban planners use. It means this: without driving, what kinds of things can you reach from your home, by walking, biking, or using public transportation, within 15 minutes? It’s a way of quantifying how Bill Agnew can easily walk downtown, while people in Cottonwood Creek have to drive everywhere.

The subcommittee added “driving” into the definition. In other words, when the people in Cottonwood Creek have to drive 15 minutes to Target, it should get measured exactly the same as Bill Agnew being able to walk downtown. What breathtaking bullshit.

3. Comp plans vs Area Plans. So, the Comp Plan is what we’re discussing. It’s the biggest umbrella. Area plans are where neighborhoods get to say, “We are wealthy and we don’t actually like living next to poor people, so can we just not?”

The subcommittee wants Area Plans to take priority over the comp plan. The original comp plan calls for a balance.

4. Split “Neighborhood – Low” into “Neighborhood Low (existing)” and “Neighborhood Low (new)”. This would allow them to write different rules for Belvin than for new neighborhoods.

What about Cottonwood Creek, which would like to be more like Belvin? Fuck those guys! Existing neighborhoods aren’t allowed to change because the subcommittee has Historic District tunnel vision.

There are a ton of other concerns. I emailed back and forth with some of the public commenters – Rosalie Ray and Gabrielle Moore – and have their entire list of critiques. This is just too dense and meaty for me to do it justice.

…

One last point: Markeymoore was pretty amazing in the P&Z meeting, gently pushing back against problematic ideas, without ever being confrontational.

For example: Bill Agnew is taking issue with the sentence “Many areas in San Marcos today are single use.”

Markeymoore gently asks, “Why is that a negative sentence?”

Bill Agnew answers, “Because I think that the people who wrote that consider it negative. If you understand the plan and the new urbanism concepts behind it, that’s negative. To be single use is negative. That’s my objection to it. Yes, some of these neighborhoods are single use, but they’re good neighborhoods, and they don’t need to be presented as an example of something negative.”

In other words, Agnew does not have a problem with the sentence as written. The problem is the bogeyman in his mind that he is imputing to it. Markeymoore was able to ask from a place of curiosity, and he disarmed Agnew, who gave an honest answer.

To Agnew’s credit, he is very consistent and honest. It’s easy to pick on him because he says the quiet parts out loud.

…

So…what happens next?

They decided to have some workshops over the summer, to deal with some of these things. The comp plan is on pause until August.

Let me tell you, I do not have a great feeling about how this is going.

P&Z meeting, 3/27/23

by The San Marxist, posted in P&Z Meetings

Let’s start with some SMART Background

Here’s a quick timeline of events:

  • 2017:  original SMART Terminal (880 acres) is proposed Heavy Industrial.  P&Z denies it.
  • Brought back in 2018.  It sounds like Council leaned on P&Z, and they approved it. Council also approves it.
  • The developer (Katerra?)  backs out.
  • 880 acres zoned Heavy Industrial just sits there for three years.

Here’s my rendition of it:

Just sitting there for three years.

Listen: developers bail on projects, or sell them off.   The developer you talk to is not necessarily the one who ends up building on the land.  But once it’s rezoned, you’re stuck with the zoning.  Zoning lasts forever!

So: The current developer comes along in 2022.  This one wants to increase from 880 acres to 2000 acres:

The blue is the same blue from my map above. The green and yellow are new.

But where is that, really? The city maps are always so terrible! Here’s my best guess, from squinting at tiny country roads on different maps:

That’s how big this thing is.

Council met in December and formed a subcommittee. The subcommittee met.  Then Council approved the development agreement in January.

Why wasn’t anyone mad when the development agreement passed?

Some were! People showed up and spoke at citizen council back in January. But way more people are angry now. And several said that they hadn’t heard about the SMART Terminal until after it had been approved.

So let’s look this up. Who gets notified, according the city code, for a development agreement? Here’s the relevant bit:

So there you have it:  notifications weren’t sent out. All they had to do was post it on a website somewhere. No alerting the neighbors, and no physical sign out on the property.   That seems…. unhelpful.

ANYWAY.  The Development Agreement passes, and this brings us up-to-date.

The current developer has no plans to use the airport or railway. They plan on renting or selling lots off to companies, who will each do their own individual heavy industrial thing.

The new stuff starts here

The first 880 acres is already zoned Heavy Industrial. The developer is applying now to get the other 1200 acres zoned heavy industrial. As you can see from that same chart:

this DOES trigger a bunch of notifications. So now the community finds out that a gigantic, 2000 acre heavy industrial wasteland is imminent, on HW 80, heading east. 

At the February 14th P&Z meeting, a lot of community members showed up to citizen comment. They were angry and concerned. So P&Z postponed the vote for a month, to give the developer time to meet and build goodwill with the community.  

Tuesday, March 27th P&Z meeting

Which brings us to Tuesday, almost two weeks ago. About 20 community members showed up to speak at P&Z, another 7 wrote letters, and there there was an online petition with 600+ people. The in-person comments are really notable – that’s a huge turnout! They were furious and concerned. 

  • The cut-and-fill is going to hit their well water
  • the river is going to be polluted
  • this thing is going to basically eat Reedville and Maxwell and these other little towns.
  • We’re underestimating the flooding
  • Sure does seem like the city of San Marcos is shitting downstream! No one would want this upstream of them.

The developers had held community outreach, but as weakly and limply as possible. Basically the developers held drop-in meetings, and then answered every question as mushy, gray, non-answers. “We’ll abide by the development agreement.” “We don’t know yet.” “We’ll see what the city says.” That kind of thing.

First, I’d like to point out that P&Z grilled the developer more closely than council ever did (at least on camera). Here’s some nice comments by Jim Garber about the sheer size of this thing – how big is 2000 acres, really?

  • 9% of the total area of San Marcos
  • 75x larger than the outlet malls
  • 10x larger than 6 Flags Fiesta Texas
  • 107x bigger than Amazon
  • 4x larger than Disneyland
  • 4.5x larger than the Texas State Campus

Elsewhere he notes that it’s 3 miles long.  That’s really long. 

Next: this thing is a money pit. Fire Chief Les Stevens goes into detail on how much it will cost to supply fire coverage alone, when it’s fully built out: it’ll take two fire stations to cover this land.  The developer is setting aside two 3-acre tracts for future fire stations.

So how much will it cost to build and staff these fire stations? According to Chief Stevens:

  • $8-13 million to construct each station
  • Apparatus: $1 million for a fire engine, need 2 per station.
  • Staffing: $2.5 million annually for 12-15 people

So basically, San Marcos is on the hook for $25 million dollars worth of fire stations, and then an extra $5 million/year to staff these.   And that’s not including SMPD coverage and any utilities or anything else that we agree to. That’s laughable. The entire General Fund budget is about $90 million/year.

(We’re already massively behind in spending for Fire and EMS. Last year, Chief Stevens asked for 32 additional positions. We added 7 of them. And we have several future fire stations already in the queue to be built.)

The plan is to split the tax revenue with Martindale.  And this is not accounting for police coverage and any other services they’re getting from us. It feels like this SMART Terminal is a money pit.

So how is it that P&Z approved this Heavy Industrial?

The San Marcos River Foundation (SMRF) wrote a letter to the P&Z members about this. Now, letters to P&Z are generally included in the packet. You can find seven letters to P&Z on this topic here. (Go to “Written Comments”)  But the letter from Virginia Parker (the head of SMRF) is not there.

So I can’t read the letter, and I generally have a lot of respect for SMRF.  But how this letter got used was disastrous.

Several P&Z members said they were voting “yes” for Heavy Industrial, because of the SMRF letter. The argument goes that if we don’t approve Heavy Industrial, then the SMART Terminal will be built anyway. But it will be built under county codes instead of city codes, which are much more lax. So if you want to protect the river, you must avoid this scenario at all costs.

In other words, “Nice river you got there. Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

It’s true that SMRF got some river protections in the Development Agreement.  But it feels like a compromise level of river protection. Definitely better than nothing, yes.

But is that the choice before us? This development agreement, or the river will be polluted all to hell? If this is the threat on the table, I think the developer is bluffing, in order to threaten us into giving him whatever he wants. My guess is that the SMART Terminal would not develop under the county regulations, because insurance and utilities would be astronomical. I don’t think they’d be able to find tenants. I don’t think these are the only two options.

Jim Garber asks Chief Stevens about this: How much would fire insurance be for the developer, if they weren’t annexed into the city?

Here’s Chief Stevens’ answer:

  • Insurance rates are based on ratings. Most of San Marcos is rated a 2. (1 is the best).  The land out there is rated a 9 or 10.   (10 is the worst.)
  • Every time you go up one number, the insurance costs go up. If you go from a 2 to a 3, commercial rates will go up about 10%.

So their fire rates alone will go up by 1.18, which is a little over double. I haven’t looked into where they’re getting water, sewer, and electricity from, but I bet at least some of that is from us, too.

Dude. You’ve already got 880 acres

Garber makes one last key point:  Why not develop the 880 acres first, and then come back for the other 1200 acres?  Have you looked for tenants for the current parcel?

The developer gives one of those mushy answers: It needs to be one cohesive project with all the same zoning.

Garber says: “One cohesive property? I thought the whole point was that you’re going to have a bunch of little tenants and projects. Can’t some of them move in the existing 880 acres?”

Developer: “They could! We just haven’t marketed that property yet because we’re still in process of zoning everything together.”

That is smoke and mirrors.  That is a worthless non-answer. That is stone-walling.

So P&Z voted to approve Heavy Industrial.

I think this was a mistake. Those who voted “yes” seemed to just trust and believe that the developer was operating in good faith. That the developer would be open to reconsidering the development agreement. I have not seen any evidence that this developer is willing to do anything they aren’t being forced to do.

Bottom line

The developer needs to establish themselves as good neighbors. Find tenants for the original 880 acres, and then come back for rezoning the rest, once the community trusts them a little bit.

Right now we’re giving the developer an unbelievably massive blank check.   We need to verify that they are:

  • Actually good stewards of the environment
  • How the property handles the first few really big storms
  • What are their labor practices like
  • How environmentally disastrous are the clients that end up building there

I don’t understand the rush to give the developer the entire massive 2000 acres. They’re not planning on building one cohesive thing there – it’s going to be subdivided among a lot of companies.  So let’s let them prove themselves first. 

Footnote:

The city used to have PDDs, where the city could find out and negotiate all the details of a project before it’s built. But we threw those out in 2018 with the new Land Development Code. This was a mistake, and I assume we did it because developers hated them. This kind of project should be a PDD.