That was a bummer. I got myself all psyched up to share the site. I joined the “No Hate in the 78666!” facebook group. I wrote a post there, and shared the link!
…and got banned by Facebook. No one in the group ever saw anything. I’m not allowed to post there until February 5th now.
I’m not banned from Facebook altogether, but just from the group. Still, establishing credibility is a slow process, especially when council only meets twice a month.
Item 7 – Animal Advisory Committee
First off is this Animal Advisory Committee. For some background, there has been a steady drip of speakers over the past six months who have expressed grave concern over the vacuum of leadership at the Animal Shelter. The director position has been open for over a year. This item expands the committee’s scope. The committee just makes recommendations to City Council, though.
Immediately, Shane Scott moves to postpone this agenda item until March. It’s a weird move. He feels that this should wait until a director is hired, so that the new director can come in and forge a path.
If there was a new director starting in a week or two? Then sure. For a position which has been unfilled since October 2020? This makes no sense.
Anyway, postponement failed 6-1, and the expansion of the committee passed.
Item 22 – Setting the Agenda
The last 90 minutes of the meeting is occupied with this question of who sets the agenda for meetings. This gets into the weeds a bit. Basically, council meetings have a habit of going 6+ hours lately. They sometimes run until 2 or 3 am. It’s completely insane. (Frankly, I don’t understand why they don’t just meet weekly.)
I had a long, detailed post, and I deleted it for being ungodly boring. Setting the agenda is complicated and political. I am happy to share details if any of you want a long, boring read.
Some of the citizen comments:
– In favor of a committee for animal services. (Which is on the agenda tonight. Spoiler: it passes.)
– Problems with SMPD: Namely, Chief Stapp’s complicity in the negligence during the Biden Bus emergency calls, and how we continue to employ him. We need SMPD oversight by external community members, instead of recycling the same individuals to guard the henhouse, so to speak.
Public Hearings:
1. There’s going to be a gas station at the corner of 123 and Clovis Barker. Eventually. This is just before you get to the McCarty overpass, heading south.
2. Renewing some low income tax credits for a housing complex (Champion’s Crossing), right at the entrance to Blanco Vista, at Yarrington Road. It’s been there for a long time, 156 apartments.
Max Baker points out that the income percentiles are based on Austin median income, not San Marcos median income. According to this, Austin median income for a family of 4 is $99K. And hooboy, those are not San Marcos numbers at all. Having apartments priced to be affordable at 40% of the median Austin income is just a regular San Marcos market rate, and yet the city is subsidizing this.
It passes unanimously. Baker basically holds his nose and votes to grandfather it in, but points out that new projects need to clear a higher bar.
3. Transportation Master Plan
Mostly they hashed these details out at the last meeting; see here. Mayor Hughson raised one last issue for discussion: reduction of driving lanes on Sessom and Craddock.
Shane Scott and Mark Gleason come out against this. Scott is pro-speed bumps in order to calm traffic, although the engineer says that Craddock and Sessom are busier thoroughfares than what you’d normally stick a speedbump on. Gleason points out that there already is a crushed granite path on Craddock, from Bishop to Old RR 12.
(Does it really extend all the way to Bishop? In my memory, the crushed granite path starts out strong on the Old 12, and then dribbles to extinction somewhere along the way. Google maps agrees with me! I win. The existing path appears to end at Ramona street, and then turn into a sidewalk till Archie, and then it peters out.)
Gleason also makes an impassioned plea to future growth. Won’t the ghost residents of tomorrow resent our bike lanes? Max Baker points out that they might also prefer the bike lanes.
Mayor Hughson asks the engineer, Richard Reynosa, some of the key questions: how much does it cost to put the bike lanes in? how reversible is the decision? what are the traffic studies showing?
Reynosa says: It’s just the cost of striping. It can easily be un-striped. The traffic studies show that these streets can handle being reduced to one lane. He points out that Sessom already has been reduced to one lane for the past year, due to construction, and will continue to be reduced for the next year.
Gleason makes another semi-nonsensical plea – what will we do in the case of natural disasters? If there is a tornado or a fire, aren’t we courting danger by reducing these roads to one lane? (Nobody responded with the obvious response: Bro, we’re just re-striping the lanes. Cars can drive over stripes, especially to flee a forest fire.) Whenever Gleason stops making sense, I start to wonder who is whispering in his ear.
Gleason makes a motion to keep Sessom and Craddock as they are.
Max Baker makes the appropriate arguments in favor: bike lanes can actually reduce the number of cars on the road. Traffic congestion is often due to speeding, and not the sheer quantity of cars on the road. Craddock in particular is like a 1950’s drag-racing avenue, just yearning to be sped down, with its wide unfettered lanes. It needs to be calmed.
Jane Hughson is persuaded mostly because this is such a cheap, easily reversible investment. Why not try it out and see how it does?
In the end, Gleason’s amendment fails:
Yes: Gleason, Scott, Gonzalez
No: Garza, Baker, Prather, Hughson
The vote on the entire transportation plan passes.
Yes: Everyone besides Shane Scott and Saul Gonzalez.
No: Those two.
Honestly, Saul Gonzalez plays his cards so close to the vest that it’s impossible to know what his game is. What didn’t he like? I have no idea!
I decided the new year is a good time to start sharing this blog. I’ve successfully kept it going since May.
Before I actively promote it, though (how? I’m not sure), the easy part is to stop all this silly google-proofing, and to add links where appropriate. Done & done.
As for the backposts, I’ll de-google-proof them over time, when I have reason to revisit them. It seems tedious to condemn myself to go fix them all. And it’s always a little mortifying to read one’s own writing.
[Update: Most of the google-proofing has been removed as of 8/11/22]
A couple small items here:
This is tricky. Eminent domain can be so exploitative, but once in a great while, it is needed for actual public safety. If public safety is truly on the line, then voting for it is more responsible. If there is another way to accomplish the goal, then voting against it is more responsible. Here we’re talking about flooding, so maybe this is a legitimate public safety issue. Eminent domain is obviously toxic in Texas, and it seemed like everyone was very uncomfortable with the idea. (Or at least performing discomfort.)
Mayor Hughson was clear that the city is still negotiating, and eminent domain may not ever be needed. My take: the city must feel that the property owner won’t ever negotiate until eminent domain is on the table. And then, once the threat of eminent domain is available, you’ve removed the property owner’s ability to freely enter or decline the contract.
In the end, everyone except for Max Baker and Alyssa Garza voted in favor of it. I just don’t know enough details to know if the city has worked hard enough to locate a workaround or not.
Then city’s Main Street office rents some space inside the Chamber building. The Chamber of Commerce turns around and charges the city $28,760/year in rent.
Max and Alyssa felt this was bullshit, or at least needed to be called out. I tend to agree. I don’t remember exactly how much money that we give to the Chamber, but my memory is that it’s on the order of 250K/year? They probably do help the business community, especially during Covid, but it’s hard not to suspect that business-types running a nonprofit may run it more like a business than a nonprofit.
The upshot: Max & Alyssa voted against it, and everyone else voted for it.
The Ethics Review Board one was regarding the financial disclosure forms that City Council and P&Z members have to fill out each year. The ERB wants more specificity. (Shane Scott balked, but it wasn’t clear that he was necessarily hiding anything. He’s generally contrarian when it comes to the ERB.)
Let’s discuss the Transportation Master Plan. The main issue here is bikes, and whether their lanes should be protected, shared, buffered, or sharrows. Here’s a nice graphic from here:
If I were to name them, I’d call them Safe, Scary, Pleasant, and Terrifying.
There was significant discussion on whether or not sharrows are terrifying. On the one side, it appears that many studies focus on the perceived safety of sharrows and not the actual safety of sharrows. It took me about two seconds of googling to find a study that clarified this point, though. So I’m calling shenanigans on the sharrows-advocates here.
Another point of contention: Barnes Drive and Monterrey Oaks. Both have the potential to be great biking places. Barnes Drive runs parallel to I-35 and can get bikers to their jobs at the outlet mall. Monterrey Oaks connects the neighborhood to Bouie elementary and the high school. The planning department pled that neither spot can handle a bike lane, and thus both of them have to be sharrows. The city council was pretty united in their polite skepticism.
Here’s my not-so-polite skepticism: wtf, planners? Neither of those roads are high speed thoroughfares, and both are plenty wide. The planners seemed tragically dedicated to the sanctity of turn lanes. It did not seem to occur to them that Bouie elementary might want a bike lane, and might even turn over some easement without a fight to make it happen. And Barnes Drive? The road that separates giant parking lots that are never full? This seems like the least difficult needle to thread. I’M ROLLING MY EYES.
City Council was great. Max Baker was the most outspoken proponent, but Shane Scott and Mayor Hughson also advocated forcefully for traffic calming measures and general bike safety improvements. Baker amended the plan to include both Barnes and Monterrey Oaks, and the city staff acknowledged that it wasn’t impossible. It would just take time and money. The amendments passed unanimously.
Anyway, this is not the final vote. This all comes up one more time. There was reasonably good turnout among the cycling community – maybe four or five speakers? Hopefully they keep mobilizing and advocating for Less Terrifying options.
In which we have a whole lot of citizen comments on the subject of the animal shelter, and on Item 28
And in which the consent agenda is passed
And in which several gas stations are approved.
In which the developer emphasizes that Tiny Houses are not the same thing as Micro Houses, and everyone promptly forgets, because semantics are dumb.
Hour 3
Development agreements, annexation, that kind of thing.
Thoroughfare master plan. Some discussion of sharrows, a thing where you paint the main lane to indicate that bikes are sharing the lane, which ends up increasing the fatality rate. Max Baker advocates for the biking community. Not up for a vote until the next meeting.
(No separate post for this hour.)
In which we discuss puppies, Jews, and fences, but not all in the same item.
Item 2: Shane Scott had pulled Item 2 from the consent agenda, on an interlocal agreement between the university and city on Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan.
Now, I clearly missed some workshop and they did not explain what was going on, so I’m using my context clues here. First Scott proposed postponing the agenda item until December, 2022. How is this not a jerk move? If it walks, talks, and quacks like a jerk move, then I mean…
Anyhow, nobody seconded his motion, and so he changed it to February 2022. At this point they had a meaningful conversation about some fence somewhere and some details, and it sounded like other councilmembers also had questions. So the postponement passed 5-1, with only Baker dissenting.
Item 24: A resolution against anti-semitism and hate crimes.
There really has been a disturbing amount of anti-semitism in these parts lately, as well as the chronic background static of anti-Black and anti-Hispanic racism, in different ways. This resolution is… nice? There’s nothing wrong with it? The councilmembers sort of had the giggles with how enthusiastically they were supporting this measure, which did not help it seem very substantial.
Item 28: Banning the sale of cats and dogs at pet stores.
This item was a discussion item, not a voting item. It sounds like the most promising outcome is to require that private venues source their cats and dogs from animal rescue shelters and humane societies.
Gleason was worried about the mom and pop breeders. That kind of drives me crazy – I suspect mom and pop breeders are quite capable of keeping animals in sadistic living standards. Not universally, but it’s not a group that I want to give a wholesale pass to, either.
The San Marxist 