Tag: budget

Hours 0:00 – 3:25, 9/16/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment

Just three speakers!  Topics:

Nobody spoke about the budget.  Nobody complained about the tax increases being too high.  Can we just put a pin in this for later? Let’s remember this.

…

Item 22:  Hazmat Routes

You know these guys. You love these guys:

via

They live in our lovely river, but nowhere else.  It could be catastrophic if there was a crash on I-35 over the river, and a bunch of hazardous chemical were spilled into their habitat.

What cities do in this situation is design a Hazmat route.  Here’s what we’re proposing:

That’s along FM 150.  So you’d cross the San Marcos river well east of the habitats of those critters, if you were driving a truck full of something nasty.  

A few notes: 

  • This is only for thru-traffic.  If you’re delivering somewhere in San Marcos, you can head there.
  • This is going to be a long process – it’s gotta go back and forth with TxDOT a few times.

Kind of related: remember when the train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, with all those toxic chemicals?

(and they tried to get away with paying each person something like $5 for wrecking their lives?)

We also have a lot of trains crossing our river! I doubt you can re-route trains quite so easily, but I wonder how environmentalists think about and plan for these risks.

…

Items 23-25: The budget and the tax rate

I’m sorry, this item gave me whiplash. This went off the rails. Not the good kind of roller coaster.

We need a fair amount of backstory. The drama on Tuesday unfolded so fast that it will be incoherent, unless I bring you up to speed, first.

I’ll try to keep it zippy!

Background

First thing to know: we have not raised our property tax rate since 2022.

Politicians genuinely hate raising taxes. Politicians like being liked! They like being elected. I don’t know where we got this idea* that they rub their palms together and cackle about bilking tax-payers, but they don’t do this.

Polititians love short-term easy decisions that make tax-payers happy! Raising taxes is the opposite of that.

*It was Reagan.

….

The budget process

1. January-February-March-etc: they hold some giant two day workshops. Councilmembers develop their priorities for the next year. More workshops. Very slow grind.

2. May-June: The first tax estimates come in: we’re in a budget crisis. We can squeak by this year, but we’re facing a budget cliff.

Roughly speaking, this is the problem::

  1.  Our sales tax is down.
  2. Our property taxes are down (because home prices are declining)
  3. Inflation is up.
  4. We are as lean as we can go. We have already cut $100K from departments.
  5. We’ve got some big expenses looming. (Covid money ending.)
  6. The state government is trying to strangle cities.

Here’s the graphic that they showed:

It was a big Come to Jesus Moment. Council went to Jesus. They gave direction that they wanted to go with the Structurally Balanced side of that road.

Bottom line: “Structurally Balanced” means raising the tax rate modestly over multiple years (instead of one big crazy future hike.) All of council agrees with it.

…

June: In June, staff comes back with some Structurally Balanced tax estimates:

Here’s what everyone said they wanted:

Ok, great! We’re getting somewhere.

….

August: Real numbers come in. (June was just an estimate.)

By law, council has to set their own upper bound, in August. It’s a weird quirk.

So staff lays out these possibilities:

That’s in the afternoon, at the 3 pm workshop.

Matthew and Saul are all willing to go up to the middle column now. The gravity of the budget crisis is evident to everyone.

The Lorenzo changes things up: “I want to go between 64.96¢ and 70.49¢. I want to land on the number that gives a $0 in that last row. Neither a surplus or a deficit forecast for 2027.”

Everyone is intrigued by this idea. He ends up successfully getting everyone on board with this! What careful planning we’re demonstrating!

That night, at the 6 pm meeting, they vote on the tax rate cap:

So we go with the 67.69¢.

This is our max: the final tax rate cannot be higher than 67.69¢.

…

Note: In August, they also mentioned something about an EMS study. It was another potential looming cost. This is going to become a very big deal, but it didn’t jump out at me then.

…

Last background month! We’re now to September.

September 2nd meeting:

They take the first official vote on the 67.69¢ tax rate:

Now you’re all caught up.

…..

This current meeting!

Here are the three scenarios we need to have on hand for this conversation:

What would home owners actually have to pay, if we raised rates in these categories?

    • The “No New Revenue” rate, 62.78¢. (NNR)  Your tax bill goes up $0.
    • Option 1: 64.96¢.   The average tax bill goes up $72.46 per year, or $6.03 per month.
    • Option 2: 67.69¢.  The average tax bill goes up $163.21 per year, or $13.60 per month.

….

Sidenote: Those amounts are based on an average house worth $347,398 (and $15K homestead exemption).

Most of San Marcos rents! But for those who own homes, home value varies a lot.

Here’s the average home price by neighborhood in San Marcos:

The last column is the monthly increase, under 67.69¢.

That chart has 40 rows. Only the last eight rows exceed the average home value! (Blanco Vista and Kissing Tree are both way bigger than they seem.)

Point being: most neighborhoods would see smaller tax increases under these proposed hikes.

….

The public outcry:

<crickets> …. <crickets>

There was none. I mean, I’m sure Council got phone calls. But I’ve watched these meetings for years now – compared to other years, this is nothing.

Two people showed up to talk about the budget during the public hearing. They both made nuanced points about the good parts and bad parts of the budget.

Contrast that to the big items this year:

  • Tantra: 50+ speakers showed up.
  • Gaza: 125+ speakers showed up (on the day of the vote)
  • Data Center: 14 speakers on August 19th

People show up when they’re mad. This ain’t that. This is the wind at Council’s back, pushing them to make the responsible decision.

And then suddenly there is a big curve ball: EMS.

This came up in August, but it was uncertain. Now it’s certain.

So, there’s something called the San Marcos-Hays EMS.  This is who you call when you need an ambulance.  It used to be a lot bigger.  Over time, Wimberly left. Then Buda left. Then Dripping Springs left.

Since the August meeting, it’s now official: Kyle and everyone else is leaving.  So it’s just San Marcos.   (The cheese stands alone)

This is a big problem! We don’t have a city-run EMS.  We’ve got fire fighters who may be trained paramedics, but they can’t take you to the hospital. We don’t have ambulances. We don’t have a facility to store ambulances.  We don’t have the infrastructure to run another department.  But because this partnership is dissolving, we’re going to have to figure it out. 

This is going to cost about $2 million.  This will start getting dealt with in November.

Bottom line: those tax rates all need to increase by about 2.4¢ to cover EMS.

Council Discussion

Council asked a lot of questions about the EMS situation. They also were asking about Council priorities – what had to be decided on Tuesday, and what stayed flexible. It was not a very long conversation.

Lorenzo keeps acting squirrelly.

Finally he says: “I don’t like the 67.96¢ anymore. The State legislature didn’t pass those crazy laws after all. We should have more economic development! I want to go back to 64.96¢.”

Well, shit!

A few things:

1. “Economic Development”: I erased a big rant about this.  It’s not a magic bullet.

This is like walking out onto the NFL sideline and telling the coach, “Hey, you should try to score more points than the other team! Then you’d win!”   City staff really does know about economic development. They are always working on it. 

2. The State legislature will definitely do Abbott’s bidding, and Abbott wants those laws. If not 2025, then watch for them in the next session.

3. The 64.96¢ isn’t an option anymore! It doesn’t include EMS!

The City Manager responds with alarm: “Please, please don’t go with 64.96¢. That won’t even cover EMS. We need at least 65.15¢.”

….

Listen: The rug just got yanked, suddenly, and nobody is prepared. Nobody has the presence of mind to call a time-out and fix all the numbers.

Confusion reigns.

But look how helpful I am! I made you a chart!

This is what I think city staff would have put on a slide, if anyone had had advance warning.

Here’s my theory: I think Lorenzo intended to go from the 3rd row to the 2nd row. After all, he said “64.96¢”. But since we now have an EMS crisis, he didn’t even cover the first row. The City Manager is asking him to please at least get to 65.15¢ in the first row.

…

We’ve suddenly rolled back all the careful planning for the budget cliff. The budget cliff is still coming! We still did all the planning! But instead, we’re about to do this:

I’m especially flabbergasted because Lorenzo himself was the one who promoted the 67.69¢. He literally picked it to leave us with a balanced budget in 2027 – neither deficit, nor surplus.

Saul, Shane, and Matthew were always barely willing to make a difficult vote. So as soon as Lorenzo gives them permission, the coalition for 67.69¢ falls apart.

The vote on 67.69¢:

Yeah.

Let’s have a time lapse:

(Technically, I’m combining two separate votes in that last column. First they vote for 67.69, and it fails. Then separately, they vote for 62.78+EMS. This passes.)

Anyway, that’s the whole saga! We had the wind at our backs, and instead we shot ourselves in the foot. It felt like someone whispered in Lorenzo’s ear at the 11th hour, and the whole thing unraveled.

Honestly, I’m kinda salty about the whole thing. .

…

One final note: $2 million for EMS is a bargain. That works out to 2 cents. By law, Emergency services is allowed to charge a special tax of up to 10 cents. That would bring in about $8.5 million.

Nobody is trying to shake down tax payers here. They just want an ambulance to show up when your grandmother has a heart attack.

…

Item 4-5: Electric and Water Rates.

The next discussion is even goofier, if you can believe it. (But less destructive.)

Your electric bill comes in two parts:

  1. a base rate ($14.31)
  2. a usage rate. (Based on how much electricity you use.)

Usage rates are going up. (Discussed here before.)

Shane Scott speaks up:”Let’s just cancel the base rate!” He wants everyone’s bill automatically lower by $14.31 every month.

You can practically hear staff’s hearts all plummet through the floor as they try to grapple with this craziness. (Ten minutes ago, we tanked the budget over whether to raise taxes by $6 or $12 a month. And now Shane wants to throw away another $14?!)

The director of utilities tactfully explains that this would blow a $3.4 million hole in our budget. The city manager gently mentions our bond rating and debt service coverage. We could get sued by bond holders.

Shane withdraws his motion.

The vote on electric rates:

A little later, we have the vote on water rates:

So water rates will not change.

Listen: this is totally irresponsible. This is lazy, wishful thinking.

The city is not turning a profit on water. You have to cover the costs of your water utility.

If you want to save people money on their water bill, help them conserve water. Don’t strangle the department that has to fix the pipes and pay for the water rights.

…

That’s basically it for the meeting. I know barely anyone cares, but this was super big bullshit.

Hours 0:00 – 3:04, 9/2/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Some years, citizens get fired up and angry at the budget. This year was the opposite. 

Three people spoke on the budget, and they all praised council for increasing funding for the Human Services Advisory Board. (HSAB grants are how the city helps fund all the nonprofits that help kids, people in poverty, vets, the elderly, etc.)

It was pretty short!

…

Items 20-24:  Welcome to our $371 million dollar budget!

It’s budget time. So far this year, we’ve talked about this back in February, then in March, again in May, and just now in August.

We’ve got several big problems:

  1. We’re bringing in less money from sales tax and property tax.

Sales tax peaked in 2023 and hasn’t returned.  Property taxes have been flat.  Actually, they’ve gone down on existing properties, but they’ve been propped up by new builds. 

(That slide is from the May workshop.)

  1. Everything is more expensive, due to inflation.

City department budgets were flat two years ago. This past year, they cut $100K collectively.  But everything is getting more expensive, so even holding things flat means you have less purchasing power.

  1. The State Legislature is always, always trying to knee-cap cities:

This past session it was House Bill 73 and Senate Bill 10. City staff implied that there were a few others. All of these cap city spending or cap city taxes.

The concept isn’t new – we already have caps on tax hikes. But these new bills are brutal in their severity.

All these bills were still up in the air last Tuesday, when city council met. Since then, the special legislative session ended. As far as I can tell, none of these passed? But Abbott could always call a 3rd session, or these could return in 2027. So this is always looming.

(Can you imagine how relaxing it would be if our state government wasn’t so hellbent on wrecking Texas cities?)

  1. We have three HFCs that are tied up in the courts

“HFC” stands for Housing Finance Corporations. These didn’t used to be scams, but they’ve become scams. For example: “Pissed” city leaders urge lawmakers to close loophole costing millions in tax revenue.

We’ve got three apartment complexes that were purchased by HFCs, and we’re losing about $630K in tax revenue from them.  (They’re tied up in lawsuit appeals, so it could still tip our way.)

  1. There are almost $4 million worth of new expenses that are kicking in soon, over the next 1-2 years.

The ones with the checkmarks were funded from federal Covid money, which is expiring next year.

6. Council also has some new priorities, which cost money:

  • Increasing HSAB funding by $200,000
  • Increased funding for tenants rights and tenants legal support
  • Start an office of community support and resource navigation.
  • Probably more that I’m not remembering

…

Because of all this, tax rates are going up.  

I mean, we don’t really have a choice, right?

If you own a $365K house, here’s how it affects you:

If you own a smaller house – say $200K assessed value – then you’d pay like so:

Last year: $1,115 per year, or $93 per month.
This year: $1,252 per year, or $104 per month.

We always focus on home owners here, because it’s easy to compute their tax costs. But rest assured: landlords cover the cost of property taxes by passing it on to their renters.

My back-of-envelope estimate is that an average renter pays about half as much: $640 per year towards their landlord’s property tax bill, or $53 per month.

…

Your utilities are also going up:

This is mostly based on CUAB recommendations. CUAB stands for Citizens Utility Advisory Boards.

Basically, if you don’t raise rates for a few years, you’ll get into a big financial hole. Then your bond ratings tank and it gets more expensive to borrow money, and you’re in even bigger financial trouble. To get out of it, you’d have to shock the community with a giant rate hike in order to right the ship.

So the idea is that it’s better to nudge prices up gently every year, to keep up with inflation. CUAB is the one that has to figure out the new rates. This is that.

…

One funny detail: The goal is to stabilize our budget going forward. We could have scrapped by this year, but then we’d be in a big hole next year. The looming expenses will kick in, and we’d have to raise taxes a lot, or cut services significantly, to handle it.

But because we’re being proactive, we actually will have $1.3 million of breathing room in the meantime.

City staff went to all the city departments, and asked about things like deferred maintenance projects or other ongoing needs. Here’s some possible ways to spend the money:

Council will hash this out later.

…

Finally: my yearly rant about taxes.

Taxes are good! This is how we can take care of our most vulnerable people. This is how we can solve collective problems, without someone trying to extract as much profit as possible.

The problem is that our taxes are not fair:

via

So yes: you do kind of pay way too much in taxes! We don’t charge our rich Texans their fair share.

(Also we Texans turn down about $5 billion every year by refusing to expand medicaid, and we turned down $350 million this past summer that would feed hungry kids.

We do this in order to prove a point, or something? The feds can’t force us to feed our kids or get medical care when we’re sick, dadgum. )

Look, the United States can easily afford for every person to have a safe home, free healthcare, and access to healthy food and education.  This country is extremely wealthy.  Collectively, we can afford to lift everyone out of basic poverty.  We just choose not to. 

Stop electing Republicans who are in the pocket of extremely wealthy Texans.

(End of rant. Thanks for playing along!)

…

Back to council. How did the votes go?

The votes on the tax rate and the budget:

Lock step, baby!

The votes on the various utility funds:

That’s the votes on Trash & Recycling rates, Electric Utility rates, and Water and Wastewater rates, respectively.

The votes are dropping like flies! Hang in there, councilmembers! They all passed, though.

….

Saul asked some interesting questions about our water supply:

Q: How much water do we sell to other cities?
A: We sell to Kyle, to County Line, and we sell reclaimed water to Buda and others.

(I don’t know what “County Line” means, and when I try to google it, I just get a bunch of BBQ joints and maps of counties. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

[Updated to add: “County Line” is this special utility district. Thanks to Diane Insley for filling me in!]

Q: What happens if they don’t use the water they buy?
A: Our contracts are “50% take or pay”. So they have to pay for at least 50% of the water we’re setting aside for them, even if they don’t use it.

Q: Were we ever in danger of not getting our water from Canyon Lake, due to drought?
A: Both Canyon and Edwards water have tiered drought restrictions. So we always get some water, but they require us to use less water during a drought. Before the July floods, Canyon Lake was Stage 4, but now they’re Stage 1. Edwards Aquifer has been between Stages 3 – 5 all year long. They’re about to tip into Stage 5 again.

…

That’s all of the budget talk for today! The official, final vote will be at the September 16th meeting.

…

Item 25: Just one tiny rezoning!

This is 906 Chesnut St:

From the street, it looks like so:

That’s if you’re standing on Chesnut looking back towards LBJ. Vie Lofts is on the right.

The developer wants to rezone it as CD-4. (Basically, they want to tear it down and build small apartments.)

Everyone says okay.

I’m okay letting it go, as long as we take a moment to pour one out for this wallpaper:

I mean:

I’m not made of stone, people.

Also this window treatment:

and maybe this pink trim:

ok, and this built-in cabinetry and paneling:

I take it back! Save this house! It’s too pure for this fallen world.

(Enjoy the full zillow tour here.)

…

Honestly, the rest of the meeting was pretty zippy. A few quick items:

  • postponing the new development by the high school
  • funding for the new water reclamation facility
  • funding for CARTS
  • setting some dates for elections and city council meetings next year.

On CARTS, we pay about $621K, and the federal and state government combined pay about $1.75 million. That’s great! Redistribution of wealth at work.

…

One last detail: Executive Session

Finally, Council discussed this land in executive session:

That’s the land that SMCISD is selling. There’s a big petition and movement in the community for the city to purchase the land, so that they can dedicate it towards the Mexican American and Indigenous Heritage and Cultural District.

So I don’t know what happened in Executive Session (obviously), but afterwards Council directed city staff to ask SMCISD about delaying the deadline of the sale, so that the city can get its ducks in a row.

I think it all comes down to timing:

  • Can the city speed up enough to meet SMCISD’s budget crisis timeline?
  • Can SMCISD delay long enough to accommodate the city’s due diligence and bureaucracy?

Also Hays county is somewhere in the mix, too. We’ll find out the details eventually!

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 8/19/25

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

It’s budget season!

Here’s where we are in the timeline:

We finally know how much money we’re bringing in.

We get money from property taxes and sales taxes. In San Marcos, we’re split pretty much 50-50 between the two:

Our property tax rate is on the higher side:

but there are some reasons for that. For example, we have a lot of tax-exempt property:

particularly because of the university. You can also see Gary Job Corp on that map.

(I always love it when I-35 is drawn East-West.)

and also because our houses are less expensive on average:

and so we struggle to pull in enough revenue.

So altogether, here’s what an average person pays in property taxes:

Now if you’re a homeowner, your property taxes also include schools, county, and special roads district. So it’s actually significantly higher than that. That’s just the part that goes to the city.

Here’s how we’re doing on property taxes:

Sales tax dropped in 2024, and it sent our budget into a bit of a tailspin. But it’s working its way back up.

Here’s how much the city spends on each person, on average:

hey, that’s a bargain! $4610 worth of services for only $1798. That’s a better ROI than you’ll get from the stock market.

The state legislature is always trying to make everything harder on the cities:

because they are counterproductive twats.

Here’s how it might affect San Marcos:

…

Basically, we’re in a bind. Here’s two slides describing how we’re caught between a rock and a hard place:

and

Especially notice those last two bullets. The city is growing and inflation has been a big thing, and yet budgets have gotten leaner. This is not sustainable.

This brings us up to the current scenario. Council has a few choices:

The first one is the “No-New-Revenue” rate. If the property tax rate is 62.78¢, the average home owner will pay the same amount they paid last year.

In this case, we can skate by this year, and we’d be in the hole next year.

The next one is the Long-Term Focused Tax Rate, 64.96¢. This helps us keep up with inflation and growing expenses, over a longer term.

The last one is the Voter-Approval tax rate, 70.47¢. They’d never go for this, but in theory it would bring in a lot of money. Anything above 70.47¢ requires voter approval at the ballot box.

[Note: The (3,000,000) isn’t what it looks like. That’s balanced out by the “Fund balance in excess of 25%” line above.]

So what would we do, if we did the middle column of 64.96¢?

It helps plan for some financial cliffs that are looming.

…

Here’s these three tax rates, again:

The middle column buys us an extra year to plan for the looming financial cliffs. (The rate in the third column ends up lasting until 2028, and then we go to the red.)

…

You can probably see why that $9 million from the data center looks so helpful. 😦

…

What does Council think?

Matthew: I’m going with the ¢64.96 rate.
Saul: Same. ¢64.96

Lorenzo: If we go with the middle rate, will we be up this same creek without a paddle next year?
Answer: Somewhat. The state legislature may hamstring us, yes.

Lorenzo: How does tax rates translate into revenue?
Answer: Every penny brings in about $800K.

Lorenzo: I want to pick a number that heads off a projected shortfall in 2027. So I think roughly ¢67-68.

Jane: How would we prioritize cuts?
Answer: It starts getting into staff, because we’re already so lean. That’s a very hard question.

Alyssa: I don’t know.. I don’t have enough information. I’m willing to lean towards the middle, but I need to know more about how we’d use that extra $1.9 million.
Answer: Council can prioritize how we use it.
Alyssa: Then I can go with the ¢64.96.

Amanda: The legislative damage is highly likely to pass this session. Originally I was thinking ¢64.96, but I’m open to Lorenzo’s point about the ¢68. I want to take care of our employees, and making sure we’re keeping up there.

Jane: I want to see the impact on the average voter.

Amanda: Is it possible to see the impact on the average renter, as well?

Jane: I’m comfortable with the ¢64.96. And if the state school tax exemption passes in November, I can go a little higher.

They all want to see the impact on the average tax bill. How much would these new rates increase the tax bill?

…

They also discuss utility rates and other things. The Citizens Utility Advisory Board is recommending a 4% increase in electric rates.

This is slightly less of an increase than last year. Everyone’s goal is to make slow, smooth, steady increases, because otherwise after a few years, you have to make a giant leap in rate increases. That’s much worse

Commercial rates are a little higher:

Similar for the water/wastewater rates, trash, and community enhancement.

Here’s how all these increases will impact your monthly bill:

…

I’m returning to the end of the regular meeting, now. In Item 19, city staff returned with the answers to some of the questions above.

  1. How would these different property tax rates affect someone’s property tax bill?

64.96¢: additional $6/month
67.69¢: additional $12/month
68.17¢: additional $14/month

2. A list of possible things Council could fund with the extra money. (I couldn’t get a clear screenshot of this, though.)

Everyone has to weigh in with their max tax rate.
67.69¢: Alyssa, Matthew, Saul, Jane
68.17¢: Shane, Lorenzo, (but not committing. Just to give wiggle room), Amanda (same)

So! 67.69¢ is the upper bound this year for the tax rate.

This comes back on September 2nd!

Bonus! 3 pm workshops

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshops are big this week! There are two:

  1. Fiscal budget bad news for next year
  2. Riverfront parks update, for summer 2025

But First, Workshop Citizen Comment:

Just three speakers. Two in favor of fencing off the river and making people enter through managed entry points.

  1. San Marcos River Foundation Director (Virginia Parker): Last weekend, the river was busier than it ever was last year. Water quality is terrible. Lots of glass and styrofoam and trash. Swimmers get stuck under tubes. It’s dangerous. Residents don’t want to go on the summer weekends, but we’re the ones who pay. Monday’s clean up was worse than any clean up last year. In favor of managed access.
  2. Board member of Eyes of the San Marcos River. In favor of managed access. Clean up does not suffice. You must protect the river. Monday morning clean up was astonishing. Piles of glass bottles in water. Cypress trees stuffed full of cans. Trashed tubes everywhere.

One speaker on the AI Data Center:

3. The data center is going to be built, either way! Your choice is this: is the data center going to be in the city – regulated and taxed – or the county – unregulated, untaxed? It’s not bitcoin mining, it’s LEED Certified!

Workshop 1: Fiscal Budget Bad News

Council starts planning the budget in January, and passes the budget at the end of September. Here’s where we are in the process:

So we’re starting to get our tax revenue estimates, but we don’t know for sure how much we’ll get until the end of July.

Ok… this sounds worrisome…

Ruh-roh, Shaggy.

So basically, our budget is has a big gash in it? We can balance the budget with a bandaid, or we can stitch it up and balance the budget responsibly.

One hurts a lot more, but leaves us in better shape longterm. Yikes.

Good lord. It is not a good sign when your city staff is putting melodramatic visuals like this in your slide show.

…

So why is this happening?!

Ok, so property values are falling from their post-Covid peak. This is good in some ways – it’s getting a little more affordable to live here! But it does mean that the city gets less property tax income.

Next, we didn’t build as much this past year, so we’re not adding as many new properties to the tax roll as we have in the past. Also sales tax is down, and inflation is up.

And yet, we keep growing:

Our budget stayed flat while inflation took a bite out of everything:

Amanda: Did all departments hold their budgets flat?
Answer: there were some exceptions last year, due to existing contracts, but no exceptions this year. All departments held flat this year.

Mid-year, the city reduced spending by $100K, across all departments.

Alyssa: How did you all reduce $100K?
Answer: They looked at the unspent budgets over the past three years, and used that to proportionally allocate the cuts.

These are not one-time cuts – they’re permanent cuts. But departments are allowed to make requests for reinstatements.

So we have less money to spend per resident:

…

Some details on the tax revenue

We get both sales tax and property tax. Let’s take these one at a time:

This chart is a little complicated. Each of those numbers is its own computation. So you see where it says “December 24, -2.3%”? What that means is that they added up the twelve months in all of 2023, and added up all twelve months in 2024, and found that the 2024 year was 2.3% less than the 2023 year.

Some cities are up, some are down:

Here’s who does the most business in town, and hence pays the most sales tax:

And here’s how much different industries have tanked recently:

Dang.

Onto property taxes:

(This isn’t the clearest visual aid, perhaps? I’d probably separate the orange line and the blue bars into two separate graphs.)

Basically, the total property values increased a lot from 2022 to 2023. Then they started slowing down from 2023 to 2024 and 2025. And now, heading into 2026, they’re going backwards.

This is a big bummer.

We’ve built some new stuff, so that helps bring in more revenue:

This is again a wee bit confusing, but let’s take a crack at it:

This is the difference from year-to-year. If it’s positive, then you got more money than last year. If it’s negative, you got less money than last year. You can see that lately, blue has gone negative. Next year, it’s projected that blue is so negative that it outweighs the green.

Lorenzo: Do we have any commercial products on the horizon?
City Manager: Yes… you already heard from the AI dude. But there’s a lot more in the pipeline. Buccee’s, IKEA, HEB, multifamily, warehouse buildings. Lots of stuff will get added to the payroll over the next few years.

Ok, let’s shift to tax payers.

We have not raised the tax rate in the past few years. But property values have fallen. If we want to bring in the same amount of money, we would have to charge a little more:

So here, the tax rate jumps by 4%, and the average person pays the same amount in property taxes. This is called the “No New Revenue” rate.

We already made some midyear cutbacks, because we got reports that things were going badly:

Also yearly fee reviews.

Here’s where this leaves us:

Ok, all that shaves us down from $12 million over budget to $1 million over budget. (The blue “$3 million shift” is balancing the budget without being structural about that.)

Also ARPA and other Covid money is going away in 2027. That $1.4 is money the city will have to pick up.

How much does it help to raise taxes?

So each cent increase helps a lot.

…

So now let’s go back to this conversation:

Are we going to take the bandaid on the left, or the painful, responsible path on the right?

Note that in Option 4, everyone’s taxes stay flat. The extra $900K comes from new buildings. It would help offset inflation and implement council priorities.

….

Look, I believe in government. I believe that the role of government is to redistribute wealth and use it to solve collective problems. Starving your government makes inequality worse.

I get that San Marcos has endemic poverty, and people need every possible cent to make ends meet. People resent taxes. But I still believe in them. So I would vote for options 3 or 4.

….

Hang in there! There’s still a whole ‘nother workshop on fencing off the river!

…

What’s not in the budget?

So the departments made $100K in permanent cuts. They’re allowed to request it back, though. These are scrutinized to see if they’re “needs” or “wants”. (Council asks to see a list of all these cuts, as well.)

What else isn’t in the budget?

Remember back in January, when Council dreamed big? We got all excited about things like:

  • Tenants Bill of Rights and advocacy program
  • Office of Violence Prevention
  • Increasing HSAB funding for social programs

None of those are in the budget yet.

….

One last thing: Back in January, we talked about how San Marcos was going to move towards a participatory budget model. The idea is to get the community input, and particularly those people who generally are disenfranchised by government. (In other words, don’t just go and ask all of Mayor Jane’s BFFs what they think about the budget.)

How’s that been going?

Staff did three things:

  • Consult with the Neighborhood Commission
  • Have a bunch of Dream Sessions
  • Have an online survey

Amanda and Alyssa are FURIOUS over this. All of the outreach methods have gotten hijacked by the same old people who always have the ear of Council. This did not connect with the people on the east side.

For example, here’s where the survey responders live:

See that densest cluster in the southwest? That would be Kissing Tree, ie a bunch of wealthy old white retirees. That is not who we mean when we say “get the input of hard-to-reach San Marcos residents”.

Time for this meme:

(via) mmhmm.

In the city’s defense, this is an incredibly difficult problem to solve. What you have to do is form relationships with community leaders in your hard-to-access regions – church leaders, barber shops and hair salons, etc. It is extremely time-intensive.

…

Time for Council direction! Roughly speaking, which road do we want to take?

More specifically, which scenario is Council leaning towards?

This isn’t a final, binding decision. But you don’t want city staff to go in a completely different direction from what Council is willing to approve. You want staff to prepare options that are aligned with what Council is thinking.

Lorenzo has a good question: is that extra $900K enough address the budget requests and council initiatives?
Answer: Yes, it’s roughly enough to get us to a stable place, and to implement council priorities:

  • Tenants Bill of Rights and advocacy program
  • Office of Violence Prevention
  • Increasing HSAB funding for social programs

Council direction

Jane: Somewhere between #3 and #4.
Lorenzo: #4
Shane: #4
Alyssa: #4, as long as the extra is dedicated to social services, public facing programs, and council priorities. I have to be able to explain this to my neighbors.
Matthew: #3
Amanda: between #3 and #4. People must see tangible benefits to their tax dollars. That can only happen through the tenants rights and HSAB funding, ie council initiatives. If it doesn’t include council initiatives, I can’t justify this to my constituents.
Saul: #3

I agree with all of them! I’d go for #4 myself.

Hours 0:00 – 2:50, 3/18/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Main topics:

  1. Malachi Williams: Seven speakers, including family members. They want justice for Malachi. Several of the speakers focus on the detail that Malachi ran because a cop pulled a gun on him. Before the videos were released, this detail wasn’t mentioned. It shows how the officer escalated the situation instead of de-escalating it, which then ended in tragedy.
  2. Human Services Advisory Budget funding: Council is thinking about increasing HSAB funding for next year. Three speakers advocated for this.
  3. Cape’s Dam and the Mill Race: Two people talk about how much they love the river, east of I-35 and want council to keep it. We’ll unpack all of this!
  4. Tenants’ Bill of Rights: The San Marcos Civics Club made this a focus, and got Council to put this in their visioning statement. Now council will need to make it happen. Two speakers focus on this.
  5. Ceasefire in Palestine: four speakers. They still want the city to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

…

Onto the meeting!

Items 1-4: A bunch of audits and investment reports.

We got the audit reports for CDBG funding and the 23-24 fiscal year.  Plus the quarterly financial report and investment report.

Everything looks normal. No rude surprises. (Apparently we’ve gotten awards for excellence for the past 35 years, on our yearly fiscal audit. OH YEAH BABY.)

…

Item 18: Rezoning about 15 acres

This property is way up north:

Back in 2020, we annexed this yellow and pink bit:

The yellow was zoned Manufactured Home, and the pink was zoned Light Industrial.

There were some concerns then – do we really want to make the folks in the mobile home community live right against an industrial park? But we let it ride.

Now the pink part is coming back for a rezoning – they want to switch it from Light Industrial to Manufactured Home.  In other words:

Great! Now nobody has to live near an industrial park.

…

Item 20: Budget Policy Statement

We’re working on the Fiscal Year 26 budget.

First: There was a two days Visioning workshop in January, which lead to approving the Strategic Plan.

The nex workshop was at the end of February. Today we’re approving the thing from that: the Budget Policy Statement.  

What’s a Budget Policy Statement?

This is like the guard rails for building the budget over the summer. Most of it is pretty dry? Like “Do you want to budget to maintain 150 days worth of recurring operating expenses in the budget, or just 90?”  “Are we okay using the General Fund for Stormwater projects over $5 million?” Etc.

There are two interesting bits:

  1. Each year, the city sets the rate for electricity, water, sewer, trash, etc.  To do this, they have to predict what their costs will be. Then they pick a rate that will cover all their costs.

From the Budget Policy Statement

What does this mean? If your utilities get turned off, you have to pay extra late fees to get your utilities back on. All of the late fees, taken together, add up to big chunk of revenue.

The question is: Suppose we are predicting that we’ll bring in $100K in late fees. (I’m making that number up.) Should we use that $100K to lower the rates for the rest of the customers?

Argument in favor: It’s more economical to include the late fees in your calculation. It allows you to set lower rates for the whole city.

Argument against: It’s kind of icky to count on late fees, for two reasons. First, you’re charging your most desperate customers – the ones who already can’t keep up – an extra fee, and then using that fee to help out all the other, less-desperate customers.

Second, it creates an incentive to creep up your late fees over time. When budgets are lean, it’s tempting to lean on late fees as an extra source of revenue you can tap, like cities that ticket their poorest residents into oblivion in order to balance their budgets.

The current council has already been going in the opposite direction. They are already trying to lower the late fees, to make it easier for residents to get their electricity turned back on.

To the original question: they decide that we are not going to use the late-fee revenue in computing utility rates. Then, when late fees come in anyway, they’ll put that money towards the Utility Assistance program.

It’s a small touch, but a good one.

2. Here’s the other one worth paying attention to:

This is what the speakers during Citizen Comment were talking about.

Last December and January, HSAB funding was a total mess. There was too little funding, and Council ended up pitting nonprofits against each other. It was clear that we need to significantly ramp up city funding of nonprofits.

Right now, HSAB gets $550K. Council sets a range of additional funding, between $50K-$200K. When we find out what kind of money we’re getting from property taxes this July, then we’ll determine where we land in that range.

This part makes me extra happy:

Yes!! Peg the HSAB budget to inflation. We do it in contracts with for-profit entities all the time. It should be universal.

(The failure to peg minimum wage to inflation was one of the greatest policy near-misses of the 20th century. Having a federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour is such a mockery.)

…

Item 21: Cut-and-fill in La Cima

Pedernales Electric wants to build a substation here:

But it’s on a hill. Like we saw last time, it’s hard to build on a hill. So they also want to do a cut-and-fill.

This time, no one is worried about flooding.

Matthew Mendoza is a little worried that the people in La Cima might have to look at a substation, though.

Staff reassures him that there is another building, and then the La Cima apartment complex, all separating the substation from the houses. So their eyes won’t be hurt by the substation.

This passes 6-0.

…

Item 5: Council Compensation

This was so weird. 

Quick Recap: (Full story here.)

Councilmembers get three kinds of money:

  1. Monthly stipend
  2. Travel and expenses
  3. Flex money (either)

Shane Scott proposed doubling the flex money and travel money, and he wanted it effective IMMEDIATELY. Like, something lit a fire under his butt.

Last time, they went in circles forever, but ultimately landed here:

Travel budget

  • There’s plenty of travel money already.  The total council travel doesn’t go over budget.
  • Council members can lend each other travel money if one is going over.
  • If they STILL go over, there can be an extra $15K in a special travel fund that any of them can apply for.
  • AND, they each get an extra $2K for travel.

Flex budget

  • Double the Flex amount from $7.5K to $15K.

In other words: right now, a council member earns $24.9K a year, if they choose to take their flex pay as income. This would increase it to $32.4K.

…

The item was put on the consent agenda, which means, “Staff thinks this will sail through.” After all, they hammered out all the votes last time.

Jane said nope! and pulled it off the council agenda. She gives a speech about how none of this is needed, there’s plenty of money in the travel budget.  And how we certainly shouldn’t be doing this mid-year.

Amanda agrees on the mid-year part. More responsible to start it with the next fiscal year. She makes that amendment: Delay this until next year’s budget?

The vote: Postpone changes until next year’s budget?

Ok, great.

But then Shane – who started this whole conversation back in December! – says, “Let’s just kill the whole thing, who cares. We don’t need it anymore.” 

(This is when I first thought, “What the hell is happening? Was this whole thing a ploy to get some quick money?”)

Jane sees her chance and makes a motion to kill both the travel increase and flex spending increase.

On the flex spending, Amanda pleads, “But why?”

Amanda has been quite open about having to resign her state job to take this position, and the impossibility of surviving on $24.9K per year.

Jane: “We don’t need it. We already raised it in 2023.”

What she means is that before 2023, council members got $23.4K per year, if they took their flex money as pay. They gave themselves a raise of $1500 then.

Amanda: I agree on the travel. But on the living expense, who here – anyone? – can live on this little?”

Jane: “It’s not supposed to be a fulltime job.”

Amanda: “Fully agree.  But we both know that it is actually a fulltime job.”

Jane: “For some people it is.  Not everybody.” 

Amanda: “Oh trust me, I understand that too. And I wish everybody shared full interest.”

Jane: “I do too.” 

Amanda: “But again, please tell me, who can survive on this?  Would anybody in this room? 

<crickets>

Then conversation dies.  

…

The key issues is this: Is being a councilmember a fulltime job? We pretend it isn’t, but in order to do it well, it definitely is.

If we pay poverty wages, then council members have three options:

  1. Be independently wealthy or have someone who can support you.
  2. Try not to neglect your council job as you juggle multiple jobs
  3. Live in poverty

This is not how you get the best possible council members. This is how you get mostly wealthy and/or distracted council members.

…

But anyway, then they vote:

The vote: Should Councilmembers survive on $24.9K per year?

So yeah, no raise.

I’m so baffled.  Two weeks ago, Shane and Lorenzo both thought it was reasonable to increase flex spending, and now they don’t? What the hell happened?

….

Then they vote to roll back the travel funds increase:

This one doesn’t bother me so much. There is plenty of travel money, if you allow people to donate funds to each other.

Bottom line: After all these meetings, everything is back where it started, aside from a special bonus travel fund.  

Clearly I have no idea what happened, but it felt like petty bullshit, to be honest.

….

Item 24: SMCISD stormwater voucher

This is a continuation from last time.  (Full backstory here.)

Super quick background:

Statewide, the legislature is intentionally starving the school districts. This is not hyperbole. Abbott is hellbent force-feeding school vouchers down everyone’s throat. He’s denying funding to the public schools is a way of increasing the pressure on the state legislature to vote for his deal.

Funding hasn’t increased since 2019, but there have been several unfunded mandates that cost a lot. Plus inflation.

SMCISD is in a $9 million budget crisis. They’ve asked for the city for a stormwater waiver, which would save them about $350K.

Which brings us to today.

First there’s a presentation about the stormwater fund:

Immediately after San Marcos created the stormwater fund, Texas State University asked the State Legislature to grant them an exemption.  They were the very first university in Texas to ask for one!  What go-getters.

After that, all the other universities thought it was a pretty good idea.

Here’s the total list of state-wide exemptions:

So basically, empty lots, lakes, universities, and ….El Paso school district.  Who knows.

…

The state law says that stormwater fees must be equitable. They go into a fair amount of detail about how we put ours together. 

Basically, if we want to help out SMCISD, here are the four options:

Option 1 would cost a lot and open the door to other nonprofits asking for a waiver, too.

Option 2 would cost some, and open the door.

Option 3 might open us up to legal challenges of being non-equitable.

Option 4 is the one that Staff clearly favors. In fact, city staff and SMCISD staff have already met, and they’re both open to this.

Option 4 is about Mendez Elementary. Mendez is located in Sunset Acres, which has terrible flooding. The city wants to build a detention pond on Mendez property, to help with the flooding.

All the council members are on board with pursuing 4. 

The only thing is that Mendez Elementary is being renovated. Until SMCISD knows the new footprint of the building, they can’t donate the land.

(Now, SMCISD has already submitted the Mendez plans to the city for permitting. So the city could literally go look right now at the Mendez plans.  It’s not a mystery. We can see exactly how much space there might be for a drainage pond.)

…

There’s a long, weirdly circular conversation where Lorenzo and Amanda keep saying, “We should meet occasionally with the school board, just to stay informed on what we’re each up to.”

Jane keeps responding with, “It’s no use.  Alyssa and I keep trying to think of a reason that all three entities – city, county, schools – should meet, and it’s very hard to think of issues that need attention from all three groups.”

Ok?  That’s a different thing?  That’s not what Amanda and Lorenzo are suggesting?

Anyway, they vote for 4. 

…

Item 25: Redwood/Rancho Vista

Last time, we discussed this property, immediately north of Redwood and Rancho Vista:

We were trying to figure out if that industrial portion would make flooding worse in Redwood.

Redwood and Rancho Vista have severe septic and flooding issues, which leads to a parasite living in the soil. It’s a big health issue, and it usually only happens in developing countries. But the community is quite poor and vulnerable, so it’s happening here. Any solution is going to be very expensive.

Last time Council tried to have it both ways: “We’ll let this development through, but we promise to take action on Redwood.”

So tonight is that action: A strongly worded letter to Guadalupe County about how the septic issue and parasites is a public health and safety issue, which has been going on for years and years.

Jane suggests that we let them know about the Texas Water Development Board, which has a specific Economically Distressed Areas Program. Maybe Guadalupe County could get some money from there.

City Manager Stephanie Reyes mentions looping in SMCISD – after all, these families go to our schools and are part of our community.

So staff will draw something up, and it will come back.

My two cents: this is fine as a first step, but not as a last step.

Hours 0:00 – 2:10, 9/17/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Uncategorized

Citizen Comment:  

  • One speaker spoke on some one-off issues – closing Cheatham street, lending police for football games, etc.
  • A second speaker talked about the utility rate hikes. Specifically, he told Council that we should have separate rates for rich people.

This connects to a thought I’ve had.  We do kind of have separate rates for rich people!

Take water as an example: 

As you use more water, the water gets more expensive. This is good! It incentivizes people to use less water.

Right now, we’re raising utilities 5% across the board. If Council had wanted to, they could have tinkered with these marginal rates. But I bet it gets complicated, fast.

(Electricity doesn’t have tiered brackets like this, though. )

….

Not exactly Citizen Comment, but a general concern from a community member: the San Marcos Housing authority put out a statement saying that they were going to open up the waitlist for housing vouchers on Wednesday morning.

So everyone showed up! Apparently something like 250 people turned in pre-applications for housing vouchers that were supposed to open up on Wednesday morning. A bunch of people even spent the night outside the Housing Authority, in order to be there when the doors opened at 8:30.  There was supposed to be a lottery to accept new applications. 

And…. it just didn’t happen. The Housing Authority did not actually accept any applications.   All the people needing housing just got sent away.

I don’t know what went wrong, but I guarantee there’s a throughline between having chronically underfunded housing assistance for decades, and this kind of mess. And Texas especially relishes underfunding programs for the poor.  

….

Item 1: New City Hall steering committee

Last time we had a big song and dance about the composition of the committee. Should we do things the way we always do them? Or should the DEI coordinator steer us in a more equitable direction?

Here’s what the DEI coordinator says at the beginning of the conversation:

A good general principle is that the composition of your committee should match the composition of San Marcos. So you look at things like race, gender, ethnicity, and try to match the overall population of San Marcos. (As your friendly marxist blogger, I’d toss wealth on that list, too. Socioeconomic status is should be included in DEI initiatives. Poor people are underrepresented!)

Here’s what Council settles on:

  1. Each councilmember will pick two community members to be on the committee
  2. The mayor and two councilmembers will be on the committee
  3. The committee will have some specific roles filled:
    • Someone from P&Z
    • From the library board
    • Someone representing the disability community
    • SMRF representative
    • Texas State representative
    • Downtown association rep
    • Chamber of commerce rep.
    • Two people from Rio Vista neighborhood

So depending on how much overlap there is between 1 and 3, there could be as few as 17 members or as many as 26  members.

The DEI coordinator tentatively pipes up: “The more prescriptive we are with roles, the harder it will be to achieve the DEI goals.” 

What she means is that the Library Board, P&Z, Texas State admin, SMRF, the Downtown organization, and Chamber of Commerce are generally less diverse than San Marcos as a whole.  The more you stack your steering committee with folks from these organizations, the harder it will be to make the composition of your steering committee match with the composition of San Marcos.

Jane misunderstands what the DEI coordinator means, and says, “Inclusion of these partners doesn’t mean exclusion of others! We’re not excluding anyone.” 

She also says (tellingly), “This just follows the pattern of how we do appointments in San Marcos.”

It does follow the pattern! Councilmembers pick people they know and put them on committees. This is how power perpetuates itself.  This is why you have to deliberately not follow the pattern of how we do appointments in San Marcos, if you want change.

The plan is to collect applications, and then have councilmembers select their two special besties from the pool.

Anyone can apply! Would YOU like to give your two cents on the new city hall?  Submit an application here, why dontcha? They’re due in 30 days. (The application is not up yet, but I’ll edit this when it goes live.)

…

Item 20: Parking by permit

The good people of Sturgeon are fed up with non-residents parking on their street.

Sturgeon is this street, in Blanco Gardens:

They filed a petition to make the street permit parking, so only residents could park there.  This is the area they want permitted:

My guess is they’re either sick of college students or river-goers parking there.

To be honest, I hate this kind of thing.  Everyone pays for roads!  We don’t own the curb in front of our houses. It’s not yours.

Occasionally, there is an extreme situation puts an undue burden on residents.  I can understand that. But here? Seven of those parcels are empty! Why are we banning the public from parking in front of empty lots? It makes me cranky.   (All the tan lots are empty in the diagram above.)

I just don’t like the privatization of something that’s public.  Public spaces belong to the public, end of story. 

…

Items 21-23: 51 acres off McCarty and 123

This bit is getting annexed and zoned:

It’s right by the high school, here:

Everybody knows we need more commerce on the east side of town.  For years, residents have asked for this.

(Quick sidebar: But don’t forget! Council removed commerce from Cottonwood Creek here, and then two months later Council removed commerce from the giant future development on 123 here. For Cottonwood Creek, residents wrote letters and showed up to say that they wanted to keep the commercial! And yet Council killed it anyway, because the developer asked nicely.)

Anyway, in general there’s very few stores east of I-35. These guys are committing to putting commerce on this corner:

It’s being zoned Commercial.

The rest of it is being zoned CD-4:

CD-4 is a Character District. That means that city staff is really hoping it will look like this:

Little shops mixed with apartments, and oodles of charm.

But it actually usually looks like this:

Not terrible, and the housing is needed, but not quite as charming as Sesame Street.

….

You know what would be fun? Dusting off our five criteria for zoning! C’mon, guys, let’s see if we agree with our councilmembers.

1. Price Tag to the City: Will it bring in taxes that pay for itself, over the lifespan of the infrastructure and future repair? How much will it cost to extend roads, utilities, on fire and police coverage, on water and wastewater?

Who knows! No one ever provides this information!

But my educated guess is yes.  The main problem is with single family detached homes – they don’t pay enough taxes to cover their roads and services. Since this will have apartments and commercial, it should be fine.  It’s also along existing roads with existing utilities and coverage areas.    

2. Housing stock: How long will it take to build? How much housing will it provide? What is the forecasted housing deficit at that point? Is it targeting a price-point that serves what San Marcos needs?

We also have no info here! But it doesn’t sound like giant $500K McMansions.  It sounds like apartments plus stores.  

3.  Environment: Is it on the aquifer? Is it in a flood zone? Will it create run off into the river?Are we looking at sprawl? Is it uniformly single-family homes?

Environmentally sound.  Not near the river.  Not sprawl. Not all single family homes.

Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?

I doubt it will be mixed income.  It is near schools, and hopefully near amenities. 

The San Marxist Special: Is it a mixed-income blend of single family houses, four-plexes, and eight-plexes, all mixed together? With schools, shops, restaurants, and public community space sprinkled throughout?

I don’t know how charming this will be.  We can hope.

So overall: I approve. It seems more good than not.

Council does, too. It all passes 6-0.  (Shane Scott is absent.)

“YAY COMMERCE!” council cheers.

…

Items 24-27:  All the budget and tax rate final details. (Discussed here and here previously.)

First things first! The good people at City Hall were able to give me the General Fund breakdown.  

I put together this side-by-side comparison for last year and this year:

Budgets are complicated. I don’t have any great takeaways here.

…

Next: We’re taxing ourselves less than we thought we were. We made an error in an obscure tax computation, and just now fixed it.

Here’s the quick version:  You’ve got your existing taxable buildings, and you’ve got your new builds.  Texas state law cares about the total amount you’re getting each year from the existing taxable buildings. (So you’re ignoring tax revenue from new buildings, for now.) 

Is the total revenue from existing buildings going up or down?  Sometimes it goes up because you raised taxes.  Other times it goes up because your housing prices are going up.  Either way, you’ve got to jump through some extra hoops if that total is going up.

We drew up our budget, and we thought it was going up, but…. <drumroll> it turns out it’s going down!  Hooray?  Since we didn’t change our tax rate, that means home values are falling.  

(Jude: THIS IS A REALLY BIG DEAL! THIS NEVER HAPPENS!

Mark: IT’S THE GROWTH!)

….

You know me: I just always have to rant a little bit about taxes.  (I swear this will be a very tiny soapbox.  Two minutes, tops.)

Taxes are good! That’s how you fund your government, and take care of your community. The problem is that we won’t tax wealthy people in Texas. First off, the poorest people are paying the most taxes:

And this is worse than in other states!

Notice that Texas is one of the states on the left part of that graph.

People complain about high property taxes, but those aren’t the unfair part.  The unfair part is the sales tax.  (Both state and local.) Sales taxes really are the worst! Poor people end up paying a much higher percentage of their income than wealthy people.  Literally, it’s capitalism for the poor and socialism for the wealthy.

End rant! I promised you I’d keep it short.

…

Anyway: only one person speaks at citizen comment and nothing gets debated.  The end! We have a new budget and next year’s tax rate.

The vote: 5-1.  Alyssa Garza votes against everything, presumably because of the utility rate hikes.  

…

Item 28: Mowing, landscaping, and litter around city buildings. It is a giant task. 

We contract out parts of it to Easter Seals of Central Texas, to the tune of $1,432,702.54.

…

Item 29:  Purgatory Creek Channel improvements

We had a whole workshop all about the Purgatory Creek channel improvements last time! This meeting, we’re kicking off $3,281,773.35 towards engineering for Phase 1.  

Saul Gonzales asks, “There’s a bunch of stagnant water in the side channels through Dunbar. Will this help with that?”

Answer: Sort of yes! Part of the project is raising some of the low-water crossings.  That is a major reason why water can’t drain downstream.  But also sort of no! This is supposed to recreate natural channels, and they do pool some. 

The city applied for grants to cover a lot of the costs. We should find out next month if we get them. If we get them, we’ll start construction next year.

….

Item 32: Filling a bunch of vacancies on different committees.

There was one moment that ticked me off.   There’s a vacancy on the Animal Shelter Advisory Committee. We only had one application. 

Matthew Mendoza pointed out that on the application, this volunteer stated that they have only lived in San Marcos for two months. Matthew is uncomfortable with this, and Jane agreed.  Matthew likes it when people have lived here longer. They decided to re-open applications and see if anyone else applies.

GUYS! Stop this rudeness.  First off, you should be welcoming to new people.  

Second off, if this were a vacancy on P&Z or the new City Hall steering committee? Sure, require 5 year residency.  You want people with some roots and community background. (I guess.) 

But that’s not this.  This is the ANIMAL SHELTER.  A new person moved to town and wants to volunteer their time to help the doggos! We should be appreciative, but instead we’re crapping on them for not having roots in the area.  That’s dumb.

…

Item 33: What night will city council meet, on election week?

The election is on a Tuesday. You don’t want to hold a council meeting the same day as an election. We don’t want to get in the way of anyone voting.

So should the council meeting be shifted to Monday or Wednesday? Historically we switch to the Monday. But Jane Hughson is suggesting that this year, council should meet on the Wednesday instead.

I want to emphasize two things:

  • When I say that Jane is good at details, this is a perfect example of what I mean.  She explained her thinking: “Suppose I am a community member who doesn’t know that the meeting was moved, and I show up on Tuesday.  If the meeting already passed on Monday, then I’m out of luck.  But if the meeting is not till Wednesday, I can come back tomorrow.”  

This is really thoughtful and detail-oriented.  Jane Hughson is unusually good at this sort of thing.

  • It’s worse for me, your friendly blogger.  I need every last minute to crank out these posts!  If the meeting is on Wednesday, then I get crunched, which gives me a sad. But in my heart of hearts, I know Jane is right. 

Hours 0:00 – 3:38, 9/3/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

  • Five people spoke against the SMART/Axis road annexation.
  • A guy from the airport asked about his lease rate for his hangar

That was about it.

…

Items 2-3:  Quarterly financial and investment report.

This is the official report for Jan 1st – March 31st went.  Back in May, we got a sneak preview: sales tax was tanking below projections and we were scrambling to reign in spending. 

This is more re-hashing of that same news. Sales tax was down, so everything got pulled back.

…

Item 19:  It takes two public hearings to approve the budget.  This is the first, and then final approval will be on September 17th.

Here’s the big picture:

With highlights:

For me, the highlights are only somewhat helpful. I need context in order to makes sense of these notes. What helps me most is a breakdown of the general fund, by department.

Last year’s breakdown of the General Fund, by department:

I got that by submitting a FOIA request last year. I’ve requested this year’s General Fund breakdown, but haven’t yet gotten it.

[Let me put on my tinfoil hat for just a moment. Indulge me in the dullest conspiracy theory of all times:

– The 2024 draft budget has the General Fund breakdown by department, starting on page 82.
– But the 2024 adopted budget has no General Fund breakdown anywhere!
– the 2023 draft budget has the General Fund breakdown by department, starting on page 88.
– But 2023 adopted budget also has no General Fund breakdown anywhere!

For the past two years, it’s disappeared from the actual budget, once it was approved. What on earth.

Finally, even the 2025 proposed budget does NOT have the General Fund breakdown included. This annoys me, hence the FOIA request mentioned above.

I submitted the request back on August 22nd, so we’re past the normal FOIA response time. The information is in the budget, but it’s scattered. It would take hours of work for a layperson to extract it from the online budget, one department at a time.

END OF MY MILDLY EXASPERATING CONSPIRACY THEORY!]

…

Back to budget discussions. Utility rates are going up:

The average home-owner will pay $13.46 more per month. There’s a big discussion in the workshops about utility assistance, so I’ll cover some details later on.

We’re using the same tax rate as last year, 60.3¢.

…

Listen: I cannot stress enough how little conversation there is about any of this. Partly this is because there have been a lot of budget workshops already.  Partly this is because the community didn’t show up to complain. (Although they have one more chance.) But mostly because this council is so used to each other that they all know exactly where they all stand.  There’s nothing left to say.

…

Matthew Mendoza asks a great question. During the section on the Water and Wastewater Fund, he asks: “These contract costs keep increasing every year. Why do we keep contracting out? There’s like 4 water and wastewater contracts. Why not do these things internally?”

The answer has a few parts:

  • Some contracts are management contracts, others are infrastructure and CIP
  • The contracts for the surface water plant and the wastewater treatment plant both have automatic inflation adjustments built in
  • On the wastewater treatment plant, we’re at the end of a 20 year contract. We’re putting a provision in the new contract to have an exit clause, so we could convert staffing to in-house in a few years if we want. When it was built in the 90s, it actually was operated by city staff. We started contracting it out in the 2000s.

This is SUPER interesting! Let’s highlight some things:

  • It’s so common for contracts to have built-in, automatic inflation adjustments! You know what doesn’t? The minimum wage. Failure to peg the minimum wage to inflation is one of the most underappreciated policy failures of the 20th century.
  • The wastewater treatment plan used to be city-run! We privatized it in the 2000s! What. Privatization is not your friend. Let’s get that back.

Mark Gleason asks if trash and recycling contracts also have automatic inflation adjustment?

Answer: Yes on refuse collection.

Alyssa still votes no on the utility fund votes, because of the rate increases. But she acknowledges the workshop on emergency utility assistance. (We will cover this below.) If it were working as it should, she says she’d be able to vote for the regular rate increases.

…

Item 4:  Axis Logistics (aka SMART Terminal) road annexation.

Backstory. The giant Axis Logistics/SMART company:

wants Council to annex city land for a road:

However, the company has made total enemies of the surrounding community, by always being super secretive about their plans. In this case, the road has jumped locations. Originally it was further from houses and now it’s closer to them.

At the August 5th meeting, there was a fair amount of discussion. Everyone seemed concerned. Nothing was resolved.

At the August 20th meeting, it was mysteriously postponed.

Time for the exciting conclusion! So much drama! Buckle up for…

…zip, zero, zilch. Literally, Council spends four minutes total on this item.

The vote:

No one ever asked in public about whether the road could be moved back to the original location.  No one explained whatever Mark needed more time to research since the last meeting.

This is what I mean when I say this council is stale. Everyone knows where everyone stands on everything, and so no one bothers to say anything outloud.

…

Item 24: School Resource Officers are back, baby!  (School Resource Officers = SROs)

Last meeting, the city approved the SRO contract. 

Two changes had been proposed by SMCISD:

  • The SRO contract should be two years instead of one
  • The contract can be renewed administratively, without Council approval. 

Council renewed the contract, but nixed those two changes. They wanted to see the contract, in person, every year.

Since then, the school board met: they really want the two year contract and admin renewal.  So they held the line on those two details, and punted it back over here.

Remember last time how I pointed out that Jude Prather should really recuse himself, because his wife is the director of the organization that oversees all SROs, statewide?  

  • He didn’t recuse himself this time, either. 
  • He actually was the one who made the motion to approve
  • Superintendent Cardona even mentioned that Prather’s wife wrote the officer training.
  • At Q&A at the end, a community member (LMC) asked about this conflict of interest.
  • By that point, Prather had gone home.  LMC said it was a question for the city lawyer, but Jane Hughson ended the meeting without giving the lawyer a chance to answer the question.

This is getting into more egregious territory!  Jude certainly knows better. He recuses himself over absurdly flimsy pretexts all the time.

ANYWAY.  Chief Standridge says he could include SROs in his yearly update to Council.  Superintendent Cardona talks about how closely everyone meets and supervises the SROs.

Mark Gleason politely says “I told you so! Stability. Safety. Etc.”

The vote: Should we switch to two year SRO contracts and administrative renewal?

… 

Item 25:  This was a little confusing.

Gather ‘round, children.  Once upon a time, there was a little Municipal Utility District, on the north end of town:

That’s east of I35, on Yarrington road. The year was 2014.

It was actually kind of gigantic if you zoomed out:

But none of the townspeople ever did. 

Here’s what the developers pretended it would look like, some day:

Look at all that water! What the hell is going on here. Here’s the satellite photo of this area:

So much less water!

(Were those lunatics planning on a great new lake? Were they going to tap the Blanco, where it runs underground, to create a watery playground for rich people? Maybe!)

Back to our story.

The village council elders put a weird clause in the development agreement that allowed landowners to opt out.  Usually council elders wouldn’t do such a thing, but in this case they did.

By 2023, these owners had opted out:

The red parts had opted out.

In 2023, the rest of the land owners opted out:

So at Tuesday’s council meeting, the little village dissolved the Municipal Utility District altogether. There’s no development agreement. There’s no lake.

THE END! 

The moral of the story is: there is no moral. 

…

Item 26: New City Hall and Hopkins Redevelopment project

Back in July, we saw some pretty pictures about what the new City Hall could look like, and what Hopkins could look like, maybe someday:

Today’s task: we’re going to form a steering committee, to help shape the vision. 

Who does Council want to be on the steering committee?

Jane: We could have each councilmember pick a person, and then have a representative from some key constituents – Texas State, River Foundation, Downtown Association.

Alyssa:  Before we have this conversation, we need the DEI coordinator. Otherwise we’ll do what we always do. That leads to the status quo, and the same old people still have the same old power. 

Mark Gleason: I like each councilmember picking two people, plus the key organizations should all have representatives.

Alyssa:  Hey! You guys. We need to stop and get input from the DEI person, before we have this conversation. 

Jane: And councilmembers themselves. What about the mayor?

Alyssa:  Listen. Stop. The DEI coordinator is not here.

Matthew Mendoza: Why should Texas State get a seat on the committee?

Jane Hughson: It’s just part of being good neighbors. They also have a representative on the downtown committee.

Alyssa:  Hello? Anyone? Bueller?

Shane Scott: You know how councilmembers get their names in the building? I think we should have little bobbleheads of ourselves, instead.*

Alyssa:  LALALALALALA AM I SHOUTING INTO THE VOID HERE?

Matthew: We should require that members have lived in San Marcos for at least five years!

Alyssa:  [mumbles to self about DEI coordinator]

Jane: How about a P&Z representative?  How about a library representative?

Alyssa:  [draws pictures of a council consulting the DEI coordinator, and holds them overhead, in the style of Lloyd from Say Anything.]

Saul: Should we require that they be caught up on their taxes?

Jane, dryly: We don’t require that for elected officials. 

Alyssa:  [Launches little confetti cannons. Sends in carrier pigeons with tiny notes tied to their legs, which read “Let’s consult with the DEI coordinator”. Does an interpretive dance for the letters “D”, “E”, and “I”.] 

In the end, everyone agrees to come back next time with their final ideas for the composition of the steering committee.  City staff is going to talk with the DEI coordinator and get best practices from her, and they’ll share those next meeting.

Here’s the thing: You have to get the DEI coordinator to talk to everyone before the brainstorming. Otherwise the brainstorming will perpetuate the same old power imbalances as always.  The point of the DEI coordinator is to gently get everyone to cut that shit out, and redirect them into new territory.

*This is a real comment. I did not make this up.

Hours 1:54 – 5:32, 8/20/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 20: The Budget

This one item is nearly three hours long.  

The budget is long and complicated.  First off, city starts having workshops in January and runs them through the end of September, when they pass the budget.  

These workshops are deathly boring and I am unable to sit through them.  I’m sorry about this.

Notice that they present twice to the Neighborhood Commission:

heh. (via)

Anyway! Here are the strategic goals:

Sure, why not.

The budget is split across a bunch of different funds:

Each of those colored headers is a different fund. So you can see the General Fund on the left is the big one, and there are a lot of little ones as you move right.

Revenue

Last year, we took in $37 million in property tax, and $42 million in sales tax.  So sales tax is huge for us.

The problem is that sales tax revenue took a big hit this spring:

I know that’s not very dramatic-looking.  Here’s how they presented it over the summer:

They kinda know what went wrong now. Here’s the biggest sources of sales tax:

Basically, some of the top sales taxpayers had unusually high sales for the past few years, and now they’re reverting back to normal. But we had banked on those returns to keep increasing. Whoops. (I’m guessing it was post-covid supply chain kinks working themselves out, especially Matheus Lumber.)

We’re going to start a sales tax volatility fund to help hedge against this kind of fluctuation.

…

Most departments are going to have the same budget as last year.  Since inflation is about 3% and the town is growing, that means they have to cover more ground with less money. So that sucks.  

We’re doing a little hiring.  These are the budget-neutral positions being added:

These are the ones that aren’t budget neutral:

…

I find it extremely hard to get a handle on the General Fund budget. So last year, I filed a FOIA to have them send me a list of how much each department gets from the General Fund.

This is what they sent me:

This is really helpful! This is how my brain works. That’s very clear to me.

What I plan on doing is put this side-by-side with next year’s proposed budget, so we can see what areas are growing and what is shrinking.  (I filed a FOIA for the new one, but it’s still being processed.)  

…

Another day, we should have a conversation on the $185K of seized assets, at the bottom of that chart. Seized asset forfeiture is wildly unethical! Have another link. It’s really bad.

Here’s what it says in the 24-25 budget:

There are not enough details on the $185K – what’s it being spent on? Was that all seized in San Marcos? Why is there a state and federal part? I have no idea.

….

Let’s talk about TIRZes. These also aren’t discussed much.

A TIRZ is a Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones. What this means is that the taxes from those zones mostly go back to those zones. We have six of them, maybe?

The example you’ll hear about most often is the Mainstreet Downtown TIRZ, because we can all appreciate it. We all want a thriving downtown! Taxes from downtown stay downtown, to keep downtown nice and vibrant.

But let’s focus on the Kissing Tree TIRZ, instead. Here are the details from the 23-24 budget:

So San Marcos sent $1,288,406 of tax dollars back to this one single gated community last year. Did you enjoy a thriving Kissing Tree or a thriving downtown more? Which ones benefit all of San Marcos? Feel free to compare $1,288,406 to your favorite category in the General Fund, above.

The other TIRZes are Loop 110, the Downtown plan, the Embassy Suites Conference Center, and maybe Blanco Vista? I can’t tell if that one ended in 2022 or not.

This year’s budget does not have a TIRZ breakdown either, which I find annoying. 

…

Let me be clear: city staff does an amazing job trying to clearly communicate the budget. No one is withholding anything maliciously.  

I just think that the breakdown of the general fund is a bit of a blindspot. It would help if it were there. 

Here’s the city budget webpage, if you’re curious to poke around yourself.

…

I’m skipping over a lot – there’s SO MUCH.  

Utility rate increases are being discussed.  It’s generally much wiser to raise rates by small amounts every year, rather than letting it accumulate and then needing a giant increase.

Alyssa Garza is opposed, out of economic concern for our neighbors.  I think she’s wrong here.  Starving your government is how you let capitalism run unfettered. Don’t be a shill for Reagan.

…

That said, we do have a utility assistance program.  The DEI coordinator gives a presentation on it.

The city puts about $230K from various sources into utility assistance:

And here’s what we handed out:

There is lots of anecdotal evidence that we do a mediocre job connecting with community members who need help:

One thing that makes it complicated is that there are two kinds of people who need assistance.
– First, people who need wraparound services in lots of areas. These people benefit from filling out the mountain of paperwork needed for federal programs. Community Action does this.
– Second, people who just need a one-time boost to get out of a hard spot. These people benefit from a low-barrier process and quick payment, so that their utilities don’t get turned off.

There is going to be a work session to try to make all this more effective.

…

Final notes:

  • There’s some discussion on how the Airport has been in the red for a long time, but I can’t find this info in the slides. 
  • As ARPA money comes to a close, we’ll have to pick up a bunch of slack in the budget next year.  So more expenses are looming.

That’s the end of the three hour budget discussion!

…

But wait! There’s more!

Item 21: Setting the max tax rate for the new budget.

Background: here are some different tax rates: 

That’s all just different vocabulary for levels of property tax rates. City Council can pick any number it wants, although if they go over 70.36 ¢, they’d have to get voter approval.

This whole budget above has been planned on the 60.3¢ number. Here’s how it would affect the budget if we raised or lowered the tax rate:

The 60.3¢ rate is the same rate as last year. Of course, if your home value goes up, then your taxes go up, even if the rate stays the same.

Home values really have shot up:

So how much more is the average home owner paying?

If Council goes with the 60.3¢ rate, the average homeowner will pay $164 more this year, or $14/month.

My prediction: The next few meetings will see a lot of focus on home owners in poverty, and whether its fair to ask them to pay $14 more per month. Some considerations:

  • Most people in poverty do not own homes. But there are definitely some, and they deserve compassion. However, they’re likely to own less expensive homes. So if $14/month is the average increase, maybe for a homeowner in poverty, it’s more like maybe $10/month.
  • Focusing on home owners in poverty allows us to avoid a conversation about wealthy home owners.

Today: just setting a ceiling.  What’s the upper bound for the tax rate this year?   (This is just a weird Texas quirk.)

The vote to set the maximum at 60.3¢:

I have no idea why Shane voted no. 

…

Item 26: We’re giving Southside $800K to Southside from ARPA money to implement the Homelessness plan.  

Over the summer, we fronted them $50K to come up with a working plan, which they’re now presenting. It’s really thorough! Unfortunately, the slides aren’t in the packet, so I’m relying on screenshots.

The three strategies:

  1. Stop the growth
  2. Improve existing systems through effectiveness and efficiencies
  3. Expand Capacity

Honestly, I’m not an expert, but she sounded way better than Robert Marbut. Feel free to listen, starting at about 4:56 here.

These are just some of the slides:

” – We will hold a community-based network to help neighbors in need.
– We will use best practices and data-driven decisions to guide our work
– We will implement collaborative technologies to support coordinated services
– We will honor the humanity and dignity of all people and help the entire community to thrive”

Target population: Those experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness

  • San Marcos resident families at risk or experiencing homelessness for the first time
  • Those with a recurring situation
  • Individuals at risk or experiencing homelessness for the first time, or in an episodic manner.

Key Deliverables:

  • Activate a network of community partners and volunteers to help neighbors in need
  • Develop a homelessness prevention and rapid rehousing framework
  • Implement coordinated entry processes for easier access to services
  • Establish standard intake procedures for streamlined client onboarding and information sharing
  • Implement a client management system, like HMIS, for secure data storage and reporting

So you don’t want homeless people having to supply data and information to a dozen different people in order to get help. You want to get someone in the system one single time, and then let the providers talk to each other and coordinate a response to get help to that person.

It sounds like we’re going to use HMIS:

A big piece of this is stabilizing people who are right on the brink of becoming homeless, or who just went through a crisis:

They’ve already started on this:

It’s just an extremely complicated problem that requires lots of human scale collaboration to put all this together.

One big piece of this is expanding capacity – we literally need more beds.

Again, it’s probably worth it just to listen for yourself. I’m struggling after a long meeting here.

….

After this, Council zips through a ton of items super quickly:

  • Whisper North and South, and Trace all get their annual thumbs-up. (Whisper North and South are giant planned neighborhoods on the east side of 35, at Yarrington Road. Trace is down south, past the outlet malls, also east of I35. These are all PIDs: Public Improvement Developments. It’s similar to a TIRZ. This is where my knowledge ends. Maybe they’re smaller? idk.)
  • The Intralocal Agreement with CARTS to provide transit in San Marcos gets re-upped for another year. Also one with the university.
  • Something something new roles on the Finance and Audit committee, we’re all pretty drowsy at this point. Shane Scott tries to kill off the whole Finance and Audit committee, but its very existence was not on the agenda, so he’s stymied.

That’s about it!

Bonus! 3 pm workshop, 5/21/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Presentation 1: Our budget is not doing well. Let’s look at some slides.

First, San Marcos keeps growing:

And while inflation is back to a normal healthy amount, it still exists:

So due to a larger population and 3% inflation, it will cost more to run the city more next year, even if we don’t change what we’re doing.

But unfortunately, we took a big hit on sales tax:

This is sort of a cumbersome chart. It’s doing a few things simultaneously.

So you see where it says October 2023 is 6.6%? What that means is:

  1. Average all the sales tax revenue from October 2021 to October 2022.
  2. Average all the sales tax revenue from October 2022 to October 2023.
  3. Work out the percent growth from the first average to the second average. For October, the past 12 months were 6.6% bigger than the previous 12 months. Great!

But you can see how this plays out over 2024 – we kept shrinking and then turned negative. So the average the sales tax income from April 2023 to April 2024 is smaller than it was over April 2022-April 2023. That is not good.

Who’s coughing all this up, anyway?

I would not have guessed that!

(I would say it’s their customers, not the business, but you get the point.)

No one else is having this problem. Just San Marcos:

No one offers up an explanation, because I don’t think anyone has one? Nobody knows if this is a shortterm fluke, or if it’s the beginning of something bad. We can’t know until it plays out a little more.

Anyway, here’s the bottom line:

We do not have the money we thought we’d have this year.

So we have to do two things simultaneously:

  1. Figure out how to tighten our budgets mid-year. There are established contingency plans on how to do this, but it’s not, like, fun to do.
  2. Figure out how to plan for the 2025 budget, if we’ve got more people and slightly higher prices, but less revenue.

Can property taxes make up the difference? Basically no.

First off, sales tax is a bigger chunk of our budget than property taxes:

But second, even though homestead prices are going up:

they’re not going up by as much as they had been going up.

The blue portion is the key amount:

So the city is expecting to collect 1.3 million more dollars next year than this year. It’s growing, but not enough to keep up with inflation and a larger population. Not like the past two jumps: from 2023 to 24, we jumped 6.8 million, and the year before that, an extra 5.8 million dollars.

So here’s the bottom line:

We are looking at being 2.3 million short this year, and 1.12 million short next year, if we don’t do anything different. Ouch.

I mean, we’re going to tighten belts, etc. The city is smart, there are plans to implement. But they involve hard choices and going without good things.

Here’s how we’re handling 2024:

Basically, that’s how they’re handling it. And they’re working on making next year’s budget work on a shoestring, as well.

One last thing:

There’s a new law that caps the how much business property appraisals can increase each year. Any non-homestead can’t grow more than 20% in a year. Or rather, the appraisal can come in higher than that, but you won’t be taxed on the excess.

Now, this only affects businesses appraised under $5 million. The problem is that we have a high number of small rental properties, and they all qualify. So we’ve lost $123 million of taxable land value, which works out to $745K from the budget.

Bottom line: the city has to tighten the budget. Kinda a giant bummer.

…

Presentation 2: There was also a presentation on the 2025 Capital Improvement Plan.

The CIP plan is all the major city projects, like re-doing the drainage for a street so it doesn’t flood anymore, or whatever. Basically it takes a lot of longterm planning. I don’t have much to say about it besides that they emphasized how much they’re trying to apply for lots of grants.

Hours 0:00 – 2:08, 4/16/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

ANOTHER FIVE HOURS MEETING! They’re trying to kill me over here!

Citizen Comments:

There was a full hour of citizen comments.   It was basically a repeat of last week:

  • Yes we love these Lindsey Street apartments! (9 speakers, but many work for the developer)
  • No, we hate them! (Seven speakers)
  • Ceasefire now in Palestine! (Four speakers)

Also Virginia Parker, from the San Marcos River Foundation, but I’ll save her comments for that section.

I mean, people did say some new stuff. I’ll save the relevant parts for the Lindsey Street discussion.

And, really, pass a ceasefire resolution already.

….

Next up we have some financial reports. 

Items 1-3:  Q1 Financial reports, Investment Reports, CBDG audit.

Here’s how our general fund is doing:

Just a note: “2024 YTD” is weird and confusing! Just to be clear, we’re talking about October, November, and December of 2023. It’s Q1 of Fiscal Year 2024. And “2023 YTD” means the last three months of 2022.

Anyway: The green bar is a little low. This is because property tax payments are coming in more slowly than last year. The speaker didn’t say why, but I assume it’s because Prop 4 passed in November, and so people got their tax bill later than usual. But the guy reassured us that it’s fine.

There’s also six Enterprise Funds: electric, water/wastewater, stormwater, resource recovery, airport, and hotel. They’re all fine! Everything’s fine!

Item 4: Short Term Rentals

We discussed short term rentals here and here already. We used to ban parties and require that STRs be owner-occupied, but (I think) the courts struck this down and so we had to rewrite our rules?

Loosely speaking, here’s what’s being proposed:

  • All STRs would need a permit. 
  • Owners can only have one STR.
  • Only one STR on a block, or at least 600 ft apart.
  • Short-term tenants can have parties, but not excessively noisy ones, just like any other resident.
  • Everyone who lives within 400’ gets a postcard with a hotline number to call if you’re having any trouble.

At the March meeting, both Shane Scott and Alyssa Garza voted no, but they didn’t exactly say why.  Jane Hughson chided them to come back with amendments that make it work for them.

To his credit, Jude Prather did come back with amendments to make it work. This is good governance! Let’s problem-solve! 

Jude proposes that we strike the limit per block.  In other words, anyone can have an STR wherever they want.  His reasoning goes that everyone should be able to rent out their own home, regardless of whoever pulled a permit on your street already.

Matthew Mendoza doesn’t like it.  You could have whole blocks which are full of STRs! It’s happened before, like on Riviera Street!

This is Riviera Street: 

You might recognize this backyard from the river:

right when you’re floating here:

I got those two images from the VRBO listing, so feel free to rent it yourself if you want.

Riviera’s probably the only place in central San Marcos where backyards open up right on the river, so yeah, I can believe Matthew when he says that they’re all STRs.  (And he also says they each have different owners – it’s not a case of one outside developer buying up the whole block.)

What do I think?  Eh, I think it’s fine.  I don’t think entire blocks are going to get bought up, in general. The other rule – “1 rental per owner” – is really much stricter than the “1 per block” rule, as far as preserving your housing supply. 

And it seems reasonable to allow everyone to at least rent out their own homestead. If I had an ADU and I couldn’t rent it out because someone down the block was already renting theirs out, I’d be annoyed.

The vote to strike the “1 per block” rule:

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

The vote on the whole set of STR rules, all together:

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

So there you have it. Done.

…

Item 7: Water Restrictions:

We’re writing new water stages.  Twenty years ago, we got a bunch of money from the state to start up ARWA, which drills from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer and requires a little more treatment before you drink it.  

That investment is finally showing up:

I’m guessing that’s the reason we’re re-writing our drought stages? Maybe not?

(Confidential to city staff who deal with water stuff: your slide is a few years out of date and it’s throwing me off, because I thought we weren’t getting ARWA water until later this year?)

Now:

The main thing that’s happening is that we’re going from 5 drought stages to 3 drought stages. This is supposed to make it simpler for everyone.

But there’s one other thing I want to discuss.

Last time, Virginia Parker from SMRF spoke about how the drought stage triggers were being recalculated.  The staff person said hey, no worries! We look at all the sources! The details aren’t in the ordinance, but it’s department policy. No worries! So I didn’t worry.

This time, Virginia Parker spoke again and made the same point.  However, this time it was a different staff member, and his answer was VERY different.  So let’s dive in.

Background for Parker’s concern:

There are triggers that cause you to go from one drought conservation stage to the next. Under the old rules, we checked the Edward’s Aquifer level, the Comal level, and the San Marcos Springs level. If any of those were low, we moved to the next stage.

For example these were the triggers for stage 4:

(Full text here. ) The J-17 well is the Edward’s Aquifer. So we measured three sources, and if any of them were low enough, it would trigger stage 4.

Under the new rules, the drought triggers are very different. What we do now is combine all the sources first, and then check how much of the total we’re using. So if one source is running low, another source can compensate, and we don’t enter drought restrictions.

Here’s the specific text:

It’s way less detailed than the old triggers.  Take Stage 2: “The average daily water consumption reaches approximately 75% of the rated available water production capacity for a seven-day period.”

In other words, now we take Edward’s Aquifer, Comal, and our new water source Carrizo, and we add all those together. Any one of them can be really low, but maybe the others compensate. If we’re using 75% of the combined total, then we’ll go into Stage 2.

You can see the scenario that Parker is worried about: The Edwards Aquifer could be way down, and our river is super low, but we’re not under any drought restrictions because the supply from Carrizo.

Here’s the answer we were given this time:  

We’re allowed to use a certain fixed amount of Edward’s Aquifer water until the Edwards Aquifer Authority says otherwise. And dagnabbit, we’re going to use it, because it’s the cheapest water we’ve got, and the way our pipes are set up means that we can’t easily switch from one source to another.  The EA water keeps our system pressurized.

When the Edwards Aquifer Authority tells us we have to cut back, we cut back. But otherwise we just take the same amount every week.

Jane Hughson: Would it be possible that Edwards Aquifer is in severe drought, like stage 3 or 4, and we’re still in stage 1? 

Answer: Yes! That could happen.

Jane: What about people in San Marcos on well water that comes exclusively from the aquifer? We’d be telling them that San Marcos is Stage 1, but they’d need to know that Edward’s Aquifer is in Stage 3.

Answer: We’ll have to publicize both stages. But we include the usage of people on well-water in our budgeted Edward Aquifer totals.

Jane does not like this. Neither does Jude Prather or Matthew Mendoza.  Neither do I!  It just feels icky to say that “haha, we’re going to use all this LUSH PLENTIFUL WATER no holds barred” in the middle of a drought, because we’re shipping it in from another part of the state.

I see what the city staff guy is saying, too – our Edwards Aquifer usage doesn’t fluctuate. End of story. Conservation doesn’t help the aquifer and being wasteful doesn’t hurt it.  But he’s being a cold engineer about how real people internalize drought stages.  Drought stages are also about setting people’s expectations and communicating to people that we need to be good stewards of our environments. 

Yes, we’ve planned well and gotten into a healthy water supply situation.  But if you zoom out, the entire state needs clean drinking water for decades to come, so let’s not be all “WE GOT OURS, SUCKS TO SUCK!” to everyone else. 

In the end, everyone votes to approve the plan, 7-0. As Jane puts it, “I have concerns, but I’m willing to see where this goes.”