Tag: CBDG

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

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen comment:

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

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

Item 10: CBDG money for 2023-24.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Item 14: CURFEWS ARE BACK. This is delicious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Item 16:  Firefighter Meet & Confer. 

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

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

Here’s the summary:

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

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

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

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

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

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

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

Have you all seen the yard signs around town?

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

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

…

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

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

And here are staff recommendations:

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

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

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

…

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

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

….

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

….

Item 10: This is the Oak Heights neighborhood:

via

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

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

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

….

This is Uhland Road: 

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

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

Good job! Drive safe.

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

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

…

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

Hours 1:01-2:10, 1/3/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Some quick items:

Items 16-18: Various CDBG funding.  Moving money around to fund rental and utility assistance, a project where they buy flood-prone land to keep it from being developed, and working on some ongoing flood projects for the Blanco Riverine and around Blanco Gardens.

Item 17: The Planning Department has a lot of fees for various services and permits.  How do they set these prices?

It’s been a while since they updated what fees they charge. So they had a consultant come in and analyze how much it costs the city to carry out all these services.  Then they compared fees to seven comparison cities.  Then they shared all this at the December 14th workshop, and proposed new fees.  

The city wants to balance covering at least 50% of their costs, without charging homeowners and small businesses too much or being too out of line with the other cities.  I did not dive deep into the fees, but the methodology sounds fine.  Council said it was all fine.

Item 20: The result of the HSAB drama from December.  At the 3 pm workshop, city council worked on this with city staff. Here’s the outcome:

(Note: It says “The Board should not fund all programs” but they intended “The board should not feel compelled to fund all programs.”)

All seems fine. I think they’re going to go back and re-allocate the December money according to these principles.

Item 21: Mano Amiga circulated a petition to repeal the SMPD contract. Now, I obviously live here in San Marcos. If Mano Amiga were to approach me, I would sign their petition, because I generally support their mission.

But as your local friendly blogger, I’m going to call shenanigans – the actual petition is confusing. As far as I can tell, this is the entire thing:

What’s the actual, specific gripe with the meet-and-confer contract? And what’s the specific, desired outcome? Maybe there’s another page somewhere spelling it out? (Update: It’s the Hartman Reforms. But I still don’t see anything about it on the Mano Amiga website.)

Anyway, this petition got started this fall. And then on December 12th, Joshua Wright was killed by a correctional officer at the hospital in Kyle.

Now this incident is extremely clear-cut abuse by the correctional officer. You’ve got an unarmed inmate in a hospital, wearing ankle shackles for god’s sake. He tries to escape. The officer shoots him six times. That officer had some fantasy that the only way to handle a person running away was to be judge, jury, and executioner. Joshua Wright has to die because this correctional officer can’t properly evaluate and handle the danger of an unarmed guy wearing ankle shackles. What the utter fuck.

Mano Amiga is clearly livid, and sprang into action, demanding bodycam footage and holding events and raising awareness. Of course, I wholly support their efforts for justice for Joshua Wright. This is the most just and deserving of causes to fight for.

Hours 3:30-4:42, 12/6/22

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 13: Marijuana has now been decriminalized in San Marcos! Go nuts. But not too nuts, because you’re still in Texas and none of the other police forces (including the Tx State campus cops) are playing by these new rules.

….

Items 14/15: Reallocating money.

The Chamber of Commerce has $200K leftover Covid Relief money. The city is giving it to a few other programs:

  • Training members of the community to get certified on QuickBooks for bookkeeping
  • Training local small business owners and setting them up with bookkeepers from the first program
  • Childcare gap funding for families

I am hugely in favor of that last one.  Childcare is wildly expensive.

There’s also some CBDG-covid money to be reallocated, $188K worth.  The city staff propose that it go to two programs:

  • Marble Falls has a stress-healing nature program, where you’d take a bus there and spend a day or two outside. It’s ~$300 per person, which would be covered by $75K of the Covid money.
  • Improvements to the Kenneth Copeland Memorial Park.  It used to be the El Camino park, but was renamed to honor the officer that was killed in 2017.  They want to put $112K into improvements to it.

Nobody likes the Marble Falls idea. Too far away, too expensive, and we have very nice local parks.

Alyssa Garza proposes that we use the money on something that meets people’s direct needs a little better – rental assistance, utility assistance, that kind of thing.  Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzalez, and Matt Mendoza all basically agree with Alyssa.

Mark Gleason and Jude Prather want to put $113K on the Kenneth Copeland park, and the other $75K on rental assistance. 

Shane Scott wants to put all $188K on local parks, arguing that parks benefit everyone, while rental assistance only benefits some people.

Alyssa says, “You guys. The people are going to be living in those parks if we don’t help them cover their rent,” and tells them they’re out of touch with the needs of the community.

Jude Prather relents. But he makes some dippy comments here, “Could we call it Kenneth Copeland rental assistance?” (The park is already called the Kenneth Copeland park. We’re not disrespecting the officer by postponing new picnic tables. It’s already a nice park.)  “Next September, I’m knocking on your door for that Kenneth Copeland money!” he says. Jane Hughson suggests that he doesn’t need to wait till next September. He can just go through the normal budgeting process that starts in a few months.

Anyway, five councilmembers want to direct the money towards rental assistance, so that’s how it will go.

…

Finally, they have to go through and replace Max on a bunch of committees and such. There’s probably 20 appointments or so.

Some that caught my attention:

  • Shane Scott has joined the Criminal Justice Review committee
  • Alyssa Garza has joined the Workforce Housing committee.

And a bunch more. Mostly these details are getting too into the weeds, even for me.

Hour 1-2, 6/7/22

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

  • The big topic of the night is the film studio to be built out in La Cima, and what kind of tax breaks they should get, and what kind of expectations should come along with it.  Someone from SMRF spoke about holding them to high environmental standards. Another speaker spoke in favor of it.
  • Rodrigo Amaya talked about one specific police officer who is known to racially profile and harass Hispanic community members at Rio Vista.
  • Remember the dangerous intersection in front of the Methodist Church? That was on April 19th. There is now a stop sign, and the head of WalkSMTX came to profusively thank the city for their quick action. That is some responsive governance right there.

(Some financial reports, an annexation into La Cima which is just more houses and not the film studio.)

Item 29: ’22-’23 CBDG Grant Allocations

There is about $850K in Community Block Development Grant (CBDG) money to be allocated this August. Tuesday’s presentation gave preliminary recommendations about how to divvy it up. Applicants are the Hays-County Women’s Shelter, Habitat for Humanity, CASA, Salvation Army, about four different city programs, and Southside Community Center. 

One of the city programs – the homebuyer assistance program – has been a flop, because there aren’t any affordable houses.  So that is discussed, but not axed. 

Max Baker tackles Southside Community Center.  Basically, there are a lot of reasons to feel warmly towards Southside Community Center – they’ve been serving the homeless for a very long time, and doing so when no one else was. As Jude Prather put it, “their heart is in the right place.”  There are also a lot of reasons to be critical of Southside – in recent years, it sounds like the director had his hands full with medical issues, and the management has fallen apart.  

Southside asked for $115K of CBDG money, and staff is recommending $55K.  However, Southside is apparently sitting on $392K, unspent, from prior years.  Max Baker wants to know why we’re even considering giving them an additional 55K.

He starts by reading this bit that city staff posted to the message board, after Max asked about the $400k:

Staff: As a subrecipient, Southside is essentially a “staff extension” – they must handle a program exactly like staff would handle it. Staff is responsible for setting them up for success, ensuring they are trained. In 2019, all City staff responsible for development and oversight of the program left. In 2020, the HUD monitoring had an extensive 15 findings that included every part of the program – such as documenting whether contractors were procured competitively, whether homeowners received information appropriately, and what each expenditure included. HUD required that City staff completely rewrite the policies and procedures and retrain Southside. Staff also chose to take on some of the actions such as procuring contractors, in order to ensure it was done correctly. Southside has been on hold since, waiting for 1) policy and procedure rewrite 2) retraining 3) contractor procurement. In addition, Southside was responsible for the application intake and income verification process and that did not go well; staff has taken this over as well and is working to receive the correct income documentation from applicants.

Max goes on to say “…This is the first time I remember hearing that  there is this large pot of money that is being unused because of Southside’s – I’m going to put it bluntly – incompetence in managing a program, or having the staff necessary, to deal with this. … If staff is doing so much of this work, why are we still working with Southside? My assumption is that it’s because they have the building.”

(The answer to this is supposed to be posted to the message boards, but it’s not up yet.)

As usual, Max is right, but kind of hostile and undiplomatic about it. Southside isn’t run by bad people. Staff is not bad people.  Maybe we shouldn’t be awarding Southside more money at this moment, but maybe we can say it more nicely? 

…

On a different note, Max Baker has an excellent suggestion that the CBDG money could be used to provide 24 hour restrooms available for homeless people and the general public. This is really important. We can ameliorate some of the worst difficulties of living on the streets, while simultaneously working to get people off the streets. 

July 6th City Council Meeting, (Part 2)

by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

The next recurring theme was a large amount of money to be allocated, across different items.

  • Items 35-36, $9 million from American Rescue Plan Fund (and it sounds like there will be 9 million more, next summer.)
  • Item 40, $800K in CBDG proposals for the 21-22 fiscal year
  • Item 41, $1 million in utility assistance

So these were quite a lot of fun – feeling flush with cash and able to grant all the wishes to all these nonprofits. Down with austerity and belt-tightening!

  1. On the first, the American Rescue Plan Fund:

– they argued about whether tourism and marketing should get quite such a big cut. It seems that this sector is limited in where they can seek funds, and they did take quite a hit during COVID. But maybe not quite as much as was proposed. ($282K)

– they argued a bit about Briarwood, a neighborhood outside of city limits that suffers severe flooding, in part because of how San Marcos has been developing. There’s a 2.5 million stormwater mitigation project there. They managed to thread the needle on that one – postpone it by three months and fund it from several spots.

– A lot of small projects got some money: Southside Community Center, bilingual outreach and communications, KZSM, vaccination outreach, Nosotros la Gente, which provides shoes for local kids. Good feelings all around.

2. On the CBDG funds, nearly everything got funded besides Roland Saucedo’s proposal, which is seeemingly why they chipped in for him in the previous funds.

3. The Utility Assistance fund is interesting. They’ve paid out about 20% of what’s available, and they’re all concerned that people aren’t applying. City staff was put on the defensive about their outreach efforts.

– Everyone who is past due gets a letter with info on how to apply. If the city has an email address, they send an email too.
– The city has reached out to the Food Bank and SMCISD.
– The application was made fairly short – just one page.
– Disconnections have been suspended during the pandemic, but there will be a date set to resume disconnections.

Criticisms:

– how about going through the churches? Commissioner Gonzalez says that he has to KEEP directing city to this and they never do.
– Commissioner Gleason, Commissioner Derrick, and Mayor Hughson all feel like until you send them notice of disconnection, no one will be very motivated to apply.
– Commissioner Garza talks about how people (meaning the Hispanic community) are more likely to just tighten their belts, out of not wanting to take more than their fair share, and that they’ll want to save the funds for someone who REALLY needs it.

Commissioner Scott, actually, was strongest on this: “Can’t we just see who is past due and pay off their balance without them having to apply?”

Hughson concern-trolled about undeserving people who have the money and could pay. Nothing Texas hates more than someone receiving some crumbs when they could have scraped by without them. Garza is enthusiastic about this proposal.

Scott’s proposal – just pay off the deliquent accounts – has to be put on the agenda and brought back as an item, because it didn’t fit onto the existing agenda. So it still could happen.

…

As an aside: there’s an ongoing dynamic where City Council and Lumbreras are perpetually exasperated with each other. It goes like this:

  1. Council frequently acts like he has done something incompetent.
  2. He then defensively retorts that they tied his hands in the way they made the request.

I am not sure yet who is being a jerk, or if there’s blame to spread to both. Mayor Hughson herself is a generally prickly person, and it often doesn’t mean anything.

…

All three topics will be finalized at some point in August.