Tag: city hall

Bonus! 3 pm workshop, 2/20/24

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

At 3 pm, there was a workshop on the future city hall.  We’ve discussed this before, back in 2022.

Basically, we can’t afford a new city hall, and Texas has a law that you can’t take out a bond to pay for a city hall. [Edit! I got that wrong. The law is that you have to get voter approval for a bond. City staff and city council don’t think that San Marcos voters would approve a bond for a city hall. Correction based on the 2022 presentation here.]

So they’re left with public-private partnerships, where some private entity goes in halvsies with you. You end up building something with both government and commercial appeal.  Bleagh, but here we are.

The first decision is location. 

This is the leading contender on location:

ie, across the street from the current city hall.

This is supposed to be a mock-up of what City Hall would look like if it were in that spot:

You’re looking at Hopkins. The old location is the lower right, and that would be converted to commercial and residential. Across Hopkins is the new City Hall, next to the retention pond. You can see the Bobcat baseball stadium in the background.

So that’s possible location #1.

Possible location #2 is where the current city hall is located, on the south side of Hopkins.

Nobody says what’s wrong with the southern side of Hopkins. What they say is, “If City Hall is on the northern side of Hopkins, it will welcome everybody coming from I-35! It will form a Civic Road of City Hall, the library, and the Activity Center.”

I guess the southern side is less welcoming because of how Hopkins bends? You’d think a big, snazzy, new building would feel big and snazzy on either side of the road, but I guess it’ll feel extra big and snazzy on the northern side.

Possible location #3 is somewhere downtown. The appeal of this is to bring back some daytime workers back to downtown. When Hays County Courthouse moved out to Wonderworld, the downtown lost a ton of people who would eat lunch at the restaurants and keep the downtown bustling during the day. It would be hard to pull off, though – we only own a tiny bit of land, and it would be pricey to acquire more.

….

Laurie Moyer is one of the assistant city managers, and she gave an extremely charming presentation about her Christmas vacation, which was spent driving all over Texas, observing the City Halls in comparable cities.

For example:

and then, her personal photo:

I was delighted by the whole thing. You should watch it here, if this is also your brand of nerdiness.

Bottom line: All these cities had city halls built in the past 20 years, and ours is 50 years old. The whole process will move extremely slowly, but we’re going to hire a consultant and get the ball rolling.

Bonus: New City Hall, some day!

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

So, the city is in a bind, because the state passed a law that you can’t borrow money to build your city hall. (Unless you get voters to approve a bond.) Our city hall is 50 years old, and staff and council constantly say how inadequate it is.

via

So city staff presents two vague plans:

(That’s a screenshot from the workshop. I couldn’t find a packet.)

The plan on the left is a bunch of new buildings on the same site as the current City Hall. The plan on the right has city hall moved across Hopkins, between the library and the dog park.

Funding is tricky, because voters are unlikely to approve a bond project for a new City Hall. So there are some creative ways to fund it, and they’ll probably kludge together a bunch of different solutions. Basically, you tie in a bunch of different purposes and get a lot of organizations to share the cost.

Max Baker and Jude Prather ask staff to consider thinking about a downtown site. The current Hays County Courthouse was built maybe 10-12 years ago. Before that, they used the strip mall that is currently Industry and Aquabrew. And that building, before it was the Hays County Justice Center, had been the old HEB.

Guys. GUYS. I was trying to find a photo online of the old Justice Center, and coming up empty. Then I recalled that I personally took some photos of it, a long time ago.

I used to call it the Supermarket of Justice:

I took that photo back in 2008, back when I was a lower case marxist.

But now I’m a big Marxist. I’ve got a blog, see? (I’m SO pleased that I was actually able to locate those old photos.)

Back to the point. In the days of the Supermarket of Justice, there was a large population of daytime employees in downtown. When the county employees all moved out to Stagecoach, the downtown became empty during the day. It has not quite ever recovered.

So putting City Hall downtown would put a serious number of employees using our restaurants and the fabric of downtown on a daily basis. It would definitely be more expensive, but maybe be worth it.

Saul and Jane are on the side of “Keep it cheap, keep it by the parks.” Max, Jude, and maybe Alyssa and maybe Mark are potentially interested in moving it downtown? I’m intrigued by a downtown city hall. But I do not want us to sell off the current land – surely we can find a quality civic use for it.

(You know what made me sad? When the Government Records department vacated southeast corner of Hopkins and Guadalupe. I’m a softie for public works.)

PS: I also took a few more photos, back in 2008:

There was a church on I-35 that sold clawfoot bathtubs:

right by Riverside Drive. I called it The Clawfoot Bathtub Church, for obvious reasons.

With this menacing Daffy Duck out front.

(I can’t figure out how Daffy is not visible from the first photo, since I would have taken both photos on the same day?! Maybe hidden behind the sign?)

And lastly, our beautiful river, doing what it does best:

being beautiful.

There is one photo that I did not take, and I regret it so much. Back then, the Chamber of Commerce was in the same building as now, on CM Allen, but it had a different sign. The font on the sign was the most ridiculous Mr. Rogers font.

In my memory, it looked something like this:

Maybe with the S, M, and C’s being even more swooping and absurd?

It looked very un-businesslike, and I miss it. If anyone has a photo of it, it would make me so happy.