CUP – The San Marxist

Hours 0:00 – 2:04, 11/18/24

November 23, 2025November 23, 2025 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

There were five people who showed up to talk.

Tonight’s the night that Council determines their HSAB grants, and so almost everyone speaking was representing nonprofits – one speaker from School Fuel, and three from Southside. I’ll save it for that item.

One last speaker talked about Meet and Confer, and whether or not it was okay for Council to make recommendations to the negotiators who represent the Council in the negotiations.

…

Item 13: Rezoning a little street in Blanco Gardens

Here’s Blanco Gardens:

It’s a very cute old neighborhood with gorgeous trees.

Here’s a close-up:

Blanco Gardens has come up a lot over the years in the blog. They were ground zero for the 2015 floods, and they’ve gotten some some flood mitigation projects since then. They got some speed bumps and parking permits. Most recently, they were the first neighborhood to get its neighborhood character study. It’s also the closest neighborhood to Cape’s Dam.

For an old neighborhood, there’s a surprising amount of undeveloped land in the middle of it:

(I wondered briefly if that was because homes had been torn down after the floods. But nope, you can see on the 2014 satellite image that there’s just always been space there for years.)

Over the years, developers have occasionally tried to put something in part of it, but so far it’s always gotten nixed.

Today’s proposal is about this bit:

A developer wants to build houses on it.

They would look and feel like duplexes, but they’re technically different, because of how they can be bought and sold. The property line runs through the two halves of the house, so you can purchase one half of it, while someone else owns the other half. (It’s called a “zero lot-line house”.)

Basically it’s a good way to fit more, smaller homes onto a street, and they tend to be a little cheaper, too.

What does Council say?

Question: will fit the character of the rest of the neighborhood?
Developer answer: We have good intentions!

(One block over, there are some extremely modern houses. The neighborhood is salty about this.)

Question: Will the alley still exist?
Answer: nope.

…

Nobody really asked about flooding. The 2015 floods are starting to fade from memory for the rest of San Marcos. But not in Blanco Gardens – they were the epicenter of the floods.

I would have liked to know what the 2015 flood water line was for nearby houses – I bet it was about 3-4 feet of water deep. How elevated will these houses be? Will they be above the 2015 water line?

My memory is that, in a 100-year flood plain, you have to build 1-2 feet above the Base Flood Elevation, based on FEMA flood maps. Does that get you to 3-4 feet off the ground? I just don’t know.

…

The vote on this cute row of sorta-duplexes:

Yes: Everyone
No: nobody

The good news is that Council is enthusiastic about infill housing. (When I first started blogging in 2022, Council wouldn’t let a home owner build two small houses on a subdivided lot, on Lockhart street. That was crazy.) They’ve definitely gotten the message that San Marcos needs more housing.

As long as the homes are safely elevated, I’m okay with this project. But the flooding risk makes me very uneasy.

…

Item 14: HSAB Funding

HSAB stands for Human Services Advisory Board.

These are city grants to nonprofits, for things like food assistance, eviction prevention, domestic violence help, mental health services, etc. For the past few years, we’ve given out $500K in grants. This year, Council bumped it up to $750K. (Of course, federal funding has gotten slashed, so the need has also grown. THANKS OBAMA.)

It’s always a grueling process. All the nonprofits all do incredibly important work.

In the past, we kinda made non-profits cagefight against each other. [Read all the gory details for the past few years.] The process was murky. The recommendations would come to council, and council members would start horse-trading around.

It was a bad look! It always seemed very fickle – “Oh, we’ll take $20,000 from those guys and give it to these guys!” It felt like the main criteria was being friendly with council members.

We’ve been working on tightening the process. It’s a super time-intensive:

the HSAB board meets weekly from August to October
They hear presentations from all 32 applications
Each one gets discussed and each board member ranks them on a bunch of different criteria
Eventually they recommend how much of each request to fund.

Here’s the criteria:

After all the ranking and discussion, they bring it to Council.

…

Just for funsies, let’s add up how much other non-HSAB money is getting allocated in this meeting!

All this was approved in one single vote, on Tuesday:

“On-Call Title Research Services Contract with Hollerbach & Associates, Inc., to increase the price by up to $200,000.00, resulting in a total contract amount not to exceed $299,999.00”.
“RMO P.C. for legal services associated with land acquisitions to increase the price by up to $300,000.00, resulting in a total contract amount not to exceed $699,000.00”.
“Change in Service to the agreement with Baker Moran Doggett Ma & Dobbs, LLP for legal services associated with land acquisitions to increase the price by up to $300,000.00, resulting in a total amount not to exceed $600,000.00”.
“STV Incorporated to provide On-Call General Engineering Services for various projects in the amount of $900,000.00”.
“Halff Associates, Inc. to provide On-Call General Engineering Services for various projects in the amount of $900,000.00”.
“a 2025 Ford F550 Crew Cab Chassis from Rush Truck Center, through a Sourcewell Purchasing Cooperative Contract, in the amount of $82,043.63, and outfitted by E.H. Wachs, through a BuyBoard Contract, in the amount of $156,865.65, for a total purchase cost of $238,906.28”.
“SHI Government Solutions, through Omnia Partners, for a City of San Marcos job application tracking software system in the annual amount not to exceed $112,000.00, and up to four one-year renewals with a total amount of $560,000.00”.

It comes to about $2.95 million. I’m not saying any of those were a mistake! I trust the city officials. Most likely, those are all totally reasonable.

I’m just pointing out who gets scrutinized, in society, and who doesn’t. We approved almost $3 million without blinking, when it goes to those contracts above. But if it’s hungry kids, homelessness, mental health emergencies, etc, we rigorously grind these applications into pulp.

…

Back to the grant grind!

There were 32 applications, and the total amounts requested added up to $1.2 million.

Here’s the full list of scores and funding:

In the presentation, they went through all of them, and why the committee might not have fully funded the request.

For example:

The rest of their thoughts are on pp 435-437, here.

They were very thorough.

…

Back to Citizen Comment

Three speakers from Southside show up to talk. Here’s what they say:

Southside is in a funny position. In 2024, the city gave Southside $800K of Covid money to implement a Homeless Action Plan.

They came up with a plan and put in all the work to get it up and running. Now they’re trying to sustain it over time. They asked for $100K from HSAB, but were only granted $50K.

The $100K is for their homeless prevention program – giving families $1000-2000 to get through a one-time financial crisis, so that they don’t get evicted.

…

Let the horse-trading begin!

Matthew kicks it off. He wants to try to get Southside back up to the full $100K that they asked for, for homelessness prevention.

Matthew proposes:

Take $4500 from Rough Draft
Take $5000 from Lifelong Learning
Take $10,000 from Hill Country MHMR

Give that $19,500 to Southside.

Ok, what are these things?

Rough Draft:

Their funding would go to $0.

Lifelong Learning:

Ok. Their funding would go from $9000 to $4500.

Hill Country MHMR

Their funding would go from $60,000 to $50,000.

….

What does Council think?

Question: How many people would Southside be able to help, with this $19K?
Answer: About ten families. Average cost to stabilize someone after a financial emergency is $2k.

It’s actually a huge bargain. If they’d been evicted, it would cost $15-30K+ to stabilize a family once they become homeless. (Plus, y’know, becoming homeless is awful. This is way more humane for the families.)

Question: Are you all applying for other grants?
Answer: SO MANY. Funding is scarce, and federal funds have been slashed.

Alyssa: The entire premise of horse-trading these dollars is problematic. Most agencies didn’t send someone here tonight to answer questions. We don’t have context and expertise. This is haphazard. I am not on board with any of this.

Amanda: Matthew, what about moving some money from the School Age Parents Program? They said they’d be able to keep the program open on $7,500, but they’re being awarded $15K.

Matthew: How dare you. Abso-fucking-lutely not!

[I’m paraphrasing. Matthew just said something like, “They do great work!”.]

Amanda: I’m trying to throw you a bone here!

Matthew: Hard no.

Amanda: Well, I’m a no on Hill Country MHMR especially. Their work is desperately needed. We are in a mental health services desert, and this program will fund teenagers without insurance.

Alyssa: I’m a NO on all of this, but especially NO on Hill Country MHMR. Homelessness and mental health are completely intertwined. There’s so much need here.

The votes are each held individually:

Move all $4500 from Rough Draft to Southside Homelessness Prevention?

Yes: Matthew, Jane, Amanda, Lorenzo, Saul

No: Alyssa, Shane

2. Move $5000 from Lifelong Learning over to Southside?

This motion dies without getting a second. So it never comes to a vote. That kinda surprised me.

3. Move $10K from Hill Country MHMR over to Southside?

Yes: Matthew

No: Everyone but Matthew

4. Amanda throws in a vote on the SMCISD School Age Parents Program:

They get $15K.

Should we take $5K from them, and give it to Southside?

Yes: Amanda, Saul

No: Matthew, Lorenzo, Alyssa, Jane, Shane

So that fails.

Me, personally: It’s an awful decision to make. I probably would have taken money from Rough Draft, Lifelong Learning, and maybe SMCISD School Age parents. But not Hill Country MHMR.

….

So that’s where it lands. Southside picked up $4500 more, and Rough Draft went to $0.

The final official vote on HSAB funding passes 7-0.

…

One more note!

We just spent $750K on the poor and vulnerable.

But we also spend $1.1 million on tax breaks to home owners every year:

About 30% of San Marcos owns their own home. That $1.1 million is just for them.

Also, remember that Kissing Tree is keeping $46 million of San Marcos tax dollars, for nice streets and trees that are then gated off from the rest of San Marcos! You can’t go visit the tax dollars. Sorry.

This is why I get cranky about this:

People who want to slash property taxes never seem to appreciate how much of their own lifestyle is being subsidized.

….

Item 19: Dunbar Recreation Center

Dunbar was named for Paul Laurence Dunbar. He was the first black poet to get widespread recognition. (He was not from San Marcos in any way. He’s from Ohio.)

Here’s one of his poems, from 1895:

Originally, the Dunbar neighborhood did not have a specific name, besides being called “the colored neighborhood”. The school was called The Negro School. In 1961, that was renamed after Paul Laurence Dunbar, and then gradually the whole neighborhood came to be known as Dunbar. So the Dunbar Rec Center just got the name “Dunbar”.

Would we like to include the poet’s full name here? Everyone says yes.

Great!

Lots of interesting history on the Dunbar neighborhood here and here!

….

Item 20-21: Jorge’s Mexican Restaurant.

Jorge’s is on Hunter Road:

Separately, Miller Middle School is on Foxtail Road:

Their front doors are far apart:

…but they share a back fence.

This causes all kinds of problems for Jorge’s, because there are extra-strict rules for selling alcohol within 300 feet of a school.

This means that Jorge’s has to do a lot more:

Renew their alcohol permit every year, instead of every three years like everyone else.
Renew their distance variance every year, which grants them an exception to the 300 foot rule.

The main problem is the fees – both of those cost $750, so Jorge’s is paying $1500 every year.

Why is it so expensive?!

Mostly because of postage. The city has to notify everyone within 400 ft. The rest of the cost is to cover staff time, to process the paperwork.

Everyone wants to at least refund half of Jorge’s fees, since the city can save costs by processing both the alcohol permit and distance variance at the same time.

They’re going to try to come up with a long term solution, too.

Hours 3:25 – 4:28, 5/20/25

May 25, 2025May 25, 2025 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 21: Downtown TIRZ.

“TIRZ” stands for Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone. We have 5 or 6 of these in San Marcos. This item is about the Downtown TIRZ, which covers this area:

This TIRZ started in 2011.

Here’s how a TIRZ works: In 2011, they appraised the value of all that property. Say it was appraised to be $100 million back in 2011. While the TIRZ runs, the city will only get taxes on the $100 million. As the property gets more valuable, the downtown will pay more taxes, but the extra taxes get put back into projects to make the downtown better.

So for example, suppose in 2018, the downtown is now worth $150 million. The city gets the taxes on the first $100 million, and the downtown gets the taxes on the next $50 million.

Here’s a little visual aid explaining this in the council packet:

The downtown TIRZ is actually a joint TIRZ with the county also knocking back some money. Here’s the actual amounts, if you’re curious:

This next bit did not get a lot of discussion:

My best guess is that everyone still wants the TIRZ to wrap up by 2027, and so we’re giving them a final boost to get across the finish line.

Here are the amounts they need to finish up the projects:

Anyway, it does not get much discussion, and passes unanimously:

The city is giving roughly $1 million to the downtown for projects this coming year.

I’m okay with the premise, but I’m uneasy that it didn’t get more discussion, in light of the massive budget cuts we’re incurring elsewhere. If we extended the TIRZ to 2028, could we have spread out $500K somewhere else?

…

Item 22: CUP appeal

There’s this Holiday Inn, on the southbound frontage road, right before WonderWorld:

They have a little bar and grill inside:

The bar and grill serves alcohol. So they have to get a Conditional Use Permit (CUP) from the city.

Here’s how CUPs work: your first year open, you get a 1 year permit. After that, you get a 3 year permit, (There are a lot of extra details, but that’s the gist of it.)

These guys got their 1 year permit back in 2017, and then never came back.

Now: this is a really common, widespread problem in San Marcos, and P&Z and staff have been working to clean it up for awhile now. The city was sloppy about sending reminders, at times, and the businesses were sloppy about not coming in for their permits if no one was checking. So a ton of businesses fell behind.

Here’s the problem: there’s a fee attached to the CUP. (A couple hundred dollars?) The city doesn’t turn a profit, but it covers the cost of staff time and materials.

So the businesses that skip the CUPs for a decade – like these guys – are saving maybe $1000 over the businesses that follow the rules. It’s a little unfair.

P&Z handles this by making businesses pay off their delinquent CUPs. If you skipped 2 renewals, you’re going to get 2 6-month CUP permits. When you’re all caught up, you can go back to having 3-year CUPs.

That’s what happened to these guys. They skipped 2020 and 2023, so when they came in last August, they got their first make-up CUP, lasting 6 months. When they came back in March, they got their second make-up CUP, lasting 6 more months.

But this time they got pissed! So they appealed to Council. They want a full 3 year CUP, and they want a refund of $765.

Here’s the thing:

1. Is the bar right? Absoutely not! This is the standard that P&Z is applying everywhere. This is absolutely fair, and the bar is wrong. But….

2. Is this a good fight for City Council to pick? Hell no! Pick your battles. If someone is making a mountain out of this molehill, have the good sense to step out of their way.

Council steps out of their way and rewards the appeal.

I’m a little annoyed that Council fawns over them for being such good community members. There’s no need to kiss their ass when you’re the one doing them a favor. But Council fawns and preens over them. Whatever.

The vote: Should they get refunded the money that the rest of the business owners have to pay?

Haha. I probably would have voted “yes”, but my heart is with Matthew voting “no”.

…

Item 12: Staffing study for SMPD

Chief Standridge came in 2022. Back then, SMPD did a staffing study, and decided that we needed a lot more police officers:

Then there was a violent crime spike in 2022, and so we freaked out and claimed that we needed a LOT more police, as fast as possible:

I would argue that our crime spike was actually part of a nationwide trend:

(From here.) As covid drifted back in time, crime rates have settled back to baseline in San Marcos, as well.

Council has been spending all its extra money adding extra police and fire fighters. Back then, Alyssa was the only progressive voice on council. But now she’s got company. So do we really need to keep adding police officers?

We’ve decided to do another policing staff study. We are hiring these guys to tell us whether we need more police officers or not.

Is council willing to spend $116K on a new staffing study for the police, from that consulting company?

Amanda: the timeline looks rushed. How are you going to get community input by July 2025?
Answer: It’s actually supposed to be five months, not two months.

Alyssa: Why these guys?
Answer: They did our Marshal staffing study. We liked them. They didn’t tell us to hire more marshals, but they had good ideas how to move people around.

Saul: This is a lot of money. Can we see the bidding process?
Answer: We didn’t have a bidding process, but next time we can do that. Sorry about that.

The vote:

…

Item 4: More SMPD!

Here’s what they want to do:

Should we spend $938K on police station improvements?

Short answer: Yes, because this decision was already made, and now we’re just following through. This is the building and the bullet trap for the shooting range. (We saw the bullet trap earlier here.)

(Did this item get a robust discussion earlier, when it was approved in June 2023? Absolutely not. But what’s done is done.)

Amanda: Will there be any more asks associated with this project?
Answer: Possibly to resurface the parking lots. But we don’t expect anything unexpected to turn up when we break ground.

Saul: You do know this is an old graveyard, right?
Answer: No, sir, I did not know that.
Saul: I’m just kidding.

That was the best moment of the night right there, for sure. I laughed so hard at that.

The vote:

…

Item 10-11: EVEN MORE SMPD!

SMPD is applying for a two grants related to license plate readers. This is supposed to relate to vehicle theft and stealing catalytic converters. Total, these two grants are about $183K. SMPD needs Council’s blessing to apply for the grants.

(This is not the same thing as the license plate scanner saga that we’ve been following here, here, and here.)

Amanda: Didn’t the deadline pass in April?
Answer: We got a special exception, because they know that city councils don’t always meet on schedule.

Amanda grills Chief Standridge over the date, and Lorenzo gets snippy over the time wasted. If you enjoy petty council member exchanges, go here and start watching at about 4:08:50.

The vote:

I am 90% sure that Alyssa verbally stated her vote was actually a “no”, but it was hard to hear.

…

Item 24, 25: Tinkering with boards and commissions, and filling vacancies.

There’s a vacancy on P&Z, left by the passing of Jim Garber. Council elects Josh Paselk to be the new commissioner.

…

One last note:

Everyone makes an effort to dress professionally for council meetings:

But is Amanda rocking a maroon three piece suit?!

Is this a councilmember, or is this Andre 3000?? I appreciate good drip, as the kids say.

Hours 0:00 – 3:21, 11/19/24

November 24, 2024November 24, 2024 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen comment:

Live music at Tantra Coffee Shop.
P&Z killed their live music back in September. The community is livid! We’ll hash it out in Item 9, below.

One speaker talks about deer. (Item 17, at the end of the meeting.)
– Urban deer are responsible for more deaths than any other animal.
– In 2010, Council thought hard about this, and decided to do nothing. Now we’ve got an even bigger problem.
– Also, stop feeding the deer, even though they’re cutie-patooties, with their big eyes and spritely tails.

November 10th, in Rio Vista. Two speakers talk about this.
– Apparently there was a violent dispute, and a shot was fired, and the cops were called. The guy with the gun left the scene.
– The cops showed up with 8 cop cars, SWAT teams, set off 6 flash bombs from neighbor’s yard, blared megaphones, and generally acted like the circus-military was setting up camp in Rio Vista for a night of revelry, from midnight to 3 am.
– The suspect was not at home, this entire time.
– This police response did not make the speakers feel safer, whatsoever. It felt like an untrained, reckless mess.

4. At the 3 pm workshops, Virginia Parker talked about Cape’s Dam. She is the director of the San Marcos River Foundation, aka SMRF. (Cape’s Dam explainer here. Warning: I wrote that when I was a baby blogger. I did my best.)

Here’s what Virginia Parker says: SMRF owns the high bank at Cape’s Dam. For ten years, SMRF has been saying that removal of the dam is the best thing for the environment. The city has been dragging their feet, and saying they’re going to hire a project manager to run a feasibility study on rebuilding the dam. There’s no money to hire this person. This study is not coming anytime soon.

Virginia Parker says: Cut the bullshit. (My words. She is far more polite about it.) SMRF will never agree to rebuilding the dam, and they own the high bank. The city would have to take it under eminent domain.

So (she says): Dissolve the agreement with the county. Reallocate the money. Dams are not safe – a teenager just lost his life there recently.

Plus, there are federal grants available for dam removal. It’s free. It’s the fastest and cheapest way to deal with this situation.

I totally agree! Listen to Virginia Parker!

Onto the meeting!

Item 9: Tantra Coffee Shop

You know you love Tantra:

Back in September, Tantra went to renew their alcohol permit. This is where our story starts – at that Planning and Zoning meeting.

The P&Z Meeting: September 24th

There was one speaker (LMC) who was mad about the music. “They’re blasting profanities and obscenities into the HEB parking lot!!” She’s called the cops on them two or three times, but nothing ever came of it. Because there was no actual violation taking place.

Now, LMC talks at almost every meeting. She’s prolific. P&Z and Council are used to taking her comments in stride.

But P&Z kicked things off with guns blazing. Jim Garber had a well-prepared speech. First he compares the decibel levels allowed at a bunch of other towns, but he mostly cherry-picks residential areas. (More on this below.)

This is the most absurd part of the speech, and I’m quoting verbatim here:

“Frank Sinatra tells us that New York City is the city that doesn’t sleep at night. He’s wrong. Because in residential areas, in various boroughs, [the noise cap] varies in daytime 45-55 decibels. We allow 85. At night, 35-45. So New York does sleep at night! The city that doesn’t sleep at night is San Marcos! You experience more noise in downtown San Marcos than you will in New York City. Something to think about.”

You guys: no. San Marcos is not louder than Manhattan. I promise. New York is such a dense, stacked place that small noises quickly amplify. So they have to control the noise output of things like air conditioners, ventilation, bars, construction sites, and garbage trucks. You get this ambient background noise level, and then all other sounds ratchet up, in competition.

New York City is not remotely parallel to live music at Tantra, with the occasional naughty word floating over to HEB.

Garber wraps up his speech with the 60 decibel limit for Tantra. There’s one single other comment from a P&Z commissioner, about how un-family-friendly it is to have vulgar music blasting into a grocery store.

The owner of Tantra is attending the meeting! He’s there on the zoom! But no one asks him a question, so he can’t say anything.

The P&Z vote is unanimous: Tantra’s alcohol permit comes with a 60 decibel cap.

The whole discussion takes just over five minutes.

How bad is 60 decibels?

The problem is that 60 decibels is actually very quiet:

So P&Z has effectively killed live music at Tantra with this decision.

So Tantra appealed P&Z’s decision at City Council this week.

The stakes are high! It takes 6 votes to overturn a P&Z decision.

First off, Council is absolutely flooded with emails and speakers. They got over 200 emails. Between Citizen Comment and the public hearing, there are over 50 people speaking in person. The major themes are “This place is community. This place is love. This place makes me happy when life gets hard.” It’s a pretty amazing testimony.

Everyone’s favorite speaker is a kid who plays the harmonica for council, and explains that they’ll be playing at Tantra on Friday, because Tantra is the only family-friendly music establishment that allows kids to perform. It was adorable.

My favorite written comment – hilarious, but maybe less adorable:

I love a straight-talker. I laughed.

Basically, Council listens to 2.5 hours of people pleading them not to kill their happy place.

Several people have decibel readers with them, and point out that this very city council meeting has ranged from about 70-90 decibels!

(Staff also provided this corrective to the specific noise ordinances mentioned at P&Z:

So San Marcos is not an outlier.)

Council discussion

Right off the bat, it’s clear that it’s going to be reversed. No one is defending the ridiculous 60 decibel cap.

Mark Gleason proposes:

1 year permit instead of a 3 year permit
75 decibels after 7 pm on Sundays

No one goes for either of these propositions.

Amanda Rodriguez – our new, shiny councilmember! – asks about getting the owner reimbursed for the $750 appeals fee. Everyone is on board with this, but it’s a whole process. So yes, but not tonight.

Both Alyssa Garza and Mark Gleason say, “This is why the community has to show up at P&Z meetings!”

I think that’s wrong! This should have been an easy case at P&Z. It would be exhausting if you had to rally all your clientele every time an ordinary alcohol permit needed to be renewed. Tantra was in good standing and had not violated any conditions of their permit.

Really, P&Z made a mangled mess of this permit. No one could have seen this coming. They should have spent more than five minutes on this discussion (and perhaps staff should have encouraged them to postpone when they felt it was going off the rails.)

THE VOTE TO REVERSE THE DECIBEL BAN:

Council knows which side its bread is buttered on.

Finally, let’s talk about swear words.

Some band was playing Rage Against the Machine songs on a Sunday night. There was profanity. You could hear it at HEB.

But listen: Can we stop pretending that bad words make little childrens’ ears bleed?

You can say a really kind, nice sentence with the word “shit” in it, and you can cruelly eviscerate someone without using any bad words at all. The absolute deference that this country pays to naughty words is mind-boggling.

One last nerdy note:

Decibels are a logarithmic scale. If you increase by ten units, you’ve multiplied the sound by a factor of 10. So Garber’s proposal to go from 85 db to 60 db was gigantic: he actually scaled the cap by 1/500th.

If he had only dropped the cap to 82 db, he could have cut the sound in half, without anyone being the wiser. (Nice chart here.)

Hours 3:22-4:16, 2/7/23

February 12, 2023 by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 20: Sean Patrick’s

You know, the Irish bar downtown:

Back in December, they applied to P&Z for a renewal of their alcohol permit.

At the same meeting, Industry was up for a renewal of their alcohol permit, too.

Industry, of course, is right next to the Dunbar neighborhood. A lot of people are very cranky about the noise coming from Industry. In response, P&Z said “No live music after 10 pm.”

Then Sean Patrick’s came up. There haven’t been any noise violations against Sean Patrick’s. But P&Z made an issue out of it, kinda out of nowhere. They changed Sean Patrick’s hours of live music from midnight to 10 pm.

This seemed way off-base to me. Sean Patrick’s is not near houses the way Industry is near houses:

P&Z wanted to be consistent, which is understandable. But the whole point of P&Z is to look at individual circumstances and make a judgement call. You do want consistency when it comes to values and ideology! Just not necessarily when it comes to outcomes.

So Sean Patrick’s appealed P&Z’s decision, and Council agreed. The bar gets its live outdoor music back, after all. At least until midnight.

…

Item 6: The SMART Terminal got revisited for about two seconds.

Alyssa brought the item up for discussion. She is a “no” on the SMART Terminal. But they’ve gotten a lot of complaints and questions over email. So she asks if the other council members – the ones who want the SMART Terminal – could respond to these citizen questions and complaints.

Translation: We all know this is going to pass, and we all know people are furious. Why don’t you all go on record addressing the environmental concerns and all the rest of it?

Jane Hughson said, “Why don’t we update a FAQ about the project? We can make it available to the public online!”

Translation: Or how about we don’t? Staff can script some soothing language about “dialogue” and “different stake-holders” and this will all go away.

And lo, that’s how it’ll go.

…

Item 24: Council appointments to all the various committees

This got postponed. Womp-womp.

It really is understandable. It was getting late, and Council has been there since 3 pm. It takes like an hour to go through all the committees. It’s also kind of a bummer, since many of the nominees have been watching for four hours, waiting for this.

Alyssa speaks up: she crunched the numbers on the applicants, and they’re overwhelmingly old and white. She brought this up last year as well. When are we going to take this seriously?

Jane defends city staff and how they worked hard to publicize the committee process.

That’s not really relevant – staff does work really hard! No one is criticizing staff! But what we’re doing isn’t working.

Jane says that she does think it would be better to push the process out a month and give more people time to apply.

That can’t hurt, but it also won’t solve the problem.

Alyssa says that only part of the problem is the publicity – the process also has to be demystified. It’s intimidating to sign up for a board or commission, especially if you consider yourself to be an outsider to the process.

Jane says it’s much better than it was five years ago. Also true, but not sufficient.

My opinion: it won’t change until we overhaul community outreach. We have to have relationships with the key individuals who work at churches, barber shops, and bars and restaurants that function as community spaces. And I specifically mean venues that cater to underrepresented groups in town: Hispanic communities east of I-35.

There is just no shortcut to building relationships. It’s time-consuming. It goes faster if your staff is also a part of the underrepresented communities, but that’s kind of a chicken-and-egg problem.

…

Items 25-26: Top Secret Executive Session

Obviously I don’t know what happens in the room where it happens, but the topics are very interesting:

1. Albian Leyva vs Ryan Harman and Jacinto Melendrez. This is the excessive force/tasing incident. This incident is pretty extreme. At the January 17th work session, one of the Mano Amiga representatives read outloud from the internal police investigation. (You can go listen here, starting at about 8 minutes in.)

It’s pretty awful. Melendrez is the second officer who also tazes Leyva.

This is from the Mano Amiga FB page:

2. Eric Cervini, et al. vs. Chase Stapp, Brandon Winkenwerder, Matthew Danzer, and City of San Marcos

I’m guessing this is the Biden Bus incident? It’s been two years. I am very interested in there being some consequences for this.

3. Repealing Meet and Confer. Obviously we know how this turned out. (This part of Executive Session was held early on.)

Plus some miscellaneous conservation of land items, and personnel things.