Tag: CUP

Hours 0:00 – 7:27, 2/3/26

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

The biggest topic of the night is the data center. 12 people spoke:

  • 1 in favor
  • 10 opposed
  • One neutral board member from Crystal Clear Water, who says some interesting things.

I’ll summarize everyone’s comments when we get to Item 11.

Other topics:

  • The Teacher Re-use nonprofit in San Marcos sounds great.
  • San Marcos is busy, and needs more businesses!
  • Loose pit bulls attacked my dog and me, and neither SMPD nor Animal Control nor the animal shelter was willing to do anything about it.
  • The KZSM issue (2 speakers)

The KZSM issue: KZSM 104.1 is the local non-commercial FM station in town. (They’re great! Check them out here!) As the speaker says, “We bring the voices, music and culture of San Marcos to the airwaves, streaming and podcasting.”

The city used to also have it’s own radio station, KZOS. In 2022, the city agreed to shut it down and transfer the assets to KZSM. This was a big generous move, and everyone was happy.

But the city didn’t finish the transfer. Like, it fizzled out and lost momentum? You can still listen to KZOS here, and the city is apparently still paying streaming fees and music licensing fees.

The speakers say: “We have tried for more than a year to explain the facts to City staff, to ask them to correct the website and to keep its promise. That is, to transfer the hardware, software and music library to KZSM. That will turn off the KZOS stream… We could use the money the City is paying for this, since we have to pay these fees out of whatever we can get from donations.”

I gotta say: I’ve never heard of KZOS and it’s wild that the city is running a tiny, redundant little radio station.

…

Item 9: Historic Preservation Plan

Last time, community members had a lot of concerns about the plan. The plan has good details, but it is short on the implementation part. What’s prioritized? What’s first? Is this all going to get shelved and forgotten? Etc.

Staff brought back a summary of all the complaints:

Basically, they’re adopting all the red and blue comments. If you want to read all 39 pages of comments, knock yourself out, here.

There’s going to be an oversight committee that governs the rest, and quarterly reports to Council.

The vote:

I think Matthew and Lorenzo did not yet trust the implementation process.

If you’d like to read the plan yourself, enjoy it here.

On we go!

…

Item 10:  Post Road and Uhland

About a year ago, this little strip came to Council for rezoning:

It was these eight plots of land:

And the owner wanted to convert them to condos.

Notice how the top corner lot is missing?  That brings us to today:

There it is! It’s the missing corner lot. They want to rezone this corner to match the rest.  Great!

Everyone is fine with this.

….

Item 11: The Data Center

Back story: Discussed previously here, here, here, here, here.

Super short version:

  • March 2025: Maberry wants to rezone his land to build a data center.
    There is a huge outcry from the public. P&Z denies the rezoning.
  • August 2025: The rezoning goes to council.
    It needs 6 votes to overturn P&Z. Maberry only gets 5 votes.
  • January 2025: Maberry re-applied for his rezoning to P&Z.
    This time P&Z approves it.

Now it’s back to council. No vote tonight – it is just a public hearing.

Two notes:

1. Every step of the way, there has been a massive outcry from the community. There are hours of citizen comments, town halls, letters written, etc. A lot of people are furiously opposed to this data center.

2. There are a lot of data centers being built in Hays County.

These are the local data centers I know about so far:

  1. Maberry, the one that Council will vote on.
  2. Carson properties, see below
  3. I don’t know who. These guys call it the “Doster property“
  4. Cloudburst Data Center (already being built)

None of those, besides Maberry, can be stopped, because they’re all in the county.

And here are the ones in Texas:

About 400 so far.

…

Public Hearing:

There are 14 more speakers: 3 in favor, 11 opposed. (Some speak twice.) I’m combining all the major points from earlier in the meeting and this public hearing.

Here are the major points from the activists:

  • Data centers use an unbelievable amount of water. We’re in a severe drought.
  • They use a ton of electricity, and electric plants also use a lot of water
  • This is not going to create many jobs.
  • You’re ignoring the comp plan!
  • You’re ignoring hundreds of people.
  • It’s extremely difficult to win lawsuits against companies that use more water than they’re allowed to use.
  • This will cause ERCOT to grow the grid, which uses more water.
  • Crystal Clear Water is in water-debt and in financial debt. But they’re legally obligated to provide water that they literally don’t have.
  • This is a violation of the Land Development Code
  • The optics of this are horrible.

And the arguments from the supporters:

  • These will be union labor jobs!
  • We’re willing to make lots of concessions. You can’t negotiate with any of the data centers in the county.
  • This petition thing is bullshit! (more below)

One neutral person speaks: he is from the Crystal Clear Water Board. Crystal Clear is the folks who would be providing water to Maberry. He says:

  • Maberry claimed that he’s putting water use in the restrictive covenant, and that the water use is about half of what it would be if he built homes out there.
  • As a board member, I would like to clarify: he only has a residential use agreement. He’s not allowed to substitute for commercial, industrial, or agriculture uses. Strictly residential.

…

Two technical points that might swing this decision towards the activists?

  1. The waiting period.

(There has been confusion about Council’s non-denial. If Council denies a rezoning, there is a one-year waiting period. However, Council did not technically deny the data center last August.)

But there was a second technicality pointed out!

This is from the Land Development Code, section 2.5.1.2.F:

Maybe this does apply. Maberry did withdraw their zoning request after that meeting in August.

2. The Valid Petition

In Texas, there is something called “a valid petition“. This is a way for neighbors to prevent a rezoning. If 20% of the neighbors within 200 yards sign a valid petition, then the rezoning requires a supermajority at City Council.

So this is what the neighbors have done.

This might be a game-changer, because the data center can probably get 4 council votes, but not 6 council votes.

One side note on the valid petition

It is mostly signed by residents who own farms next to this site. But the last signature on the petition is not from a home-owner:

Carson Properties signed the petition. They also want to build a data center, right next to Maberry.

The home-owners are the ones who did the hard work of collecting signatures. But the petition definitely benefits Carson’s ability to build their data center.

…

Let me address the activism directly:

The activists are in an impossible position, because Texas politics is very rigged:

  1. They care deeply about the environment and critical drought in central Texas. (Me too!)
  2. Data centers, as an industry, pose a real existential threat to the water resources in this state.
  3. Texas has entrenched systems that make it virtually impossible to fight the data center industry.

This is a slow-motion trainwreck, and it’s really awful.

Maberry is a lightning rod for all this activism and anger, because he uniquely made the dumbass decision to get his land annexed into the city. So out of 400 data centers in Texas, this one can be fought.

A victory against Maberry is symbolic, but not much more than symbolic.

Here’s what Council’s decision is:

My two cents

I am a little exasperated with the activists, because I don’t like extremely hyperbolic language. I hear lots of people overstating the situation – “people will die!” and “the river will run dry!” and “there is literally no reason to vote for this!” – and none of that is accurate.

But far more than that, I’m angry at the state government. We’re in this no-win situation because they refuse to do their job.

I think the real path forward probably involves following:

  • Legal battles from water districts who are legally obligated to supply water that they do not have.
  • Legal battles from counties that have no mechanism to regulate natural resources
  • Activists and environmentalists who are extremely concerned about the drought.
  • ERCOT needs to continue to transition to low-water energy sources like wind and solar
  • the Texas Water Development Board needs to step in to help coordinate all this.

My sincere hope is that the activists see themselves as part of a much larger fight than just Maberry’s data center.

What does Council say?

Barely anything! There’s no vote tonight.

Here’s where we are on the timeline:

The big discussions and votes will happen on February 17th and March 3rd.

That is when all the wheeling-and-dealing will take place. Stay tuned.

…

Sidebar: Valid petitions are also called Tyrant’s Vetos, and they are generally not good:

Valid petitions are an obscure zoning procedure that have been used to try to obstruct a Dallas hospital expansion, student housing in Bryan, and Habitat for Humanity houses in Austin.

Lefty groups generally do not like them because they are anti-democratic and a big NIMBY problem. They make it incredibly easy to block things (like affordable housing) that a city needs to support its residents. Last year, the Texas legislature fixed it to some extent.

…

Item 12: Rooftop on the Square

This is one of those clubs on the square.  It’s located here:

and looks like this:

They first opened in 2012. Based on their webpage, it looks like this:

It advertises “first class vibes”, and looks like a good place to get blackout drunk and get felt up.  Maybe that’s your jam!

It is NOT the jam of P&Z.  

So, the Rooftop first pissed off P&Z back in August, 2025. The Rooftop is technically a restaurant and not a bar. (Can’t you tell?) So they have a restaurant alcohol permit, not a bar alcohol permit. This means that they’re supposed to be selling at least a little bit of food and pretending that patrons are not merely trying to get blackout drunk.

They were not selling any sort of food.

Here’s how Code Compliance writes things when they are really fed up with a business:

In August, due to all these shenanigans, P&Z gave the Rooftop a 3 month alcohol permit.

They were supposed to:

  1. Get some sort of food service up and running
  2. Get that nasty health violation stuff cleaned up.
  3. Keep your nose clean for three months.

December, 2025: they did not keep their noses clean!

1. The food stuff is fine: first they worked out something with Bagel Bros, and then replaced Bagel Bros with a food truck.  Great!

2. The health inspection stuff is so-so: they mostly got this stuff cleared up, but Matthew Mendoza toured the place and found it disgusting, even after they’d been working on it for awhile. He reported seeing these little buzzballz liquor bottles stashed all over the place:

3. Did they at least keep their noses clean? No. They got NINE police calls during that same three month window. 

To be fair, some of those were initiated by Rooftop staff. You don’t want to ding an establishment for calling the cops themselves. But the one that is a really big problem is Halloween weekend.

If you remember, that was the night that a person was killed downtown. That killing did not specifically involve the Rooftop, but a bunch of other stuff did.

So what did involve the Rooftop?

Here’s the police report from that one night:

Here’s the fire marshal report about why the Rooftop was shut down that night:

The fire marshal said to the manager, “I can either close you down, or we can empty the place and count how many people leave.”

The manager said, “Let’s empty the place out, and count!”

No one can recall the exact number of people who came out of the Rooftop, but the fire marshal decided it needed to be closed down.

Finally, and most damning of all, this police bit from after the shooting:

I mean, dude. DUDE. You’re letting in underage dudes with guns in their pajamas! While you’re on probation! If you’re trying to smooth things over with the grown-ups at P&Z, this ain’t the way.

Over the next few weeks, there was some mixed communication between SMPD and the manager, as SMPD tried to locate the Rooftop surveillance video for the night. It got automatically erased after seven days.

Bottom line: due to all this, P&Z denied the alcohol permit.  No booze for you, Rooftop.

…

Which brings us to tonight!

The Rooftop is appealing the P&Z decision. This means that it will take a supermajority of councilmembers to overturn the P&Z decision. In other words, it takes 6 votes out of 7 to overturn the denial.

At the public hearing, there are four people from the Rooftop who all try to plead their case:

  • We’ve gotten LOTS of renewals since 2012!
  • Sometimes WE’RE the good guys who called the cops!
  • On that crazy Halloween night, all the bars were shut down, not just us!
  • We have metal detector wands and dress codes.
  • Listen, it was a mix up about the security video from Halloween night.

And then there was the lawyer, who was mostly very repetitious:

  • This is arbitrary and capricious!
  • This is hearsay!
  • Quasi-judicial setting!
  • Not clear and substantial new evidence!
  • You can’t make decisions on emotions! P&Z does everything emotionally!

She seemed to be mostly threatening to sue if they were shut down.

Ok then.

What does Council say?

Matthew is a hard no: “When I toured your establishment, you all were very dismissive of all these problems. There were ball bottles stashed everywhere. There was a nasty patch in the kitchen that still wasn’t clean.”

SMPD:

  • This was not arbitrary and capricious.
  • It’s not hearsay when it comes from a police report.
  • We were at the Rooftop because of a fight – not arbitrary nor capricious.
  • The fight spanned two locations.
  • They were the only bar closed for overcrowding, before the shooting. All the other bars were shut down because of the shooting.

Manager:

  • We wand and pat down every person that enters!
  • Two separate lines for 18+, 21+
  • There’s a dress code! No baggy pants, no sweatsuits, no jerseys, no do-rags.

Alyssa: Sounds a little bit racist!

(I had that same thought.)

Code compliance:

  • We flagged a LOT of problems in September.
  • Since then, they’ve been very cooperative. Almost everything code-related is cleared up.

Lorenzo does his very Lorenzo thing, where he gets bogged down in overly technical amendments. “What if they try to outsmart us and serve food during the daytime and not serve food at nighttime? We should require two full time periods! No, we should limit their hours of operation! But what about the Superbowl on Sunday? Are they trying to pull a fast one on us?” None of this goes anywhere.

…

Other amendments that they consider:

  • Making the alcohol permit last 4 months. (this passes)
  • Make them 21 and up (this does not pass)
  • They must hire more off-duty cops (I don’t remember).

At one point, Josh Paselk asks SMPD Chief Standridge point blank: “Can you all work with this business? Do you feel okay about them?”

Chief Standridge: “We can work with ANYBODY. We will always do our best to keep the community safe! That said, the rest of the downtown businesses are sick of underage kids getting blackout drunk and puking everywhere.”

I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but that’s the gist of it. The Downtown Business Association would like to see some accountability among the bar owners.

Two hours later, the vote to restore the alcohol permit for the Rooftop:

<drumroll…> (Remember it needs six votes to pass)

That’s not a supermajority! IT FAILED.

The Rooftop has lost it’s alcohol permit.

….

How long until they can reapply and reopen? The city lawyer said he needed to stop and look it up, but then we never found out. It might be one year.

(I hunted around the Land Development Code and couldn’t figure it out, either.)

…

Item 13: Whisper PDD

Whisper PDD is this development, way up north:

PDD stands for “Planned Development District” and it means that there are all sorts of fiddly rules about what they can and can’t do.

What these guys want to do is….

a FOURTH HEB?! what? Didn’t we just break ground on our THIRD HEB?

Guys, this is like an embarrassment of riches. We’re going to be swimming in HEBs. You’re going to have so many high quality groceries from this good-hearted company, you’re not going to know what to do with yourself.

Here’s where it will go:

Everyone is a hard yes.

Just one thought: they’re not going to try to shut down little HEB, are they? It’s so well-loved.

…

Item 5: New train bridge!

Maybe you’ve noticed that we have a lot of trains in San Marcos. Here are the railroad lines through town:

source

This is why the trains sometimes completely stop – they’re merging or crossing tracks or avoiding another train.

Here’s the south side of town:

The tracks are running parallel to I-35. When there’s a train stopped, you have to go to Wonderworld to go over it (or find the end of the train and go around it).

But change is a-coming! Good news, Centerpoint fans! YOU get a train bridge!

You lucky dogs. Now don’t spend it all in one place.

…

Item 8: Downtown security

SMPD is trying to keep downtown from spinning out of control on the weekends.

They struck a deal with Texas State PD: Texas State is kicking in $150K to help pay for officers downtown.

Just this once, though! It’s not an ongoing deal.

…

Item 15: Appointments to boards and commissions

We were already six hours deep in the meeting, and I didn’t know any of the names of the people being appointed, and so I didn’t listen very carefully to this bit.

Sorry about that!

Hours 0:00 – 2:04, 11/18/24

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:

  1. 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:

via

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

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

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen comment:

  1. 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.
  1. 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.
  1. 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:

photo credit

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

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.