Tag: Downtown

Hours 0:00 – 1:17, 12/2/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen comment:

There were 12 speakers, and only one topic: Flock Cameras

  • 10 people: they’re authoritarian and hijacked by ICE. Hard no.
  • 2 people: they keep us safe! yay cameras.

Lots and lots of details when we get to that item.

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Item 10: The Downtown TIRZ

TIRZ stands for “Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone”.   What this means is that we’re going to put more resources into a fixed area.  TIRZ #5 is the Downtown TIRZ.

Here is the boundary of it:

Boundary of the Downtown Tirz goes from Texas State, through downtown, to I-35

Here’s how a TIRZ works: First, you fix a baseline year. For the downtown, it’s 2011. Back then, the whole region had a taxable value of $103 million.  

San Marcos always gets to keep the taxes on  $103 million.  But the value of the land keeps growing. San Marcos agrees to split the taxes 70-30 on all the value added above $103 million, until the TIRZ runs out. (Hays County is also part of the deal.)

So in 2025, the land is now worth about $550 million. San Marcos keeps the taxes on the $103 million base, and then splits the taxes on the other $447 million. All told, the TIRZ gets about $1.2 million from San Marcos, and another $600K from the county, in 2025.

What does the TIRZ do with the money? The rules are that they have to spend it all on enhancing the downtown, which is supposed to increase its tax value all over again.

Today they’re adding a little bit extra to their plan. Here’s what they want to do:

The TIRZ expires in 2027.  After that, the city keeps all the tax revenue on that district.

Fine! Everyone likes it.

…

Item 12:  Rezoning 24 acres on Wonderworld and 123.

Here’s a little patch of land:

Here’s what it looks like if you’re going south on 123, on the Wonderworld overpass:

The developers want to make it CD-5.

What is CD-5?

In theory, CD-5 is supposed to feel like a cozy, dense downtown area where you have shops and apartments and all kinds of nifty things, kinda like on Sesame Street:

But inevitably, it always ends up looking like this:

Relentlessly giant apartment complexes. 

…

What about some stores and restaurants?

I’m not actually opposed to giant complexes! Housing is great.  But this intersection is a great spot for some stores and commerce, no? It’s a constant drumbeat that the east side needs more commerce.

Jane brings this up:  “Will you all put in some commerce?”

Developer: “Who can say? We’re so mysterious!” 

Jane: “It would be really great.”

But then no one on Council actually does anything.

COUNCIL!! You have powers!  There are zoning overlays and Planned Development Districts, where developers agree to make some portion of a development into commerce.  

But here’s Council:

So Council just tells the developer, “Fingers crossed! Thoughts and prayers for commerce!” and leaves it at that.

….

Is this re-zoning a good idea? Let’s be a little systematic about it:

Five Questions For New Developments

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

There’s a lot of development around this already, and this will be dense.  This is a good financially for the city. A+

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

We’re still in a housing deficit, and more housing is good.  So I’m fine with this.

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

Not environmentally sensitive, not a flood zone. And it won’t be sprawl, because CD-5 has to be dense.  So doing well here, too.

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

I doubt it will be meaningfully mixed income.  Developers don’t care.  It drives me crazy though – wealth segregation is a societal problem.   

It is very close to two elementary schools, Goodnight middle school, and SMHS, and also Bonham pre-K.   There are some restaurants near those schools. 

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

This is literally what CD-5 should be.  A Marxist blogger can dream.

My $0.02: If I were on Council, I’d push hard for a zoning overlay that guaranteed some commerce. But if that was impossible, I’d vote yes, anyway.

…

The vote on rezoning:

Everyone: YES!

No one: no. 

So there you have it. 

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Item 6: Mural at the Price Center. (Cousin to Panic! at the Disco.)

This item is peak ridiculous, in all the best ways. This is why I love local politics: everyone’s a regular person, and regular people are totally absurd.

This is the Price Center:

It’s right behind Tantra, facing San Antonio St:

It’s mostly a public event space – there are concerts and shows inside, people rent it out for parties, there are market days where you can buy stuff from vendors, etc.

Here’s the front steps:

No one ever uses this entrance.  You walk around through the garden to go in.

Today’s item is about a mosaic mural to go on the front steps.  In other words, it’s a single picture that will be cut into strips, and go on the risers, like this:

Maybe you’ve seen a photo of the proposed mosaic! If you haven’t yet seen it, I’m going to withhold it until the end of this item, for maximum comedic value.

Because this is what Jane Hughson posted to the message boards ahead of time:

This mosaic definitely involves cacti, and Jane is NOT a fan. 

During the meeting, Jane brings up more points:

  • The mural is beautiful! But the cactus? Hard no. 
  • We’re trying not to have spiky plants like yucca downtown, because they are hazardous if someone falls in them.
  • We’re not Arizona. Feh, Arizona!
  • Cacti are prickly and unwelcoming.

Lorenzo agrees: it does hurt to fall in a cactus.

City Staff:  Some artists like cacti!  It’s subjective.

Amanda:  Cacti stand for our cultural heritage in Mexico!

Alyssa: I love ’em. Also they’re delicious.

Shane:  If we asked the artist to take out the cactus and re-do it, and they said no, what are the sunk costs? 
Answer: $1000.

Saul: I guess I’m a yes, because I don’t want to waste $1000.

…

ARE YOU READY TO SEE SOME CACTI?

Pause for a second.

Before you see it, I want you to picture an unwelcoming, prickly mayor cactus.  Get a good visual image in your head, before you scroll down.   What kind of cactus would be too hostile for the front steps?

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Ready?? 

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READY??

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Here’s the proposed artwork:

Guys. GUYS. It’s so beautiful.  It’s mostly prickly pear flowers, more than anything else.  There’s nothing remotely hostile here.

This is the mural that we almost killed for being too prickly!  What a world.

….

The vote on the beautiful mural:

Yes, we love it!! :  Amanda, Alyssa, Saul, Shane, and Matthew

Ow, thorns: Lorenzo, Jane

So there you have it. Small town politics, eh?

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?

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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”.

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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:

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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.

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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.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 3/18/25

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Two workshops this week!

Workshop #1: Update on Downtown plan
Workshop #2: Privacy policy on SMPD License Plate Scanners

….

Workshop #1: Listen, this was great. I just ran out of time to write it up properly, so it’s a little short.

We approved the Downtown plan in 2023.

So now we’re implementing it:

So far, we’ve done a bunch of great stuff!

Here’s what we’re in the middle of doing:

And here’s what we’re going to do next:

And here’s what we need, to do it:

Like I said, I’m shortchanging a really enjoyable presentation. Go listen!

…

Workshop #2: License Plate Readers

In February, SMPD asked Council to approve a bunch of license plate readers.

We had literally just talked about privacy with respect to technology, and these definitely require privacy protections. So we postponed the purchase until we had an updated privacy policy.

Here we are! Policy time.

…

What is FLOCK?

So in other words, there are seventeen intersections in San Marcos that are recording your license plate every time you drive by. (And soon there will be thirty locations.)

Is that reassuring? There’s still a lot of ways that this can go wrong.

How it works:

So basically, SMPD owns the data, but it’s located on the FLOCK system. If you have a crime in mind, you log in and run a query, and then it tells you which license plates were at that location, or it tells you all places a specific car went, or whatever.

Council had three big concerns:

We’ll take these one at a time.

Retention periods: how long do they keep the data?

We’re currently 30 days, and Chief Standridge makes the case that we need to stay at 30 days.

There’s no slide for this part, but he’s basically saying, “People don’t report crimes right away. Sometimes the crime isn’t even discovered for a week or two. If you don’t have the crime reported for two weeks, that eats up a lot of your time to query the data base for the license plate.”

He had his crime analyst go back into the system and pull the average length of time people waited to report various crimes, in 2024 in San Marcos. He says:

  • Criminal sexual contact: average 513 days delay
  • Forcible rape: average 640 days delay
  • Credit card ATM fraud (ie, steal your wallet or purse from your car and go to the nearest ATM): delay of 103 days
  • Shoplifting: average 21 days delay.
    (This is because stores submit the theft to corporate, and corporate decides whether or not it meets the threshhold to bring in the local SMPD.)

I mean, ok. This makes the case that the cameras aren’t actually helping you solve most of these crimes, but point taken on the delay in reporting.

…

Onto 2: Privacy Concerns:

They’re proposing a bunch of amendments to current policy.

Great.

The “TBP” bit stands for “Texas Best Practices”, which is an accreditation thing.

Amanda asks if we can include “economic status” to the list of protected statuses? In other words, no targeting an intersection because it’s known that homeless people are camping near there.

Sounds great to me! Everyone is on board with this.

Next:

What the hell – until now, you didn’t need reasonable suspicion or probable cause to run a query?!

Anway, now you do.

There’s a bunch of details here!

  • You get regular training.
  • You have to supply a case number when you run a query.
  • Later on, someone else in SMPD will be double-checking all the queries to make sure they make sense.
  • SMPD will not give the data to any private entity.

These are definitely huge improvements.

…

We’re sticking with 30 days, but we’re no longer going to grant exceptions:

3. Data sharing with other organizations:

There’s going to be an MOU, or Memorandum of Understanding. Any other law agency that wants San Marcos data has to sign this MOU.

The MOU isn’t written yet. But it’s going to require that officers in other jurisdictions follow all the same rules as us. Specifically, there must be a case number. You can’t just be looking people up.

And there will be a portal with general information available to the community.

Finally, misusing the system is a crime:

and you can get punished for it:

…

One weird thing about Flock Cameras is that anyone can buy them and join in. The outlet malls probably have them, your apartment complex or HOA could have them. Anyone who cares enough about who is coming and going can buy one.

Will we share our data with any old HOA or shopping mall?

Not anymore!! (But JFC, we sure used to play fast and loose with this data. The deleted part in red is wild.)

There’s some discussion of ICE in all this. We’ve opted out of immigration tracking. But there are some laws (SB4) which may or may not make this more complicated.

…

My opinion: These are really big amendments that make the system safer. I am still wary about license plate readers and Flock Safety, but this is at least much better.

Hours 1:58 – 4:01, 10/17/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 15: The Downtown Area Plan

The Downtown Area Plan is more than just the CM Allen District, but that’s definitely the part that sucks up all the oxygen in the room.  (Discussed here last time.)

Still, let’s take a moment to pay attention to the rest:

And here are the major points:

The thing is: downtown is already owned and zoned. You can’t demand or legislate hardly anything. All you can do is entice and form partnerships and collaborate with the people who run the things located there.

So let’s move onto the CM Allen District, which we discussed last time:

There was a Downtown Area Plan committee, who came up with Option 1:

Option 1:

Five Story Loaves of Bread:

Similarly to VisionSMTX, the shadow subcommittee of P&Z plus Jane Hughson was horrified, and rewrote it.

Hence Option 2:

Given that the city doesn’t actually own all that land, the Planning Department tried to thread the needle and come up with a compromise option:

Option 3:

Colorful, vibrant, smaller loaves of bread:

At P&Z, we heard about the unaffordability of Option 2. P&Z voted for Option 2 anyway.

This time the staff presentation spends even longer on the complete unaffordability of it:

  • Basically, downtown land is worth much more than anywhere else in town. 
  • Right now, the 6.25 acres are mostly undeveloped, but they bring in this much taxable revenue:

The whole thing is 6.25 acres, so I’m going to ballpark the yearly revenue at $456K for the three lots marked.  A community member says that if they were developed, they’d pull in $3 million/year for the city.  Maybe?

No one can really say how much it would cost to acquire the parks, but if we had to say, staff puts the market value at $27 million dollars.

The city staff are always so professional, and so they presented all options neutrally, but I definitely got whiffs of Springfield Monorail from Option B:

Besides the magical thinking of the price tag, there’s also serious equity issues here.

Here is how the current parks are distributed throughout the city:

You may notice that there’s barely anything east of 35. People who live east of 35 have noticed this too, and are not amused. (They’ve also noticed a bunch of other patterns of systematic disregard. Isn’t that something!)

So what does the public think?

MO-NO-RAIL! MO-NO-RAIL!  Ahem.

  • Giant student housing will make parking way worse downtown.
  • There’s a shallow water table under CM Allen, and drilling into the rock wil fracture it.
  • If Texas State buys this land, we’re hosed.
  • The procedure was not democratic. Option 2 preys on emotions.
  • There are serious accessibility issues downtown for people in wheelchairs. This plan doesn’t address any of that.
  • The college students run downtown and grown ups don’t feel welcome.
  • We can find much better ways to spend $27 million dollars than this.
  • Car dependency is bad, it’s better to put more housing in walkable areas like downtown.

In actuality: there are three in favor of Option 2, five opposed, and one speaking on accessibility issues.

Council discussion:

Mark Gleason goes first:

  • He loves the vision of #2. He wishes we could afford it.
  • There’s absolutely no way he can go face constituents on the East Side and tell them he voted to spend $27 million on more West side parks.
  • It’s already zoned, it’s not undeveloped like the Woods
  • This won’t stop flooding.
  • Not ideal, but #3 is best. We must to something to help the rest of town.

I certainly agree with all of that! He also talks about how there’s going to be a trail around the whole city, which is a reference to the Elsik Tract.

(I can see the marketing now! “A River Runs Through Us, That Historic Trail Also Runs Through Us, and a Loop Runs Around Us.” Practically a spaghetti bowl of significance!)

Jane goes next: She literally says “I need to do some ‘splaining,” which is endearing.

  • Her ‘splaining: The graphics freaked her out, and she wanted some green space. Never pictured golf course style mock up. Never said “Eminent Domain” or millions of city money. 
  • The idea was that if you don’t explicitly ask for green space, you’ll get zero. If you do ask, maybe you’ll get a little.

Jude: There are better places to turn into parks than this. Could City Hall move here? Hotel, civic space?

Alyssa: I don’t like any of them, but I agree with Jude and Mark. 

Shane: What about a splash pad downtown? I’m here for families! Families first! These are the last tracts along the river. Option 2!

Saul: I’m born and raised in San Marcos. There were no skyscrapers back then. Whenever I talk to anyone, they say “Why are there so many skyscrapers downtown? Why is there so much student housing?” That’s not San Marcos. Plus, it’s a slippery slope. What’s next, high rises all the way to 35? What if Texas State buys it? They don’t pay taxes or fees!  It’s for the kids. Bring back how it was!

[Side Note: “Why is there so much student housing?” Because the town loses their goddamn minds if students live anywhere else. Students are actually people, and they’re entitled to live in this town.

Sometimes students act like jerks! But so do rich people, and also middle-class people, and also poor people. People are jerks.]

Matthew: I had been a big fan of #2. Rio Vista Relief! But paid parking is coming. Where would this park’s parking be? 

We had a community meeting with Blanco Gardens on crime. Wasn’t well attended, and just me and Mark. They kept saying, “Why does the west get EVERYTHING?” Park distribution is not fair. East side is always neglected.

Matthew gave this huge impassioned speech about the plight of the east side, and then finished by saying, “And that’s why I’m on the fence!” which made me laugh. Way to undercut your own passion. 

Saul: Cape’s Dam is coming to the east side!

Matthew: But not, like, anytime soon.

The Vote on the CM Allen District:


Love me some Option 3!: Mark Gleason, Jane Hughson, Alyssa Garza, Matthew Mendoza, Jude Prather

Option 3 Gives Me a Sad: Shane Scott, Saul Gonzales

So there you have it.

The entire downtown plan will get revised to incorporate Option 3, and then will come back on November 6th for a final vote.

…

Item 12: Sights & Sounds

Apparently people ask Alyssa every year to keep an eye on S&S.  The former city manager gave her the runaround when she asked for documentation.  She asks if she could please get some straight answers. She’s told “no problem!”

…

Item 16: Land Development Code:

Last meeting, we were going to kick this back for two months, to give committees a chance to meet.  Now the planning department is asking if we could please just pass it, since it’s holding up a bunch of stuff, and they promise the committees will all meet promptly.

Sure: 7-0. So that’s that.