Tag: edwards aquifer

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 5/5/26

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Citizen Comment:

Two people spoke:

  • Stop putting up Native American creation imagery because it’s hostile to Catholics.
  • Virginia Parker, director of the San Marcos River Foundation: yay EAHCP! They put in Dog Beach, Rio Vista, Ramon Lucio stepped entries into our park.

…

Workshop 1: Incidental Take Permits

Here is the Edward’s Aquifer:

The green part catches all the rainfall. The light blue part is all the porous caves and springs, where the aquifer is right at the surface. The dark blue part is the storage tank of the aquifer.

The water only pops up in two places: the San Marcos and Comal rivers.

In 1991, the Sierra Club sued the US Fish and Wildlife Service, for not protecting the endangered species in these rivers. They won the lawsuit, and the Edwards Aquifer Authority was created with legal status to protect the flow of these two rivers. (Here is all the history you might ever want to know, and then some.)

…

So the Edwards Aquifer Authority’s job is to keep the rivers flowing. They are required to have a plan, and the plan has to get approved by the US Fish and Wildlife department.

The old plan is going to expire in 2028, and so we’re working on the new one:

“EAHCP” stands for Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan.

…

A big part of the new plan is the Incidental Take Permit:

Incidental Take Permit means “you’re going to disturb the endangered plants and fishies, so let’s plan to do it legally”. Otherwise you could get sued.

Here’s the things you might do that would be bad for endangered species:

  • swimming and playing in the river
  • Pumping water out of the Edwards Aquifer
  • Construction things that happen alongside the river

The biggest thing is pumping water out of the aquifer.

Here’s who gets permits to pump water:

  • Edwards Aquifer Authority – Total water available is about 500,000 acre-feet of water.
  • San Antonio Water System – gets allotted about 235,000 acre-feet of water/year
  • City of San Marcos – gets about 5000
  • City of New Braunfels – about 9000
  • Texas State University – about 2000

…

Next up on the ITP: making sure recreation on the San Marcos River doesn’t hurt the protected species.

Here are the specific activities we want to allow, in the EAHCP:

Here’s the type of thing EAHCP has done, so that people can swim without destroying the river:

They built the steps on the left, and fence off the stuff in the middle.

So we used to have a barren bank, very bad for the river, on the left here:

and now we have nice steps and a protected, healthy river bank. Hooray!

San Marcos is expected to also do some work:

Basically:

  • Keep people from swimming and messing with protected parts of the river, and help people have fun in designated areas.
  • Pick up a lot of litter.
  • When the river gets super low, we have to keep the habitat from getting hammered, by limiting how much people are going in the water.

…

The plan lays out how to measure whether or not the river is healthy enough for the species to survive.

They have to measure a bunch of things:

For example, here’s some of the goals for springflow:

Average flow of the San Marcos river is 175 cfs (cubic feet per second). Right now it’s about 90 cfs. It’s been about 90 cfs for the past few years.

The absolute lowest that’s okay is 45 cfs, and only if it doesn’t stay that low for very long. I can’t imagine the river only having half as much water as it does right now.

…

What’s the plan when the river gets low?

The Edwards Aquifer makes everyone cut back on pumping during a drought:

So San Marcos normally gets 5433 acre-feet per year. But if we were in a Stage 5 drought, we’d only be allowed to use 3042 acre-feet.

So that’s the blue line at the bottom of this chart: the amount of water that we’ll always be guaranteed to get from the Edwards Aquifer.

…

I might have misunderstood this next part. I think the Edward’s Aquifer Authority is going to buy back 100K acre-feet of water, and then use that to protect the river when it gets low.

….

Here’s another goal for the river:

they measure the amount of endangered plants, and plant more good plants, and remove more bad plants.

So we also have to take care of the plants:

They measure the animals:

Listen: if I hadn’t been listening to the presentation, I might have been freaked out by the photo on the top right. Doesn’t that guy look a little spooky, laying facedown like that?

They also raise the endangered species outside of the river:

in case of some natural disaster.

…

In total, here are all the conservation measures that San Marcos and Texas State University are supposed to implement:

It’s mostly things we’ve already been doing, under the old plan. They help us fund these, too.

…

So how much does this all cost?? It is expensive! About $28-30 million/year.

Cost of water rights will probably go up over the next 30 years, to pay for all this.

What does Council say?

Josh: How much does it cost to put this plan together?
Answer: Mostly staff time. About $2 million in grant money.

Amanda: Is the city already able to hold up our end of the bargain?
Answer: Yes, we contract out a lot of the conservation measures. It’s a lot of continuation of what we’ve been doing.

Jane: You say that we need to controlling access during extremely low flow events. What do you think this will look like?
Answer: There are a lot of unknowns. Could be paid access, parking access, might depend on what locations have been degraded. River hasn’t been at 45 cfs since the 1950s.

Jane: Are the fences along the banks less ugly?
Answer: Yes, they’ve been replaced with more aesthetically pleasing black fences.

Jane: We’re trying to stop promoting the river to tourists. Like the TxDot sign on 35 advertising river recreation.
Answer: It’s hard to get them to take their signs down.

Conclusion: We’re going to have a future conversation about how to downplay the river to tourists. Especially since water is such a big topic these days.

…

Workshop #2: Water and wastewater fees

We’re going to be raising impact fees later this summer. This presentation is mostly informational.

What’s an impact fee?

Great. This presentation is specifically about water and wastewater fees.

Developers only pay impact fees new developments. Nothing existing is going to have to pay any of these fees.

Here’s the past history:

Great.

There are rules for impact fees:

…

You can only charge an impact fee in your service area. So here’s where we can charge impact fees:

and here’s where we think people are going to build:

…

In order to compute impact fee rates, they need to know two things:

  • What’s the total cost of projects that need to be paid for by impact fees?
  • How many developers are going to be sharing those costs?

Let’s take those one at a time.

First: total cost of projects:

So they know where the growth is expected to happen, and so they can map out what kinds of water and wastewater projects will need to be completed so that all the new homes and buildings can get water impact.

Second: how many developers will be sharing the costs?

You want to charge them different amounts, according to how big the development is. So we go according to meter size.

Here’s how we translate meter size into number of homes:

In other words, we assume a 10-inch meter is equivalent to 350 homes.

After doing all that conversion, here’s the total number of “homes” that we’re providing water to:

…

So that would give the city what they need to compute the new impact fee rates:

Actual proposed rate hikes will come in June and July.

Council questions:

Josh: How do we compare to neighboring cities? Are we scaring off developers?
Answer: We benchmark with neighboring cities. We’re in line. It basically depends on how recently they’ve updated their impact fees. If they’re still going on 2015 rates, we’re higher.

Amanda: Do we incentivize reducing impact? Do we have reward programs for water re-use?
Answer: We’ll take this input and get back to you.

The city has a big reclaimed water facility. It doesn’t produce drinking water, but you can use it for cooling and irrigation. We run “purple pipe” to a bunch of places, like the Kissing Tree golf course, the power plant, the downtown plants, and some parts of the university.

Shane: What if they use reclaimed water. Does the purple pipe give a discount or anything?
Answer: No, it’s an entirely separate thing. This is only clean drinking water. It means they use less water, though, so that reduces their costs.

Lorenzo: Does the university pay impact fees?
Answer: Yep.

This is important, because the university skips a lot of local taxes, in general.

…

Workshop 3: Public Art Policy

In the last 20 years, we’ve put up way more public art!

There are a lot of decisions about what gets funded and where it’s located. How should we be transparent with the public on how these decisions are made? We need a Public Arts Policy.

We already have one, but it’s old:

For awhile it was just donations. Then around 2018, we commissioned the mermaids statues and Big Wavey:

Since then, we’ve gone on to do a lot more.

Some are big, like this mural behind Industry:

and some are little, like these traffic boxes:

I really love that traffic box.

…

Here’s the program that commissions and maintains these public art pieces:

So we’re trying to lock down some details and create a more formal Arts Policy. It’s going to cover things like: how do we maintain art? How do we approve things? How do we ensure these things sustain after we’re gone?

This is the planning stage.

Council questions:

Amanda: If we’re collaborating with a private organization, how are they consulted?
Shane: What about the public?
Answer: We hold lots of meetings with the collaborators, and at least one public meeting, unless it’s a super small project.

Alyssa: It’s great that we’re getting a reputation as a creative community.

Shane: What happens if someone tags a mural?
Answer: Murals actually prevent graffiti. People are less likely to tag murals. When it happens, we remove it or work with original artist to repair the mural.

Jane: What about murals on private buildings?
Answer: We go in halvsies. They have to keep it up for at least five years.

Then we get to The Big Conversation:

Jane: For major art, I want it to come to Council. I’m so embarrassed that we omitted the rattlesnake on the big mural, but we have a bobcat.

Jane is talking about this:

You see this mural as you’re driving on LBJ from I-35 towards downtown.

It makes Jane lose her mind every time, because there is a bobcat:

which obviously represents Texas State, but there is no rattlesnake in the mural, to represent SMCISD.

Jane is so upset about this mural that she wants a line-item veto on every major art piece that comes through San Marcos, because if she’d seen this design, she’d have asked, “Where’s the rattlesnake?”

I happen to totally agree with her – that mural needs a rattlesnake. However! Council should not have a line-item veto on artwork.

Listen: Edge cases make bad policy. If you have a single unusual bad situation, it’s going to have a lot of unique aspects, and you should not write general public policy with that case in mind. (And in fact, the very next time a mural came around, Jane tried to apply the lessons of the bobcat mural standard. She tried to ban a cactus painting for being prickly. It was a total mess.)

Staff: Best practices is that council and community provide the prompt up front, and give them what to go by.
Jane: That wouldn’t have saved the rattler problem. I want to see the art before it’s too expensive or too hard to change.

Shane, Matthew: YES!

Josh: We could make a list of ten principles! Artists could be required include three of ten!

(Note: oh god, this is how you end up with bland mush.)

Jane: Nope. I want to see the art and proofread it to make sure there’s a rattlesnake in it.

Amanda: Art is super subjective. We don’t want to tie the hands of the artists.

Josh: I don’t want to weigh in on art.

…

So what went wrong with that mural? Here’s the process of how murals are designed:

  • The arts commission talks with the building owner
  • Hold public meetings, get community direction and input
  • Call for qualifications to get a style
  • Pay 2-3 artists a stipend to get designs
  • Arts commission votes on 2-3 designs. Makes minor changes.

With that mural, the artist included every single thing that was mentioned in the community meeting.

City staff: And actually, it was not a Texas State bobcat. It was an actual bobcat, like a wildlife thing.

(Note: the bobcat is literally standing in front of Old Main, so I’m pretty sure it’s a Texas State bobcat.)

…

Alyssa: No. I don’t trust our judgement. Don’t you all remember our insane Gateway Sign discussions? We have terrible instincts. Leave it to the experts on the Arts Commission.

Josh: does the arts commission weigh in on highway signs?
Answer: No, that’s graphic design. It’s art but also functional.

(Apparently all the council members have gotten a lot of phone calls from community members who hate the gateway signs.)

Jane: Do you all know WHY we even have an arts commission?
Amanda: I don’t.
Jane: It was my idea!
Shane: in 1821.
Jane: it was 1998. I was on CDB, we were asked to do a lot of art design, and I was like, “I’m not qualified. We should have a commission.” Boom, you’re welcome.

Bottom line: they’re going to probably get to micromanage the art. We’ll see what the next draft of the Arts Policy looks like.

Hours 2:03 – 3:58, 5/7/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Onto council business!

Items 9-10: It’s been a while since we discussed La Cima. (Quick primer on La Cima development here.)

Basically, it was originally approved in 2013.

In 2014, it looked like this:

As of 2022, it looked like this:

It’s grown! It seems to keep growing, in fact.

The problem is that the entire development is in the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone. It’s incredibly sensitive land, but it keeps growing.  Anytime there’s an amendment to the Development Agreement, you should sit up straight and take a closer look.  

In this meeting, they’re not changing the actual La Cima Development Agreement.  So there’s nothing controversial here.  Today’s annexation is just following the existing agreement.

The highlighted pink part is what they’re about to start building now:

Have fun with that, you guys!

It’s going to be single-family houses.

….

Items 7-8:  We’re giving a bunch of Covid (ARPA) money to youth soccer and youth baseball, for scholarship money.   

Surge Soccer is getting $100K, and SMYBSA is getting $45K. 

Alyssa Garza asks: how easy will it be for parents to get these scholarships? There’s been a lot of problems with ARPA funds and all kinds of paperwork that make it too hard for community members to actually get the money.

No one really has an answer, but they say that it should be as simple as having a San Marcos address, since most of San Marcos is located in qualifying census tracts.

Unrelated Note:  I heard a rumor once that San Marcos Soccer was going to change their name to Smoccer, but instead they went with Surge Soccer.  Truly a missed opportunity, I don’t know how they sleep at night.

…

Item 2: (Items are out of order, because they got pulled off the consent agenda)

We’re selling more Edwards Aquifer water rights to Kyle.  

Just like last time, city staff emphasizes that Kyle is going to use this water whether or not we sell our rights, so we might as well collect the $7k – $1.5 million from them, for the proper water rights. 

They have to follow or strengthen all our drought restrictions. Currently, they’re running a tighter ship than we are, but then again, we just loosened our drought triggers considerably.

….

Item 12: Speed cushions!

This is Blanco Gardens:

(image via)

People drive like maniacs on Barbara Drive, and eventually the residents got sick of it. So they filed a petition. There was a survey and some data collection, and everyone agreed that this was a good idea.  

So they’re getting some speed cushions:

Hooray!

If you are also fed up with maniacs driving on your own block, reach out to these folks.

…

Item 13: Let’s woo some grocery stores on the East side of town, eh?

New Braunfels wooed HEB like so:

Kyles wooed Sprouts like so:

So we want to offer up some goodies for new grocery stores in San Marcos.  

Here’s some questions for Council to field:

  • Do we just want offers for the east side, or all over San Marcos? 
  • Do we only want big grocery stores, or are we open to a mix of big and little grocery stores?
  • Do we want to give them a property tax rebate, or a sales tax rebate, or both?
  • Do we want to offer them some grant money up front?

We’ll negotiate individually with any retailer. This is just putting something out there to negotiate.

So what does council think?

  1. Do we just want offers for the east side, or all over San Marcos? 

Jane Hughson is super enthusiastic that the west side needs more grocery stores. She mentions this several times. Most everyone else says they’re open to offers from all over town.

Alyssa is the one exception: her priorities are strictly the east side of town, and good paying jobs.

My two cents: we should not subsidize grocery stores on the west side.  We’ve specifically said that we do not want to encourage growth over the recharge zone, because run-off ends up in the underground springs that feed the river.  Rivers only run clear if the recharge zone is kept clean.

Second, the west side residents have higher incomes. This attracts grocery stores, as soon as there are enough people living there.  If a grocery store wants to open a location there, they already can.  But the lower incomes on the east side mean that even with tons of people, grocery stores won’t open there without subsidies.

  1. Just big grocery stores? (like 120,000 square feet or bigger). Or both big and little grocery stores?

Everyone’s open to a mix of big and little stores.  This is my preference, too.

  1. What kind of tax breaks? Jane Hughson makes a strong case for giving sales tax rebates instead of property tax rebates.  Basically, with a sales tax rebate, their rebate rises with their performance.  It aligns the incentives of the city and the store.  

They settle on a 5 year offer.  Both property and sales tax would rebate 80% in the first year, and then step down from there. 

4. Should we offer grant money up front?

No, we shouldn’t. No one likes this, and we’re not really set up to do it anyway.

Anyway: This is just a preliminary discussion. There will be more to come.

…

Item 15: Concrete

We’re paying for $1,000,000 of concrete. 

Honestly, it’s not very clear who we’re paying it to:

but I gather it’s these guys. (They spent about one minute on this item, so I have no details for you.)

Either way, I am amused by the acronym IDIQ, for Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity. Doing this forever and ever and ever.

….

Item 16: We’re building a Wastewater Treatment Plant!

We spent literally 3 minutes on this during the meeting, and there were no details given.

There is a slide show in the packet, which they did not present during the meeting. So I’m improvising here, with pictures like this:

Maybe the purple areas will be the areas served, and that green corner piece is where the plant will go?

Here’s a close up of that green corner piece from above:

Here’s one of those “I-35 Goes East-West” maps that I am so fond of:

The presentation says this will address all of San Marcos’s waste water needs through 2063.

That’s about all I can get out of that slide show!

Item 18: Purpose Built Student Housing

Back in January, there was a recommendation from the Neighborhood Commission that we end Rent-by-the-Bedroom leasing practices, or RBB. (Discussed previously here – they also wanted to re-instate the ban on 3 unrelated people living together.)

One problem is that the city does not regulate RBB. The city regulates Purpose-Built Student Housing, but these aren’t the same thing. You can have either one without the other.

Council decides that this topic is big enough that it needs a workshop discussion. So stay tuned on this.

Hours 3:19-4:07, 9/19/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Rally the troops. We’ve got to keep going. This meeting is just so densely packed with important information.

Next up:

Item 19: VISION SMTX.  

We’ve talked about Vision SMTX a lot.  It’s the new comprehensive plan. (What is a comprehensive plan? It’s the vague, conceptual plan for how we want San Marcos to grow over the next 30 years.) 

Quick background:
There was a 30 member citizen committee that met with a consultant over two years and came up with a plan. Then P&Z looked at it and said “fuck no!” Mayor Hughson and three P&Z members rewrote large parts of it, and that’s basically what’s before council now.

It now comes up three times before council:
– This current meeting: informational, with public comment
– First vote on October 17th, where the public can give feedback again
– Final vote on November 6th , (with no public comment)

Comments from the community:

  • we should tax businesses instead of giving them tax breaks
  • “Low Intensity” shouldn’t allow for heavy industrial. (In other words, SMART Terminal should never have been taken up for consideration out in a bunch of cow fields.)

Some philosophical ramblings

The comp plan does not end single-family zoning. San Marcos is not wading into that debate. But it’s simmering in the background.

The problem with single family zoning is that it’s very sparse. That means you’re building a lot of roads and utility pipes and lines, and increasing coverage of fire and police, without covering many people. That’s all very expensive to maintain over time. Single family zoning does not bring in enough money to pay for itself. If you live in a house, you are subsidized by apartments and businesses. In most cities, 70% of the land is zoned single-family.

Why has our city budget swollen to $315 million dollars? Because San Marcos has to run services Whisper Tract up north, Trace down south, La Cima out west, and Riverbend Ranch out east. All sprawl.

On top of that, we pretend there are only two ways to live:
1. sprawling single family neighborhoods, or
2. gigantic apartment complexes.

That’s it! Only two choices! Sorry! But that’s just super not true. The idea is to allow slow, incremental change, where now and then you can put a small four-plex on a single lot. It still feels like a neighborhood, but there’s housing for people who don’t need 3+ bedrooms in a house.

(In fact, it would feel like the goddamn Historic District, which was built before single family zoning was a thing, and now weeps piteously about it’s own demise any time you try to discuss any other neighborhood in the city.)

Then you can spread the tax burden across more units per acre, without driving up costs for the city. This actually reduces taxes!

Listen, council just spent THREE HOURS talking about the budget. The community seems to care a LOT about property taxes.

You want to know why the city struggles to balance it’s budget? Single family zoning.  You want to know why traffic keeps getting worse? Single family zoning.  You know who benefits from single family zoning? Anyone who got their house early or who can afford to pay a lot.  Fuck everyone else. 

If you want taxes to go down, you’ve got to spread the costs of government over more people, without creating more work for the city.  In other words: less sparse. More dense.

  • Allow people to rent rooms in their houses to others. (End occupancy restrictions!)
  • Allow people to build ADUs in their backyards
  • Allow 2, 3 and 4-plexes throughout any neighborhood. 

And my personal beef with single family zoning: stop segregating by wealth. It’s toxic and destructive. We are all part of the same community. 

I agree with Max about taxing businesses. But you also need more people to share the tax burden.

End of philosophical rant. Back to Vision SMTX.

Dr. Rosie Ray is probably the smartest person in town on this stuff. She spoke about Vision SMTX, back at the beginning of the meeting, but I saved it till now. She’s advocating for two small tweaks:

  1. City planners have a concept of a 15 minute city.

Here’s what wikipedia says about it:

The 15-minute city (FMC or 15mC)[1][2][3][4][5][6] is an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk or bike ride from any point in the city.[7] This approach aims to reduce car dependency, promote healthy and sustainable living, and improve wellbeing and quality of life for city dwellers.[8][9]

But the P&Z/Jane Hughson subcommittee put the phrase “or vehicles” into the definition for San Marcos. In other words “15-minute walk, bike ride, or car ride”. You can understand how that makes the whole “reduce car dependency” thing totally worthless, yes/yes?

So Dr. Ray (diplomatically) suggests we use the actual definition that the rest of the world uses. She’s much friendlier about it than I am.

2. P&Z/Jane Hughson created something called “Neighborhood Low – Existing” in the Preferred Scenario Map. The idea here was to freeze all existing neighborhoods in carbon, like Hans Solo, and prevent any of that gentle densification like ADUs, townhomes, or four-plexes that I talked about earlier. So they said that all existing neighborhoods are single family.

The problem – which Dr. Ray points out – is that a lot of current neighborhoods are not strictly single family. She herself lives in a condo! So they’ve made a lot of existing neighborhoods out-of-conformance with being existing neighborhoods. If you don’t allow multiplexes – that are already there! – from being part of existing neighborhoods, then the people who live in them will have much more trouble making changes to their property. Dr. Ray asks that they restore the multi-plex housing type to existing neighborhoods.

These are the least possible asks. Dr. Ray is wise and I’ll just go with banging the drum in support of her asks. 

…

There’s not much discussion, because the night is so blisteringly long already. Just one important comment, from Mayor Jane Hughson, regarding the P&Z/Jane rewrite:

“Everybody keeps saying that we watered down the plan, when me and P&Z got together and rewrote it.  For the longest time, I didn’t know what they meant. Watered down? What did we water down?

“Then I realized what they meant! They didn’t like the word swap of objectives to considerations! That’s all! So I’m going to go through and change it back!”

NO. No. Jesus, Jane, that is not at all what we’re saying.  How on earth did you get that impression? Dr. Ray literally said:

  • Remove the word “vehicle” in the definition of 15-minute City
  • Allow townhomes and other existing multiplexes in the definition of Neighborhood Low – Existing.

Those are actual meaningful changes. This is not a case of “What a wacky misunderstanding! We meant the same thing all along.”

One final note: No city council member made a peep about either of Dr. Ray’s suggestions. There are still two more opportunities, but I have a bad feeling about this.

…

Item 22:  Kyle is running out of water.  Specifically, they’ve used up all their Edward’s Aquifer alottment.  They want to buy our unused Edward’s Aquifer water from us. This also happened last year!

Recall that during citizen comment, most people said, “Yes, give Kyle the water, because they’re our neighbors. But for the love of god, attach some strings to it! They shouldn’t waste their water and then just dip into ours!” 

Here’s how the city presentation goes:

1. Kyle will take the water either way.  They will either pay someone else, or they will default on their contract, but the water is going to be used, for sure. So the aquifer will be depleted by the same amount, regardless of our decision

2. Kyle uses different water conservation stages than we do. So yes, they just entered Stage 3, but that’s pretty similar to our Stage 4.

3. As part of this deal, they have to match San Marcos water conservation efforts.

4. We stand to make $344K off this deal-io.

So first: are Kyle’s water restrictions similar to ours? It’s surprisingly hard to tell.

Ours has a handy graphic with all our stages: 

We’re Stage 4.

Their website has their current stage, but not all the stages:

But they only entered this stage last week. Before that, they were Stage 2, and I can only find all their stages in this cumbersome, unreadable thing.

So has Kyle been irresponsible with their water usage? It depends. It could be that they’ve been watering golf courses all summer, while Rome burns. It could be Tesla or other new businesses. It could be that they’ve approved a bunch of housing developments without thinking about the water issues.

And yes: approving too many housing developments or signing unsustainable development agreements with Tesla would be totally irresponsible. But it’s the kind of irresponsible that Texas does unconsciously. We don’t think through the ramifications of sprawl or corporate resource abuse very well. Like, at all.

Jude Prather speaks up on behalf of the public speakers: What about the next year? Can we put something in there about conservation in the future, so that they don’t need to borrow more water next year?

Answer: Kyle is just waiting for ARWA water to show up! Then this won’t be an issue!

The Kyle representative clarifies: Actually, ARWA water won’t show up to the west side of town until December 2025! Those are the folks that need this water.

But Jude does the thing that Council always does:
– Asks about an issue that is a real problem
– Gets told “yes, it is a problem”
– Does nothing. Ta-da!

Yes, Kyle will have to use our water next year. Whatever they did this year was not enough, and they’ll do the same exact thing next year. The new water will not be here in time. La la la la la.

The vote: It passes 7-0.

Hours 0:55 – 1:26, and Council Workshop

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 23 plus Workshop:  Purple Pipe and the Edwards Aquifer.

You guys.  This was all so fascinating that I don’t know where to start. Half the reason I wanted to start this blog is that I don’t feel like I’ll retain anything unless I organize my thoughts well enough to explain them to someone else. 

The afternoon workshop is on the Edward’s Aquifer.  First off, Edward’s Aquifer is gigantic:

via

The green part catches all the rainfall. The blue part is all the porous caves and springs, where the aquifer is right at surface.  The tan part is the storage tank of the aquifer.

It’s a little weird, because you would think that those three parts – catching rain, rocky and porous, storing rain – would be stacked on top of each other, going towards the center of the earth.  You wouldn’t think that they’d be side-by-side on a map. Why would water flow from Kerrville to Uvalde?  But it does! Or so I’m told.

It’s kind of both:

Via

The left side of that picture is north, the center is San Marcos-ish, and the right part is south.  So underground, water really is flowing from Kerrville to Uvalde.

Next!  So, we were using the aquifer too heavily in the 70s and 80s, and water-people were getting nervous, projecting that we’d exceed capacity in the future.  During droughts, things would get scarce.  In the 1950s, the Comal dried up completely at one point, during a massive drought.  Water rights for surface water – lakes, rivers, etc – have been fought in the courts for a long time, but not for ground water (or at least not in Texas). So people were allowed to enforce caps on how much water you take from lakes and rivers, but no one was allowed to enforce a cap on how much water you pump from an underground aquifer.

So in 1991, the Sierra Club files a lawsuit against Texas, because of the endangered species in the San Marcos and Comal rivers.  And they won!  Texas was ordered to do something to guarantee that the water wouldn’t stop flowing into these spring-fed rivers.  And so the state legislature created the  Edwards Aquifer Authority. 

So the EAA has legal power to protect that quantity and quality of water in our river. That’s amazing! I got legitimately nerdy-emotional, contemplating the sheer amount of effort and science and coordination across different groups of people that goes into protecting our river.  

They do a lot:

  • They issue permits for who is allowed to use aquifer water. So San Marcos has a permit, TXST has a permit, etc.  There are only 2000 permits, total.  There are 2 million people on the aquifer, but only 2000 permits.
  • They cap the amount of water that can be by someone holding a permit. During drought, they force permit holders to reduce their usage.  (Apparently Drought Stage 1-5 refers to how much you have to reduce your usage. So Stage 1 means reduce by 10%, stage 2 by 20%, etc.)  As long as the EAA enforces these caps, your river is going to keep flowing.
  • They worry about water quality: contamination from abandoned wells, chemicals from firefighters putting out fires over the aquifer, about storing other things underground, besides water. (Like gas tanks for a gas station.) So they have programs in place for all these things.  They cap the amount of underground storage under the aquifer. If someone wants to open a new gas station, they’re going to have to buy storage credits from someone else who already has them. 
  • They’ve got a big research facility in San Antonio where they’re studying all these strategies so that they can say with certainty how much each intervention helps.

San Antonio has a program where 1/8th of every cent of their sales tax goes to counties in the west, to help them protect their aquifer.  So San Marcos really is not going at this alone! We’re the tip of a large network of scientists and environmentalists who are all coordinating their action to help preserve these rivers.  I somehow find that very reassuring. 

Next: we zoomed into San Marcos at the city level.

Zooming out:

Remember: 

  • green is the part that catches the water, 
  • blue is where the aquifer comes to the surface
  • tan is where water gets stored.

Zooming in: 

We have a lot of blue.  In total, San Marcos is about ⅓ inside the aquifer.

Zooming in to the green-blue boundary in particular:

Everything south of Bishop, or past Craddock on Old 12, or north on Lime Kiln road: all of that is extremely sensitive land.   It’s really important to fight these fights over La Cima, or Mystic Canyon, or wherever.

We actually only get about 7% of our drinking water from it.   The rest of our water comes from several different places, through a bunch of different organizations. We’re trying to diversify our sources, so that if one region gets hit by a drought, we still have other options. (It did occur to me that droughts aren’t that local. It’s not like we’re piping water in from New Orleans. Wouldn’t all our sources be hit by the same drought, if it lasted for a few years?)

Moving on! Did you know that San Marcos has a purple pipe program? 

Not like that, you dingbat.  Purple pipe is reclaimed water.  In other words, you flush your toilet, the water goes to the water treatment plant, and they get it fairly clean. Not clean enough to drink, but fairly clean.  Then they can either put it back in the river, or they can pipe it back out in specific Rattler-pride-hued pipes.  Then businesses can use it for landscaping and flushing toilets, so that we’re not using drinking water for these things.

Here is a map of the purple pipe in San Marcos:

The Kissing Tree golf course, the downtown landscaping, and some of the stuff at Texas State are all using reclaimed water.  That’s so great! 

We have the capacity to pump 5.5 million gallons of reclaimed water per day.  We’ve got it all contracted out, but they’re only using about a million gallons/day, so we need to renegotiate these contracts so that we can free up the rest of the water for use.

The water pressure is pretty terrible, apparently, enough so that it’s not really available for residential uses yet.  And there are concerns about double-piping neighborhoods, and some future plumber using the wrong water line for drinking water.  But these are being hammered out.  The future is now!

3:50 – 6:00, 8/16/22

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 22: The Lobbying Ordinance. 

This is literally the sixth time this has come up since I started blogging last year: here, here, here, here, and then they finally held a workshop on it here. At the workshop, the ordinance got scaled way back. Instead of catching anyone with a financial interest in city council decisions, it was pared down to only include real estate developers.  There was a consensus that a majority of council would support this.

For a while, Max Baker and the city manager, Stephanie Reyes, discuss some of the finer points of implementation.

Mark Gleason makes the same points that he always makes:

  1. Overreach
  2. Too complicated for citizens, to hard to implement, too hard to enforce
  3. There’s no evidence of any corruption that would necessitate this.
  4. Unintended consequences. This will be weaponized.

The guy from the Ethics Review Commission takes these one at a time:

  • Overreach? We pared it down to just developers, like you all agreed you wanted during the workshop.
  • Weaponized? we have a specific item that states that this ordinance cannot be used as a political weapon or for personal reasons. [Note: I personally understand why this is not convincing.]
  • Too complicated for citizens? this is why we have a clear trigger process with so many exemptions.
  • No evidence of need? We have ethics complaints all the time. Someone was fired for this right before we started this process in 2020. So far this year we’ve dealt with a bunch of ethics complaints. Think of Lindsey Hill, La Cinema, etc.
  • You personally said you were worried about protecting the city from lawsuits. [Note: remember Mark’s School Resource Officer plea for legal protection?] This itself will protect the city, by documenting behavior along the way. This is lawsuit protection.
  • We’re not defining who is a “lobbyist”. We’re defining what kinds of behavior triggers need to register and disclose. It’s been disingenuous for you to persistently focus on the confusion around who is a lobbyist.

Mark is very offended at being called disingenuous, and yelps disingenuously about it.

Listen: I’m very done with Mark Gleason’s self-righteous rants.  Shane Scott and Mark Gleason vote equally badly, but Mark Gleason subjects me to long, infuriating soapboxes on every single issue.  Wheras at least Shane Scott occasionally waves around baggies of schwag weed for my personal entertainment.

Then the big bomb drops: Saul Gonzalez says that he will not be supporting this bill.  

Everybody understands the following:

  • Max & Alyssa will always support this bill.
  • Shane & Mark will never support this bill.
  • Saul is probably in, and Jude is probably not in.  
  • Jane is gettable, if she can put in some amendments.

So when Saul switches sides, he has doomed the bill.  Why?  

What Saul says is that he wants out-of-town developers to count as lobbyists, but not in-town developers. Since this bill catches in-town developers, he’s out.

Everything about this smells super fishy.  There was a whole workshop! They built a consensus that if the lobbying ordinance were restricted to developers, it would be okay. Saul was on board.  In fact, from the very beginning, Saul has been hungry to go after developers.

At this point, the mood flips. Jane Hughson drops her amendments, since there’s no longer a coalition of councilmembers who might pass the bill. And without the amendments, she’s not going to support it. 

So abruptly, they vote:

The vote:
Yes: Max & Alyssa
No: Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzalez, Shane Scott, Mark Gleason, and Jude Prather

The whole lobbying ordinance is dead, and the whole thing is fishy as hell.  

…

Item 25: There’s some federal money that was supposed to go to reimburse housing repair costs after the 2015 floods. The rules were so onerous, and the program was adopted so far after the fact, that it had exactly one recipient.  It’s being shut down, and everyone is frustrated.

Still, the money must be spent by 2024, and so the money is being re-allocated towards flood-mitigation projects in midtown and Blanco Gardens. 

Probably no one to blame here, but still frustrating.

…  

Item 27: There will be a council workshop on protecting the Edwards Aquifer.  Max opens pointing out that the river is extremely low and praising GSMP for their forward-thinking planning, which is really unexpected.  He’s got a couple ideas that should be considered – partnerships with the county to look at the value of conservation easements, looking at whether setbacks around natural things like caves should count as dedicated parkland, I forget what else.

Jude Prather has several good ideas which make him sound well-informed: aquifer storage where the ecology allows it, very large rain-water recovery cisterns, one-water concept for buildings,  water re-use, purple lines, etc.  That we should be preparing for droughts that last decades.

I don’t know what any of those things are, but I whole-heartedly approve of preparing for droughts that could last decades! 

…

Item 29: Shall we name one of the downtown alleys “Boyhood Alley” due to its use in Richard Linklater’s movie, Boyhood?

There it is! You can see the courthouse in the background:

via

Shane Scott and Max Baker bring the proposal forward.  The idea is to celebrate our movie industry. After all, La Cinema is coming. 

Apparently the Main Street Board was opposed, thinking that the public wouldn’t know what Boyhood means and might be weirded out. I find it funny that in the absence of context, “boyhood” sounds off-color and sleazy.  You know boys, with their creepy childhoods. How suspect.  

Jane Hughson is right there with those Main Street Boomers, asserting that “Boyhood Alley” sounds creepy.  She prefers Linklater Alley.  Mark Gleason, our Forever Hedger, kinda agrees with her but kinda agrees with everyone else.

Everyone else likes Boyhood Alley.  After all, Linklater isn’t especially tied to San Marcos. The movie Boyhood is especially tied to San Marcos. 

It passes 6-1, with Mark Gleason openly deciding to cast his vote with the majority since it was already going to pass. 

…

Item 32: Should people on boards and commissions earn a small stipend? Max & Alyssa make the case that this is an equity issue: we have a very skewed pool of volunteers for boards and commissions. Maybe younger people who are juggling three jobs would see a way to contribute if they were able to offset some of the cost of missing a shift at work.

Stephanie Reyes, the interim city manager, suggests that this would be a good issue to raise with the new DEI person. 

It’s funny how this plays out. First, Mayor Hughson asks everyone if they’d like to pursue this as a possible policy.  Everyone (besides Max and Alyssa) skewers the idea – too expensive! Too complicated! Too un-service-minded! (Well, not Shane Scott. He already skedaddled home for the evening, with his three oz baggie of the wacky tobacky.)

Second, Mayor Hughson asks everyone how they feel about talking to the DEI person about the idea. This time, they all pause and stroke their chins in contemplation, and agree that that would be fine.  

It’s like they had to be heavy-handed NOs on the topic itself, but they don’t want to sound unwilling to work with a qualified expert. So they all had to backpedal rapidly.

What’s my take? Our boards and commissions are disproportionately older, whiter, and male-r than San Marcos as a whole. Finding volunteers that match the population of San Marcos is a big problem. It’s possible that compensating board members would enable broader participation. Talking to the DEI person is a very good idea.

(I wasn’t entirely clear if they were talking about the future DEI hire or the host of the upcoming DEI council workshop. Either one will be better informed than the collective wisdom of Jane, Shane, Jude, Mark, and Saul.)