Tag: edwards aquifer

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.)