Tag: eviction moratorium

Hours 3:17-4:14, 5/16/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 22: Ending the Covid disaster ordinance. Back in March 2020, we passed an emergency declaration. It’s been in effect ever since. Maybe it’s time to let it go?

This is not really about ending the emergency declaration.  It’s about the 3 month eviction delay, which we began discussing last time. If the emergency declaration ends, the eviction delay automatically ends, too.

So when should this happen? On what date? 

  • Mark Gleason is very worried about landlords. Thousands of new students will show up in August.  Landlords need to be able to evict all their deadbeat tenants and then have another month or so for repairs and remodels before students arrive on August 1st. 
  • Alyssa Garza’s sympathies are with the tenants. She keeps hearing from families whose leases expire this summer, and they just want to patch it through without getting an official eviction on their record, because that’s the kiss of death when you’re trying to find a new place.

Earlier this year, Council specifically set aside some rental relief money. But it won’t be available until August.  Alyssa would really like to hang on to the eviction delay until the money is available.

In the end:

What day should landlords be able to evict tenants who are delinquent on their rent?

June 30th: Jane Hughson, Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Mark Gleason

July 15th: Alyssa Garza, Matthew Mendoza

(Saul stepped out for a moment)

So the eviction delay will end sooner rather than later.

…

Item 24:  Shane Scott brought this item up. There’s nothing written down on this item in the packet, so I’ll just paraphrase what Shane says:

“You know how SMART turned into a holy mess? I went and talked with Max Baker, since he was on the SMART subcommittee back then with Jane Hughson and Mark Gleason.  He said that he tried to talk to the developers about environmental concerns, and he wanted to talk to the public, and he wanted to talk to SMRF, but city staff wouldn’t let him.  But when I was on subcommittees a decade ago, we were allowed to talk to whoever we wanted. What gives? Can we get that back?”

City staff confirms:  When Bert Lumbreras was city manager, he implemented a policy that Council members can only talk to staff.  Staff is the middleman that ferries info back and forth between developers, experts, etc, and city council. 

The reason given is that, under the Texas Open Meetings Act, meeting with developers must be posted in advance under an agenda, and recorded for the public. 

Mayor Hughson proposes a change: at the end of each subcommittee meeting, the subcommittee can decide if they want the next meeting to be a public meeting or a private meeting. They can also decide on any experts or outside participants that they want to invite in.

For the record, I don’t think this would have fixed the SMART Terminal disaster.  I think Mayor Hughson and Mark Gleason were probably reflexively shooting down everything Max Baker said.  If the subcommittee had to agree to bring in outside experts, they wouldn’t have let Max pick them. 

And even if they’d brought experts, they certainly wouldn’t have let him go public with the whole thing.  They never sought large-scale community input. They never launched a charm offensive to try to sell their vision to the community.  Basically, they were just determined to royally screwed the pooch on this one. 

….

Item 25:  To pull a work permit in San Marcos, you have to be a licensed contractor.  To be a licensed contractor, you have to pass a specific test. 

Regular people have to pay $500 or so to hire a licensed General Contractor any time they want a permit pulled. There are some exceptions, but that’s the gist of it.

Saul Gonzales brings this item forward.  He wants to end the GC testing requirement, and make it so that anyone can pull a permit.  You’d still need to be licensed in plumbing or electricity before you did any tinkering, and you’d still get inspected before you get your certificate of occupancy.  

Plus: there are only two cities in all of Texas that require this!

City staff explains.  This law has been on the books since 1993.  And actually, the “two cities” thing is wrong. It used to be us and Seguin.  But Seguin killed their requirement, so now it’s just us. Ooops.

Everyone agrees that the it’s a terrible policy. So it will come back as a formal policy change.

Hours 2:58-4:37, 5/2/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 14: The ever-loving SMART Terminal.

(Background here, here, here, and here.)

The development agreement has been opened back up! Cue angels singing. 

First order of business: who is going to do the actual renegotiating with Franklin Mountain?  

  1. Staff?
  2. A subcommittee of council?
  3. The entire council?

If you picked 1, then you agree with Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Mark Gleason, and Mayor Hughson.

If you picked 2 or 3, you have the company of Alyssa Garza, Matthew Mendoza, and Saul Gonzalez.  

So option 1 wins, and it will go back to staff to renegotiate things.  

Alyssa Garza brings up the issue of dialogue: the community has been asking for a back-and-forth conversation. They’re not getting it.  Jane Hughson points out that council has heard hours of comments from the community, and she had a three hour conversation with three of the community members.  I kinda see where both sides are coming from.

Straight talk: do community members really want dialogue? No, they want the SMART Terminal to be cancelled. But they’ll settle for dialogue because they suspect they’re going to lose the war, the moment they stop talking. If they truly believed that a majority of council was fighting hard for their interests and was willing to cancel the whole SMARTGASBORG, then I bet community members would feel comfortable relinquishing control.

Dialogue without changing the outcome is infuriating.  No dialogue, but a responsive government who shuts down the whole SMART boondoggle would be fine. Dialogue is important, but I kinda agree that there’s not a whole lot of team-building to be done here.

Next order of business: which issues should be renegotiated by staff?  

The planning director, Amanda Hernandez, gave a quick presentation.  They amalgamated the 12 concerns from the community (that I posted here last time), along with an email from Ed Theriot and one from Virgina Parker.   In addition, the emails were all included in the packet.

However: you know whose email wasn’t included in the packet?  MINE.  Since they had specifically invited the community to email any additional suggestions, I sent one in about labor practices, and specifically indexing the minimum wage to inflation. 

And….<crickets>.  So city staff: I hope you feel the mighty burn of my stink-eye, aimed in your general direction, from the safety of my own living room.

(Jane even asked, “Is that everything that was sent in?” And still they suppressed my wee little marxist voice! For shame.)

Matthew Mendoza proposes that we send all the issues to the negotiating table, and see where it lands. Everybody seems on board with that.

…

Item 14: Coming up in future discussions:

Car boots.  Apparently we bought a bunch in the 90s and never used them, in part because we needed a court order to do so.

They’re going to discuss a policy where you can get booted if you have three unpaid parking tickets. 

The idea is not to be punitive. In order to get the boot off, all you need to do is get in touch with the city and come up with a payment plan. 

Item 17:  Eviction Delay:  Currently we have a 3 month eviction delay.  This is still under the auspices of the Covid Emergency Declaration, which is still in effect.

There’s a couple things going on:

  1. Some landlords are ignoring the delay and illegally evicting tenants early.
  2. Some renters are intentionally skipping out on the last three months of rent, knowing they can’t be evicted
  3. Rents are insanely high in San Marcos, especially with regard to the median income

So there’s bad circumstances all around, plus some bad actors on both sides.

Alyssa is very concerned that we will not be able to properly notify community members that the extension is coming to an end.  This is grounded! We’re really terrible about outreach. Or rather, outreach is incredibly hard to do well.

Mayor Hughson puts a call out for media outlets to help spread the word.  I GOT YOU, MAYOR HUGHSON!   From your lips to my ear!  I’m doing it!

There are a lot of details to hammer out, but expect to see it end around July 1st. 

Hours 1:18 to 3:50, 10/3/22

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 20: Here are some current city ordinances:

1. City Council and P&Z members all fill out financial disclosure forms every year.

2. City Council has some caps on campaign finance:

– There is a cap on total fundraising: you can’t raise more than 50¢ per registered voter in an election cycle. (Mayor gets 75¢ per registered voter.)

– No donor can donate more than $500 to a candidate in an election cycle. Any donations over $300 trigger certain mandatory recusals for conflict of interest.

These were passed circa 2018. Since then, the Ethics Review Committee has looked these forms over and followed up with the person for clarifications/omissions/sloppiness.   However, that review is not part of their official duties.

Jane Hughson brings this up to formally add it to their duties. After all, we have these laws, someone had better be double-checking the forms, and so it might as well be the ERC.

Shane Scott dislikes the formula for the donation limit. It’s based on the number of registered voters, and Shane argues that voter registrations fluctuate substantially from year to year. 

This is true! If medical marijuana is on the ballot, you can register a whole bunch of college students, who then graduate in a few years.  Odd years have low turn out, presidential years have especially high turnout. Etc. (Now, it’s fair in the sense that all the candidates running for the same council seat have the same cap. But sure, between different council seats that come up for election in different years, the total will fluctuate.)

Anyway, good news! There is an easy fix: just take the average of the voter registration numbers over the past four years. Then every cycle always includes one presidential cycle and one off-presidential cycle contributing to their voter registration number.

Jude Prather says that the fundraising cap isn’t keeping up with the price to run a campaign.  In a way, this is true, but in a more important way, this is silly.   The point is to constrain the price tags of campaigns.

Suppose it works out that candidates are capped at $10K total contributions. And suppose further that it would be easy to spend $30K on signs and Facebook ads and whatever else.  In that sense, Jude is correct – the cap is not keeping up with the potential cost of the campaign.

But one big reason to impose a cap is to level the playing field.  You want candidates with poor friends to be able to wage a successful campaign against candidates with wealthy friends.  If everyone is capped at $10K, then great – spend it wisely.  Sure, you could spend more, but this is fair.  However, if the cap is $30K, and Matthew Mendoza can only raise $2k, then the cap serves absolutely no purpose. It hasn’t leveled the playing field at all.

Bottom line: if the cap doesn’t constrain the spending of the candidates with wealthy connections, then it doesn’t help the candidates without wealthy connections.

(But here’s the counterargument: name recognition is really expensive, and encumbents have a huge advantage. Capping the fundraising means it’s harder for an outsider to challenge an encumbent.)

Saul Gonzales asks, “how do voters get taken off the voter rolls?”

Jane Hughson gives him a detailed answer: in January of odd-numbered years, they send out a mailer to all voters.  If it bounces back as return-to-sender, they assume that the person no longer lives at that address, then the voter gets put in a limbo for a while.  In this waiting period, if the person tries to vote locally, they can hash it out. After a certain length of time, the person is removed from the voter roll. At any point, if they register and vote somewhere else, they’d be removed locally.*

Mark Gleason raises some other concerns with the cost of elections – what about voters that move out of town and mistakenly get city ballots? What about city residents who vote in Wimberly, so city candidates have to advertise at those polling locations?  I dunno, Mark.  What about them.  He also grumbles about election cycles being 3 years instead of yearly. 

In the end, this gets postponed till the end of November.  Basically, campaign finance laws are important, but there’s a fox-guarding-the-hen-house thing when Council tries to write its own laws.

The point of tonight’s discussion was that the Ethics Review Committee should keep an eye on these things, but that largely wasn’t discussed.

…

Item 24: Max Baker proposes a committee to talk about noise ordinances and alcohol permits.  

I guess it’s not surprising, but Council apparently gets a ton of noise complaints – people in neighborhoods mad about the downtown bars. (I always wonder how fussy people are being – are we talking about hearing music from downtown outside your house, or inside your house? Probably many complaints are completely valid, and others would make me roll my eyes.)

Either way, Max’s suggestion is that venues with repeat offenses could be required to have a sound board person when music is being played, to keep the volume in check.  

I know from watching P&Z meetings that determining decibels is a big problem for code enforcement and cops, but I’ve never understood why there isn’t a technological solution.  Surely there’s a little device that measures decibels and records the data to an app.  If an officer is called in for a noise complaint, then the business should have to produce decibel data for the evening, on the spot.  

On alcohol sales:  Max wants the committee to look at some things that lead to underage binge drinking downtown.  He gives the example of “bottle service”. I know people can buy a bottle of wine or champagne for their table, which they then can pour out as they please, but apparently you can also buy a 5th of vodka and then pour your own drinks.  (I was not aware of this, but it seems to be pretty much as Max describes.)

Mark Gleason thinks that venues have tightened up over the past ten years, which amuses me. As you’ve settled down, joined city council, and had a baby, it’s the venues that have tightened up?

Anyway, Alyssa Garza, Jude Prather, and Max Baker will be on the committee, plus a couple folks from P&Z.

…

Item 25: There’s a discussion about the eviction delay.  When Covid hit, San Marcos implemented a 3-month eviction delay. We’ve discussed this here before.

Today’s agenda is just for a discussion, but it ends up being a rather thoughtful discussion, and I’m not being sarcastic. Council did well.

Alyssa Garza starts off by noting how poorly the implementation has gone: landlords have strong armed tenants into moving out without going through the actual legal process.  Having an eviction on your record prevents you from being able to find anywhere to rent, and so tenants will do anything to avoid this.  Therefore many tenants aren’t being given the full 90 days to recoup their back rents. 

Shane Scott asks about people abusing the system: are they just using their three free months, skipping out on the rent, and then getting three free months at the next apartment, over and over again? (Oh, Shane. Please.)

The answer: no, they’re not. Getting evicted seriously wrecks your ability to get another place to live.

Mark Gleason argues that landlords are missing out on 7-8 months rent by the time an entire eviction plays itself out, and that dragging out the inevitable is bad for both tenant and landlord.   (I don’t know if that 7-8 months bit is accurate or not. I’m sure it occasionally is, but other landlords definitely kick out tenants on much shorter notice.)

It is true that landlords can get screwed over by tenants. But ultimately, landlords have far more power over tenants than tenants have over landlords. It’s an asymmetric power imbalance, and tenants are way more vulnerable than landlords. Therefore our job is to shore up protections for tenants.

Several people make the point that the Covid emergency is over, and it’s time to segue into a permanent solution.  I think this is correct: it’s time to look at permanent protections for tenants from abuses of power by landlords. (Evictions are part of this, but so are unsafe living conditions, loss of privacy, illegal rate hikes, and so on.)

Primarily, we need a well-funded tenants’ council, with affordable or free lawyer access.  In my fantasy, I would pay for that with a tax on rental properties. (Will that cost get passed onto tenants? Of course, but I can’t think of any other way to fund this.)

One last part of this: underlying this discussion is a lack of close, affordable housing.  If it were easy to find an acceptable place to move, then the power dynamics of landlords and tenants would be hugely transformed.

As I always say, we need some things:

  1. An ongoing, updated inventory of apartment complexes, broken out by rental cost.
  2. An ongoing estimate of the population of San Marcos, broken out by income level.
  3. An estimate of how many units are approved to be built over the next few years.

We’ve got to know how much housing we need, and then we need a plan to build it.

But also, go forth and fight for a tenants’ council, with a lawyer! We need that too.

* I just deleted a line – I thought Saul responded rudely to Jane. But I went back and listened again just now, and I misheard him. Sorry for the misunderstanding!