Citizen Comment:
- Texas Disposal Systems is the trash/recycling company. They’re up for a five year contract renewal tonight. This topic had the most speakers.
– There were people saying what an amazing job TDS has done, and how we must renew with them.
– There were people from other waste systems saying that they can also do a great job, and if we’d just open up bids, they could show us.
- One speaker made an interesting point about HEB: as long as we’re getting a new HEB, why don’t we revisit the almost-HEB, and see if we can acquire that land?
Here’s what he means:
There was almost an HEB here, back in 2016:
That is when HEB was the controversy of the day. HEB applied for a rezoning to put a grocery store on that corner.
The community was furious. Purgatory Creek had flooded just one year earlier, and it’s very environmentally sensitive. Traffic is already mess at that intersection. The WonderWorld extension was new, and part of the deal struck was that no new curb cuts would occur on WonderWorld. People were worried that HEB would close Little HEB.
But Council approved the rezoning anyway. (Jane Hughson and Jude Prather were two of the yeses.)
Zipping along to 2024: clearly HEB never built the grocery store there. This week’s big announcement is the new HEB on McCarty and I35 instead. (See item 10.)
So… can we buy this old land from them? Can we at least approach them for this land? It’s right there, where we’re putting all these trails down. Why don’t we at least ask?
Great question!
….
Onto the meeting!
Item 12: Rezoning a little over an acre, out on Hunter Road:
in other words, just to the right of this Shell station:
as you’re headed south on Hunter.
It got zoned Neighborhood Commercial, so it will definitely not be apartments. Some kind of office or store.
…
Item 2: After four years, we have a new Comprehensive Plan! VisionSMTX is now officially approved.
Backstory here. There are lots of big thank yous, and no major changes.
So how exactly did the committee thread the needle? If I had to summarize, they:
- Added back in the language about walking, biking, and transit. How close are you to parks, schools, and stores, without needing to drive?
- Added ADUs, duplexes, and triplexes back into low intensity areas.
- But kept one of the major P&Z changes, which was to split “Neighborhood Low” place types into two sub-types: Neighborhood Low-Existing and Neighborhood Low-New.
They did a great job of carving out a compromise position.
…
Item 4: We lease land to the Chamber of Commerce for $1/year:
On CM Allen, on the edge of the river parks.
They’ve been there since 1977. They are raising money to build an extension, but for the time being, they want to extend this contract until 2031.
Here’s what Jane says at 58:00 minutes in:
“Whenever the Chamber got ready to expand, the city discovered that there were a lot of back lease payments that we had never advised the Chamber to pay. And the Chamber didn’t know they needed to pay, and the Chamber president came to me and said, ‘If you add all this up, and the penalties and interest, the money that we just raised for the expansion kinda goes up in smoke.’ So I brought it to the council and we forgave all of that, so that the Chamber could use the dollars they’d raised for the expansion.”
I can’t find any Council discussion of this, so I assume it happened in top secret executive session?
This bit was boxed red in the packet, so I assume this is the Forgotten Lease Payments:
Look how cute that 1978 typewriter font is.
Here’s the thing: Sure, forgive Chamber’s debt – it got lost to the sands of time. Just be sure that we are equally charitable to other nonprofit organizations that may need a bit of grace.
(We did cover a bunch of debt from Together for a Cause a few years ago. One of the Place 5 candidates is involved, at that link.)
…
Just for funsies: Remember the time that we rented that land to Chamber of Commerce for $1/year, and they turned around and rented office space back to us for $28,760/year? And everyone – besides Alyssa Garza and Max Baker – voted to approve this!
…
Item 5: We finalized the gateway signs business. It’s going to look like this:
And go here:
and
This was not discussed. I just wanted to wrap up the topic.
….
Item 10: Texas Disposal Systems
Staff did a pretty good job writing up the backstory, so I’m just going to cut-and-paste from the packet:
Council is kind of split. Everyone definitely loves TDS.
- Jane, Shane, Jude and Alyssa are all fine with going with TDS now, and opening up bids for the 2030 contract.
- Matthew, Saul, and Mark are all a little more uneasy about not going through the process of soliciting bids, and seeing what other companies can put out there.
The vote:
TDS it is!
.
The San Marxist 