Tag: HSAB

Hours 0:00 – 2:04, 11/18/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

There were five people who showed up to talk.

Tonight’s the night that Council determines their HSAB grants, and so almost everyone speaking was representing nonprofits – one speaker from School Fuel, and three from Southside. I’ll save it for that item.

One last speaker talked about Meet and Confer, and whether or not it was okay for Council to make recommendations to the negotiators who represent the Council in the negotiations.

…

Item 13: Rezoning a little street in Blanco Gardens

Here’s Blanco Gardens:

It’s a very cute old neighborhood with gorgeous trees.

Here’s a close-up:

Blanco Gardens has come up a lot over the years in the blog. They were ground zero for the 2015 floods, and they’ve gotten some some flood mitigation projects since then. They got some speed bumps and parking permits. Most recently, they were the first neighborhood to get its neighborhood character study. It’s also the closest neighborhood to Cape’s Dam.

For an old neighborhood, there’s a surprising amount of undeveloped land in the middle of it:

(I wondered briefly if that was because homes had been torn down after the floods. But nope, you can see on the 2014 satellite image that there’s just always been space there for years.)

Over the years, developers have occasionally tried to put something in part of it, but so far it’s always gotten nixed.

Today’s proposal is about this bit:

A developer wants to build houses on it.

They would look and feel like duplexes, but they’re technically different, because of how they can be bought and sold. The property line runs through the two halves of the house, so you can purchase one half of it, while someone else owns the other half. (It’s called a “zero lot-line house”.)

Basically it’s a good way to fit more, smaller homes onto a street, and they tend to be a little cheaper, too.

What does Council say?

Question: will fit the character of the rest of the neighborhood?
Developer answer: We have good intentions!

(One block over, there are some extremely modern houses. The neighborhood is salty about this.)

Question: Will the alley still exist?
Answer: nope.

…

Nobody really asked about flooding. The 2015 floods are starting to fade from memory for the rest of San Marcos. But not in Blanco Gardens – they were the epicenter of the floods.

I would have liked to know what the 2015 flood water line was for nearby houses – I bet it was about 3-4 feet of water deep. How elevated will these houses be? Will they be above the 2015 water line?

My memory is that, in a 100-year flood plain, you have to build 1-2 feet above the Base Flood Elevation, based on FEMA flood maps. Does that get you to 3-4 feet off the ground? I just don’t know.

…

The vote on this cute row of sorta-duplexes:

Yes:  Everyone
No:  nobody

The good news is that Council is enthusiastic about infill housing. (When I first started blogging in 2022, Council wouldn’t let a home owner build two small houses on a subdivided lot, on Lockhart street. That was crazy.) They’ve definitely gotten the message that San Marcos needs more housing.

As long as the homes are safely elevated, I’m okay with this project. But the flooding risk makes me very uneasy.

…

Item 14: HSAB Funding

HSAB stands for Human Services Advisory Board.

These are city grants to nonprofits, for things like food assistance, eviction prevention, domestic violence help, mental health services, etc. For the past few years, we’ve given out $500K in grants. This year, Council bumped it up to $750K. (Of course, federal funding has gotten slashed, so the need has also grown. THANKS OBAMA.)

It’s always a grueling process. All the nonprofits all do incredibly important work.

In the past, we kinda made non-profits cagefight against each other. [Read all the gory details for the past few years.] The process was murky. The recommendations would come to council, and council members would start horse-trading around.

It was a bad look! It always seemed very fickle – “Oh, we’ll take $20,000 from those guys and give it to these guys!” It felt like the main criteria was being friendly with council members.

We’ve been working on tightening the process. It’s a super time-intensive:

  • the HSAB board meets weekly from August to October
  • They hear presentations from all 32 applications
  • Each one gets discussed and each board member ranks them on a bunch of different criteria
  • Eventually they recommend how much of each request to fund.

Here’s the criteria:

After all the ranking and discussion, they bring it to Council.

…

Just for funsies, let’s add up how much other non-HSAB money is getting allocated in this meeting!

All this was approved in one single vote, on Tuesday:

  • “On-Call Title Research Services Contract with Hollerbach & Associates, Inc., to increase the price by up to $200,000.00, resulting in a total contract amount not to exceed $299,999.00”.
  • “RMO P.C. for legal services associated with land acquisitions to increase the price by up to $300,000.00, resulting in a total contract amount not to exceed $699,000.00”.
  • “Change in Service to the agreement with Baker Moran Doggett Ma & Dobbs, LLP for legal services associated with land acquisitions to increase the price by up to $300,000.00, resulting in a total amount not to exceed $600,000.00”.
  • “STV Incorporated to provide On-Call General Engineering Services for various projects in the amount of $900,000.00”.
  • “Halff Associates, Inc. to provide On-Call General Engineering Services for various projects in the amount of $900,000.00”.
  • “a 2025 Ford F550 Crew Cab Chassis from Rush Truck Center, through a Sourcewell Purchasing Cooperative Contract, in the amount of $82,043.63, and outfitted by E.H. Wachs, through a BuyBoard Contract, in the amount of $156,865.65, for a total purchase cost of $238,906.28”.
  • “SHI Government Solutions, through Omnia Partners, for a City of San Marcos job application tracking software system in the annual amount not to exceed $112,000.00, and up to four one-year renewals with a total amount of $560,000.00”.

It comes to about $2.95 million. I’m not saying any of those were a mistake! I trust the city officials. Most likely, those are all totally reasonable.

I’m just pointing out who gets scrutinized, in society, and who doesn’t. We approved almost $3 million without blinking, when it goes to those contracts above. But if it’s hungry kids, homelessness, mental health emergencies, etc, we rigorously grind these applications into pulp.

…

Back to the grant grind!

There were 32 applications, and the total amounts requested added up to $1.2 million.

Here’s the full list of scores and funding:

In the presentation, they went through all of them, and why the committee might not have fully funded the request.

For example:

The rest of their thoughts are on pp 435-437, here.

They were very thorough.

…

Back to Citizen Comment

Three speakers from Southside show up to talk. Here’s what they say:

Southside is in a funny position. In 2024, the city gave Southside $800K of Covid money to implement a Homeless Action Plan.

They came up with a plan and put in all the work to get it up and running. Now they’re trying to sustain it over time. They asked for $100K from HSAB, but were only granted $50K.

The $100K is for their homeless prevention program – giving families $1000-2000 to get through a one-time financial crisis, so that they don’t get evicted.

…

Let the horse-trading begin!

Matthew kicks it off. He wants to try to get Southside back up to the full $100K that they asked for, for homelessness prevention.

Matthew proposes:

  • Take $4500 from Rough Draft
  • Take $5000 from Lifelong Learning
  • Take $10,000 from Hill Country MHMR

Give that $19,500 to Southside.

Ok, what are these things?

Rough Draft:

Their funding would go to $0.

Lifelong Learning:

Ok. Their funding would go from $9000 to $4500.

Hill Country MHMR

Their funding would go from $60,000 to $50,000.

….

What does Council think?

Question: How many people would Southside be able to help, with this $19K?
Answer: About ten families. Average cost to stabilize someone after a financial emergency is $2k.

It’s actually a huge bargain. If they’d been evicted, it would cost $15-30K+ to stabilize a family once they become homeless. (Plus, y’know, becoming homeless is awful. This is way more humane for the families.)

Question: Are you all applying for other grants?
Answer: SO MANY. Funding is scarce, and federal funds have been slashed.

Alyssa: The entire premise of horse-trading these dollars is problematic. Most agencies didn’t send someone here tonight to answer questions. We don’t have context and expertise. This is haphazard. I am not on board with any of this.

Amanda: Matthew, what about moving some money from the School Age Parents Program? They said they’d be able to keep the program open on $7,500, but they’re being awarded $15K.

Matthew: How dare you. Abso-fucking-lutely not!

[I’m paraphrasing. Matthew just said something like, “They do great work!”.]

Amanda: I’m trying to throw you a bone here!

Matthew: Hard no.

Amanda: Well, I’m a no on Hill Country MHMR especially. Their work is desperately needed. We are in a mental health services desert, and this program will fund teenagers without insurance.

Alyssa: I’m a NO on all of this, but especially NO on Hill Country MHMR. Homelessness and mental health are completely intertwined. There’s so much need here.

The votes are each held individually:

  1. Move all $4500 from Rough Draft to Southside Homelessness Prevention?

Yes: Matthew, Jane, Amanda, Lorenzo, Saul

No: Alyssa, Shane

2. Move $5000 from Lifelong Learning over to Southside?

This motion dies without getting a second. So it never comes to a vote.  That kinda surprised me.

3. Move $10K from Hill Country MHMR over to Southside?

Yes:  Matthew

No:  Everyone but Matthew

4. Amanda throws in a vote on the SMCISD School Age Parents Program:

They get $15K.

Should we take $5K from them, and give it to Southside?

Yes: Amanda, Saul

No: Matthew, Lorenzo, Alyssa, Jane, Shane

So that fails.

..

Me, personally: It’s an awful decision to make. I probably would have taken money from Rough Draft, Lifelong Learning, and maybe SMCISD School Age parents. But not Hill Country MHMR.

….

So that’s where it lands. Southside picked up $4500 more, and Rough Draft went to $0.

The final official vote on HSAB funding passes 7-0.

…

One more note!

We just spent $750K on the poor and vulnerable.

But we also spend $1.1 million on tax breaks to home owners every year:

About 30% of San Marcos owns their own home. That $1.1 million is just for them.

Also, remember that Kissing Tree is keeping $46 million of San Marcos tax dollars, for nice streets and trees that are then gated off from the rest of San Marcos! You can’t go visit the tax dollars. Sorry.

This is why I get cranky about this:

People who want to slash property taxes never seem to appreciate how much of their own lifestyle is being subsidized.

….

Item 19: Dunbar Recreation Center

Dunbar was named for Paul Laurence Dunbar. He was the first black poet to get widespread recognition. (He was not from San Marcos in any way. He’s from Ohio.)

Here’s one of his poems, from 1895:

via

Originally, the Dunbar neighborhood did not have a specific name, besides being called “the colored neighborhood”. The school was called The Negro School. In 1961, that was renamed after Paul Laurence Dunbar, and then gradually the whole neighborhood came to be known as Dunbar. So the Dunbar Rec Center just got the name “Dunbar”.

Would we like to include the poet’s full name here? Everyone says yes.

Great!

Lots of interesting history on the Dunbar neighborhood here and here!

….

Item 20-21: Jorge’s Mexican Restaurant.

Jorge’s is on Hunter Road:

Separately, Miller Middle School is on Foxtail Road:

Their front doors are far apart:

…but they share a back fence.

This causes all kinds of problems for Jorge’s, because there are extra-strict rules for selling alcohol within 300 feet of a school.

This means that Jorge’s has to do a lot more:

  • Renew their alcohol permit every year, instead of every three years like everyone else.
  • Renew their distance variance every year, which grants them an exception to the 300 foot rule.

The main problem is the fees – both of those cost $750, so Jorge’s is paying $1500 every year.

Why is it so expensive?!

Mostly because of postage. The city has to notify everyone within 400 ft. The rest of the cost is to cover staff time, to process the paperwork.

Everyone wants to at least refund half of Jorge’s fees, since the city can save costs by processing both the alcohol permit and distance variance at the same time.

They’re going to try to come up with a long term solution, too.

Hours 0:00-2:25, 1/7/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Two issues dominate:

  • The Human Services Advisory Board grant money. (HSAB)
  • Demolition of a little blue building at 734 Valley Street

Let’s take these one at a time.

  1. HSAB grants: These are San Marcos city grants to nonprofits. Back in December, there was a bit of a stand-off between councilmembers supporting Salvation Army and councilmembers supporting HOME Center. Yes, it’s totally weird to pit nonprofits against each other.

It was postponed without resolution. So people showed up to this meeting, to advocate for their nonprofit. By the numbers:

  • Advocates for Salvation Army: 2 speakers
  • Advocates for HOME Center: 9 speakers
  • Nosotros la Gente, ACCEYSS, School Fuel: 1 each

The chair of HSAB (Yancy Arevalo) also spoke. She made the most important point: $550K is peanuts for social services.   There were over $1 million requested in the applications, and the need in the community is far greater than that. We need to be allocating far more money to this cause.

(She is exactly right. This is the heart of all these problems. We should not be pitting HOME Center against Salvation Army – we should be increasing the size of the pie.)  

If you want the most compelling speaker of the meeting, you want to listen to the man speaking at 17:48 here.  He is a formerly homeless man on the brink of death, who was helped by HOME Center and now is in a stable home. It’s really incredible.

  1. The other big issue is the demolition of a house at 734 Valley Street.  
  • A speaker from the Historical Preservation Commission (HPC) talks in favor of delaying the demolition
  • The owner speaks against the delay
  • A representative from the Calaboose Museum says, “Please don’t use our name as a reason to delay the ordinance. We are fine with whatever the owner wants to do.”

We’ll unpack all this when we get there.

One final comment worth noting from the 3 pm workshop:

3. At the workshop, Max Baker spoke about the San Marcos Civics Club: they’re putting together a Tenants Bill of Rights.

They want to collaborate widely on this, so if you’re interested, let them know. And they want Council to incorporate this into their upcoming Visioning sessions.

…

Item 12:  The HSAB Grant Money Saga

Brief background:

HSAB stands for Human Services Advisory Board.  This is a committee that meets weekly for four months, and scrutinizes nonprofits who are applying for grant money from the city. 

In December, council got the HSAB recommendations and started tinkering.  First, they moved $10K from ACCEYSS to Salvation Army.

Then Jane Hughson tried to move all of HOME Center’s funding away.  She reduced this to 75% of their funding.  This was the issue that blew up. 

The whole thing looked really, really bad.   It looked partisan. (Full details here.)

This meeting:

Jane drops her motion about changing HOME Center’s funding.  

She justifies the attempt like so: “I went back and watched the HSAB meetings. Originally Salvation Army was given $10K, and that was moved over to HOME Center since they were local.  My feeling is that our local chapter of Salvation Army is also local, so I wanted to move that back.”

Amanda responds:  “I also watched the meetings.  You’re oversimplifying what they said. They didn’t just give it to HOME Center because they’re local.  They noted that HOME Center has a 90% success rate and is one of the few organizations doing high quality longterm casework.”

There’s some more discussion, but things fizzle out pretty quick.   So the only amendment that stuck is the one from last meeting, to move $10K from ACCEYSS to Salvation Army.

There will be a discussion about the HSAB grant process in the future, where Council can do some more tinkering. It’s a work in progress.

…

I want to highlight one thing Amanda says (at 1:38, if you’re so inclined):

Amanda: If you want to get to the root, we – as a city – have created a system that relies on nonprofits to provide critical social services, right? We created that.

Jane: I don’t know that I agree that we created it, but I’ll agree that we have it.

Amanda: I mean, thank god someone’s doing it, to the level that they’re doing it. But I think all of the “thank yous”, the “we’ll work on the criteria”, and all of that – it’s really empty. One of the things that has been reiterated both in this meeting and in the previous one is that $550,000 was never going to be enough.  If so, if we really want to address the issue to its core, we know budget season is coming up.

I mean we’re about to – probably later in this meeting! – approve $684,000 for something probably with no discussion, no pushback. That to me is a shame. And so if we really want to address the issue, it needs more money. They need capital.

Jane interjects about Covid money – one year we were able to double the HSAB budget, but only because we could use Covid money.  

Amanda: That’s great. But we can find the money. We can find the money because we’ve found the money for so many other things. I don’t think it’s a plausibility issue. If we wanted to do it tomorrow, we could fund it. But it’s a matter of desire. 

All I’m saying is if we want to really address the issue, this is the conversation we should have in budget season. We should put our money where our mouths are.

(lightly edited for clarity)

I AM SO EXCITED!! This is my new battle cry: “$550,000 was never going to be enough.” Rally the troops, we’ve got budget season coming up!

The vote:

$550,000 WAS NEVER GOING TO BE ENOUGH!

…

Item 3: The lease with Ruben Becerra

Back again to talk about this cute little building!  

on LBJ, at the railroad tracks, across from Toma Taco.

Background:

Like we said last time, Council bought the property from Union Pacific in 2013, in order to maybe put a railstop there someday. 

Ruben Becerra owns the building, but not the land.  The building sits half on city land, and half on Union Pacific land.  It’s very confusing!

You can see the little building there – it’s half on red land (San Marcos) and half on blue land (Union Pacific Rail Road).

Last time, I wasn’t clear on the full backstory of why there is tension, but this time, city staff had a presentation that sheds some light on it:

Staff recommends tightening up the lease terms a bit:

In addition, Jane Hughson reads a carefully scripted main motion and amendment:

That is legalese for “We met behind closed doors and are scrupulously following the advice of our lawyer.”  

The vote: 

Lorenzo is our brand new councilmember!  The rumor mill generally holds that Lorenzo is Becerra’s candidate, in case you were looking askance at that vote.

But wait! There’s more!

The San Antonio Express-News has an article from Friday:

On Thursday, Becerra sent a written statement to the Express-News accusing the city of “targeted interference,” and said that litigation is “the course that will likely be pursued.”

“This project seems to be unjustly targeted due to political motivations,” he wrote. “The city’s refusal to honor prior agreements or pursue reasonable business solutions underscores a deliberate effort by political adversaries to obstruct progress.”

So Becerra might sue the city over this? That linked article has way more details than I was able to find, so you should trust them over me.

…

Item 5:  The SMPD shooting range

Here’s SMPD, located on I35:

SMPD has a shooting range. It was built in 1991.  

I’m guessing it is here?

because they described it as a sand berm, and when I zoom in, it looks like this:

Which looks like a sand berm to me!

Here’s what it looks like on the inside:

That was built in 1991. Back then, they needed to be able to shoot pistols at 25 yards.  

Since then, you now have to be able to shoot rifles at 50 yards. So officers were going offsite to shoot at ALERRT Shooting range at Texas State.  That is free, but it’s often busy. 

In 2021, they converted the SMPD range from 25 yards to 50 yards. They also put a roof overhead, to keep the sand from getting washed out and to prevent bits of projectiles from going all over the place. Great! 

But the roof also contained all the dust, which has a lot of lead in it, from the bullets. So it’s now super toxic.   Also, they have to mine the sand for the bullets every now and then, or else fragments start to bounce back at the officers.

So what’s the solution? 

Enter the Total Bullet Containment Trap by Action Target!

[Cue jaunty action music]

Basically you shoot into these deflection plates:

And then the bullets get trapped in that round drum on the right:

Plus there’s a whole HVAC thing to help control the toxic dust.

How much does this thing cost? 

The unit is  $643,800.00.  The total installation will be around $800K.  

So what’s the issue?

This item was on the consent agenda. This means no discussion was planned.  The only reason we’re discussing it is because Amanda requested that we pull this item off the Consent Agenda.

Remember how 15 people showed up to plead with Council on whether Salvation Army or HOME Center is more deserving of $10K?  And ten minutes later, we are green-lighting $643K for a bullet containment system.

It’s even worse than that: it’s already been approved. The whole $800K was buried in the CIP list that got approved in 2023.  There was a workshop in June of 2023, which covered the entire CIP list, and then the CIP list got approved in September 2023, along with the rest of the budget. Today is just authorizing the actual purchase.

It just happened automatically! There was literally never any discussion about this $800K, because of the sheer number of projects being addressed. No one single person is the bad guy – this is how systems operate on auto-pilot. But the outcome is unjust.

Look: officers should not be breathing lead-dust.  Of course we want them to be safe! The point is the contrast: we greenlight $800K for SMPD without noticing it, and wring our hands over $10K for the homeless.

[Council has some dull side conversations on whether or not the lead and brass can turn a profit, when scrapped for resale.]

Amanda makes her key point: This is her fourth meeting. Over those four meetings, we’ve spent $1 million on SMPD.  We can afford to double the HSAB budget – the money is there. We just have to choose to do so.  Even people who are paying attention – like herself! – had no idea that $800K got set aside for this TOTAL BULLET CONTAINMENT SYSTEM last summer. It just happens invisibly.

The vote:

C’mon, Lorenzo. I’m rooting for you here, but this isn’t knocking my socks off.

Hours 1:56 – 3:47, 12/17/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 15: The Human Services Advisory Board (HSAB)

Every year, we give money to nonprofits. The HSAB sorts through the applications and gives out money.

This year, they are giving out $550K.

HSAB has a tumultuous past.  In addition, they used to have a bunch of Covid money to give away in 2022 and 2023, and now they don’t.   So this is a tough spot to be in.

This year, they got 37 applications for a total of $1.1 million dollars requested. So that’s also a tough spot to be in!

The HSAB Process

First, some useful guiding principles:

The whole decision process takes months. 

Here’s how they evaluate the applications:

(“Council priorities” always drives me fucking nuts.  It’s all about Council ego, and not what’s best for those in need.)

Here’s how HSAB ranked the applications:

(I know that’s tiny, but I think you can click on it and make it bigger.) Green is highest score, yellow is medium, pink is lowest.

Then the board discusses each application individually.  They consider:

  1. Rankings
  2. Amount of money requested
  3. Need in San Marcos

At the end of all that, here’s what the board recommends:

They talk a little bit about why they chose not to fund the agencies at the bottom. Some of them are hard to measure, and they wanted programs that can measure results. Some of them were not aligned with which needs the board wanted to focus on this year. Some are not local.

Summary by category:

What does Council have to say?

OH LORD, YOU GUYS, THIS WILL GET INTERESTING.

Matthew Mendoza kicks things off. He wants to remove $10K from ACCEYSS, and give it to the Salvation Army. 

What is ACCEYSS?

Ok, summer camps and after school programming in Dunbar. They were awarded $20,000 to do this.

Here’s what the Salvation Army wants to do:

They were awarded no money.

Jane asks why? The answer is that one of Council’s priorities is to support locally grown organizations. Since Salvation Army isn’t local, they lost points for that. [Jane deeply sighed, “Ok.”]

Jane explains this away: this is a local chapter of the Salvation Army. They are extremely local.

Note: Roland Saucedo – the council candidate that Jane campaigned for and supports – shows up to speak on behalf of the Salvation Army. That’s how local they are!

Council talks to the Salvation Army representative for a long time, about the Salvation Army budget, and whether or not we could partner with the Salvation Army on utility assistance, which is also an ongoing conversation. Maybe we could direct some utility assistance money over to them?

The vote:

Move $10K from ACCEYSS to Salvation Army: everyone

Keep things as they are: No one

So that money is shifted over.

…

Next, Jane brings up the HOME Center.

HOME Center is these guys. They do individual case management with homeless people to get them into stable, longterm housing. It is exceedingly difficult work and they do an outstanding job.

I frankly don’t know how to sugarcoat this: the city has a history of being vindictive and retaliatory towards HOME Center. This is because historically, the city has not always been on the up-and-up regarding the homeless community, and HOME Center advocates on behalf of the homeless people who have gotten the raw end of things.

Jane proposes moving $15K from HOME Center, and giving $10K to Salvation Army, $5K to Nosotros La Gente. This would bring the Salvation Army up to $20K, and put HOME Center down to $5k. (Actually, her first proposal is to bring HOME down to zero. Matthew gently chides her to leave HOME Center with $5K.)

Keep in mind that Jane openly endorsed and campaigned for Roland Saucedo, who is loosely affiliated with the Salvation Army. He was present at Tuesday’s meeting and advocated for the Salvation Army.

I like to stick to cut-and-dried facts, but you absolutely have to know that this is a very tense topic. Jane is not a neutral party here, and her proposal feels like a shot across the bow.

Jane’s stated reason is that HOME Center is requesting money for a case manager salary. She says, “We don’t want to fund salaries, because we don’t want someone to be laid off if we don’t fund them.”

The staff member says, “In the application, we said Board can allocate up to 20% of a fulltime position or fully fund a part-time app.”

Jane argues this point, but she is wrong here. Here is the policy from January 2023:

And in the actual discussion, they settled on 20% of a fulltime position is okay, and funding a parttime position is okay.

So first, Jane is technically wrong. But more important, she’s morally wrong. The staff, Alyssa, and Amanda all point out to her that many of these applications asked for staff funding, and yet she’s singling out HOME Center to slash.

Jane: We have given a LOT of money to Southside. They are hiring.  So that’s an issue that I have with HOME Center in particular.  

She is referring to the $800k of Covid money that the city recently gave Southside Community Center, to implement our Homeless Action Plan. She is somehow making the case that Southside’s funding works against HOME Center?

Alyssa comes in hard: Absolutely not.  We gave Southside an obscene amount of money. Initially, there were community concerns and Council concerns about Southside’s capacity. We had grace and did a trust fall.   We need to extend that to HOME Center.  They do boots on the ground hard work. The service and case management they do is unmatched.

She continues: “I know this is not your intention, Mayor, but I need to name this.  Within different groups that do homeless outreach, there is a perception that HOME Center continues to face retaliation because they use their platform to bring to light some historic concerns and trends regarding homeless outreach in general in our community.  And so I  know that’s not your intention, but the community had a very thorough process with feedback and open meetings. It is not a good look, without any process or notification, to be making these moves.”

There’s some continued hectoring from Mark and Jane – they could have asked for money for different costs! They could have shown up to this meeting and defended themselves!

Amanda is furious: “This is not the only organization that asked for staff funding! So many of these organizations are funding staff! I’ll be honest: I’m losing my patience, because as someone who has volunteered with HOME center, as someone who has spoken to the clients that receive what they do: our community benefits in ways that we will never understand…. The reasons you’re giving are not strong enough for me, and this just feels wrong.”

Jane, sweetly, “Then you can vote against it!” 

Amanda, coldly: “I will.”

Jane: “I just wish they’d asked for money for something else!”

Alyssa, “Well, I wish you weren’t nitpicking, but sometimes we don’t get our wishes granted. We need to meet the moment where it’s at.”

(I’m abbreviating all this hugely. Feel free to listen yourself. HSAB item starts at 2:00, and Council discussion starts at 2:19ish.)

Eventually Alyssa makes a motion to postpone. She says, “We need space for community feedback.  We’re overstepping and moving things around without rhyme or reason.  We need to let our neighbors know.” 

The vote to postpone:

Yes: Alyssa, Amanda, Shane, Saul
No: Mark, Jane, Matthew

So the postponement squeaks through. This will come back around in January.

…

Let’s zoom out for a moment on the HSAB funding:

The committee spends months on these applications. All of the agencies provide metrics and ample documentation of how they spent previous money – literally over 2000 pages of applications in the Council packet this week. Council argues passionately about whether $5000 is better spent on kids in Dunbar, or emergency funding from the Salvation Army.

Here is a list of things that received zero discussion on Tuesday:

  • $45,000.00 to McKimm & Creed, for Leak Detection Services
  • $241,036.36 to Cunningham Recreation, for various playground and outdoor fitness equipment
  • $573,458.79 to Nueces Power Equipment, for the purchase of a Wirtgen Asphalt Milling Machine
  • $2 million (annually) for McCoy Tree Surgery Company, for tree trimming
  • $6 million for Techline, Inc, for materials and supplies for San Marcos Electric Utility
  • $8.6 million for the Lower Colorado River Authority, for various goods and services concerning electrical transmission, control and substation facilities
  • $765 reimbursement to Tantra

Was Jane Hughson worried about us paying someone’s whole salary at McKimm & Creed? Was she worried that the company might become too dependent on us?

Did a committee meet for months, and have a scoring system? Why do we scrutinize $20,000 to HOME Center, and not $6 million to Techline, Inc?

We also give homestead exemptions of $15,000 to all homeowners, and $35,000 to seniors and people with disabilities. We have an estimated 10,295 owner-occupied homes in San Marcos. The tax rate is 60.3 cents per $100. So ballpark, we’re giving homeowners $904,500 yearly in homestead exemptions.

Why don’t we include this $900K in an application to HSAB? We could call it “Subsidies to Home-owners Program” and see if it scores higher than ACCEYSS on the evaluation criteria. We don’t think of this as charity, but we should. And we don’t even make the home owners provide metrics, measurable outcomes, nor turn in performance reports for how they spend their extra charity dollars each year. Isn’t that nice?

(And finally, I will never get sick of reminding you that we’re giving $1.2 million yearly to Kissing Tree. No metrics, no scrutiny, no gnashing of teeth. Just a nice, gated community that’s not for you.)

…

Item 16: Guiding Principles to lobby the Texas Legislature.

The Texas legislature only meets once every two years, for 140 days. This is to minimize the damage that they can do. 

Or as Molly Ivins put it, “The Texas Legislature consists of 181 people who meet for 140 days every two years. This catastrophe has now occurred 63 times.”

Or, as the old joke goes: “The Texas legislature meets every two years for 140 days. Many citizens believe that the law was incorrectly transcribed and that the legislature was meant to meet for two days every 140 years.”

Anyway! San Marcos lobbies the state legislature on behalf of our interests. So we have a Guiding Principles document, to determine what we’ll lobby.

Amanda comes in with a ton of amendments.  Keep in mind that she’s worked with the state legislature for the past few years. It quickly becomes clear how much expertise she’s bringing to the table.

The first batch is all under the mental health section. Here’s the original:

Amanda #1: Suggested add: Support legislative action to establish a school mental health allotment fund. 

Why? The Legislature passed a School Safety Bill last time, but it doesn’t fund mental health. So this asks the state to create line item funding to address mental health funding. 

Everyone loves this. The vote:  7-0

Amanda #2:  Support legislative action to increase in funding for Local Mental Health Authorities (LMHAs) to provide early intervention services to prevent crises.

The vote: 7-0

Matthew Mendoza is so happy. He says, “Yes, because it will go to SMPD!!” when he casts his vote.

Amanda #3:  Support legislative action to expand access to maternal mental health support throughout pregnancy and the post-partum period. 

The vote:  7-0

Amanda’s on a roll! Everyone loves these!

Amanda #4:  Support legislative action that expands eligibility for Medicaid.

Texas turns down $5 billion in federal money every year for Medicaid. About 19% of Texans are uninsured, which is far and beyond the worst in the country. This is because we never expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

Mark has finally had enough of this nonsense! “I’m going to be a no on this. Those are conversations for the state and federal government to have.”

He has a deep moral conviction about staying neutral on healthcare coverage. Should uninsured diabetics die for lack of insulin? Mark refuses to have an opinion, and you can’t make him!

The vote:

Yes, the state should accept Medicaid funding: Everyone but Mark
No, this is none of my business: Mark

Amanda #5: Support legislative action to increase funding for permanent supportive housing programs.  (Housing First programs.)

There is a fake-debate among homelessness experts. Should you provide housing and then treat the mental illness and/or substance abuse? This is Housing First. Or, should you withhold permanent housing until the person gets their issues solved? This is Treatment First.

I’ll give you a hint: in Trump’s first term, his housing guy was a strong Treatment First guy. (And then we hired him as a consultant.)

Mark: I’m a no. Housing First isn’t always the best! 

Mark is wrong. (If that link gets scrubbed under Trump, then we can use this one.) Housing First works better, and it’s more humane. It’s better all around.

The vote:

We support Housing First: Amanda, Alyssa, Jane, Shane, Saul

We don’t: Mark, Matthew

Amanda #6: There is no section on Housing in our Guiding Principles.  We should have a Housing section.

In the Housing Section, Amanda recommends:

  • That we support legislative action that prevents unnecessary evictions
  • To promote housing stability and protecting tenants from undue hardships

The vote: 7-0

Mark is deeply suspicious, though.

Amanda #7: Support legislative action that seals a tenants eviction records in the event that a court rules in their favor

Mark and Matthew are both gobsmacked that this is not already the case. A tenant can win in court, but landlords can still use their eviction against them? Yes, currently.

The vote: 7-0

Mark is so suspicious! He literally says, “How is this not already the case?! WHATEVER. Yes.”

Amanda #8:  Support budgetary measures to increase state funding for low income housing in Texas, especially for the most cost-burdened households that are at or below 50% of the AMI. 

The vote: 7-0.

Amanda #9: Remove the whole carve-out for SMART/Axis. 

This brings us back around to the Citizen Comment, four hours ago! (Backstory on the SMART/Axis development here.)

Mark: Hard no. We have to increase and diversify our tax base! People don’t realize what that development could mean to this community! All the jobs! This is PRIME for development! I-10, Toll road, railroad, and airport!  JOBS! JOBS! Major mistake! In 50 years, this will be the most important bullet point in this whole document!

Matthew: We just postponed due to second-guessing HSAB board and here we are, second-guessing this board!  There aren’t smokestacks. This is environmental protection! Do you really want SMART/Axis to go to Caldwell county?  Plus Gary Job Corp is right there.

(This is the weakest argument I’ve ever heard.)

Amanda: I’m not opposed to diversifying and growing our tax base. This is a very specific major development that arose through shady means. The entire city is not behind this development. Nowhere else in this document are we so specific.

Mark: Because it’s 3000 acres! Nowhere else in the COUNTRY has this opportunity! DC wants to hear how we’re diversifying. This is amazeballs! 

The vote:

Remove the carve-out for SMART/Axis:  Alyssa, Amanda
Keep it:  Jane, Shane, Mark, Matthew, and Saul

So that stays.

That’s all of the amendments!

…

After this, we have a series of little items:

  • the $2 million on tree-trimming
  • the $6 million to the LCRA
  • we officially the money back to Tantra
  • an appointment to the Animal Shelter Advisory Committee

But Council zips through these, and so will I.

Hours 1:20-2:37, 12/19/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 4: ”Citizen Comment” vs. “Community Perspectives”

Shane pulled this item from the Consent Agenda. 

Backstory

Mayor Hughson decided to clean up the city ordinances on committee meetings. She flagged a bunch of things that were inconsistent or unclear. One thing she noticed is that “Citizen Comment” is a terrible phrase, because you don’t actually have to be a citizen in order to comment. It sends a bad message.

We’ve discussed this here and here. Jane suggested “Community Perspectives” and in the past two months, no one ever protested it.

Here we go:

Shane says that he doesn’t like “Community Perspectives” because it implies that each speaker represents the entire community, instead of their own individual opinion.

Look, clearly “Community Perspectives” is a bit dippy. It sounds like a church bulletin board. But Shane’s complaint is also silly. No one is going to think that some rando speaker is supposed to represent everyone in town. It’s not “Community Spokesperson.”  

Jane, wearily: We’ve talked about this on a bunch of occasions.

Shane: I’ll just vote against it.

Jane: The entire list of all the changes?!

Shane: No, just this one. 

Jane: You can’t just vote against one.

Shane: Oh right. 

So Shane makes a motion: Keep it “Citizen Comment” after all. Alyssa seconds it.

Saul: I’m fine the way it is. Citizen Comment.

Matthew: I don’t care either way.

Jane: Honestly, I was concerned about changing it, because it’s been called “Citizen Comment” for years. Everyone is used to that. But I just don’t want anyone to feel excluded.

Alyssa: I appreciate that. But maybe we can just say something on the website.

Mark: I’m on the fence. Everyone knows it as Citizen Comment. 

The vote to amend:

Keep calling it Citizen Comment: All seven councilmembers

Change to Community Perspectives: no one.

On a scale of 1-10 of importance, this is maybe a 2. Nevertheless, they got it wrong! “Citizen Comment” is bad because “citizen” is exclusive. Jane is exactly right here. 

Off the top of my head, they could have gone with:
– Community Comment
– Open Comment
– Civic Comment
– Citizens-and-Not-Citizens Comment (okay, now I’m getting punchy)

I know they’re worried that changing the name would up-end years of familiarity. But that’s tunnel vision from being in the center of the action for too long.  Most of San Marcos is not paying any attention to City Council at all! Those who know the phrase “Citizen Comment” are not emotionally attached to it. You can switch to “Open Comment” and we’ll all be okay.

They didn’t want to go with “Public Comment” because it sounds very similar to “Public Hearing,” which is a specific different thing. 

Oh well!

The vote on all the little changes that Jane proposed:

Yes: Everyone.
No: No one.

….

Item 21:  Gary Softball Sports Complex is getting renovated.

We’re spending $1,238,000.22 on the following:

  • Roadway, drainage, parking, water/wastewater improvements.
  • Parts of the fields are 20+ years old

There were no slides or pictures for me to nab for you.

….

Item 23: Human Services Advisory Board (HSAB) Funding Policy

We’re going to spend some time on this item, because it drove me batty.

Backstory

Earlier in December, we allocated $650K in grant money to local nonprofits. There were 34 applications. Each nonprofit got between $5K and $34K, except for the Hays-Caldwell Women’s Shelter and the Hays County Food Bank, which got $50K and $80K respectively.

I griped last time that Council makes these nonprofits jump through a lot of hoops, while we just hand out other money seamlessly and invisibly. 

Guys. guys. We are about to get SO MUCH MORE micromanaging of this whole mess. We are going to nitpick this thing to death.

The current issue

Recall that the HSAB committee assigned points according to this rubric:

Jane is mad about Council Priorities being neglected. It’s only 15 points! Nevermind that people with nonprofit experience developed priorities 1-4, and that Council Priorities are somewhat redundant.

Here are the things that Jane’s mad about:

  • It’s not punitive enough if performance reports are late.
  • The Council priorities should add up to 25 or more points!
  • We want to know where the board members live. Do they live in San Marcos? Do they live in Kyle? In Austin?
  • They should spell out all acronyms. No unclear abbreviations. (I acknowledge this one. They really should.)

Complaint #1: Those Pesky Performance Reports:

Because last year was so weird, the money wasn’t approved until March. So the whole calendar was up-ended. The nonprofits were supposed to turn in mid-year reports when they re-applied for new funding in August. One nonprofit was late by one day, due to turnover in staffing. One other nonprofit was later, but ended up withdrawing altogether. 

So there is not really a problem here: nearly everyone turned in their mid-year reports on time. Final reports will be due at the end of January.

First off, everyone seemed really confused about the calendar. It is legitimately confusing, because it was never spelled out clearly up front.

Here’s the normal situation:

A funding cycle is three years:

Year A: You apply and get your money. (Applications are due in August, money awarded in December.)
Year B: You spend your money. (It’s a calendar year, Jan-December)
Year C: You turn in your final report. (It’s due by January 31st)

If you are re-applying for funding, you’d apply again in Year B. So your final report from the previous cycle isn’t available yet, because you’re still spending that money.

Jane is acting like it’s a two year cycle, and that it’s just incompetence that keeps nonprofits from having their final report on time. The staff member gently tried to explain, but Jane kept misinterpreting the explanation. (Jane kept acting like the issue was nonprofits that skipped an application cycle, and she’s say things like “If they didn’t apply for a year, then they should just turn in the most recent report.”)

Alyssa: Working for a nonprofit, you are constantly dealing with so many grants, and this is a small amount of money. These are good people, overworked on a shoestring budget, and we’re offering them 50¢. Can’t we have just have grace for our neighbors? Let them work it out on a case-by-case basis with staff?

I’m going to skip about 20 minutes of haggling between councilmembers, but suffice it to say: No. We cannot have grace for our neighbors. Matthew Mendoza is the biggest hard-ass of all, harping on how everything needs to be promptly on time, no exceptions. 

Jane: How about this: the report is due in August. We’ll accept late reports, as long as the final report is in before the committee needs to consider applications. 

The staff member tries to explain again: this year, only half-year reports were due Oct 15th. The Board considers applications in November. So the nonprofits really can’t get final reports in by decision time. They can submit final reports eventually though. 

Jane: We’re going to need to see the final report!

Answer: The final reports are due January 31st. So they could easily submit that for the following cycle, in August?

Jane: Yes. Have them print it out again.Thank you.

Bottom line: if you’re funded in Year A, you’ll submit that report two years later, when you re-apply for funding August of Year C. No one could possibly be late with their final report, because it was due seven months earlier, in January.

Alyssa, “This is really insulting, because it’s not actually a problem. Bigger granting agencies handle extenuating circumstances with grace all the time. We’re the ones treating nonprofits like they can’t handle being professional.”

Alyssa is right. The whole tone of this conversation is that nonprofits are naughty wayward children, and if they carry on, they shan’t have any figgy pudding. 

Such naughty, naughty non-profits.

Complaint #2: Council priorities should add up to more points!

We’re talking about this slide again. Jane suggests that the points allocated should be:

2 years San Marcos Service (5 points 10 points)
Office in San Marcos (5 points 10 points)
Funding creates increase in service (5 points)

Everyone nods compliantly. 

Alyssa:  What’s the rationale behind increasing the first two and leaving the third the same?

Jane: No reason! We could do 10/10/10, make it 30 total!  

This is exactly how haphazard this all is. She’s not actually making a claim about the relative merits of the bullet points. Council just felt neglected, since their priorities were only worth 15 points. (I think they settled on 10/10/10.)

Complaints #s…: Other Things

  • Jane would like to know which cities the board members live in. She doesn’t need to know their address, but she is interested to know if they live in San Marcos, or Kyle, or Austin, or what.
  • Jane wants to require them to spell out acronyms. (One application didn’t.) 

No one objects to these two criterion, although I assume Alyssa rolled her eyes. I mean, it’s good manners to spell out your acronyms, but I wouldn’t make it a rule.

Matthew: Can we ask them what percentage this grant is of their total budget? 
Answer: We already know this, based on the information provided.

Jane: Could they could have a coversheet that divided the applications, with the organization’s name and their San Marcos address with their requested amount?
Answer: no problem.

(I actually find this one quite reasonable. It’s just about improving the readability of the applications. And staff can implement this without inconveniencing the nonprofits.)

Jane: Will Council be able to review and vote on the final draft of the application and rules?
Answer: No problem.

Alyssa has one final comment. “Can we see this level of accountability and reports when we talk about the police department, or the fire department, or public works? We give the police $322 per resident. We give the fire department $218 per resident. And we give public works $141 per resident. Yet we are wasting all of this time over the HSAB board, which works out to… $7 per resident. Can we carry this energy when we talk about budgets in general?”

Jane responds: That’s different. Those are all city departments with department heads that report to us.

Let’s analyze this last bit. Who gets micromanaged, and who doesn’t?

  • It is true that micromanaging city departments is different than micromanaging contracts and grants to external groups. 
  • However, all of those departments have many external contracts that run between $5K and $35K, and those contracts do not get scrutinized by council. We just trust the department.

In fact, immediately before this item, we approved a contract for $1 million, for improvements at Gary Softball Complex. We did not check whether the contractor was a local company. (They are not local.) We did not ask the private company to explain what all the acronyms meant! We did not second-guess how council priorities were weighted in the selection criteria. We just voted yes, because we trusted the city staff that recommended the construction agency.

Furthermore, there are at least two Very Special Nonprofits that the city negotiates with directly.
1. The Greater San Marcos Partnership, or GSMP.

Back in 2021, we signed a three year contract with them for $400,000 each year. They get $1.2 million dollars! Isn’t that something. 

GSMP has to submit a yearly report card. The last – and only! – time they gave an update to City Council was back in May 2022. I can’t find any yearly report cards on on the San Marcos website, so transparency is nonexistent there. From the GSMP website, here’s their yearly report from 2022. It reads more like a promotional brochure than a detailed report, though. Is that the same as a yearly report card? I have no idea!

Things no one on Council cared about:

  • Where the board members live. Do the GSMP board members live in Wimberly? In Austin? Who knows. Because no one cares.
  • The exact date that the report was submitted, or whether yearly reports are happening at all. City Council has not hyperventilated about this yet.
  • Whether all the acronyms were spelled out precisely. In fact, there are a lot of abbreviations!
  • What percent the San Marcos money is of their total budgets.

What a funny thing, right? (I actually wrote about the contract with GSMP here, but I was a newbie blogger and was still trying to get the hang of it.)

2. San Marcos Chamber of Commerce

We give the Chamber of Commerce $28K/year. They get two automatic yearly renewals. We got some details because we gave them more money this past fall, reallocated from Covid money.

There has not been any discussion that I can see about this money since a work session in 2020. I did not watch the work session, but the powerpoint slides are very vague and uninformative. 

Here’s the thing: I don’t think we should micromanage GSMP or Chamber of Commerce, either! We could have a philosophical conversation about how they benefit the community, but I think they basically do what they say they’re doing. (I’m not opposed to the idea supporting small, locally owned businesses. We can quibble about dollar amounts some other time.)

The point is that we treat these groups like professional adults. If they’re late, we pick up the phone and give them a call. If there’s a confusing acronym, we shoot them an email. We don’t act like a grumpy school principal who posts an additional rule on the bulletin board every time someone misbehaves.

Finally: it helps small locally-owned businesses if we lift people out of poverty. Middle class people can eat out downtown more than poor people can! Supporting the most vulnerable members of our community is actually best for everyone.

…

Item 24: Should we postpone VisionSMTX?

Right now, VisionSMTX is supposed to come around on January 16th for a final vote. In the meantime, a subcommittee had been meeting, and they’re recommending that we do more community outreach.

There’s a brief discussion, and Jane checks with everyone informally. It’s really hard to hear who is a “yes” and who is a “no”, but I think this is how it goes:

Check-in on January 16th, but not the final vote: Everyone except Matthew Mendoza
Final vote should be Jan 16th: Matthew Mendoza

I’m not sure what Matthew is hung up on. He clearly has some strong opinions about this process, but didn’t quite say what’s bugging him.

Hours 0:00 – 1:51, 12/5/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen comment: The two main topics are the Can Ban and HSAB grants.

Can Ban:
– A bunch of people speak in favor, many who have spent years cleaning up the river
– Can it be a restriction on single-use beverages but not single-use food containers? Texas Water Safari folks need some single-use food containers,
– City Council member from Martindale describes how well their can ban has worked.
– The Eyes of the San Marcos River does regular clean ups just past where city contractors stop picking up trash. It’s a lot.

Speakers promoting their nonprofits for HSAB Grants:
– Outsiders Anonymous representative describes their free addiction recovery program.
– PALS for free spay/neutering and low cost pet care

All these things in due time!

…

Item 9:  We are rezoning about 1 acre here:

Currently it looks like this:

That is the restaurant Sakura.

Sakura is staying, but it’s gaining a bunch of little apartments behind it.  They can put up to 9 apartments there.  This seems like a good place for apartments!  Infill does not need to be scary.

…

Item 10:   There’s a little road you’ve never heard of here:

called Flustern Road.  It’s up in Whisper Tract:

Whisper tract is gigantic, and slowly getting built out.

Flustern Road has exactly one resident, a company called Manifest Commerce. They asked if they could get the name changed from Flustern Road to Manifest Way.  

However, Flustern Road will eventually cross Opportunity Blvd, and connect with Celebration Way: 

 From the POV of the fire department and EMS, it’s better to have roads that don’t change names.  So as long as we’re changing the name anyway, we’re going to go with Celebration way. 

Also, don’t the names all sound like someone from the 1960s was dreaming of a brighter tomorrow? Celebration Way, Opportunity Blvd, Technology Way, Manifest Way… Flustern never really fit in, did it.

Nevertheless: would you like to know what Flustern means? [drum roll] ….it means “to whisper.” And it was in Whisper Tract. Aww, very cute. But over!

…

Item 11: Consolidated CBDG funding report.

All of our CBDG money originates with the Federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) department. We have to regularly write reports to them, documenting that we’re using the money according to the rules.

Alyssa Garza feels like the report isn’t widely circulated enough. Maybe fewer neighbors would harass her about wasting money if they saw how meticulously nonprofits have to account for every last nickel.

I’m more cynical than she is. People just like to gripe.

…

Item 5: We’re buying a generator, for $445K:

Technically, we’re buying a 600-kilowatt diesel generator, automatic transfer switch, electrical installation, and associated engineering services.

Technically, it’s Covid money that’s paying for it.

And technically, it will be located in San Marcos High School, so that the high school can serve as an emergency shelter in the future.

…

Item 12: Citizen Comment will now be called Community Perspectives.  (Mentioned before here.)

  • We’re getting rid of “Citizen” because you do not have to be a citizen to have a comment. This is good!
  • We didn’t want to name it “Public comment” because we already have “public hearings”, and those might sound too similar.
  • Not sure why we didn’t go with “Community Comment”. “Community Perspectives” sounds a little bit like a hokey small town newspaper op-ed column, but hey, sometimes we are a hokey small town. Did you have a chance to stop by Sights & Sounds this weekend?

…

Item 13: Human Services Advisory Board  (HSAB) Grants.

We put $550,000 of our city budget towards grants to nonprofits. This year, we also have $100,000 of the last bit of Covid money to distribute as well.  HSAB is the committee that meets, looks over applications, and recommends to council who should get money.

Last year – for reasons I was never quite clear on – the process was deemed a shitshow. Council made HSAB go back and do it all over again. Then Council tinkered with the results anyway.   After all that, HSAB thoroughly revised their process for evaluating grant applications. 

It seems everyone likes the new process! You can read all the applications yourself here, as well as a bunch of other reports and information.

So this year:

  • 34 nonprofits applied.
  • 5 board members rated them independently on a huge matrix of things:
    • All the nonprofits pass the Risk Assessment
    • One nonprofit needed to get their nonprofit status back
    •  They were ranked according to some evaluation criteria

Here’s the evaluation criteria:

The committee met weekly, all fall long, and discussed all of the nonprofits individually. They heard presentations from all the nonprofits. It sounds like a massive amount of work.

Here’s the full scoring matrix on the Evaluation Criteria, if you’re so inclined:

Evaluation Score DetailsDownload

(I know it’s tiny, but you should be able to zoom in and scroll around.)

And here’s the summary table of the scores:

(scores were re-centered across committee members, for consistency.)

Finally, here’s HSAB’s complete funding recommendations:

Scoring matrixDownload

So what does Council think? Let’s dive in.

Council Discussion

Alyssa Garza: Last year, Council deviated from the recommended HSAB funding in a really haphazard way.  I’m glad to see a really systematic process. This is good work, I support the recommendations. 

Matthew Mendoza: Great job! But I want to tinker with it.  Any Baby Can is centered out of Austin.  Let’s deduct $7K from them and give it to the San Marcos Youth Services Board, because that’s centered in San Marcos.

Jane Hughson: Any Baby Can has an office here in San Marcos. Make it $5K and I’ll support it.

The Vote:  Should we take $5K from Any Baby Can and give it to SMYSB?

Yes: Shane Scott, Mark Gleason, Jane Hughson, Matthew Mendoza
No: Alyssa Garza (who explains that she just wants to stick with HSAB process)

Abstain: Jude Prather, because his wife serves on the board of the food bank.

So now:
– Any Baby Can requested $30K, recommended $25K, and will get $20,000.
– SMYSB requested $39K, was recommended $20K, and will get $25,000.

This is a good example of haphazard meddling. They’re both good organizations!

But let’s take a moment anyway:

Any Baby Can is providing early childhood intervention for birth-3 year olds, for kids with medical diagnoses, developmental delays, or any impairments.  (Getting interventions in early is huge.  This majorly redirects the trajectory of kids’ lives.)  According to their application, they served 159 children and families in San Marcos last year, over 29,600 hours. They expect to serve 165 children in San Marcos this next year.

SMYSB is an afterschool program for 11-17 year olds in San Marcos. They’re asking for rent for their new facilities, which is $2700/month.  Their application doesn’t say how many kids they’ve served, but looking at their progress report from last year, SMYSB got $10,000, and served 16 kids in the spring and summer.  They used to be located at Southside Community center, so I’m guessing that they’re working with kids dealing with housing instability or homelessness. This is a super vulnerable population! They need this kind of one-on-one care to navigate what they’ve gotten handed to them.

Both are good programs, staffed by hard-working, underfunded organizations!   But the committee took their job seriously when they evaluated the benefit to San Marcos.

I guess I’m harping on this because it’s, well, haphazard. It didn’t feel like Matthew Mendoza read all the applications super closely and then felt compelled to shift this money around. It felt like someone from SMYSB picked up the phone and asked him if he couldn’t find a few more dollars for them. He did, but it comes out of someone else’s funding.

The vote on the entire thing:
Yes: Everyone but Jude
No: No one
Abstain: Jude Prather

…

Because I’m an insufferable prig, may I make a comparison?  

  • Just now, we generously gave out HSAB grants which cost the city $550,000.
  • We also give all homeowners a $15,000 homestead exemption on their property tax.

How much does that cost the city?

Basically, the city is donating of $1,100,000 towards the worthy charity of home owners.

  • The elderly and disabled people get a tax exemption of $35,000. This works out to a $211 discount on their tax bill.
  • Everyone else gets a $15,000 tax exemption. This works out to a $90 discount on their tax bill.

This is fine! I’m not mad about this. But it’s invisible. And we don’t call it “charity”, we call it a tax break.

Bear with me for a moment more:

  • We’ve got about 7000 owner-occupied houses (as of 2021) who get to share that $1.1 million. There’s a tiny bit of paperwork, but that’s it. Each person gets either $211 or $90, no strings attached.
  • There are 22,219 people below the poverty line (as of 2021). The HSAB money isn’t exclusively for poor people, but it’s a good place to start.  That works out to $25 per person.

And there are SO MANY STRINGS attached. Thirty-four nonprofits fill out extensive paperwork. A six person committee meets for weeks and scrutinizes the applications. Council scrutinizes the recommendations further. Afterwards, each nonprofit writes ongoing grant reports on each person they helped. It’s an extremely labor-intensive, highly visible process. Someone has to maintain the website charting all these details.

To recap:

  • $1,100,000 on charity for 7000 homeowners.
  • $550,000 on charity for at least 22,000 people in poverty.

Haha, weird, right!  [hard stare at city council.]

Hours 1:01-2:06, 3/7/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 15: Human Services Advisory Board . This is an item that’s dragged out for months. 

The city allocates $500K from the General Fund for nonprofits every year. A bunch of nonprofits apply for it.  HSAB reads the applications and recommends to council who should get how much. Council takes the recommendations and then redoes it all, re-allocating money all over the place, which is what happened tonight. 

The difference this year is that the first set of HSAB recommendations made everyone so mad that Council came up with new guidelines and then asked HSAB to meet again and re-do everything. So the allocations are several months behind schedule this year.

I think HSAB tried to be exceedingly objective and impartial, and ended up being rather algorithmic.  What I can’t tell is:

  1. Does council want HSAB to go deeper than this algorithm approach, and evaluate the merits of each individual nonprofits?  In other words, is Council annoyed that HSAB kept it so formulaic?
  2. Or does Council ultimately always want to be the ones to make the individual judgements about the merit of each nonprofit? In other words, this is exactly how it’s supposed to go, and no matter what, Council is going to re-do everything HSAB does?

Anyway, they re-do it all.

In case you’re curious, here are the recommendations from HSAB – both last December’s recs, and then revised for Tuesday’s meeting (but not necessarily what Council adopted):

“CORN” is in a big circle because that nonprofit doesn’t exist anymore. (I guess it didn’t have the juice.)(Sorry, that was corny.)(I’ll stop now.)

This discussion started during the 3 pm workshop, and then wrapped up during the official council meeting.  

First, Council reduced the funding for a bunch of agencies:

Reductions:

MELJ/Iron Sharpens Iron: from $33K to $0.

HOME Center/Emergency Motel Program: from $20K to $15K.

Treasured Protégé /Protégé  Program: from $13K to $0

Rough Draft/Superhero Art Program: from $3K to $0.

Communities in Schools/Counseling SMCISD: from $7K to $3.5K. 

ACCEYSS: From $35K to $30K

Here are some things to note:

  • Every agency has a worthwhile mission
  • I am not closely tied enough to the nonprofit world to know how to tease apart the effectiveness of different nonprofits.
  • But neither is most of Council.
  • Except for Alyssa Garza, who is not happy about many of these reductions.

Rationales weren’t given for every reduction. Of the ones that were:

  • HOME Center duplicates Southside, which has been doing emergency housing longer.
  • Treasured Protégé  is just one school. Not all the schools. (I can’t tell what that means from the website.)
  • Rough Draft isn’t a basic need, like food and housing.
  • Communities in Schools should be funded in collaboration with SMCISD.  

So if my math is right, that saved them roughly $70K to dole out. (Including the CORN money.) During the 6 pm meeting, they increased funding like so:

Increases: 

Hays County Food Bank: $30K to $40K

Combined Community Action/Meals on Wheels: $3K to $15K

Nosotros La Gente/”Viva Zapatos” Shoe Drive (no website): $5K to $10K 

Salvation Army/Emergency Assistance: $27.5K to $35K

St. Vincent de Paul: $16.5K to $20K

School Fuel/Weekend Food: $19.5K to $24K

Youth Service Bureau: $4.4K to $10K

Southside Community Center/Specific Assistance: $4K to $16K

One last one that Jane referred to as “Emergency” to $30K .  I lost track of what this was and can’t figure it out. I can’t tell if this is something that was reduced to $30K or increased to $30K. 

Alyssa reiterates that she’s particularly angry about reducing MELJ/Irons to $0, and HOME Center from $20K to $15K. In my summaries above, I didn’t really convey how frustrated she was with the fickle and random shuffling of money above.

On MELJ/Iron Sharpens Iron, I agree: Council really dropped the ball.  (Also, they kept calling it “MELI” instead of “MELJ”, which doesn’t instill a whole lot of trust.) Here’s the blurb from their application:

Iron Sharpens Iron uses a multi-faceted approach to address the challenges that reentry poses for nearly 40,000 individuals annually in the city of San Marcos. Iron Sharpens Iron program model assists those persons who’ve been incarcerated by determining what their needs are during the intake process that will enable them to be successful in the community in which they are living. We have support mechanisms in place that will enable this population and their family members to have somewhere to go to seek assistance with financial issues, substance abuse referrals as well as discussion of academic interests, employment and any legal situation that may have not been resolved. This includes sharing ideal strategies and best practices for living a crime free life. This particular project will have a large reach to multiple entities including those that have been or parole and their families. We’ve learned that those persons who have lived experience that are included become the best educators on social justice change as it refers to “imprisonment” and successful re-entry back into their respective communities. This project will allow us to increase awareness to corporations and municipalities to participate in inclusion of those labeled a felon-as well supportive things for the population that we are currently serving and extend more to the family members.

Council keeps saying that community safety is their highest priority, and they’re freaked out about crime. But they only seem aware of punitive, authoritarian ways to combat crime. They don’t seem to see the point of nurturing and supporting people who have committed crimes in the past. (Except Alyssa. All of this is except Alyssa.) It’s like it’s off-putting for them to consider the humanity of people who’ve been incarcerated.  

First, that’s gross. You judge a society by how it treats its prisoners, not its princes.  

But second, it’s impractical.  If you want crime recidivism to decrease, you should do things that help people transition out of incarceration and into stable lives.  Instead, we’re taking an authoritarian approach.  Keep making life harder for them!  The beatings will continue until morale improves, as they say.

…

One final thought, and I hope I don’t offend anyone: I feel a little weird about School Fuel.  Kids get sent home with brown bags of food that is supposed to help with food insecurity over the weekend.  But it puts poor kids in a weird, possibly stigmatizing position to have to get a Poor Kid’s Food Bag right in the middle of a social situation, and take it home on the bus with a bunch of other kids.  

I’m not really criticizing anyone who is taking time to help others in this community. There’s a lot of need, and it’s important that a kid knows they’ve got some dependable food over the weekend. And there’s probably not that much stigma in a community that’s pretty used to widespread poverty. It’s just something that crossed my mind.

…

Updated to add: The 40K number in the MILJ application above – “nearly 40,000 individuals annually in the city of San Marcos.” – can’t possibly be right. The whole town is only around 70K. I don’t know where they got that from, but it’s nonsensical.

Hours 2:21-3:58, 1/17/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 29: Riverbend Ranch

We’ve seen this proposed development before, and after P&Z denied their cut-and-fill. Residents of Redwood mobilized like 30 people to come talk to P&Z that night. It was really amazing.

The major issue is that Riverbend Ranch will be on the hill immediately above Redwood. Redwood is home to a lot of extremely vulnerable community members and is dealing with flooding, raw sewage, and significant health challenges due to sewage contamination.

The council could force Riverbend Ranch to be developed in such a way that it helps Redwood tie in to San Marcos water and sewage. Or the council could allow them to develop in a way that increases flooding and sewage contamination. This could be done really well, or it could be a nightmare.

Matt Mendoza, Alyssa Garza, and Saul Gonzalez all volunteered to be on the Riverbend Ranch committee.  I am relieved.  You can trust Alyssa to remember to protect Redwood, and Matt Mendoza was personally the one who went down and talked to the Redwood community prior to the P&Z council meeting, so he’s also invested. And Saul is generally sympathetic to people without financial means to protect themselves from developers (although he usually takes the safe route when it comes time to actually vote).

….

Item 30: Paid parking in the Lion’s Club parking lot. 

We have a lot of out-of-towners who come to tube the river and go to football games.  We want to recoup some costs by charging them to park in the Lion’s Club parking lot.  So we’re launching a 3 year pilot program.

It’s supposed to be free to San Marcos residents, which means that there has to be some system to tell who is a resident and who is not a resident.  It sounds like you go online and ask for a sticker to put on your car? You would either have a license or some sort of photo ID, or something with your address on it. (I might be wrong about the sticker.)

Alyssa gets them to include library cards on the acceptable forms of ID, which is good.

It’s pretty pricey for non-residents:

The biggest discussion came about whether or not the machines should be cash-less.  Mark Gleason doesn’t like cash-less machines out of general get-offa-my-lawn old man vibes. (He’s not wrong!) Alyssa doesn’t like them because poor people are less likely to have credit cards. (Also correct.) So the compromise is that there will be one machine that accepts cash, and the others throughout the parking lot will be cashless.

I share Alyssa’s uneasiness about the invisible barriers that arise when you implement cashless payment systems. At the same time, in this case, those bonkers prices are their own impediment for poor people. You can get like three eggs for that kinda money!

…

Item 31: One last time with the Human Services Advisory Board.

San Marcos donates money from the General Fund to nonprofits.  The funding process this year was a shitshow (apparently – I don’t really know details) and so council stepped in to give new instructions.  So now, on this third meeting on this topic,  council is nailing down the final details of how they want grant applications to be evaluated. There are two main sticking points:

  1. Grant money is only available if you’re serving San Marcos residents. The issue is what kind of track record is required. Should nonprofits from Austin and San Antonio who want to expand their service to include San Marcos be allowed to apply for city funds? Or should money be restricted to nonprofits who already serve San Marcos?

Jane wants the nonprofits to already be serving San Marcos. Saul agrees.

Alyssa makes the case that in certain categories, like mental health, we have a dire need for providers.  Nonprofits from San Antonio and Austin will be more successful finding other grant money to use on San Marcos if they can use this grant to demonstrate a need here.  

Mark Gleason and Matthew Mendoza want to give preference to San Marcos-established nonprofits, but not exclude the others from applying.  I didn’t catch what Jude preferred, but this is where Council lands as a whole.

  1. Jane Hughson feels strongly that nonprofits should not depend on this money. She doesn’t want anyone to lose their job if the city has less money one year and can’t fund as many nonprofits.  In light of this, there is a rule that no full-time employee should be funded. You can ask for money to fund a part-time employee, but not a full-time employee.

So the issue is: can you split the workload of a full time employee, and ask for partial funding? Can a grant ask for 30% of the salary of the full time employee who is assigned to work on the program for 15 hours per week? Or do they have to hire a standalone part-timer for 15 hours per week?

Jane is a strong no. You must hire a literal part-timer for 15 hours per week. No carving up the time of a full-time employee. 

Good news! We have an actual nonprofits expert on council! Alyssa has tons of non-profit experience, and is currently employed writing grants for her job. She explains that this is standard operating procedure in the world of nonprofits. Nonprofits are used to piece-mealing their employee’s salaries together across several grants. As long as the non-profit is basically competent and experienced, they will have a Plan B in place so that no one loses their job if San Marcos doesn’t offer these funds one year.

Out of everyone, Mark Gleason is the only person who seems to hear what Alyssa is saying. Weirdly, Jane keeps marking down that Mark is on Jane’s side, but Mark is persistent in correcting her.

But on the whole, it is the most infuriating goddamn conversation.  Everyone is sure that they know what’s best for nonprofits and no one is listening to Alyssa.  It comes off as paternalistic and arrogant.

Jane keeps requesting that any councilmember who wants to allow partial funding of full-time employees must give a specific numeric cap. Alyssa keeps explaining that that is arbitrary and counterproductive – the nonprofit will have to justify their request, and the HSAB can make an informed judgement.

They settle on a 20% cap: you can ask the grant to cover up to 20% of a fulltime employee’s salary. Because they know best.