Tag: joshua wright

Hours 0:00-50:31

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Several people (mostly from Mano Amiga) speak on Josh Wright, the guy killed by a corrections officer at the hospital a few months ago.  (Six shots in his back, while wearing leg shackles. There’s no way to parse that as anything but cold-blooded murder.) 

Several of the speakers point out that none of the councilmembers, besides Alyssa Garza, have issued statements on Joshua Wright’s death, nor offered condolences to the family. It’s true that the corrections officer is part of the Hays County system, not the city system, but councilmembers are still public officials with a platform and influence. Right now, they’re using that influence to quietly twiddle their thumbs. 

Several people speak on the SMART Terminal.  SMART Terminal was approved two weeks ago. Last week, at P&Z, the SMART Terminal was up for re-zoning to Heavy Industrial. An even bigger turnout of people showed up to speak against it.  A ton of people shared stories of flooding downstream of the proposed SMART location. I do not see how Council could have thoroughly vetted stories of flooding before approving the terminal, given the vast number of personal stories that popped up last week.

P&Z ended up postponing it for a month, to give the developer time to meet with community members and gain their support.

As an aside:  A lot of people are upset because the SMART Terminal was approved before they even heard it was coming. This is a big problem: how can a city notify the public about a project in their area? The city does actually try pretty hard: there are supposed to be signs posted, in big font, and there are supposed to be notifications mailed out to residents nearby. The problem is that these things are time-consuming, expensive and still don’t work that well. Signs blow over, mailers go out to home owners and not renters, people live further than 400 yards away but still will be affected, etc. (Council is fixing the renter problem – they will start getting notifications too.)

I want to talk about mailing notifications. The notification radius is 400 yards. Everyone who lives within 400 yards of the boundary of a project is supposed to get a notification in the mail. It used to be 200 yards.  It was expanded a few years ago.  City staff was stressed out by increasing the radius – it increases their workload, and also gets expensive.

So look, here’s an easy solution: the notification radius should be proportional to the size of the project.  Rare gigantic project like the SMART Terminal or the entire Riverbend Ranch Development? Should have a very large notification radius.  Frequent, ordinary, small scale project? Should have a proportionally smaller notification radius.  It’s very weird that the notification for Sean Patrick’s CUP is the same radius as for the Martindale-sized massive-slab-of-concrete-by-the-river future SMART Terminal.

…

Item 17: The speed limit on 123 is going to be reduced from 60 mph to 55 mph. 

I mean, this is basically the stretch that half the high school students take to get to the high school.  It doesn’t seem crazy to me to knock the speed down just a hair. 

(There was an awful tragedy at Goodnight Middle School on Friday, involving a car. We are all so fragile, and the people we love are so fragile, too.)

…

Item 18:  Apparently the state of Texas wants to give us $45,000 for us to build a metal awning to protect police cars. Nothing wrong with a metal awning to protect cars.

The problem is that the source of the $45k is deeply tainted: it’s from State Seized Asset Funds. Civil asset forfeiture is a giant gross mess.  Basically cops are allowed to confiscate anything potentially related to a crime.  But then, regardless of whether the owner was innocent, guilty, or completely unrelated to the crime, the cops end up keeping the property.  Police departments end up profiting hugely off it, which then motivates them to grab property even more aggressively and ever so tenuously connected to an actual crime.

Do I think we should turn down the money? I don’t know. This state is so broken on this topic that I don’t think it would do any good, frankly, except as protest.  Whether we accept the money has zero bearing on whether or not Texas ever reforms its civil forfeiture policies.  But it’s worth adding this to your mental rolodex of ways that police abuse community members.

Hours 1:01-2:10, 1/3/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Some quick items:

Items 16-18: Various CDBG funding.  Moving money around to fund rental and utility assistance, a project where they buy flood-prone land to keep it from being developed, and working on some ongoing flood projects for the Blanco Riverine and around Blanco Gardens.

Item 17: The Planning Department has a lot of fees for various services and permits.  How do they set these prices?

It’s been a while since they updated what fees they charge. So they had a consultant come in and analyze how much it costs the city to carry out all these services.  Then they compared fees to seven comparison cities.  Then they shared all this at the December 14th workshop, and proposed new fees.  

The city wants to balance covering at least 50% of their costs, without charging homeowners and small businesses too much or being too out of line with the other cities.  I did not dive deep into the fees, but the methodology sounds fine.  Council said it was all fine.

Item 20: The result of the HSAB drama from December.  At the 3 pm workshop, city council worked on this with city staff. Here’s the outcome:

(Note: It says “The Board should not fund all programs” but they intended “The board should not feel compelled to fund all programs.”)

All seems fine. I think they’re going to go back and re-allocate the December money according to these principles.

Item 21: Mano Amiga circulated a petition to repeal the SMPD contract. Now, I obviously live here in San Marcos. If Mano Amiga were to approach me, I would sign their petition, because I generally support their mission.

But as your local friendly blogger, I’m going to call shenanigans – the actual petition is confusing. As far as I can tell, this is the entire thing:

What’s the actual, specific gripe with the meet-and-confer contract? And what’s the specific, desired outcome? Maybe there’s another page somewhere spelling it out? (Update: It’s the Hartman Reforms. But I still don’t see anything about it on the Mano Amiga website.)

Anyway, this petition got started this fall. And then on December 12th, Joshua Wright was killed by a correctional officer at the hospital in Kyle.

Now this incident is extremely clear-cut abuse by the correctional officer. You’ve got an unarmed inmate in a hospital, wearing ankle shackles for god’s sake. He tries to escape. The officer shoots him six times. That officer had some fantasy that the only way to handle a person running away was to be judge, jury, and executioner. Joshua Wright has to die because this correctional officer can’t properly evaluate and handle the danger of an unarmed guy wearing ankle shackles. What the utter fuck.

Mano Amiga is clearly livid, and sprang into action, demanding bodycam footage and holding events and raising awareness. Of course, I wholly support their efforts for justice for Joshua Wright. This is the most just and deserving of causes to fight for.