Tag: Land Development Code

Hours 0:00 – 5:51, 5/5/26

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Ten speakers. The two biggest topics are whether San Marcos should sell water to Kyle or not, and the Land Development Code.

Water to Kyle:

  • We shouldn’t be giving water to Kyle.
  • Only sell water to Kyle on the condition that they don’t then allow data centers
  • Don’t give water to Kyle, we don’t know how long this drought will go on.

We’ll get to this in Items 4 and 5.

Land Development Code comments:

  • Limit power plants to Heavy Industrial
  • Create a distinction between large load back up generators that data centers use, vs ordinary small scale back up generators, in terms of which require CUP.
  • 100 ft is too far for bar clean up radius.
  • Virginia Parker, director of SMRF:
    – Keep the Qualified Water Protection Plan presentation at P&Z, to allow for review by the public.
    – Fee-in-lieu for parkland should be restricted to purchasing new parkland, not maintenance
    – Fix the wording on impervious cover item

We’ll get to all these in Item 22.

Other comments:

  • The Uhland Bridge over the Blanco River has not been cleaned since the last flood. It’s full of debris and could be very dangerous if it floods again.
  • The Downtown Association of San Marcos is in favor of giving SMPD these four parking spots on weekend nights
  • We need to coordinate with Texas State, be business-friendly in the LDC, and be wise when we give tax breaks.
  • We need more accountability.
  • The city UniverCity course was great, and it’s too bad it’s being discontinued. You should put slides online.
  • A large portion of my land is being purchased by the city, please talk to the liason company so we can move forward.

Onto the meeting!

…

Itsme 17-18: Crestwood retail center

This is the Crestwood shopping center, out on Old RR 12:

Back in 2022, it came up that their septic tank was old and degraded and leaking nasty sewage onto a driveway nearby. Gross! Council mentioned back then that the county hadn’t dealt with the septic system for four years already.

Now it’s been another four years, and the septic system is still a problem! Basically they need to get on the city sewer.

That’s what they’re here for, finally. Crestwood is getting annexed and zoned into the city. Great.

…

Item 19: A little rezoning

There’s a little piece of property tucked away in this neighborhood:

Right now, it’s a pair of boarded up houses and an empty lot:

They’re going to redevelop it into four houses.

Note: people get really nervous about the word “infill”. The fear is that it’s a Trojan horse, and that if you allow “infill”, you’ll end up with a giant apartment complex in the middle of neighborhoods. (And sometimes that has happened! Developers can be jerks!)

But there’s also a good kind of infill: replacing two abandoned houses with four houses that families can live in. This is what we’re trying to encourage. This is good!

The vote: 7-0. Great.

…

Items 4-5: Selling water to Kyle

This sounds really bad! It’s not quite as bad as it sounds. But against a background of severe drought and data centers and reckless development, anything water-related deserves some scrutiny.

So let’s scrutinize! What’s going on?

It’s two slightly different things:

Item 4: Kyle uses San Marcos water in an emergency. In other words, if a water main breaks, or if they’ve got fire hoses on full blast to put out a fire, they tap our water so that they can maintain water pressure for their residents.

It’s an emergency back up, basically. We’ve had an agreement like this for the past ten years, but it expired in November 2025.

Details:

  • They pay $6.42 per 1000 gallons, which is our current wholesale rate.
  • This would last 10 years, with two 5 year extensions.
  • It gets used a few days each season, which works out to about $150K/year
  • Texas sets the rules for what constitutes an emergency.

In the past six months, they’ve used emergency water once.

Item 5: Kyle buys regular old everyday water from San Marcos, because they don’t have enough infrastructure yet to get enough water to their residents. The way it works is that we are allocated a certain amount of water from Edward’s Aquifer. We generally don’t use it all, so we sell them our unused Edward’s Aquifer water rights.

We sold them water back in 2023, and then again in 2024. (We might have done it earlier than 2023, but I wasn’t blogging yet.)

Kyle knows they’ll go over their allotted amount of Edward’s water rights, but they don’t yet have infrastructure to get enough water to the parts of the city that need it. Supposedly the infrastructure will be finished in 2028.

(For the record: back in 2023, they were sure the infrastructure would be finished in 2025. Just saying.)

So they need to buy Edward’s Aquifer water from someone. We generally go under our allotted water, so we sell the water rights to them.

Details:

  • We automatically get $732K from them, even if they don’t use any of our water
  • We get up to $1.5 million if they do.

Here is the big question: why is this happening? Is Kyle being irresponsible and allowing development that it can’t supply with water? Does Kyle allow its residents to be irresponsible with water? (Are we the most virtuous neighbors ever?)

Answer: We can’t really answer any of those questions satisfactorily.

Here’s what we can say: There’s a clause in both contracts that Kyle’s drought restrictions must match or exceed our drought restrictions.

That doesn’t entirely solve the problem, of course. Drought policies say things like, “Residents can’t fill their pools or water their lawns on Thursdays.” They don’t say things like, “Council should not approve a new development here, because the city lacks the water.”

Also, the two drought ordinances are tricky to compare, though. They don’t line up as neatly as you’d like. Also, Kyle is planning on revising their Water Conservation and Drought policy in the next month or two.

Bottom line: We agree to one year of emergency water, and postpone the Edwards Aquifer rights, until Kyle revises their drought policy, so that we can compare apples to apples, and decide how virtuous they are.

This should come back over the summer.

…

Item 21: Four police parking spots downtown

Last year, things on the square got disturbingly violent:

In response, SMPD is trying to ramp up its presence downtown. Texas State also kicked in some money to help cover the extra police time.

So officers have been parking in these four spots:

Starting in December, we reserved those parking spots for police cars only, so that cops can park there while monitoring the bar scene.

However, we also don’t want to take away daytime downtown parking spots! So they’re trying to thread the needle: these spots are public parking during the day, and then at night it becomes SMPD parking. (It’s like the Hannah Montana of parking spaces.)

The tricky part is trying to explain that in the parking signs. Here’s an example, the one on Hopkins:

Great. By day, you’ve got the two green signs. By night, you’ve got the red. (Not pictured: an extra sign with an SMPD number to call if you get towed.)

The downtown businesses are very happy with this! They like having the police presence downtown.

This has been a trial run. Does Council want to make these spots permanently designated?

What does council say?

Lorenzo: This is a mess. It’s too complicated. Why not just dedicate the spots to SMPD, day and night?

Amanda: I don’t want to remove them during the day, because of parking shortages.

Jane: What if we stripe them?

Josh: People will learn the hard way.

Alyssa: Are people learning? How many people have been penalized?
Answer: In the past three months, there have been 3 citations, 1 warning, and 10 cars towed.

Also SMPD says: We actually tow a ton of cars downtown. Ten cars towed is barely a drop in the bucket!

The vote: 7-0.

Spots will now be permanent! From now on, it’s green-by-day, red-by-night.

….

Item 22: Back to the Land Development Code

We last discussed this here and here. Last time, Council got about halfway through their amendments. Now we’re going to wade through the rest of them.

This item is super long. Sorry! Buckle up.

New Amendments:

1. Clean sidewalks

How far out should restaurants have to keep their sidewalk clean? 50 ft or 100 ft?
Answer: Council goes with 50 ft.

….

    2. Food trucks downtown.

    This is actually two different issues.

    First food-truck issue: San Marcos only allows 14 bars downtown. Each bar has an alcohol permit. Everyone else who serves alcohol downtown is technically a restaurant, and they have a different alcohol permit that requires them to serve food.

    This is one of the (many) reasons that the Rooftop got in trouble last year. They weren’t serving any food last summer. After they got in trouble for this, they added a food truck.

    The question: Is a food truck enough to make a bar feel like a restaurant, for purposes of the alcohol permit?

    Amanda: Yes. Look at Zelick’s – it feels like a restaurant, because people are sitting at tables and eating.

    Jane: What if the food truck operator gets sick and they don’t show up one weekend?
    Lorenzo: Then the business would be out of compliance if they tried to serve alcohol.
    Jane: That is naive!

    The vote: Should food trucks count as restaurants for purposes of establishments that need to sell food because they have a restaurant-alcohol permit?

    Yes: everyone
    No: No one.

    (Later on, Jane spends a LONG time being mixed up on what exactly they voted on. She and Matthew might have actually intended to vote “no”. But they don’t re-open the vote.)

    Food Truck Issue #2: What if you have a food truck that just sells alcohol and no food? Like a margarita truck or a beer truck? These exist – we have one at the outlet mall. Are these allowed downtown?

    Lorenzo: Every bar permit has a fixed address. So a bar truck would need to get an alcohol permit and could only sell alcohol at a fixed address, right?
    Answer: yes.

    The vote: Should Bar Trucks be banned downtown?

    So bar trucks are not allowed downtown.

    …

    3. Data Centers: Last time they didn’t quite nail down the definition.

    Staff came back with this suggestion:

    This passes.

    …

    4. The Waiting Period Loophole: Amanda wants to close this.

    Backstory: Say you want to build a development, and you apply to get the land rezoned. Council votes you down. How long do you have to wait before you can try again? It depends!

    Here’s how the loophole currently works:

    Situation 1: A vote to approve your rezoning fails.
    Situation 2: A vote to deny your rezoning succeeds.

    These sound like the same thing, but they aren’t the same. Situation 1 means no waiting period. The developer can zip right back to the city office and reapply. Situation 2 means the developer must wait a year before they can reapply.

    This is super misleading! Council deliberately uses this when a project is unpopular, but Council still wants to pass it. They’ll vote it down, but then give developers a backdoor to reapply.

    (This is what happened last August with the data center. Predictably, everyone got super mad and confused when there was no waiting period.)

    Amanda makes a motion to close the loophole. Both Situation 1 and Situation 2 would require a waiting period of one year.

    Jane: Council uses the loophole! Sometimes we want something to come back!

    Nobody ever seconded Amanda’s motion, so it doesn’t come to a vote.

    …

    5: Gardens and farms

    Amanda: Allow community gardens, urban farms, and plant nurseries all over San Marcos.

    Specifically:

    • Community gardens in all zoning districts
    • Urban farms in High Industrial and Business Park
    • Plant nurseries: limited/conditional in the kinds of dense, walkable neighborhoods that have businesses in them.

    Matthew has opinions: “I am going to vote yes, but I want to go on the record for being against community gardens in single family neighborhoods! I have seen the damage they can do!”

    Matthew has seen community gardens:

    and he watched some rotten shit go down.

    (“Rotten shit” is basically the point of a compost pile, so maybe he just misunderstood.)

    Anyway, the vote: 7-0. Great!

    …

    6. Four and five bedroom apartments.

    Right now, there’s a rule that you can’t have an apartment with more than three bedrooms. You can have a house with four bedrooms, but not an apartment.

    Why is this? What’s the problem with a four-bedroom apartment?

    This was the argument: “We have to get rid of four-bedroom apartments, because landlords use them for rent-by-the-bedroom. We’ll only allow with a special permit, in purpose-built-student-housing.”

    This has always been insane. Lots of people besides college students need four bedroom apartments! What if you have a family with three kids? What if the family has two kids, and a grandparent, all living together? What about coop living? What about people, generally, trying to share expenses and live together to save money?

    Furthermore: wealthy people get to buy 4- and 5-bedroom houses! Why would no one else need this?

    Historically, powerful people in San Marcos have cared a lot more about micromanaging students than about the unintentional consequences on poor people.

    So this is Amanda’s amendment: let’s fix this.

    The vote: should developers be allowed to put 4 bedrooms in a small multifamily, courtyard housing, or multifamily?

    Jane opposes it because of parking. She’s worried that if you allow 4 bedroom apartments, you won’t have enough parking spaces for everyone.

    However, parking is actually based on the number of bedrooms unless you’re downtown, and downtown is the one place that already has 4-bedroom units. So her argument does not hold water.

    …

    7. Professional Office Space

    Right now we’ve got some super weird rules about these:

    Got that? No upstairs offices, ya dirty crooks! And don’t you dare try to be mid-block, away from an intersection. You think we were born yesterday?

    Amanda proposes that we nix all of these. Staff agrees – they meant to get rid of these, because they’re weird and restrictive, but missed this instance.

    Alyssa: I’m a night owl. Can we scrap the 6am-11pm part, too?

    The vote: 7-0.

    (They did not yet scrap the 6am-11pm part.)

    …

    8. Maximum parking.

    Let’s talk about parking lots. Basically too many parking spots and too few parking spots are both problems.

    Too few parking spots mean that it’s hard for customers to find places to park. Too many means that your parking lot is huge. You’re paving too much of your city. It’s bad for flooding and walkability.

    So if a business really wants an extra large parking lot, they’re required to do some mitigation:

    • Use permeable pavers on the extra spots, so water can soak through instead of running off.
    • Provide shade trees and keep existing trees
    • Shade at least half the extra spaces with solar panels.

    Wouldn’t that make a big difference at Target or Walmart?

    The question is: when does this kick in? How much wiggle room should we give you to provide extra parking?

    Amanda’s amendment: “Extra Parking” means 30% above what’s required. If you’re required to provide 100 spots, and you provide 130, then you have to think about shade and solar panels and permeable pavers.

    The vote:

    Matthew voted no, because he speaks for the trees the floods. When no one else has the courage, he speaks for the water and the mud that just want to be inside people’s houses.

    Matthew speaks for the hot asphalt! for the smelly melting tar! In this busy modern life, Matthew remembers.

    …

    That’s everything that got voted on, officially.

    Other discussions – no vote

    Most of these will be formalized and voted on in June:

    • Major utilities, power plants, and large scale back up generators should require a permit from Council, and only be allowed in Heavy Industrial.

    This is mostly about data centers, but not entirely.

    • Public notices for zoning and permit hearings.

    Should city staff put the signs up, or should the applicant put the signs up?

    • Supermajority vs. regular majority to overturn P&Z decisions.

    Right now, it takes a supermajority to overturn P&Z. Sometimes when P&Z does something especially stupid (like ban live music at Tantra) it seems dangerous to give them so much power.

    Should Council be able to overturn P&Z decisions with a regular majority, instead of a super majority?

    My $0.02: This has come up before, in 2022. I was opposed to weakening P&Z then, and I still am. It’s a dangerous sign when a governing body weakens the checks-and-balances that are supposed to put some friction and dissonance in the system.

    If P&Z can be overruled with a simple majority, then P&Z does not actually hold any power. They just make recommendations. And I’ve been around long enough to have seen it swing the other way – a wiser P&Z and a more foolish rogue City Council.

    P&Z may occasionally make some dumb-ass decisions, but I generally think the principle of checks and balances is wise, and should not be weakened.

    …

    • Qualified Watershed Protection Plans:

    Right now, developers have to submit environmental studies, to make sure they’re not going to cause a lot of flooding or poison the river, or something. Part of that is a Qualified Watershed Protection Plan. This gets presented to P&Z. This gives other groups – like the San Marcos River Foundation – a chance to listen and make comments, in case there’s a concern.

    However, apparently it makes the whole development process stall out for 6 weeks, while they wait to get on P&Z’s calendar. This costs developers a lot of money, which drives up everyone’s costs.

    The question: can we find a way to make the study available to the public, without wasting 6 weeks of everyone’s time?

    …

    • The Business Park Zoning is not complete.

    This zoning is not very walkable nor part of a “complete streets” dream where everyone can get their basic needs met without driving.

    • Some zoning tinkering to put language in about neighborhood commerce and encouraging affordable ownership and ownership alternatives.
    • Permits for special events right now are phrased as “indoor AND outdoor space”. We should switch it to “Indoor OR outdoor space”.

    Discussions that will be continued, but not as Land Development Code amendments

    • Fiscal Impact studies. If a developer wants to build something in the middle of nowhere, will it cost the city more to maintain roads, utilities, and public safety than the neighborhood will contribute in tax revenue? It would be nice to know this! Right now it’s a big ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
    • Single stair apartment buildings: small scale apartment complexes are a sweet spot for places like San Marcos. They’re low profile, can house 8 units or so, and provide affordable housing in neighborhoods. They don’t get built often for big complicated reasons. But one reason is that the building codes for giant buildings often apply to them. One major one is needed two staircases. This is a thing that gets fixed in places like Austin. Can we fix it here?
    • Can we mandate water reuse systems for sufficiently gigantic businesses?

    I hope these don’t get shelved. They’re very important

    ….

    THAT’S THE WHOLE THING!

    They vote: 7-0.

    This was just a first reading. This will come back for a final vote in June!

    …

    Item 23: Housing Finance Corporations

    HFC stands for Housing Finance Corporations. These started off as legitimate attempts to create affordable housing, which then got hijacked by scammers.

    It’s supposed to work like this: San Marcos or Hays County partners with a nonprofit. The nonprofit gets a tax waiver in exchange for building affordable housing.

    The problem is something called “travelling HFCs”. Can a city 200 miles away partner with a nonprofit, and they build housing in San Marcos? So San Marcos doesn’t get the tax money, but they never agreed to anything? The housing may not even end up being affordable.

    So here’s what happened to us: Pecos is a city here:

    The city of Pecos partnered with the Pecos HFC, and built (or bought) The Grand at Stone Creek. This is the apartment complex between Academy and Crunch Fitness, near Target. They also had complexes in Kyle and Hays County (and a ton of others throughout Texas).

    This was costing us about $200K in property taxes. We don’t know if they actually offered affordable housing or anything.

    Anyway, we won! Or we settled. But we got the outcome we wanted, which is the tax money, plus a little extra in legal fees.

    There’s 1-2 more HFCs that are still tied up in lawsuits, which will hopefully also tip our way.

    …

    Item 24: We’re building a trail to New Braunfels!

    Or rather, we’re applying for Federal land along Hunter Road to build a trail.

    The goal is to put a hike-and-bike trail here:

    So that’s cool! It sounds like it’s supposed to tie in to a much bigger thing, here:

    The Great Springs Project, apparently.

    Great!

    Hours 0:00 – 5:07, 4/21/26

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Citizen Comment:

    By the numbers:

    • 11 speakers at the 6 pm meeting,
    • Two at the 3 pm workshop, and
    • 22 more at the public hearings, mostly for the Land Development Code.

    (I just pooled them all together here.)

    The biggest theme of the night: Data Centers in the Land Development Code. (5 speakers during Citizen Comment, and another 19 at the public hearing.)

    Roughly speaking, everyone said: “When you revise the land development code, either ban data centers altogether, or at least regulate them tightly. They’re terrible and we hate them.”

    …

    Side note: several speakers had spent their morning at the Guadalupe Commissioners Court. Guadalupe County approved a whole package of tax breaks for a Cloudburst Data Center on 123, despite listening to four hours of public comment about how much everyone hates them.

    To put it mildly, this smells corrupt. The only argument in favor of a data center is the money. There is zero upside to giving a data center tax breaks.

    …

    Back to citizen comment. Non-Data-Center thoughts on the Land Development Code:

    • Don’t require bars to clean 100 feet from their door. 50 ft is plenty.
    • Serving food at all hours is fine, but don’t inadvertently ban food trucks downtown.
    • Most of the proposed amendments on housing density look good. But be careful with permeable pavers – they can stop working if you get the wrong kind.
    • Keep the watershed quality protection program presentation in P&Z. Even if they don’t vote on it, it’s important to cast sunlight on these things. (I strongly agree.)
    • Don’t remove the tree requirement for situations where there aren’t previous trees. The east side was farmland, and so what looks like “no trees” was actually cleared by people.
    • Mandate rainwater capture and gray water re-use
    • Targeted stormwater fee with offsets for water innovation
    • No potable water for any cooling

    Note to Council: I strongly agree with keeping tree requirements. Developments without trees age really badly. We are talking about farmland, east of 35, which is also the more economically vulnerable side of town. If you allow developers to skip the trees, then the residents’ homes will not gain as much value over the years, the way it would on the west side.

    We need a tree canopy in Texas to make the summer tolerable. You absolutely must require tree planting, unless the developer is putting in actual xeriscapes. (I’m okay with a xeriscape exception.)

    …

    Other comment topics, unrelated to the Land Development Code:

    • We need to fight for immigrants and their safety. For example, AI entrenches a systematic bias in our health care.
    • We need to bring industries to bring in tax dollars
    • The city needs to stop rewarding incompetence
    • We need more public and affordable housing.  Also this would ease homelessness. 

    Onto the meeting!

    ….

    Item 9: Five Mile Dam Park

    Back in November 2024, the city bought Five Mile Dam parks from the county. This is where the youth soccer leagues have all their games:

      The idea was that we didn’t want the county to privatize the soccer fields, and the county would only let us buy the soccer fields if we also took these two Blanco River parks:

    This is the Blanco River, but the river runs underground and so the river bed often looks dry.

    The county charged us $0, because they REALLY did not want those parks any more. (Presumably because of upkeep and liability.)

    Readers, meet Dudley Johnson:

    and Randall Wade Vetter:

    Dudley Johnson, Randall Wade Vetter: meet my readers. Go say hi. You’ll get along beautifully.

    Anyway, Dudley Johnson Park and Randall Wade Vetter Park now belong to the city, and so at Tuesday’s meeting, we formally annexed them into city limits.

    Note: According to the deed, the land will stay parkland forever. Go enjoy it.

    …

    Item 11:  Amending the Land Development Code

    We update the Land Development Code every few years. This means we’ve accumulated 300+ things to address – some big, some small.

    We saw this briefly back in March, when Council was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of 300+ changes. They postponed it till this week, to give the public and themselves time to wade through it.

    The biggest issue is data centers. They’re so new that they’re not yet in the development code, so we need to build those policies from scratch. But there are also a lot of more minor topic.

    Note: this is only the first half of the first reading. They paused because it was getting so late. There will be at least two more meetings where they can hash out the details.

    Data Centers

    Let’s start here. What do we want our data center policy to be? 

    Five people spoke during Citizen Comment and 19 more during the public hearing. Everyone hates data centers!

    Nationwide, there is a swelling backlash against data centers. Everyone hates them, everywhere!

    Issue #1: Zones and Permits. Should data centers be allowed in just Heavy Industrial? Should they be allowed in other zones? Should they require a special permit?

    Jane and Amanda each propose an amendment, so we have dueling amendments.

    • Jane’s proposal: all data centers should need a special Council-approved permit, regardless of zone.
    • Amanda’s proposal: no data centers anywhere, at all, in any zone.

    The conversation kind of overlaps on these, but they each get their own vote.

    The votes:

    1. Jane’s amendment: Should every data center require a special Council-approved permit?

    Data centers will all be required to get a specific Conditional Use Permit from Council.

    2. Amanda’s amendment: Should data centers be banned altogether in city limits?

    So Data Centers will not be banned altogether.

    My $0.02: This is the right outcome. I’m a techno-optimist. There is a version of data centers, somewhere over the rainbow, where they run on reclaimed water and renewable energy.

    I don’t want to ban data centers – I want them to be well-regulated. So I’m glad Amanda’s amendment did not pass.

    (Also Shane’s votes don’t really make sense. He wants data centers banned or unregulated, but nothing in between?)

    …

    Issue #2: What counts as a Data Center?

    Here’s what Staff proposes as a definition:

    Amanda proposes: Add “Cryptocurrency mining and facilities”.

    This vote passes. The definition has now been modified to include that use.

    Josh: Data centers have been around forever on a small scale. Do old school data centers fall under this definition? Or just these giant new AI data centers?

    Jane: What if a big business has a room full of servers, but it’s not their primary function as a business? Do they count as a data center?

    Everyone agrees that this is incomplete. You want to regulate a building of computers if it’s hoovering up lots of electricity and water and spewing pollution. You don’t want to micromanage a small architecture firm who has their own servers for running CAD. We need some notions of scale and purpose.

    Everyone’s going to look into this and bring back suggestions for the next meeting.

    …

    Issue #3: Potable water for data centers:

    Amanda proposes: No data center may use a potable water source for cooling purposes.

    In other words, data centers must either use reclaimed water, or find an alternative cooling technology. But no wasting massive amounts of drinking water.

    My $0.02: this is great!! This is what I mean when I say I am a techo-optimist! Renewable energy is cheap and available, if Texas wants it. If data centers decide to invest in non-potable water cooling, then we can solve two of the major environmental problems.

    We can imagine a world where we don’t sacrifice the environment to data centers, and in turn, big tech executives accept regulations.

    This passes 7-0.

    This is probably my favorite amendment of the night.

    …

    Smaller Data Center Proposals:

    • Amanda: Increase setbacks to 1000 ft near residential zones, hospitals, hotels, agricultural, schools, and daycares.
    • Amanda: Extra permit required for on-site generators
    • Jane: On-site generators must meet Tier 4 emissions standards
    • Amanda: Noise limit of 60 dB at property line

    All of those pass.

    Matthew floats the idea of requiring a supermajority to approve a data center, but says he’ll bring something back at the next meeting.

    Matthew has generally been very quietly pro-data centers for the past two years, so I don’t think he’s serious here.

    …

    Non-Data Center LDC Amendments:

    Waiting Periods:

    Suppose a developer wants to build some apartments, but they get turned down when they apply to re-zoning the land. How long do they have to wait until they can re-apply and try again? The answer is “it’s complicated”.

    Here is the technical answer: it depends on how the motion was phrased. This is the hair that is getting split:

    • Situation 1: The motion is, “A vote to approve a new zoning,” and the vote fails.
    • Situation 2: The motion is, “A vote to deny the new zoning,” and the vote passes.

    Situation 1 does NOT trigger a waiting period, and Situation 2 DOES trigger a waiting period of one year. It’s very subtle!

    Council uses this power carefully. If Council likes a project, but the public hates it, they’re going to use Situation 1. The public feels like they got a win, and Council buys themselves some time to thread the needle. The developer jumps right back into the game.

    If Council does not like the project at all, they’re going to use Situation 2, and put some nails in the coffin.

    This is exactly what happened with the data center

    In March 2025, P&Z denied the Mayberry Data Center. Maberry appealed the decision to Council. In August, Council voted on the appeal.

    Appeals require a supermajority, so Maberry needed 6 votes. But the vote to overturn went 5-2.

    The key detail: the vote was phrased as Situation 1, not Situation 2. They failed to approve the rezoning. But they did NOT deny it.

    This was very intentional! Here’s what I said about it, last August:

    There is no waiting period. They can waltz in tomorrow.

    So there you have it.

    …

    Bottom line: This application is dead. But Council left a trail of bread crumbs for the applicant to re-apply to P&Z and get a better outcome.

    That was Council using the loophole. Unsurprisingly, it made the public confused and angry.

    And rightfully so! What do you mean, “not approve” is different from “deny”? Get outta here. Why are you playing word games with everyone?

    A lot of community members thought the waiting period was being violated, and were angry that they were being jerked around.

    Which brings us to tonight

    Again, both Amanda and Jane have proposed amendments to fix this confusion:

    • Jane’s amendment: Keep the loophole, but make it EXTRA clear.
    • Amanda’s amendment: Eliminate the loophole. Situations 1 and 2 would both lead to a one year waiting period.

    Jane’s argument: Council likes the loophole! Sometimes we want to give the developer another attempt, without making them wait a year. (She did not say, “For example, with Maberry last August with the data center!” but listen: yes, they did that intentionally.)

    At any rate, they only vote on Jane’s proposal:

    So there you have it. Loopholes 4-evah.

    …

    Bars Serving Food

    There has always been tension in San Marcos between the Serious Grown Ups and the College Party Kids. (We all agree to ignore how the Serious Grown Ups often used to be College Party Kids.)

    Decades ago, the Serious Grown Ups got mad about the number of bars on the square. So they capped the number of alcohol permits.

    Then the Serious Grown Ups got mad because they wanted to have a beer at a restaurant downtown. So they added in Restaurant alcohol permits.

    What are these caps? As of 2026, you can only have 14 bars and 25 restaurants downtown that serve alcohol. (There are an unlimited number of permits available for the rest of the city. It’s only capped downtown. It’s almost as if we want you to drive after a few drinks.)

    What do you do if you want to open the 15th bar downtown? All the bar permits are taken. So you try to get a restaurant alcohol permit, and sell as little food as possible. This is part of why the Rooftop got shut down.

    The city then plays cat-and-mouse games trying to figure out if you’re a real restaurant, or just a fake-out-secret-bar-restaurant. At one point, the city would track sales, and they wanted a certain percent of sales to come from food. Then they switched to saying “you must serve food for two meals, each of which lasts four hours”. But what if the restaurant is only open from 12-5 on Sundays? Etc.

    Jane proposes an amendment: If you’re a restaurant, you must always serve meals, any time the business is open.

    Amanda: What if the kitchen closes at midnight?

    Jane: This will be EASIER for restaurants! I’m helping.

    Alyssa: Yes, but most of these downtown restaurants close their kitchen down early.

    Lorenzo: It’s a loophole. If you want a restaurant permit, then be a restaurant and sell food. If we think this is a dumb loophole, we should offer more bar alcohol permits. But until we fix the loophole, we should make them follow the rules. If you have a restaurant permit, you have to sell food.

    The vote:

    Interesting!

    I probably would have voted “no”. Who cares if a restaurant shuts their kitchen down early and just becomes a bar after 11 pm?

    ….

    In the end, they postpone the rest of the LDC amendments, because it’s getting late. They have not discussed:

    • Valid Petition procedures
    • Qualified Watershed Protection Plans
    • Parkland dedication
    • Housing density and landscaping
    • Lorenzo and Amanda both have a bunch more amendments
    • Increasing PSA waiting period from 6 to 12 months

    I thought this was funny. They voted on the postponement of this item:

    and very quietly, Jane mutters, “What is wrong with y’all?”

    …

    Item 6 – reallocating the last bits of ARPA funds

    All remaining Covid money has to be spent by December 2026. We’ve got a little bit freed up, to give to other projects. (Discussed here.)

    The plan tonight: give $100K to Operation Triage and $100K to Mission Able, both for home repair.

    However! This plan is getting derailed because of a home repair nightmare, which has been unfolding behind the scenes at Mission Able. It’s horrifying!

    Here’s the scoop: the home owner lives in Dunbar, in a home that has been in her family since 1900. She keeps it immaculate and organized, but it needed foundation repair.

    Mission Able supplied a contractor, who pulled in some foundation workers with no equipment. They start jockeying around with the house. The floor buckles and splits – literally, while she’s sitting in her living room. They wedge it up on cinder blocks and bricks. Some pipes burst and some walls split. They take off.

    The home owner chased down their insurance, only to find out that they’re uninsured. (She even asked the contractor if they were insured, ahead of time, because the vibes were off.)

    It is true that houses will shift and you will get cracks, when you re-level a foundation. But this is not that. This is honest-to-god 6″ gaps where snakes and critters can wander in. Her own granddaughter is too scared to spend the night, because of the gaps in the walls.

    It’s been like this since last summer, and sounds like a nightmare. I believe there is now a second contractor working there, trying to remedy the situation?

    …

    Council tries to figure out what went wrong. Should the city be requiring more outcomes and metrics from the grant recipients? Is the standard city oversight broken in? Is the operational structure of Mission Able broken?

    Everyone sort of protests. The city oversight mechanisms were not triggered, because the first contractor didn’t pull any permits. The second contractor has pulled permits, but the actual oversight occurs when the inspection happens, and they’re not there yet.

    Mission Able protests – we want to learn from this disaster and become better at what we do! We’ve done 149 projects last year, and this is the only bad one.

    The plan: the city is going to meet separately with Mission Able and with the homeowner, and do a courtesy inspection to get a full sense of what needs to be done, and report back. No decision on the $100K for Mission Able tonight.

    (In the meantime, we did fund the other $100K to Operation Triage.)

    …

    Items 12-17: Some very big dollar amounts:

    “CIP” stands for Capital Improvement Projects, which are the giant multi-year projects like redoing all the drainage in a neighborhood. You pay for these with grants and bonds.

    If you want to see some big numbers, check these out:

    yessir, those are some enormous sums of money!

    I didn’t listen terribly closely to the details, but everything sounded kosher.

    Hours 0:00 – 4:32, 3/3/26

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Citizen Comment

    Two big topics!

    1. Should we reduce speaking time from 3 minutes to 1 minute, when the public gets to speak at Citizen Comment?
    2. Revisions to the Land Development Code. Are we creating a fast track to permitting Data Centers more easily in the future?

    There were 41 speakers, and 40 of them covered the two topics above.

    Main points on Topic 1:

    • No one wants this! In fact, everyone is furious.
    • This sure feels like a response to the Data Center turnout.
    • Austin lost a lawsuit when they restricted people’s comment time
    • It’s very hard to speak concisely when you’re new to citizen comment
    • Emailing council is no substitute for citizen comment, because other people don’t get to read the emails, and council can ignore emails. This is how the public informs each other.
    • The nationwide average is 3 minutes per speaker.

    Main points on Topic 2:

    • Are we making it easier for Data Centers by allowing them in the Business Park zoning?
    • Are we making it easier for Data Centers by giving the permitting decision to P&Z?
    • Why aren’t we proposing regulations on their water use, air quality and waste water quality, power usage, and other things like that?

    We will get to this! Sit tight.

    Finally, that last 41st speaker, on his own topic: Clearly last meeting, everyone said they love the river. Can we monetize the river? There aren’t any billion-dollar industries besides data centers. How are we going to bring businesses to this town?

    …

    One last comment that’s worth noting:

    At the 3 pm meeting, Max Baker asked: Hey, the executive session was all about “Confidential Utility Competitive Matters” with the Lower Colorado River Authority. Is this a data center thing?

    City Lawyer: Legally we cannot say, but no, this was not a data center thing.

    Good to know!

    …

    Item 7: Youth Standards of Care

    This is a yearly item. San Marcos runs a bunch of affordable camps for kids. The big one is Summer Fun, which is $40 for the entire week, including meals. This is really a lifesaver for lots of families. There’s also a discovery camp, and a spring break camp, and other helpful camps.

    City run camps are exempt from state licensing the way other childcare centers are licensed. Instead, they have to pass a Standards of Care. So this is that.

    If you want, you can dive deep here.

    …

    Item 8: SiEnergy

    SiEnergy is a natural gas company. They are not in San Marcos. They’re in Houston, Dallas-FortWorth, and Austin.

    If they want to come to San Marcos, they have to get a franchise agreement with the city. Then they’d have to pay the city a surcharge once they’re operating.

    The franchise agreements last five years. They’ve had one for the past five years, which they got one back in 2021. They’ve just been sitting on it. Now it’s 2026, and they want another one, for another five years.

    Everyone says fine.

    …

    Item 9: CDBG Money

    CDBG stands for “Community Development Block Grants”. This is money from the federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) department. San Marcos gets about $740K every year.

    Applications from nonprofits were due last week. City staff are about to wade through them. So tonight is to find out if there’s anything specific that Council wants staff to think about while reading applications.

    Max Baker speaks up during the public hearing: Hey, the Civics Club has been working on the Tenants Bill of Rights. Can we steer some funding towards those efforts?

    The Tenants Bill of Rights dovetails nicely because it can keep housing decent. They say they’ll look into this.

    …

    Item 10: The LDC

    This is the first hot potato of the night!

    Background

    “LDC” stands for Land Development Code. The Land Development Code is where all the planning and zoning rules are spelled out in excruciating detail. 

    Because it’s so weedy, it requires lots of revisions. If a law gets changed, you have to change the LDC. If you change one thing, you have to change 20 other details that are all connected. People find typos or extraneous details that didn’t need to be there. New situations arise and we need new rules to deal with them. Council has new ideas about how to do things better. Etc.

    The planning department takes notes, and stockpiles all of these changes for two years. Then they take the pile out and implement all the changes, all at once. This is that.

    There are 320 proposed changes. They range from boring and insignificant to exciting and controversial. 

    What does the public say?

    Everyone’s worried that this is a stealth maneuver for data centers. (Thirteen speakers.)

    What does staff say?

    Data Centers: Let’s start here. The staff proposal is terrible and I promise that it is not going to happen. Multiple council members said they had amendments to fix this. They know everyone hates it.

    So what was it? The proposal was to require a permit for the Business Park zone and the Light Industrial zone, and automatically allow data centers in Heavy industrial.

    My $0.02: Is there any way to put standards on water and electric use, as part of the permit process?

    …

    Here are a bunch more of the LDC changes, mentioned in the staff presentation:

    • Revising the Valid Petition rules for protesting a rezoning, to match the new state law.
    • My personal favorite: the state struck down Occupancy Restrictions.

      Occupancy Restrictions are the city rules that say things like “No more than two unrelated people may live in the same house”. It’s micromanaging what people do in their own homes, and it’s very classist. It’s never enforced unless you’re hunting around for a reason to harass someone.

      We’ve had big fights about it here and here and here. We loosened it from two unrelated people to three unrelated people. And now it’s gone! Haha. Good riddance.
    • Mellow out on when a historical property needs a Certificate of Appropriateness
    • Modifies when a Qualified Watershed Protection Plan is required:

    I don’t know how to evaluate that!

    I’m not clear on how generous this is.

    • Zero lot line houses and cottage courts in CD-3 (this is good!)
    • Including microbreweries into the possible land uses
    • Add “sensitive features protection zones” around Environmental Protection Zones
    • Allow street parking to count towards parking requirements downtown. This is good for walkability and density.
    • Require bike parking racks to be provided with parking lots. (This is good!)
    • Add pollinator plants to what can be planted downtown. (yay for butterflies!)
    • Instead of the city putting up signs about public hearings, the applicant is responsible for putting up signs. The city has to supervise, so I don’t know if this helps much, though.
    • We used to have something called PDDs, where the city could micromanage what a developer built, and developers could get all kinds of breaks. Then we got rid of them. Now we’re bringing a lite version back: you can put constraints on developers, but no freebies.
      Note: Maybe this is a good place to put water and power use considerations?
    • Formalizing what we mean by amplified sound and background sound, so that P&Z can put restrictions on downtown bars.
    • Add in Demolition Delays to one of the tables
    • Eliminate number of rooms from hotel categories.
    • Tree surveys required any time someone wants to develop around a heritage or protected tree
    • Require downtown businesses to clean 100 feet out from their exits instead of just 50 feet.

    It’s a lot.

    I didn’t go through the other 250 changes to verify that they were all minor. There’s always a judgement call on whether something is a big deal or not.

    What does Council say?

    It takes about 2 seconds for Amanda to motion to postpone. This is such a gigantic topic that no one has properly vetted all 300+ changes.

    Note: The data center thing will definitely be changed. Several council members said this. But feel free to weigh in with your preference!

    What’s next?

    Basically, you have homework. Or maybe I do.

    Here’s where you can find all the proposed changes. And here’s the City Council message board and this will be the dedicated thread for their questions the Land Development Code.

    • If you’ve got opinions, share them with council ASAP.
    • Council will get all their thoughts on the message board by March 31st.
    • City staff will take all the thoughts and try to organize it and bring it back for the April 21st City Council meeting.

    …

    Item 14: Should Citizen Comment be reduced from 3 minutes to 1 minute?

    Everyone is super mad about this! And with good reason!

    Background: During a city council meeting, here’s how you can speak up:

    • Citizen Comment: anyone can speak for 3 minutes, on any topic, at the beginning of the meeting.
    • Some items are “Public Hearings”.  If it’s a public hearing, you can sign up to speak at the beginning of that item, as well.
    • At the end of the meeting, there’s a Q&A from the press and public.  So you can weigh in then, too.

    Citizen comment can run long.  Since I’ve been blogging:

    So this is not a new thing. (But I went and looked up some old controverseys – Cape’s Dam, and the Sessom Creek apartments, and the Woods Apartments, and the HEB on Wonderworld – all of these citizen comment periods were at most an hour. So things are getting longer.)

    Which brings us to today

    So the last meeting was a doozy. This meeting, Jane proposes that we should cut people off after 1 minute.

    DUDE JANE. What the hell? This idea monumentally dumb in so many ways:

    1. Don’t restrict people’s participation. Citizen Comment is heavily utilized because it holds so much value.
    2. The timing is tone-deaf – are you trying to come off like you’re retaliating?
    3. If you don’t like going until 3 am, then focus on that. Your policy should address your problem. Right now, it sounds like you think the problem is people having three minutes to talk.

    Jane speaks first! Here’s her argument:

    • She’s not trying to remove Citizen Comment altogether!
    • She’s willing to go to 2 minutes, to avoid the Austin lawsuit.
    • You can say if you’re a Yes or a No on an item in 1 minute.
    • If you have more to say, send an email. (Preferably before 5 pm the Friday before the meeting.)
    • Right now, the 100th speaker speaks at 11 pm. This way, the 100th speaker would speak at 8 pm. This is good for the public citizens who want to speak!

    Alyssa claps back hard: Absolutely not. Give our neighbors every opportunity to speak. Organizing is hard and stressful and we’re not going to create more obstacles.

    But Alyssa does also admit: it’s true that none of us are at our best at 1:00 am.

    Amanda goes next: Hard no on reducing citizen comment time. But there is a problem with these ultra long meetings. Why don’t we brainstorm creative solutions for that?

    Lorenzo:
    – I’m open to brainstorming other creative solutions.
    – I’m open to reducing citizen comment.
    – And also, have you all heard yourselves ramble? Maybe some limits on council monologues?

    Oh Lorenzo. You drag things out during council meetings!

    For the record: I’ve been hard on Lorenzo lately, between his tax rate mess and his motion to postpone the data center decision.

    But Lorenzo also brings good ideas to council discussions! He notices details and is good at brainstorming creative solutions. But he’s not quick about it. He sometimes gets hung up on tiny details and goes down rabbit holes trying to hash them out.

    Josh: When people aren’t sure what they’re walking into, it sparks fears and leads to citizen comments that drag on. If we’re more prepared, it leads to more clarity and better-run meetings.

    …

    Bottom line: they’re going to have a future council discussion on how to shorten meetings.

    My $0.02: you’re going to have to meet more often. Clearly San Marcos has outgrown two meetings per month.

    Either:

    • Cut meetings off at 11 pm and come back on Wednesday?
    • Meet weekly occatsionally?
    • Special sessions for hot topics?

    I personally do not like the last option, because my schedule for cranking out these posts hangs by a thread sometimes. But I guess the world doesn’t revolve around me. Sadly.

    Hours 1:58 – 4:01, 10/17/23

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Item 15: The Downtown Area Plan

    The Downtown Area Plan is more than just the CM Allen District, but that’s definitely the part that sucks up all the oxygen in the room.  (Discussed here last time.)

    Still, let’s take a moment to pay attention to the rest:

    And here are the major points:

    The thing is: downtown is already owned and zoned. You can’t demand or legislate hardly anything. All you can do is entice and form partnerships and collaborate with the people who run the things located there.

    So let’s move onto the CM Allen District, which we discussed last time:

    There was a Downtown Area Plan committee, who came up with Option 1:

    Option 1:

    Five Story Loaves of Bread:

    Similarly to VisionSMTX, the shadow subcommittee of P&Z plus Jane Hughson was horrified, and rewrote it.

    Hence Option 2:

    Given that the city doesn’t actually own all that land, the Planning Department tried to thread the needle and come up with a compromise option:

    Option 3:

    Colorful, vibrant, smaller loaves of bread:

    At P&Z, we heard about the unaffordability of Option 2. P&Z voted for Option 2 anyway.

    This time the staff presentation spends even longer on the complete unaffordability of it:

    • Basically, downtown land is worth much more than anywhere else in town. 
    • Right now, the 6.25 acres are mostly undeveloped, but they bring in this much taxable revenue:

    The whole thing is 6.25 acres, so I’m going to ballpark the yearly revenue at $456K for the three lots marked.  A community member says that if they were developed, they’d pull in $3 million/year for the city.  Maybe?

    No one can really say how much it would cost to acquire the parks, but if we had to say, staff puts the market value at $27 million dollars.

    The city staff are always so professional, and so they presented all options neutrally, but I definitely got whiffs of Springfield Monorail from Option B:

    Besides the magical thinking of the price tag, there’s also serious equity issues here.

    Here is how the current parks are distributed throughout the city:

    You may notice that there’s barely anything east of 35. People who live east of 35 have noticed this too, and are not amused. (They’ve also noticed a bunch of other patterns of systematic disregard. Isn’t that something!)

    So what does the public think?

    MO-NO-RAIL! MO-NO-RAIL!  Ahem.

    • Giant student housing will make parking way worse downtown.
    • There’s a shallow water table under CM Allen, and drilling into the rock wil fracture it.
    • If Texas State buys this land, we’re hosed.
    • The procedure was not democratic. Option 2 preys on emotions.
    • There are serious accessibility issues downtown for people in wheelchairs. This plan doesn’t address any of that.
    • The college students run downtown and grown ups don’t feel welcome.
    • We can find much better ways to spend $27 million dollars than this.
    • Car dependency is bad, it’s better to put more housing in walkable areas like downtown.

    In actuality: there are three in favor of Option 2, five opposed, and one speaking on accessibility issues.

    Council discussion:

    Mark Gleason goes first:

    • He loves the vision of #2. He wishes we could afford it.
    • There’s absolutely no way he can go face constituents on the East Side and tell them he voted to spend $27 million on more West side parks.
    • It’s already zoned, it’s not undeveloped like the Woods
    • This won’t stop flooding.
    • Not ideal, but #3 is best. We must to something to help the rest of town.

    I certainly agree with all of that! He also talks about how there’s going to be a trail around the whole city, which is a reference to the Elsik Tract.

    (I can see the marketing now! “A River Runs Through Us, That Historic Trail Also Runs Through Us, and a Loop Runs Around Us.” Practically a spaghetti bowl of significance!)

    Jane goes next: She literally says “I need to do some ‘splaining,” which is endearing.

    • Her ‘splaining: The graphics freaked her out, and she wanted some green space. Never pictured golf course style mock up. Never said “Eminent Domain” or millions of city money. 
    • The idea was that if you don’t explicitly ask for green space, you’ll get zero. If you do ask, maybe you’ll get a little.

    Jude: There are better places to turn into parks than this. Could City Hall move here? Hotel, civic space?

    Alyssa: I don’t like any of them, but I agree with Jude and Mark. 

    Shane: What about a splash pad downtown? I’m here for families! Families first! These are the last tracts along the river. Option 2!

    Saul: I’m born and raised in San Marcos. There were no skyscrapers back then. Whenever I talk to anyone, they say “Why are there so many skyscrapers downtown? Why is there so much student housing?” That’s not San Marcos. Plus, it’s a slippery slope. What’s next, high rises all the way to 35? What if Texas State buys it? They don’t pay taxes or fees!  It’s for the kids. Bring back how it was!

    [Side Note: “Why is there so much student housing?” Because the town loses their goddamn minds if students live anywhere else. Students are actually people, and they’re entitled to live in this town.

    Sometimes students act like jerks! But so do rich people, and also middle-class people, and also poor people. People are jerks.]

    Matthew: I had been a big fan of #2. Rio Vista Relief! But paid parking is coming. Where would this park’s parking be? 

    We had a community meeting with Blanco Gardens on crime. Wasn’t well attended, and just me and Mark. They kept saying, “Why does the west get EVERYTHING?” Park distribution is not fair. East side is always neglected.

    Matthew gave this huge impassioned speech about the plight of the east side, and then finished by saying, “And that’s why I’m on the fence!” which made me laugh. Way to undercut your own passion. 

    Saul: Cape’s Dam is coming to the east side!

    Matthew: But not, like, anytime soon.

    The Vote on the CM Allen District:


    Love me some Option 3!: Mark Gleason, Jane Hughson, Alyssa Garza, Matthew Mendoza, Jude Prather

    Option 3 Gives Me a Sad: Shane Scott, Saul Gonzales

    So there you have it.

    The entire downtown plan will get revised to incorporate Option 3, and then will come back on November 6th for a final vote.

    …

    Item 12: Sights & Sounds

    Apparently people ask Alyssa every year to keep an eye on S&S.  The former city manager gave her the runaround when she asked for documentation.  She asks if she could please get some straight answers. She’s told “no problem!”

    …

    Item 16: Land Development Code:

    Last meeting, we were going to kick this back for two months, to give committees a chance to meet.  Now the planning department is asking if we could please just pass it, since it’s holding up a bunch of stuff, and they promise the committees will all meet promptly.

    Sure: 7-0. So that’s that.

    Hours 1:55 -2:55, 10/2/23

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Next up! 

    Item 9: Updates to the Land Development Code.

    We discussed this in August and in September. There are just a few remaining issues to hash out. Here we go:

    1. Should staff be able to approve the most mild, least controversial restaurant alcohol permits, or should they all go to P&Z?

    For now, all restaurants and all bars will go through P&Z to get their permit. (Discussed here before.)

    A subcommittee will look at carving out some exceptions. For example, hotel bars generally aren’t close to neighborhoods, and aren’t generally rowdy. Maybe City Staff can just renew those on their own.

    2. Developers have to donate land for parks, or pay a fee instead. If you’ve got just a little infill development of 4 to 8 units, should you have to pay a fee towards the park system?

    No one on council really felt strongly about this. They compromised at 6 units: if you’re building a little development with 6 or more units, you need to pay a fee towards the park system.

    3. If houses are only allowed to be 2 stories in your neighborhood, and you’ve got a little rooftop patio, does that count as an extra story?

    It used to be 25%. If 25% of your roof has a structure on it, it counted as an extra story. Now it’s any structure at all counts as an extra story.

    (Discussed here and here before. I accused them of being killjoys.)

    4. Should we continue beating a dead horse on this occupancy restriction thing?

    Yes, yes we should.

    Quick background: San Marcos has restrictions on how many unrelated people can live together.  It’s been two. Back in May 2022, Council agreed to loosen them from 2 to 3.  

    Matthew Mendoza balked at this in August, and then tried to roll it back to 2 in September.  The vote failed 4-3.  But he’s still all heated up about it, and makes another motion to amend it back to 2.

    So first, some facts:

    • In San Marcos, it’s only certain housing that has occupancy restrictions. Basically, single family neighborhoods. 
    • In these neighborhoods, you can have any number of people, but only up to two unrelated people.  
    • Here’s how we define unrelated: “A family is defined in the Land Development Code as any number of individuals living as a single housekeeping unit who are related by blood, legal adoption, marriage, or conservatorship.” 

    Here’s what city staff say:

    Whenever neighbors complain, they’re not actually mad about the number of unrelated people.  It’s always noise, or parking, or the trash, or yard not being kept up.   We can deal with the noise/parking/yard complaint.  It’s not literally the marital status of any of the tenants that’s the issue, so this ordinance is not needed.

    Here’s what Matthew and Jane Hughson say:

    Landlords want to be able to rent to three tenants. So if you increase this, landlords will buy up housing stock and let it crumble into shitty, ill-maintained housing that exploits tenants.  It’s bad for renters, and decreases the available housing stock for people who want to purchase a home. 

    Here’s what I say:

    Actually, I want to say two things. I want to refute Matthew’s argument, and I also want to make a separate argument on why you should get rid of occupancy restrictions all together.

    Look at Matthew’s argument:

    When your chain of cause and effect becomes really long and stretched out, that is often a sign that you are writing bad policy.

    If you’re worried about those Bad Consequences – low housing stock and shitty landlords – this would not make it onto the top 100 of effective things to do. 

    What you’d do is:

    1. Build more housing. (All sorts.)
    2. Hold landlords accountable. Enforce code violations and fund a city lawyer to send letters to landlords on behalf of tenants. 

    Furthermore, his facts aren’t right.  Letting bedrooms go unfilled reduces available housing.  Occupancy restrictions decrease housing, which is the opposite of Matt’s Bad Consequence #1. 

    So I have yet to see a compelling argument for these restrictions. 

    Arguments against – and here’s where I get pissed off:

    1. Why is the city meddling with whether people are married or not?  A married couple can take in a tenant, but an unmarried couple cannot?  Three friends can’t rent a house? This is gross.
    2. There is a serious housing shortage.  You should be able to put people in bedrooms. You should be able to flexibly problem-solve to provide housing on the fly, when someone you care about is in a pinch. 
    3. We just talked at length for two meetings about the burden of property taxes on Grandma.  Grandma should be allowed to take in her friend’s grandkids as tenants.  Grandma’s primary asset is her house, and she doesn’t want to move, but it’s more house than one person needs. Let her share.

    The common thread is non-traditional living situations.  Why should non-traditional living situations be banned?  A few people want to live together, and they can’t, because the city can’t crack down on shitty landlords? That’s dumb as fuck.

    Bottom line:

    1. Hold landlords accountable for providing safe, well-maintained housing.
    2. Build a variety of housing in neighborhoods, not just 3- and 4-bedroom houses. Build four-plexes alongside houses so that people can rent apartments in quiet neighborhoods.
    3. Stop micromanaging who is married and who isn’t.

    One final point: Yes, landlords buy up housing stock. But listen: being a good landlord is a lot of work. Make bad landlords be good landlords, and some of them will decide it’s not worth it. Hold landlords accountable for maintaining safe and well-maintained properties, and their profit margins will go down, and they’ll be less likely to buy up your housing stock, and it’s better for tenants, and neighbors.  Win-win-win.

    Here’s how the conversation goes, after Matthew makes his basic argument:

    • Shane Scott points out that letting someone rent a room may help them afford their property taxes.
    • No one knows the occupancy restrictions in other cities more generally, but College Station sets it at 4 unrelated people.

    (I went hunting, and couldn’t find much. Austin puts it at 6 unrelated people.)

    • Jude Prather: I’ve been in this situation. I know plenty of respectable, good neighbors who have had three unrelated people living together at various times. How do you tell people they can’t do this, when housing is unaffordable?
    • Matthew: but Minneapolis got rid of their occupancy restrictions and they went to hell in a handbasket!!
    • Jude: Actually, Minneapolis went the other way. Their housing costs actually resisted inflation. What about a compromise, where you can take in extra tenants if it’s owner-occupied?
    • Alyssa: Let’s remember that occupancy restrictions are rooted in racism and classism.
    • Jane Hughson: NOT IN SAN MARCOS, IT’S NOT! The history here is NOT racist!

     In San Marcos, its origins are mostly anti-college students. But the folks in power did not shed a tear that it was also disproportionately impacting poor and non-white community members.

    Also, confidential to Jane: I wouldn’t go betting the farm on San Marcos being a bastion of anti-racism.

    • Matt: I’m trying to protect renters!

    (Ahem. Establish a tenant’s council, then.)

    • Mark Gleason: My worry is keeping people in their homes. So I’m in favor. I think people should be able to rent out a room or two.  I don’t think it affects whether or not investors buy up houses.  I’m okay with owner-occupied only, though.
    • Jane: Let’s postpone the whole thing for two weeks!
    • Matthew: I’m just sad about the historic district.
    • Jude: San Marcos is clearly an outlier. We’re not trying to get rid of the rule altogether. 3 unrelated people seems like a good compromise.

    The vote:

    Jane keeps talking about creating a subcommittee and postponing it for two weeks.  It feels like she’s just unwilling to recognize that she’s lost this vote.  Both Jude and Alyssa gently say that they would be fine just letting it go.  

    She forms a committee anyway – Matthew Mendoza, Alyssa Garza, and Mark Gleason – and Alyssa says if there’s a committee, she at leasts wants to be on it.  

    When actually forced, 6-1 vote in favor of committee.  The committee will consider whether three unrelated people should only be allowed when one of them owns the house. (We really only want to micromanage the marital status of renters, I guess.)

    …

    5. Should the notification radius for a giant ungodly thing like the SMART Terminal be bigger than for a dinky little development?

    Yes. The notification radius should be proportional to the size of the development. We’ve been over this multiple times.

    Staff says no, and gives this as their reason why not: “If we made the cutoff at 500 acres, then developers will just come it at 499 acres!”

    In other words: it can’t be done because developers will game the system.

    Give me a fucking break. How about this: “For every 25 acres, you have to notify 400 ft out.” Not to brag, but that took me all of ten seconds to write down. I bet someone can spend 10 more seconds and come up with something even better.

    Thankfully, Jane is also not satisfied with staff’s lame evasion, and says, “I don’t know the best way to do it, but there’s gotta be a way.”

    So this will go to committee.

    …

    In the end, the whole set of revisions will be postponed until December 5th, to give all these committees time to meet

    Hours 4:07-5:45, 9/19/23

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Item 20: Updates to the Land Development Code. 

    We went over the proposed updates last month.

    Public Comment

    • We relaxed parking restrictions downtown and it is having unintended consequences – The Parlor has bought up several private parking lots.
    • Several speakers talk about the development agreement notification radius again. They use that the radius needs to be “proportional to the size of the project”, and my little blogger heart swelled three sizes.

    Council Discussion

    One of the changes being proposed is to increase the occupancy restriction from 2 to 3 unrelated people.

    (What does this mean? In San Marcos, in single-family zonings, you get only one roommate. You cannot have three unrelated people living together. This is a great way to maintain wealth segregation. And yes, this is totally unenforceable but we do it anyway.)

    Matthew Mendoza starts off with a rousing cry against it.

    You guys: the speech Matthew gave made my little blogger heart shrivel back down to the size of a blackened pea.  I could not disagree more with him.  

    Matthew’s basic claim: if we let three unrelated people live together, then we’re on a slippery slope to ending single family zoning.  He claims that Minneapolis tried this, and it failed so hard that they’re undoing it.

    For what it’s worth, it looks like he got every detail of the Minneapolis example wrong. They ended their occupancy restrictions, and then liked it so much that they doubled down.

    And then, Minneapolis did exactly what Matthew is scared of – in 2019, they were the first major city to end single-family zoning. So far it’s providing gentle, incremental densification, the way it’s supposed to. (But rents and housing prices are actually falling there for an entirely different reason – elimination of parking minimums.  But yowza, we cannot handle a topic that spicy on this particularly epic-length entry.) Since then, several states and many cities have ended single-family zoning.

    Matthew!! Why are you micromanaging everyone’s lifestyle? Let people have a goddamn roommate.

    But also: YOU ALL JUST BEMOANED HOW EXPENSIVE TAXES ARE. LET GRANDMA RENT OUT AN ADU, FOR GOD’S SAKE! Let people live with their friends!

    See how crazy-making this meeting was? The cognitive dissonance fried my wee brain.

    (Alyssa does respond to Matthew, wearily: Who are we to dictate what counts as family, anyway?)

    Here we go:

    The vote on occupancy restrictions:

    Restrict back to 2: Matthew Mendoza, Saul Gonzalez, Jane Hughson
    Relax it to 3: Shane Scott, Jude Prather, Mark Gleason, Alyssa Garza

    So it barely passed.

    A stray thought: Jane voted 6th in line. She was a reluctant yes when this was discussed 18 months ago. I think she switched her vote mid-stream, because she could see it would pass either way. If Mark had voted after Jane, he might have switched his vote to match hers, and the whole thing might have failed.

    Bottom line: It should never have taken 18 months after extensive discussion to bring this to a vote. It almost undid all that hard work.

    But whatever: it passed.

    …

    Still on the Land Development Code: Businesses that serve alcohol have to get a Conditional Use Permit. (CUP). These get renewed by P&Z every three years. Should we separate out bars from restaurants, and only make the bars go to P&Z? Staff is proposing this, because it would save time and effort.

    Jane Hughson makes a motion to say no, and stick with the current situation – all CUPs, both restaurants and bars – should go to P&Z for renewal.

    The reasoning goes like this: sometimes restaurants are jerks, and are bad neighbors to nearby residents. Noise complaints aren’t addressed by the police. But at P&Z, neighbors can state their case and the restaurant owner will actually pay attention because they don’t want to lose their CUP. Then P&Z can attach conditions to the CUP – make the restaurant come back for renewal in one year instead of three, put quiet hours on the restaurant, that kind of thing.

    I agree with Jane here. And sometimes you do get a lot of people from a single street, all pissed off about the same restaurant. This is a really important opportunity for community input, and we shouldn’t take this power away from community members.

    As Jane puts it, “Sometimes our biggest problem child is a restaurant.”

    One extra thought: It’s already a thing where bars try to pretend that they’re restaurants in order to get more relaxed treatment. If you let restaurants skip P&Z approval, even more bars will try to get reclassified as restaurants, to avoid scrutiny.

    The vote:

    Restaurants have to go to P&Z: Matthew Mendoza, Mark Gleason, Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzalez
    Let restaurants skip all that: Jude Prather, Shane Scott, Alyssa Garza

    So it passes 4-3.

    Finally, Mayor Hughson has a few issues that are queued up for next time:

    • In the new (poorly named) “business park” zoning, Jane just doesn’t want truck bays for 18 wheelers. Little delivery trucks are fine, but she doesn’t want semis.

      The point of this new zone is to be “good neighbor industrial” (which is what I’d name it). I agree that 18 wheelers are less neighborly than delivery trucks. Staff is worried that no one will apply for this zoning if you rule out 18 wheelers.
    • Notification radius for development agreements: Jane is listening. She agrees that it should be larger for larger projects.

      She also wants you to know that the city already goes above and beyond the notifications that are required by state law. (Sure, kudos. But state laws are mostly written by jerks, so that’s a low bar to clear.)

      At any rate, getting her on board here is a huge win, because no one else was responding.
    • A month ago, Mark Gleason got really mad about some house on Sturgeon with a rooftop patio. In response, staff is proposing that rooftop patios count as a “story” if they cover 25% of the roof.

      Jane wants it to be much lower: any rooftop structure counts as an extra story.

      My opinion: stop being a bunch of killjoys. Let people have their rooftop patios. Quit harshing my mellow, man.
    • Developers have to either donate parkland, or pay a fee. We’re updating the calculations to be more fair. If you’re only developing 4-8 lots, you can skip the fee.

      Jane: Why wouldn’t people in the 4 or 8 houses use our parks? Why exempt them from park fee? I’ll bring this back next time, too.

    So there are a lot of fiddly details still to hash out.

    The first vote, which is not the final vote:

    Yes, let’s update the code: Everyone besides Matthew
    No, I’m still mad about occupancy restrictions: Matthew

    …

    Item 21: SMPD body cams.

    We rent them from this company called Axon. The company’s prices are going up. If we renew early, we can stay at the old rates. Save a million dollars.

    We have 10 drones, btw. 

    Alyssa: There are multiple grants available for body worn cameras. Did we seek any of these opportunities? 

    Chief Standridge: We do not have an Equal Employment Opportunity Plan (EEOP) so we can’t apply for grants. We are aware and trying to fix that.

    This is an interesting point. It turns out that we can’t apply for a lot of federal funding until we have an EEOP. It includes any Department of Justice or SAFER grants. We are definitely taking this seriously and working on one.

    The vote to re-up on the body cams:
    Yes: Everyone but Alyssa
    No: (no one)
    Abstain: Alyssa Garza

    Alyssa explains that she hasn’t reviewed our SMPD body cam policy since it was last updated, and she can’t in good conscience vote on these in the meantime.

    …

    Item 23: Single use container ban!!

    You guys. It’s been SUCH a long meeting. This last item is so popular and great – it’s a shame that I’m just now getting to it.

    If you’ll recall, five hours earlier we had boatloads of community members show up to speak in favor of banning single-use containers from the river and parks. Volunteers pull out epic tons of trash from the river as often as possible, and we just can’t keep up. It flows down river and to the gulf. It’s bad for the river itself. 

    So what happens tonight?

    This is just the very beginning of the process. Mark Gleason and Matthew Mendoza are bringing it up to see if council is interested in moving forward with this.

    So who’s in?

    Mark is a hard yes. 

    Jude: let’s do it!

    Saul: Me too!

    Matthew Mendoza: I live in Rio Vista! I’m desperate to see this pass.

    Alyssa: Let’s focus on the education piece, and secure the buy-in of the community. Lean on park ambassadors instead of marshalls. Best practices. No unnecessary policing of our neighbors.

    Jane: I’m in to move forward.

    So everyone is enthusiastic! It’ll take some time and work.  I definitely want to give Mark and Matthew props for initiating the issue, though.

    …

    Q&A from the Press and Public

    Listen, Max Baker spoke as many times as possible this evening, and he has a tendency to pack ten ideas into a three minute speech. So I’m cherry-picking, because this was entertaining.

    First, Axon is the company that makes the body cams. Max accuses, “Are you all aware that there is a SUPREME COURT CASE against them for antitrust issues? Do your homework!!”

    He’s right but he’s wrong: It’s exactly that – some anti-monopoly wonky lawsuit brought against them by the Federal Trade Commision. But I can’t see how that’s a big scandal.

    Max also says, “This same company wants to design TASER DRONES. Lotta concerns about civil liberties in that regard.”

    Max is entirely correct – they are batshit crazy and they definitely wanted to design m-f-ing taser drones. But also, shortly thereafter “Axon halts its plans for a Taser drone as 9 on ethics board resign over the project.” So at this point we can just marvel at the human capacity for inventing really, really bad ideas.

    I’m not saying this company is any good. But given that they’re involved in an anti-trust lawsuit, I’m guessing we don’t have terribly many choices either way. Have fun dreaming about TASER DRONES!

    Hours 1:29-2:57, 8/1/23

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Item 18: Updating the San Marcos Development Code

    This is big and interesting. It has four parts:

    1. Compliance with State Laws
    2. Business Park Zoning
    3. Process Improvements
    4. Clarification and Corrections

    Part 1: Compliance with State Laws

    The state just passed a bunch of laws, like repealing all curfews. What else do we need to fix to be legal?

    • Plats: A plat is the drawing that shows things like roads, bus stops, parks, parking lots, and things like that. Everything but the details of the actual building.

      Right now plats get approved by P&Z. But P&Z is legally not allowed to make a judgement call. They’re only allowed to consider if the plat meets the conditions in the land development code.

      In the future, plats won’t go to P&Z anymore. City staff will approve them. We’re told this is because the state legislature tightened the shot clock, so we have less time to approve applications. We need to streamline processes to comply. They will publish the plats on a website

    Okay: this is a small thing, but city staff is mildly bullshitting their case to City Council here. The shot clock was tightened back in 2019 to 30 days. This most recent bill says it’s okay to skip P&Z approval. So P&Z approval used to be required by the state, but now we’re allowed to let staff approve plats.

    What else?

    • More appeals procedures added in to land at City Council, and we modified the timeline
    • Private schools must be zoned just like public schools.

    City staff is misleading us a teeny bit here, too. This says “Municipalities will be required to treat charters as they would an independent school district for the purposes of permitting, zoning, etc.” It does not say private schools. Just charter schools. We’re allowed to zone private schools however we want, but don’t pretend that the state is making us do this.

    Listen: the city staff work hard and they’re good people. I’m just being persnickety here.

    Part 2: A new zoning district, called “Business Park”.

    To me, this is a business park:

    via

    That’s not what we’re talking about. What Jane Hughson means is, “Hey, if you want to put industrial next to residential, it has to be super mild and chill.”

    I think she actually means little warehouses, like this:

    via

    I would call it “Good Neighbor Industrial”.

    Either way, it’s going to be capped at 35′ high, and excludes a lot of bad neighbor uses. If you wanted it higher than 35′ or to include warehouse and delivery, you’d have to get a Conditional Use Permit from P&Z.

    Part 3: Process improvements

    City council keeps getting bit in the butt over Development Agreements. They pass something in the dead of night, and then when everyone finds out the details, they’re furious.

    In recent memory:

    • La Cinema. Council modified the Development Agreement with La Cima to allow for movie studios back in December 2021. There were no notifications sent out and no one noticed. Then it came time to negotiate tax credits, and everyone got super mad that movie studios were allowed over the aquifer. But it was too late.
    • The SMART Terminal. They doubled the size of the SMART Terminal back in January. But there were no notifications to the public. Afterwards, everyone was furious. I would have to link to every single meeting from the past six months to flesh this out.

    Clearly we need to mail out notifications for Development Agreements and for amendments. We’re finally going to start doing this.

    How many people should get notified? They’re proposing a 400 foot radius – everyone who lives within 400′ gets mailed a notification. That matches what we do for zoning changes.

    Listen: It should not be 400′. It should be proportional to the size of the project. Tiny projects get a tiny notification radius. Giant projects need a larger notification radius.

    If you’re looking at the 2000 acre SMART/Logistics park, 400 feet is a tiny sliver around it. If you’re talking about a little 4-plex, 400 feet is plenty.

    Note to Council: Since you’re tinkering with Development Agreements, why not also add in tree remediation?

    Other changes

    • Historical Preservation Commission (HPC) can postpone things now.
    • Timeline for Demolition by Neglect is increased from 30 to 45 days
    • Park land dedication – this one is a bit weird. Let’s spend a moment here.

    Right now, if you want to build anything residential, you have to set aside some land for parks. The equation is 5.7 acres per 1000 people.

    The old code says this: “A minimum of 50% of the parkland required under this ordinance shall be dedicated to the City of San Marcos as a neighborhood or regional park under Section 3.10.2.1. The remaining 50% may be owned and managed by one of the entities under Section 3.10.1.6.”. Those entities are the city, a land conservancy or land trust, an HOA, or a public easement.

    The new code says: “Appropriate plat notes describing the ownership and maintenance of all proposed parks are provided on the plat.”

    In other words, maintenance is expensive and we want to pawn it off onto HOAs. But then the city doesn’t actually own the land. We could just make the developers and HOAs cover the costs, but we still own the land. But that’s not what’s proposed.

    Jane Hughson asks: Will the park still be open to the public?
    Answer: Yes, dedicated parkland is required to be open to the public.

    Mark Gleason asks: What can we do if it’s not maintained?
    Answer: We withhold their final permits until the park looks good.
    Mark: No, I mean like five years later. What if the bathrooms are all broken and there’s garbage all over the place? What can we do?
    Answer: [squirming in the uncomfortable silence]

    Looking in the code, I see this bit:

    That doesn’t quite apply here.

    No one offers a motion and the motion passes.

    See? This is the Council Dance again:
    – Here, we identified a problem.
    – Let’s all sit uncomfortably for a sec
    – Rather than fix it, just pat it on the head and go on our merry way.

    • Occupancy restrictions: let’s dish on this.

    We have an occupancy ban in San Marcos. No more than two unrelated people can live in the same house. This is an extremely shitty policy that punishes poor people, out of fear that college students will throw wild keggers next door. There is a housing crisis, and people need to be able to move in with each other. (Furthermore, this dumb policy is totally unenforceable, so it only gets trotted out when someone has an axe to grind. It’s the worst!)

    Listen: you cannot govern San Marcos solely out of fear of beer cans from college kids. That is a code compliance issue. That is not the basis for good policy.

    Back in April ’22, Alyssa Garza fought hard to get everyone to consider relaxing the occupancy ban. Eventually she built consensus: council asked city staff to bring back a policy loosening the restriction to 3 unrelated people. Hooray, sort of.

    Somehow it took city staff 15 months to bring it back, so here we are. However, during that 15 months, Max Baker was voted out and Matthew Mendoza was voted in. And Matthew Mendoza is very salty on this issue.

    The more he talks, the more conservative Matthew seems. He sees this all the time in his neighborhood: a bunch of unrelated people live together, and it reduces home values for families in his neighborhood, which is how you buld generational wealth. He was calling this New Urbanism and claiming this was a gateway for big apartment complexes. It was kind of unhinged.

    Everyone reassured him that there’d been a big conversation. Matthew did not get any traction re-opening the topic. But it was still a weird rant.

    • Awnings can be now be 7′ clearance instead of 9′ minimum clearance. This is in response to the owner of Chances R Bar downtown, who pointed out that the building literally isn’t tall enough for a 9′ awning.
    • Mark Gleason is super mad at his neighbor.

    Apparently there’s a house in Mark’s neighborhood which is lifted off the ground and is two stories high. It’s got a flat roof, and they made a little patio up there. Mark is livid that they can see into other people’s backyards, but you can’t really legislate that, so instead he is livid that there is a structure up there – “with shingles!” – that allows them to hang out and see into people’s backyards.

    Shane Scott says, “Our house in Mexico is like that. It sounds pretty cool.”

    This is the Shane I like best, when he needles Mark for being a prig. You can practically see them in the same high school cafeteria, circa 1991: Shane wearing a Metallica t-shirt and black jeans, Mark wearing the same khakis and golf shirts that he wears to city council meetings. Shane leaves his lunch trash behind on the table when he leaves, and Mark urgently flags down the teacher to let them know that it was Shane.

    Amanda Hernandez, the planning department director, strongly suspects that this house is probably already violating city code. The top of a house can’t be more than 35′ off the ground. If this is elevated and two stories already, you’ve got to be pretty close. Mezzanine structures count if they’re at least 30% of the area.

    Mark makes a motion to measure height from the ground to top of rooftop structures.

    Yes: Everyone besides Shane Scott.  
    No: Shane Scott
    (Jude Prather is absent.)

    I prefer to live in a world that facilitates rooftop patios and rejects Mark’s killjoy tendencies. So I’m a “no”, if anyone asks.