Tag: parking

Hours 0:00-0:52, 1/16/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment

  • A few people spoke in favor of a city resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza
  • A few people spoke against high rises along the river

Neither topic comes up during the actual meeting tonight, but both might in the future.

Item 1: Gateway Signs

Other cities have gateway signs, like so:

So we want one, too. 

Back in November 2022, city staff brought forward a few options:

Council smiled politely and sent them back to do more work.

So in April, staff showed these options:

Council hemmed and hawed, and asked staff to bring two more final choices back.

So these are the two finalists:

I like these rocks better! These look like river rocks, not suburban masonry. But the new heron is worse. It was better off-center with the blue outline, I think. 

The one on the left reads: “State Park, but make it Business-Professional.” I’m okay with that vibe.

They will be located at these two locations:

I always enjoy it when staff draws the city sideways.  Look at that wonky compass in the corner:

What’s reality anyway, man? Time is a construct! North is an illusion! You’re not the boss of me!

What does Council think?

Mayor Hughson, with a pained expression: So these are our only two choices?

Staff: You literally told us to only bring back two.

Mayor, deep sigh, clearly repressing the urge to say, “But I didn’t mean this crap.”

Matthew Mendoza: Maybe it’s because I live in Rio Vista, but I love the heron!  It symbolizes conservation and the environment.  Option B for Bird.

Alyssa Garza: I like the bird.  Ever since I first visited San Marcos, I’ve seen those beautiful white birds. Option B.

Jane Hughson: The bird does not represent the whole city. It could be a neighborhood sign, but I don’t like it here. Option A.

Mark Gleason:  The bird is not the mascot of San Marcos. It’s distracting. Option A.

Saul Gonzalez is also for Option A.  (Jude and Shane are absent.)

So it’s 3-2. Council argues about whether to wait until Jude and Shane are back, so that one option can get a full four votes.  Alyssa weighs in: “I truly don’t care. We are spending way too much time on this. I’ll switch my vote.”

So the State-Park-But-Business sign wins with a clean four votes. And City Council gave the bird to the bird.  (Ba dum ching.)

….

Matthew: Can we cycle through different colors for the lighting? Purple on Rattler nights, Maroon on Bobcat nights, holiday colors around the holidays?

Answer: Yes! As long as it’s static. TxDOT just says no moving parts. 

So there you have it. At some point this year, these harmless little welcome signs will appear on I-35.

…

Item 9: Rezoning 18 acres behind the outlet malls.

This has come up before.  It’s part of a larger chunk of land:

In 2016, someone wanted to build houses there, so we annexed it and called it the Gas Lamp District. The houses were never built.

In August 2022, it got rezoned:

Mostly light industrial, but with this one little piece for apartments. These were never built, either!

The current owners want to change the yellow square to Light Industrial, to go along with the rest.

Saul is the only one who asks questions:

  1. What is the expected tax revenue for this?

Staff says, “We can’t give an estimate.”   

  1. What is the impact on the neighbors?

Answer: They’re all doing the same thing.

It passes 5-0.

…

Item 11:  We are fiddling with little parking details, as discussed here.

Among other things, we are raising the parking ticket fees, for the first time in 50 years:

I didn’t really know what to make of this.  Are the little cities price gouging? Or are the big cities subsidizing bad behavior? So I emailed the chair of the parking committee (Rosalie Ray), who tells me:

– By state law, your fine for illegally parking in a handicap spot must be at least $500. So those cities with cheaper fines in that category just haven’t updated their fees since 2009, when that law was passed. (We hadn’t updated ours since 1974!)

– To avoid price-gouging, the committee has a couple things in place: 

  • you can opt for community service instead of a fine,
  • you can get a payment plan, and
  • you can get your fine cut in half by responding within 14 days. (Council could extend the 50% discount to double-parking and blocking alleys, if they want.)

– The main targets are things like FedEx and delivery trucks. They’re the ones blocking alleys and bike lanes or double-parking. So we want them to pay their fair share.

There you have it. 

Hours 1:39-3:02 , 6/6/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 14:  “ARP” stands for “American Rescue Plan”, ie Covid money. We’re down to our last $3 million.  We started off with $18 million. This last bit has to be spent by the end of 2024, or we have to give the remainder back. 

Here’s what staff is proposing, based on instructions from council:

The controversial part is spending $1.3 million on Uhland Road quiet district. Here’s what I think that means:  Every time the trains cross the road, they blast their horns.  If you want that to stop, you have to construct automatic traffic arms, and turn-around barriers, and some other safety things.  We’ve done this in other neighborhoods.  

Staff is trying to get the quiet zone funded through other grant money, but their most recent grant application was denied, so they stuck it here.   It’s not really connected with Covid, though.

Alyssa Garza makes the case that ARP funds should be used to address direct needs. In other words, we shouldn’t be spending $2 million on the two parks and a quiet district.  Direct needs are things like financial emergencies, mental health care, and violence prevention programs.  Alyssa focuses in on that last one: other cities are using ARP money to pilot communiy violence prevention programs. Why not us?

She’s making a clever case: all of you who are obsessed with the police and crime rates? Let’s address violence in a preventative way. Wouldn’t that be better than just being reactive? 

Objectively, Alyssa is right. (Let’s pretend I’m objective.)  Support for police departments is generally shrouded in language about public safety and rising rates of violent crime.  But police departments respond to violence. They’re reactive. That’s different from proactively working to reduce the causes of violent crime. If you claim you care about public safety, then you should support community violence prevention programs.

So Alyssa asks point blank: Can we re-arrange this money to pilot a violence prevention program?  

And…. <crickets> … the silence dragged out, and no one joined in.

The problem is that the rest of council has a semi-acceptable excuse: there really is a fixed deadline to spend this money.  Staff’s recommendations are all shovel-ready programs. So the rest of council doesn’t really have to entertain what Alyssa is saying, because momentum is on their side.

Should we be furious at them? It depends on what happens next.

Possibility 1:  

  • Alyssa brings up community violence prevention programs at the next CJR subcommittee meeting. 
  • Mayor Hughson and Shane Scott respond enthusiastically! 
  • They work up a pilot program for Council.  
  • Council enthusiastically finds some funding and moves forward with it!  

 In this case, everyone is forgiven for squirming uncomfortably and avoiding Alyssa’s proposal to use ARP funding right now.

Possibility 2: 

  • Alyssa brings up community violence prevention programs at the next CJR subcommittee meeting.
  • It gets bogged down in the slow wheels of San Marcos city government.  
  • Everyone says nice things, but also sandbags the process.   
  • It stays in the background as a nice idea, and never quite makes it into implementation for the next several years. 

In this case, City Council is making it clear: “Public safety” is a code word for “We love the police!” and they are going to prioritize SMPD over actual public safety whenever given the choice.  Vote the jerks out of office!

…

Item 18: Here’s Trace development, way down south, past the outlet malls:

That’s where Rodriguez Elementary is.

Some sort of development wants to go in here:

The Trace developers are definitely worried about something industrial right going in right behind people’s backyards.  Council decides to form a subcommittee: Jane Hughson, Matthew Mendoza, and Jude Prather are going to take care of business for ya.

…

Item 19: File this one under “victories are anticlimactic”: eight months after Max Baker loses his city council seat, they officially change the rules to allow subject matter experts to attend subcommittee meetings.  (Discussed here previously.)

This was a flashpoint with Max – he’d bring up new issues, and everyone would cock their heads like a confused golden retriever, and then ignore what he was saying. Max wanted to bring in experts to explain complex issues, so that others would take him seriously, but he couldn’t even get experts in, because no one took him seriously. (Partly, this was because Max generally had 50 issues to solve simultaneously, and everyone kind of just got woozy at the overload. But partly, they just didn’t want to consider new ideas, like the environmental impact of the SMART/Axis Terminal.)

But this can also be abused, as noted by Markeymoore and Forrest Fulkerson in the comments here. If you have councilmembers who are shmoozy with a developer, and they invite the developer to the subcommittee meeting, you may essentially have a developer writing their own agreement with the city.

…

Item 21: Ramon Lucio Park is where the baseball fields are. 

There’s also a little path to a bridge over the river, which leads to some trails.  And there are some art installations, right where you’d head from the parking lot towards the river.

More art is coming!

I am not sure where it will go, but I’m guessing with the other art installations. (Not at the falls, despite that picture.)

It’s big:

This is the winner of a nationwide call for artist submissions, and then an open house forum, and finally the arts commission picked this one.  

I didn’t find the price tag anywhere, but I generally think that arts enrich a community, and it’s worth spending money to compensate artists fairly.  

By the way: has everyone seen the kites display at the library? I love them so much. 

…

Item 20: Finally! I promised you more parking news, and you stayed for it. Here’s your big pay-off:

Things in the works:

  1. Parking Benefit Districts: this is not paid parking, but it’s a necessary pre-condition.
  1. Parking Mobility Funds: if we had paid parking, we’d need a bucket to put the revenue in.
  1. COLAs for fees

Currently, our parking tickets cost $20. They’ve been at that rate since 1974.  That’s almost 50 years! Congratulations, $20 parking tickets, you’ve had a great run.  

(Just for funsies, I went to an inflation calculator: a $20 ticket in 1974 is equivalent to a $126 ticket in 2023. What a bargain we’re getting!)

What’s proposed is having fees drift upward automatically with inflation.  In other words, every three years or so, you’d just set a new, higher fee rate to match inflation.  (COLA stands for Cost of Living Adjustments.)  

Jane Hughson cracked me up again: “This is a good idea. We should just get it automated, so we don’t have to update it every… fifty years.”

Here’s why I like this so much:  First, Jane says that we do this already with other fees that the city charges.  Second, we do this with certain city employees.  In other words, we are already well-versed in COLAs!

Which brings me to my hobbyhorse: Automatic COLAs for minimum wage.  San Marcos does have a minimum wage of $15/hour for any business receiving tax breaks from the city.  LET’S PEG IT TO INFLATION! If we can do this for parking tickets and city employees, surely we understand why this is so important for our neighbors earning minimum wage.

But wait! There’s more!

  1. An amnesty/incentive program. Suppose you rack up a huge amount in fines. Maybe you even got booted. This is the program that will make it easier for you to settle up with the city – like signing up for volunteer hours instead of owing money, for example.

Everyone loves this idea. I love this idea, too.

5. Dynamic pricing. In other words, a little sign that says “Violators will be fined $20-$60” or whatever. So if you park illegally in off-peak hours, it’s not so bad. If you park illegally in the middle of Sights & Sounds, you get charged more.

(They claimed this was about deterrence, but surely it’s about making more money. It’s hard to see how dynamic pricing would make a dent in the decision-making of the shmuck clogging up Sights & Sounds, in the middle of four different choir performances.)

All of these will be fine-tuned before Council officially votes on them. But it’s clear: our widdle San Marcos is gwowing up.

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

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 14: The ever-loving SMART Terminal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

Item 14: Coming up in future discussions:

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

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

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

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

There’s a couple things going on:

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

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

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

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

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

Hour 2, 5/17/22

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 23: Camacho Street Warehouse

So what is the resolution of the Camacho Street Warehouse? Well, the owner pulled the application.

Is this a win? It’s hard to say! Did he pull the whole project, or just decide to go forward without the permit? 

What needs to happen is that the entrance on Camacho needs to be closed. The property should be accessed via Black’s BBQ parking lot.  I am guessing we don’t have any mechanism to make that happen.

…

Item 24: Downtown Parking Committee

  1. They’re going to set up a park-and-ride shuttle to help move employees back and forth.

2. Paid Parking is not coming to downtown, at least for the foreseeable future.