Presentation 1: Hays County Health Department
I assume all you readers here already agree that health care should be free. Americans pay way too much for way too little, for vague reasons about “freedom”, as if anyone is excited about the freedom to be sick or die early.
Everyone deserves affordable health care, as a basic right. Great.
Here’s a second reason that health care should be free and universal: you need a coordinated response in order to launch the best fight against contagious diseases. Do we really want each person to get sick with tuberculosis and see if they can recover, with good old fashioned rugged individualism? Or do we want tuberculosis to actually be eradicated, for everyone, like a bunch of dirty socialists? Maybe grandma doesn’t need to hack up a lung in the first place.
This is what we mean by public health: often it’s better for everybody when everybody gets basic health care. It’s better for rich people, when poor people aren’t sick! Seems basic, but it’s mindblowing if you’re used to punishing poor people for being poor.
So we have a Hays County Health Department.
What’s the need like in Hays County? Well, first, we keep growing:
Second, we’re in need:
Some notes:
1. San Marcos has about 70K people, and Hays County has about 269K people. So the poverty rate is only 12.4% for all of Hays County, because there’s a lot of wealth in the north and west parts of Hays County.
Most of the poverty is concentrated in San Marcos and Kyle. The poverty rate in San Marcos is about 27%.
2. Let’s just note that the poverty rate is 12.4%, but unemployment is only 3%. Can you believe that we allow companies to hire people without paying them a living wage? Me neither.
You’d think we’d be storming the castle over this kind of exploitation, but instead we all just wake up in this world every day, as usual, stressed out over our meager salaries.
3. That housing crisis is a disaster. Spending half of your meager income on housing is no joke.
“TVFC” is Texas Vaccines for Children. “ASN” is …American Supplemental Nutrition? American Nephrology Society? Autonomous System Number? I got nothing.
“TB” is definitely tuberculosis, and we definitely do not want TB cases to be rising.
The presenter stopped and talked about syphilis for a little bit. It is definitely on the rise in Hays County, across all age groups, ethnicities, and economic classes.
Here’s statewide syphilis data:
from here. (The linked report focuses on women, because one of the worst risks is congenital birth defects if she has a baby.)
In conclusion: the health department does a lot on a shoestring budget, but they could do a lot more if the state funded public health like we should.
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Presentation 2: American Rescue Plans (ARPA) money and Covid Relief money.
Covid money is running out. It has to all be budgeted by this December, and it has to all be spent by the end of 2025. We started with $22 million, and we’re down to about $1 million. Most of that is because of projects that came in under budget.
Here’s how staff is recommending we spend the money:
The LCRA tower is a bargain that came out of nowhere. It’s to give radio access to fire/EMS/etc on the southeast side of town. It was going to cost $4-5 million, but in the last moment, we looped in Guadalupe County and some other partners. So the fire chief Chief Stevens is a big advocate for that.
Jane Hughson asks about the running list of side-projects that council keeps, to be funded whenever we stumble into some money. Staff does not have that list available.
Alyssa Garza asks about some of the programs she’s tried to fund with ARPA money, where money never seems to materialize in a meaningful way. Specifically, funding for the Parent-Liaison SMCISD program and translation services. In both cases, money has gone to the program, but not in a way that addresses things well. Like, it’s all well and good to translate the website, but we’re not making events bilingual and bringing parity into public spaces.
Alyssa points out that the whole Council is being steamrolled into saying yes, for the tower they’ve never heard of before. Chief Stevens pleads that the stars aligned in a special way.
I get what Alyssa is saying: this is part of a larger pattern. Whose priorities get fast-tracked and whose priorities limp along, half-heartedly? The tower is not a bad project! It’s just a convenient example of a problematic, ongoing pattern.
The San Marxist 