Tag: p&z

Hours 3:25 – 4:28, 5/20/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 21: Downtown TIRZ.

“TIRZ” stands for Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone. We have 5 or 6 of these in San Marcos. This item is about the Downtown TIRZ, which covers this area:

This TIRZ started in 2011.

Here’s how a TIRZ works: In 2011, they appraised the value of all that property. Say it was appraised to be $100 million back in 2011. While the TIRZ runs, the city will only get taxes on the $100 million. As the property gets more valuable, the downtown will pay more taxes, but the extra taxes get put back into projects to make the downtown better.

So for example, suppose in 2018, the downtown is now worth $150 million. The city gets the taxes on the first $100 million, and the downtown gets the taxes on the next $50 million.

Here’s a little visual aid explaining this in the council packet:

The downtown TIRZ is actually a joint TIRZ with the county also knocking back some money. Here’s the actual amounts, if you’re curious:

This next bit did not get a lot of discussion:

My best guess is that everyone still wants the TIRZ to wrap up by 2027, and so we’re giving them a final boost to get across the finish line.

Here are the amounts they need to finish up the projects:

Anyway, it does not get much discussion, and passes unanimously:

The city is giving roughly $1 million to the downtown for projects this coming year.

I’m okay with the premise, but I’m uneasy that it didn’t get more discussion, in light of the massive budget cuts we’re incurring elsewhere. If we extended the TIRZ to 2028, could we have spread out $500K somewhere else?

…

Item 22: CUP appeal

There’s this Holiday Inn, on the southbound frontage road, right before WonderWorld:

They have a little bar and grill inside:

The bar and grill serves alcohol. So they have to get a Conditional Use Permit (CUP) from the city.

Here’s how CUPs work: your first year open, you get a 1 year permit. After that, you get a 3 year permit, (There are a lot of extra details, but that’s the gist of it.)

These guys got their 1 year permit back in 2017, and then never came back.

Now: this is a really common, widespread problem in San Marcos, and P&Z and staff have been working to clean it up for awhile now. The city was sloppy about sending reminders, at times, and the businesses were sloppy about not coming in for their permits if no one was checking. So a ton of businesses fell behind.

Here’s the problem: there’s a fee attached to the CUP. (A couple hundred dollars?) The city doesn’t turn a profit, but it covers the cost of staff time and materials.

So the businesses that skip the CUPs for a decade – like these guys – are saving maybe $1000 over the businesses that follow the rules. It’s a little unfair.

P&Z handles this by making businesses pay off their delinquent CUPs. If you skipped 2 renewals, you’re going to get 2 6-month CUP permits. When you’re all caught up, you can go back to having 3-year CUPs.

That’s what happened to these guys. They skipped 2020 and 2023, so when they came in last August, they got their first make-up CUP, lasting 6 months. When they came back in March, they got their second make-up CUP, lasting 6 more months.

But this time they got pissed! So they appealed to Council. They want a full 3 year CUP, and they want a refund of $765.

Here’s the thing:

1. Is the bar right? Absoutely not! This is the standard that P&Z is applying everywhere. This is absolutely fair, and the bar is wrong. But….

2. Is this a good fight for City Council to pick? Hell no! Pick your battles. If someone is making a mountain out of this molehill, have the good sense to step out of their way.

Council steps out of their way and rewards the appeal.

I’m a little annoyed that Council fawns over them for being such good community members. There’s no need to kiss their ass when you’re the one doing them a favor. But Council fawns and preens over them. Whatever.

The vote: Should they get refunded the money that the rest of the business owners have to pay?

Haha. I probably would have voted “yes”, but my heart is with Matthew voting “no”.

…

Item 12: Staffing study for SMPD

Chief Standridge came in 2022. Back then, SMPD did a staffing study, and decided that we needed a lot more police officers:

Then there was a violent crime spike in 2022, and so we freaked out and claimed that we needed a LOT more police, as fast as possible:

I would argue that our crime spike was actually part of a nationwide trend:

(From here.) As covid drifted back in time, crime rates have settled back to baseline in San Marcos, as well.

Council has been spending all its extra money adding extra police and fire fighters. Back then, Alyssa was the only progressive voice on council. But now she’s got company. So do we really need to keep adding police officers?

We’ve decided to do another policing staff study. We are hiring these guys to tell us whether we need more police officers or not.

Is council willing to spend $116K on a new staffing study for the police, from that consulting company?

Amanda: the timeline looks rushed. How are you going to get community input by July 2025?
Answer: It’s actually supposed to be five months, not two months.

Alyssa: Why these guys?
Answer: They did our Marshal staffing study. We liked them. They didn’t tell us to hire more marshals, but they had good ideas how to move people around.

Saul: This is a lot of money. Can we see the bidding process?
Answer: We didn’t have a bidding process, but next time we can do that. Sorry about that.

The vote:

…

Item 4: More SMPD!

Here’s what they want to do:

Should we spend $938K on police station improvements?

Short answer: Yes, because this decision was already made, and now we’re just following through. This is the building and the bullet trap for the shooting range. (We saw the bullet trap earlier here.)

(Did this item get a robust discussion earlier, when it was approved in June 2023? Absolutely not. But what’s done is done.)

Amanda: Will there be any more asks associated with this project?
Answer: Possibly to resurface the parking lots. But we don’t expect anything unexpected to turn up when we break ground.

Saul: You do know this is an old graveyard, right?
Answer: No, sir, I did not know that.
Saul: I’m just kidding.

That was the best moment of the night right there, for sure. I laughed so hard at that.

The vote:

…

Item 10-11: EVEN MORE SMPD!

SMPD is applying for a two grants related to license plate readers. This is supposed to relate to vehicle theft and stealing catalytic converters. Total, these two grants are about $183K. SMPD needs Council’s blessing to apply for the grants.

(This is not the same thing as the license plate scanner saga that we’ve been following here, here, and here.)

Amanda: Didn’t the deadline pass in April?
Answer: We got a special exception, because they know that city councils don’t always meet on schedule.

Amanda grills Chief Standridge over the date, and Lorenzo gets snippy over the time wasted. If you enjoy petty council member exchanges, go here and start watching at about 4:08:50.

The vote:

I am 90% sure that Alyssa verbally stated her vote was actually a “no”, but it was hard to hear.

…

Item 24, 25: Tinkering with boards and commissions, and filling vacancies.

There’s a vacancy on P&Z, left by the passing of Jim Garber. Council elects Josh Paselk to be the new commissioner.

…

One last note:

Everyone makes an effort to dress professionally for council meetings:

But is Amanda rocking a maroon three piece suit?!

Is this a councilmember, or is this Andre 3000?? I appreciate good drip, as the kids say.

Hours 0:00 – 2:73, 2/4/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment

No one spoke this week.

Moving on!

…

Item 9: Rezoning some land.

A developer wants to develop this stretch: 

and turn it into townhomes.

Up close, it looks like this:

It includes the old Bismark filling station: 

I went hunting for photos of the old Bismark Filling Station back in its heyday, but came up empty handed. I did find this deep dive on the history it, though.

…

Q: Are there any concerns about flooding?

Answer: It’s partially in the floodplain, and it is near the headwaters, which is very sensitive. But the land is actually angled so that the water runs away from the sensitive stuff.  The water runs away from other houses on Post Road, and towards the stadium.

Q:  Are there any concerns about buried gas tanks?

Answer: no, the station is too old. They checked the records. They didn’t bury tanks back then.

Q:  Are you going to preserve the gas station?

Answer: We are working with the Historical Preservation Committee on this! Hoping to save the facade and columns, and put it somewhere where it can be memorialized.

Note: This is how you make best friends with Council. Who knows if it will actually happen or not, but Old San Marcos is happy to hear this guy say the right things.

One other note:  

The developer is asking for CD-4 zoning.  He’s saying he wants to build townhomes:

Ok, maybe not quite that beautiful. But maybe like these, near Wonderworld:

which are also pretty cute. (via)

But CD-4 zoning can also mean large scale apartment complexes like so:

When you zone land, you don’t get to pick and choose which use the developer ends up doing.   The developer can do anything included in the zoning.

Now, this particular lot isn’t very big:

So my guess is that he will probably build townhomes or condos.  But he is allowed to sell it to someone else, and that other person can do anything allowed under CD-4 zoning.

The vote:

Great! That’s how I would have voted, too.

…

Item 6: License plate recognition cameras.

Should the city spend $124K for SMPD to have cameras that read license plates for one year? 

Maybe! We need to unpack some stuff first.

Backstory:

Budgets get approved in September.  But the planning starts nine months earlier.  So at the end of January, Council had a two day workshop where they started laying out big ideas.

They go into great detail on the strategic goals:

Under each goal, Council decides what they want to prioritize for the next year.

On Day 2, they tackled Public Safety. Amanda proposed the following outcome:

  • Establish clear guidelines and protections governing the use of technology to ensure transparency, accountability, and respect for the personal privacy and civil rights of the public.

(Around 3:05 if you want to watch.)

Everyone was in favor of this! It sounds great!

Next: let’s talk about license-plate cameras:

So these cameras that SMPD wants to buy. They are Automatic License Plate Readers, and they read your license plate when you drive by.

The ACLU does not like them one bit:

A little-noticed surveillance technology designed to track the movements of every passing driver is fast proliferating on America’s streets. Automatic license plate readers—mounted on police cars or on objects like road signs and bridges—use small high-speed cameras to photograph thousands of plates per minute.

The information captured by the readers—including the license plate number and the date, time, and location of every scan—is being collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information are growing rapidly. This information is often retained for years, or even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights.

Although they do say there are some appropriate uses:

We don’t find every use of ALPRs objectionable. For example, we do not generally object to using them to check license plates against lists of stolen cars, for AMBER Alerts, or for toll collection, provided they are deployed and used fairly and subject to proper checks and balances, such as ensuring devices are not disproportionately deployed in low-income communities and communities of color, and that the “hot lists” they are run against are legitimate and up to date.

Now, what the ACLU really doesn’t like is this particular company, Flock Safety:

Unlike a targeted ALPR camera system that is designed to take pictures of license plates, check the plates against local hot lists, and then flush the data if there’s no hit, Flock is building a giant camera network that records people’s comings and goings across the nation, and then makes that data available for search by any of its law enforcement customers. Such a system provides even small-town sheriffs access to a sweeping and powerful mass-surveillance tool, and allows big actors like federal agencies and large urban police departments to access the comings and goings of vehicles in even the smallest of towns.

And yes, Flock is exactly the company we’re buying cameras from. And it’s not just the ACLU: other folks also don’t like Flock Safety one bit.

Look, ICE raids have already started. (Not as intensely as Trump would like, but they’ve started.) Do we really think this universal surveillance data will be off-limits? It wasn’t off-limits back in 2019.

Sure might be nice to have a clear policy! Maybe we should “Establish clear guidelines and protections governing the use of technology to ensure transparency, accountability, and respect for the personal privacy and civil rights of the public.”

This brings us to Tuesday’s meeting

Amanda makes a motion: Postpone the purchase of the cameras until we’ve established the policy that focuses on privacy and civil rights when it comes to the public. (After all, it was literally five days earlier that Council agreed this is a priority!)

Chief Standridge says, “No worries! We already have such a policy! It’s four pages long and follows all the best practices in Texas! This is what all the departments across Texas are doing.”

I think he’s referring to this: Policy 5.4: Automated License Plate Readers.

Amanda: “I’ve read the policy. Those may be the best practices in Texas, but they’re not the best practices nationwide. Things like data usage, data retention, data sharing – we should address those things, and then we can bring back the vote on the cameras.”

They get into it a little bit, over how long data should be stored. Is 30 days too long? Just right? (That same article on Flock Safety has recommended legal language specifically for this kind of situation.)

“Furthermore,” Chief Standridge says, “this is already underway. We got the first batch of cameras in 2022, and then we got a grant for some more…” he kind of trails off.

Amanda: “The cameras have already been purchased? The cameras that require council approval?”

Chief Standridge: “The Flock representative is here online, they can confirm or deny if the cameras have been purchased.”

Jane tries to smooth it over: “It was probably something like it was initiated because they thought they’d be under 100K, and then it turned out to be over 100K, so they need needed approval!”

Standridge: “Close enough!”

Note: I think it was because of this:

The original contract was not discussed when Council approved it, in April, 2022. Later on, SMPD applied for some grants, and Council didn’t discuss those, either. My guess is that since the grants were in motion, SMPD assumed it was fine to move forward with the cameras.

(This also happened with the Total Bullet Containment System. It had been purchased before Council actually authorized the purchase.)

…

Back to the conversation:

Jane: I’m game to have a work session on this policy, but I don’t want to hold up the purchase of the cameras in the meantime.

No one else (besides Alyssa) weighs in.

The Vote: Should we postpone the purchase of these cameras?

WHOA!   I was not expecting that, but I’m thrilled to see it!

…

Items 10-13: An enormous number of appointments. 

The vast majority of the meeting was spent making appointments:

Those are all boards where they appoint community members.

The most public of these is P&Z. P&Z had three open spots. David Case and Maraya Dunn were both re-upped for a second term, and “Rodney” got the last spot.

No one in the meeting ever used Rodney’s last name, and I don’t have access to the applications, so I guess we’ll all find out which Rodney in a few weeks, when he starts attending the meetings.

…

Item 14: Attendance on External Boards

There are a bunch of committees in the city and county that have a representative from city council.

Sometimes you have one of these external boards with a city council rep, but that council member never shows up to any of the meetings, and sometimes his name is Shane Scott. 

(Specifically at the January 7th council meeting, where Shane found out that he’s been on the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau Board for the past year, and had missed all of the meetings. Shane was kind of sheepish about the whole thing.)(Around 4:18 in this video. It’s pretty funny.)

Jane: Do we want some sort of attendance policy for these situations? Like you can’t have more than three unexcused absences in a row? That’s the policy for the rest of our boards and commissions. 

Everyone is on board. So this will come back around.

Hours 1:30 – 2:50, 2/6/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 7: PDDs

This might feel a bit like insider baseball, but it’s insider baseball that makes me happy.  

Here’s the issue: say a developer applies to get their land zoned. The developer says, “You’re gonna love it! I’m going to put in some cute condos, a great restaurant, and some retail.” They show us some charming sketches of what they have planned. We think it looks great and give them the zoning they want.

Then they change their mind and sell it. The new owner gets the zoning, but decides that they really want to build something that pisses everyone off. As long as the new plan is legal under the zoning, there’s no mechanism to stop them. 

(To be fair, Council and P&Z know not to trust charming sketches. But in general, there are a lot of hard calls on zoning when you’re okay with some uses and not others.)

Enter PDDs. PDD stands for Planned Development District.  This means you get to micromanage the developer.  You get to see the actual plans and say, “A few more trees over there, how about an awning on this little store, etc.”  You can be extremely heavy-handed and rigid.  Everybody signs the PDD contract and the city gets exactly what it signs up for. 

There are bad parts, too: it’s an enormous amount of work for city staff.  Sometimes it has meant sweetheart deals for developers who don’t feel like following the code. Sometimes PDDs haven’t been enforced. PDDs are only as good as the council that approves them.

Here’s the frustrating thing: we used to have PDDs, but in 2018, we threw them out! I never understood this. Why not just use them less? You’re allowed to have tools that you don’t use very often. But no: we went Marie Kondo on our tool set and completely cut them out. (There are plenty of PDDs that are still around – Trace, La Cima, etc, but we eliminated our ability to write new ones.)

Since then, there’ve been a number of occasions when it would have been nice to have them! The most obvious example is the SMART Terminal.  We were on the verge of handing over 2000 acres and saying, “Have fun with all that! Let us know what you decide to do with all that heavy industrial zoning!!” Only for massive public activism did we back away at the 11th hour. 

So now we’re bringing PDDs back!  

Jane Hughson’s main motivation is to hold developers’ feet to the fire. If they promise beautiful things, then they can put it in writing and be held accountable.  I agree – that’s a great reason to have PDDs.

Everyone else is on board. What’s not to love about micromanaging developers?

…

Item 8: Emergency Sirens

There are emergency sirens throughout town.  We occasionally have emergencies – floods, tornados, snow-vid, etc. (Now, I can’t recall ever actually hearing them during different emergencies we’ve had? but surely they did their job.)

If we’re going to have massive sprawl, maybe the developers should include sirens in their new developments.  Everyone agrees this sounds reasonable.

Shane Scott asks about GMRS systems?  Apparently these are fancy walkie-talkies, somewhere in between CBs and ham radios, in terms of watts of power.

Answer: they require really tall towers, so they wouldn’t piggyback on the siren towers. But maybe someday!  

10-4, good buddy.

… 

Item 9: Boards and Commissions appointments.

There are 19 different city boards and commissions with open slots. It’s appointment time. 

Last year, Alyssa Garza was super frustrated by the perpetual Oldness and Whiteness of the applicant pool.  It was never shared with the public if anything came of that? Maybe the DEI coordinator worked with the communications outreach team to get the word out more effectively?

Jane Hughson applauded this applicant pool for being the most diverse yet.  Maybe it is! I have no idea. Alyssa did not say anything good or bad either way about it.

On P&Z, there were three open slots.  All three current members – Lupe Costilla, Jim Garber, and William Agnew – were re-appointed for a second term. Jane Hughson, Saul Gonzalez, Mark Gleason, and Matthew Mendoza voted for those three reappointments.  Jude Prather, Shane Scott, and Alyssa Garza all voted for some new and some returning people.

All three of those P&Z members work hard and in good faith.  I’m totally annoyed with how P&Z handled VisionSMTX, but that’s just one part of many things they do, and they do other things well. (New appointments keep it fresh and interesting, though.)

One last thought: I recognized so many of the names from people who are friends with me on social media! You’re good people. Everyone who submits an application to be on these commissions deserves a hearty thank you.  

…

Item 11-12: Top Secret Executive Session.

I just want to note that one of the items is a legal discussion about San Marcos being sued by Ken Paxton for decriminalizing weed. What an goddamn asshat he is.

(Obviously I don’t know how it went, it being executive session and all.)

P&Z Comprehensive PlanWorkshop, 6/21/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries, P&Z Meetings

Note: I mostly try not to call out P&Z members by name, because they’re not public officials the way that City Council members are. But there are nine of them, and they’re not all equally frustrating. Last time, I gave William Agnew a hard time, and I give Jim Garber a hard time in this post. What can I say? They’re staking out positions that I disagree with, hard.

Markeymoore does the best job of gently pushing back against the crap that I’m describing below. Griffen Spell sometimes does, as well. #notallp&zcommissioners

Quick Timeline:
– 2020-December 2022: Team of community members plus consultants and city staff spend two years putting together a comp plan. A huge amount of community input goes into it.
– February 2023: P&Z says, “This plan is an utter disaster. We will form a subcommittee to rewrite it.”
– May 2023: Now there are two versions of the Comprehensive Plan. The changes are so extensive that they need a workshop to get through them

This workshop was so exasperating.   It was aggravating for the exact same reasons that the previous P&Z comp plan discussion was aggravating.

More background: There’s an area of condos called Sagewood. It’s roughly here:

on the edge of an older, beautiful neighborhood.

The landlords of Sagewood have let Sagewood get really rundown: buildings seem to slant, broken fences don’t get fixed very quickly, trash cans get knocked over and trash stays strewn about, etc.

Here’s what Google Streetview has to say about the matter:

(It actually looks fine in that photo.) It’s mostly college students living here.

The point is: many of your older San Marcos NIMBYs close their eyes at night, and dream of Sagewood taking over their own neighborhood, and presumably wake up screaming.

In the 2000s, tons of new giant apartment complexes were approved: The Retreat, The Cottages, Redwood/The Woods, and probably some I’m forgetting. This angered a lot of citizens, including me! I think it was criminal to build The Woods on the river. (Here’s some backstory if you’re curious.) Many NIMBY types feared that Sagewood was taking over the city.

This is what you must understand, if you want to understand fights over the comp plan: many P&Z members are stuck in 2010, fighting against The Cottages, and suffering from Sagewood night terrors when they try to close their eyes and rest.

What else was 2010 like? I did my best to find some data:

  • Median rent in 2009: $741/month. (Median is more useful than average – this means that half the units rented for less than $741, and half for more than $741.)
  • In 2011, the median house in San Marcos sold for $140K.
  • There were 165 total listings for houses on the market
  • the 2010 census puts San Marcos at 44K people.
  • Median household income in 2009: $26,357

So that’s the world that most of P&Z believes we’re living in: 44K people in San Marcos, many houses cost less than $140K, and median rent is around $700/month.

Here’s the most current numbers I could find:

This is a wildly different world! Rent has almost doubled, home prices have more than doubled, and there are fewer houses on the market.

The comp plan has got to deal with the actual San Marcos in 2023:

  • we need affordable housing,
  • we need public transit and safe biking options, and
  • we have a moral obligation to give a shit that the world is quickly overheating.

The way you do this is by controlling sprawl and increasing density, in small-scale ways. Build 3- and 4-plexes throughout single family neighborhoods. Increase public transit options. Put commerce near where people live, so you can drive less.

This is why the Comp Plan discussions are so frustrating. There are three main coalitions:

  • Old San Marcos, fighting the battles of 2010.
  • Developers, who would still love to build those giant apartment complexes that piss everyone off
  • Progressives, trying to wrangle developers into building small scale, dense housing, and simultaneously trying to convince Old San Marcos not to sabotage it.

I’m really not exaggerating. The chair, Jim Garber, literally states that this is his position at roughly 0:43:00:

  • The apartment complexes approved in the 2000s drove him to local politics: he got involved in the last Comp plan, in order to save San Marcos neighborhoods from giant student apartment complexes.  
  • This last Comp plan was approved in 2012. In order to get it passed, the Planning Department promised to conduct Neighborhood Character Studies. Every neighborhood was going to get to come together and declare what its personality is. Your personality is things like “no duplexes” and “no carports”. In other words, it’s mostly class-based.  The goal is to enshrine these wealth signifiers for all eternity. 
  • However, the neighborhood character studies were never carried out.  Jim Garber has been steamed up about this ever since; the planning department cannot be trusted; etc etc.
  • He just doesn’t understand why “protection of existing neighborhoods” is not in this plan.
  • He wants to divide all neighborhoods into “existing” and “new”. Once a brand new patch of land has been platted, it switches from “new” to “existing”, and then it’s personality is enshrined, never to be touched again. 
  • What’s the difference? Existing neighborhoods should not have duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and condominiums.  In other words, no small-scale, dense, affordable housing.

Jim Garber is so mad about The Retreat, The Cottages, and other gigantic apartment complexes that he is fighting tooth-and-nail against small-scale affordable housing that would blend in to a neighborhood.   He is stuck fighting the battles of 2012, and can’t empathize with 30 year olds in 2023 who can’t afford to live in a little residential neighborhood.

Amanda Hernandez is the planning department director.  She responds thoroughly to his points:

  • First off, she has only been the director for three months. Most of his complaints span previous admins.
  • She wrote most of the comp plan in 2012, and she now thinks it’s a terrible plan.  They started the neighborhood character studies and spent a year or two on them, and then she was told to abandon them and to switch and work on the new Code Development.
  • But! Now! They are now finally doing character studies. Blanco Gardens and Dunbar are underway.  Victory Gardens and north of campus are coming up next.
  • You know the Cottages, the Retreat, Sagewood, and The Woods? Big complexes in residential areas? Those have not been approved since 2012. The old Comp Plan worked. Those were all passed under the even-older comp plan, two comp plans ago.

Bottom line: we have effective mechanisms to prevent giant apartment complexes from being built in residential neighborhoods.  This is no longer happening.  The fight against giant apartment complexes is going to sabotage efforts to bring small-scale affordable housing into neighborhoods.

Finally, I’m going to be blunt: the utter narcissism of the Historic District is exhausting.  To hear P&Z speak, there is no neighborhood that could merit planning, besides this one. All Historic District, all the time.  It’s extremely tiresome and means that nothing else ever gets considered. 

At the public comments, speakers try to explain that no one wants to change the Historic District. The Historic District is actually the gold standard of a neighborhood!  It’s got small scale tri-plexes and four-plexes sprinkled around, it’s got neighborhood commercial, and nearly every house has an ADU – a mini-house in the back.  It is the dream of small scale, dense living!

One of the speakers, Rosie Ray, made some handouts for P&Z, to try to convey this point. She was kind enough to share them with me:

Cottonwood Creek does not have diversity of housing. The residents keep telling the city that they want some stores nearby. The Historic District is chock full of different kinds of functionality. It works great.

When this is brought up, the P&Z folks say, “Yes, but the Historic District happened naturally.”

Basically: Historic Districts usually are older than land use codes. Single-family zoning originated to make sure white, wealthy neighborhoods stayed that way. So along with red-lining, you wanted to make sure there was nothing affordable. Hence you specify that lots have to be big, and houses have to be big and spread out. This is the problematic origin of single-family zoning.

So sure, the Historic district happened naturally, because it’s older than single-family zoning.  And now we will prevent that from happening anywhere else. 

Bottom line:

  • P&Z wants to separate all existing neighborhoods and freeze them in carbon, like Hans Solo. Future neighborhoods, in a galaxy far far away, can be built like the Historic District.
  • Developers will not build future neighborhoods like the Historic District, because the way you maximize profit is to build yet another sprawling single family neighborhood or a giant apartment complex. (Good link on how to get builders to fill in these missing middle housing types. The problem really is single-family zoning.)
  • In ten years, we’ll have another comp plan, and we’ll beg and plead for this all over again.

I’m struggling to avoid making “OK Boomer” jokes about P&Z, but gerontocracy is a real thing in the US, and in San Marcos. The members of P&Z do not seem attuned to the idea that the financial hurdles of 30 year olds in 2023 are wildly different than the financial hurdles of 30 year olds in 1990.

(I didn’t have a good place to put it, but Rosie also passed out this map:

It’s pretty stark!)

P&Z meeting, 5/9/23

by The San Marxist, posted in P&Z Meetings

We’re going to start with a P&Z blog post, because I think the topic is important. This is nearly two weeks ago, when P&Z discussed the Comprehensive Plan, aka VisionSMTX.

Background

The Comprehensive Plan is the most high level vision of the city, which says things like, “We want more business here, we want to protect the river, we want more housing here,” etc.  It’s big, general, and vague.  Then when you go to draw up specific master plans – Land Development Code, Transportation Master plan, Housing plan, Environment, etc – you have to be consistent with the Comprehensive Plan.  So it drives a lot of choices that get made down the line.

It’s going badly.  

Back in 2020, City Council selected a group of 31 citizens, including several city council members and P&Z commissioners.  This group met with consultants for two years. City staff also held outreach events every month or two, and sent out online surveys, and generally worked hard to solicit a wide range of community input.  All this was drawn up into the VisionSMTX draft. 

This draft went to P&Z in February, and the chair, Jim Garber said, “Oh dear. This is such a train wreck that there’s too much to discuss in one meeting.  Let’s form a subcommittee.” 

So four P&Z members and Mayor Hughson met a dozen times. They had so many revisions that staff just said, “We need to call it an alternate plan, VisionSMTX+.”  This subcommittee ends up being so influential that I need to refer to them as “The P&Z Subcommittee”. 

So now there are two drafts:

  • VisionSMTX, which took two years, $350K+ worth of consultants, and thousands of community hours, and
  • VisionSMTX+, which took five people about a month. (Ie, they added a little plus sign to this one.)

They are substantially different from each other. They’re so different that the staff created a comparison table to help us sort through the differences, and the comparison table is 74 pages long.

….

Listen: I have been struggling to write this up for the past two weeks. It’s really difficult to explain, because the various sides are not all having the same conversation. It’s a total mess.

…

The subcommittee read VisionSMTX and thought, “This document is going to let developers destroy our beautiful neighbohoods. People who live in the historic neighborhood, Dunbar, Barrio Pescado, San Antonio street, and so on, do NOT want their neighborhoods changed!”

What do they fear? Their fears are very slippery.

  • Giant apartment complexes, like the Cottages or the Woods. Developers are assholes!
  • Increased density in the form of smaller housing – ADUs, which are the tiny house-behind-a-house. Duplexes, triplexes, 4-plexes
  • Anything that threatens the “genteel” character of their neighborhoods.

So their fears range from the reasonable (large scale apartment complexes) to the jerky (fear of low income people being able to live near wealthy people).

…

Here are my personal beliefs on increasing the density of housing:

  • Cars and suburban sprawl are super convenient! I can drive to Target, get exactly what I want, and drive home in 30 minutes.  I do not have to plan, or consult a bus schedule, or get sweaty riding my bike.
     
  • Literally, cars should never go away.  There are plenty of people with mobility issues and resource constraints, and we have to take care of them, as a community.  I will fight for your right to drive to work.
  • That said, we are currently gorging ourselves on cars and sprawl.  This is a disaster.

    On the global scale, the oceans are rising and extreme weather events are escalating.  Sprawl and car-centric communities are not sustainable. Younger people are looking at 50 years of climate change. I worry about future generations.

    On the local level, San Marcos literally can’t pay for enough cops and firefighters to cover the distant, sprawling developments.   Plus, we’re prone to flooding, and we have a river which is one of the most special things on the planet.  We’ve got to take this seriously.

    And on the individual level it costs $7K-10Kish per year, to have a car-centric life, but centrally located housing is very expensive. That’s a losing combo for younger or poorer people.
  • I believe that wealth segregation is immoral. Giant apartment complexes are a way of keeping poor people all housed together. In my opinion, duplexes, triplexes, and 4-plexes should be scattered throughout every housing development. They can even be built to look like beautiful houses!

We are predicted to need 50K homes for people moving to San Marcos over the next 20ish years. It’s irresponsible to put all the housing in relentless swaths of single family housing. So what’s the alternative?

The way you take it seriously is that you create a world where it’s more convenient for people to live close to where they need to go.  If it’s sufficiently easy for you to walk to work, you might choose to do so 2-3x per week.  Smart people have worked hard to figure out charming, small-scale ways to create this.  In fact, it should feel like our historic district! It should feel like San Antonio street.

Finally: I personally adore old homes and the historic district. I am not going to advocate for any plan that puts a large scale apartment complex in a charming historic neighborhood.  But any plan that pretends “only wealthy people” is an essential ingredient to a charming neighborhood can fuck right off.

…

This meeting is too big and sprawling, and would be its own multi-part post for me to do it justice. I’ve struggled for two weeks now to write it up. So I’m going to massively shortchange it.

There is one key moment, at 3:30, that I want to zoom in on. William Agnew reads this sentence from the comp plan out loud:

Many of San Marcos’ original neighborhoods, especially those closest to Downtown, benefit from access to shops, restaurants, cultural amenities, employment opportunities, civic offerings, and recreation. The streets are well connected and for the most part, daily needs can be obtained on foot, by bike, or by car. New development can benefit from modeling and drawing inspiration from the treasured Historic character of these neighborhoods.

Then he says:

I live in one of San Marcos’s original neighborhoods. This paragraph’s just not true! I don’t have better access to all these amenities than most other neighborhoods in San Marcos! It just isn’t true. And on top of it, I don’t know how new development can somehow duplicate what it is that you all think I have that I don’t have.

The only place I can really walk from my house that would be considered goods and services is the Little HEB. It’s about 3 blocks from where I live. That’s great if I come back with one sack, but that’s only if I go to the grocery store each and every day. But you can’t walk back with your big shopping trip of the week and 8 or 10 sacks walking down Hutchison. It’s just not true! Other than that, there’s nothing I’m particularly close to anything. I love my neighborhood. It doesn’t bother me to drive to big HEB , Lowe’s, PetSmart, Target. So I don’t think this sentence is true. That’s why I’d like to get it out of there.

This is…delusional. Like, this is astonishingly delusional.

If you can walk 3 blocks to HEB, you are immediately nearby:

  • multiple churches,
  • laundromats,
  • bars and restaurants,
  • hair salons,
  • Shipley’s, Mink’s, Zelicks, North Street, Tantra (if it ever reopens)
  • You’re only another block from the literal town square.
  • The entire university is only a few more blocks away!
  • And right past that is the river itself!

Like, Bill Agnew literally thinks that he lives here:

when he is three blocks from this:

Staff continuously tries to explain that people who live in places like Cottonwood Creek complain that they have to drive long distances to get to stores or any other amenities. The “Complete streets” discussion is about places like Cottonwood creek.

But the P&Z subcommittee is on an entirely different planet. The existential threat to Belvin Street is the only conversation to be had. It sucks up all the oxygen in the room, and it will trample anything that the people in Cottonwood Creek might like to have.

…

What are the problems with VisionSMTX+? What was changed from VisionSMTX, without the plus sign?

1. ADUs. “Accessory Dwelling Units” are the little house-behind-a-house. You may have noticed that the Historical District is absolutely chock full of them. This is the gentlest way to increase density as people move to San Marcos.

The original draft, VisionSMTX, is pretty positive towards ADUs. The subcommittee version, VisionSMTX+, removes a lot of this encouragement.

2. “15 minute streets” This is a measure that professional urban planners use. It means this: without driving, what kinds of things can you reach from your home, by walking, biking, or using public transportation, within 15 minutes? It’s a way of quantifying how Bill Agnew can easily walk downtown, while people in Cottonwood Creek have to drive everywhere.

The subcommittee added “driving” into the definition. In other words, when the people in Cottonwood Creek have to drive 15 minutes to Target, it should get measured exactly the same as Bill Agnew being able to walk downtown. What breathtaking bullshit.

3. Comp plans vs Area Plans. So, the Comp Plan is what we’re discussing. It’s the biggest umbrella. Area plans are where neighborhoods get to say, “We are wealthy and we don’t actually like living next to poor people, so can we just not?”

The subcommittee wants Area Plans to take priority over the comp plan. The original comp plan calls for a balance.

4. Split “Neighborhood – Low” into “Neighborhood Low (existing)” and “Neighborhood Low (new)”. This would allow them to write different rules for Belvin than for new neighborhoods.

What about Cottonwood Creek, which would like to be more like Belvin? Fuck those guys! Existing neighborhoods aren’t allowed to change because the subcommittee has Historic District tunnel vision.

There are a ton of other concerns. I emailed back and forth with some of the public commenters – Rosalie Ray and Gabrielle Moore – and have their entire list of critiques. This is just too dense and meaty for me to do it justice.

…

One last point: Markeymoore was pretty amazing in the P&Z meeting, gently pushing back against problematic ideas, without ever being confrontational.

For example: Bill Agnew is taking issue with the sentence “Many areas in San Marcos today are single use.”

Markeymoore gently asks, “Why is that a negative sentence?”

Bill Agnew answers, “Because I think that the people who wrote that consider it negative. If you understand the plan and the new urbanism concepts behind it, that’s negative. To be single use is negative. That’s my objection to it. Yes, some of these neighborhoods are single use, but they’re good neighborhoods, and they don’t need to be presented as an example of something negative.”

In other words, Agnew does not have a problem with the sentence as written. The problem is the bogeyman in his mind that he is imputing to it. Markeymoore was able to ask from a place of curiosity, and he disarmed Agnew, who gave an honest answer.

To Agnew’s credit, he is very consistent and honest. It’s easy to pick on him because he says the quiet parts out loud.

…

So…what happens next?

They decided to have some workshops over the summer, to deal with some of these things. The comp plan is on pause until August.

Let me tell you, I do not have a great feeling about how this is going.

P&Z meeting, 3/27/23

by The San Marxist, posted in P&Z Meetings

Let’s start with some SMART Background

Here’s a quick timeline of events:

  • 2017:  original SMART Terminal (880 acres) is proposed Heavy Industrial.  P&Z denies it.
  • Brought back in 2018.  It sounds like Council leaned on P&Z, and they approved it. Council also approves it.
  • The developer (Katerra?)  backs out.
  • 880 acres zoned Heavy Industrial just sits there for three years.

Here’s my rendition of it:

Just sitting there for three years.

Listen: developers bail on projects, or sell them off.   The developer you talk to is not necessarily the one who ends up building on the land.  But once it’s rezoned, you’re stuck with the zoning.  Zoning lasts forever!

So: The current developer comes along in 2022.  This one wants to increase from 880 acres to 2000 acres:

The blue is the same blue from my map above. The green and yellow are new.

But where is that, really? The city maps are always so terrible! Here’s my best guess, from squinting at tiny country roads on different maps:

That’s how big this thing is.

Council met in December and formed a subcommittee. The subcommittee met.  Then Council approved the development agreement in January.

Why wasn’t anyone mad when the development agreement passed?

Some were! People showed up and spoke at citizen council back in January. But way more people are angry now. And several said that they hadn’t heard about the SMART Terminal until after it had been approved.

So let’s look this up. Who gets notified, according the city code, for a development agreement? Here’s the relevant bit:

So there you have it:  notifications weren’t sent out. All they had to do was post it on a website somewhere. No alerting the neighbors, and no physical sign out on the property.   That seems…. unhelpful.

ANYWAY.  The Development Agreement passes, and this brings us up-to-date.

The current developer has no plans to use the airport or railway. They plan on renting or selling lots off to companies, who will each do their own individual heavy industrial thing.

The new stuff starts here

The first 880 acres is already zoned Heavy Industrial. The developer is applying now to get the other 1200 acres zoned heavy industrial. As you can see from that same chart:

this DOES trigger a bunch of notifications. So now the community finds out that a gigantic, 2000 acre heavy industrial wasteland is imminent, on HW 80, heading east. 

At the February 14th P&Z meeting, a lot of community members showed up to citizen comment. They were angry and concerned. So P&Z postponed the vote for a month, to give the developer time to meet and build goodwill with the community.  

Tuesday, March 27th P&Z meeting

Which brings us to Tuesday, almost two weeks ago. About 20 community members showed up to speak at P&Z, another 7 wrote letters, and there there was an online petition with 600+ people. The in-person comments are really notable – that’s a huge turnout! They were furious and concerned. 

  • The cut-and-fill is going to hit their well water
  • the river is going to be polluted
  • this thing is going to basically eat Reedville and Maxwell and these other little towns.
  • We’re underestimating the flooding
  • Sure does seem like the city of San Marcos is shitting downstream! No one would want this upstream of them.

The developers had held community outreach, but as weakly and limply as possible. Basically the developers held drop-in meetings, and then answered every question as mushy, gray, non-answers. “We’ll abide by the development agreement.” “We don’t know yet.” “We’ll see what the city says.” That kind of thing.

First, I’d like to point out that P&Z grilled the developer more closely than council ever did (at least on camera). Here’s some nice comments by Jim Garber about the sheer size of this thing – how big is 2000 acres, really?

  • 9% of the total area of San Marcos
  • 75x larger than the outlet malls
  • 10x larger than 6 Flags Fiesta Texas
  • 107x bigger than Amazon
  • 4x larger than Disneyland
  • 4.5x larger than the Texas State Campus

Elsewhere he notes that it’s 3 miles long.  That’s really long. 

Next: this thing is a money pit. Fire Chief Les Stevens goes into detail on how much it will cost to supply fire coverage alone, when it’s fully built out: it’ll take two fire stations to cover this land.  The developer is setting aside two 3-acre tracts for future fire stations.

So how much will it cost to build and staff these fire stations? According to Chief Stevens:

  • $8-13 million to construct each station
  • Apparatus: $1 million for a fire engine, need 2 per station.
  • Staffing: $2.5 million annually for 12-15 people

So basically, San Marcos is on the hook for $25 million dollars worth of fire stations, and then an extra $5 million/year to staff these.   And that’s not including SMPD coverage and any utilities or anything else that we agree to. That’s laughable. The entire General Fund budget is about $90 million/year.

(We’re already massively behind in spending for Fire and EMS. Last year, Chief Stevens asked for 32 additional positions. We added 7 of them. And we have several future fire stations already in the queue to be built.)

The plan is to split the tax revenue with Martindale.  And this is not accounting for police coverage and any other services they’re getting from us. It feels like this SMART Terminal is a money pit.

So how is it that P&Z approved this Heavy Industrial?

The San Marcos River Foundation (SMRF) wrote a letter to the P&Z members about this. Now, letters to P&Z are generally included in the packet. You can find seven letters to P&Z on this topic here. (Go to “Written Comments”)  But the letter from Virginia Parker (the head of SMRF) is not there.

So I can’t read the letter, and I generally have a lot of respect for SMRF.  But how this letter got used was disastrous.

Several P&Z members said they were voting “yes” for Heavy Industrial, because of the SMRF letter. The argument goes that if we don’t approve Heavy Industrial, then the SMART Terminal will be built anyway. But it will be built under county codes instead of city codes, which are much more lax. So if you want to protect the river, you must avoid this scenario at all costs.

In other words, “Nice river you got there. Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

It’s true that SMRF got some river protections in the Development Agreement.  But it feels like a compromise level of river protection. Definitely better than nothing, yes.

But is that the choice before us? This development agreement, or the river will be polluted all to hell? If this is the threat on the table, I think the developer is bluffing, in order to threaten us into giving him whatever he wants. My guess is that the SMART Terminal would not develop under the county regulations, because insurance and utilities would be astronomical. I don’t think they’d be able to find tenants. I don’t think these are the only two options.

Jim Garber asks Chief Stevens about this: How much would fire insurance be for the developer, if they weren’t annexed into the city?

Here’s Chief Stevens’ answer:

  • Insurance rates are based on ratings. Most of San Marcos is rated a 2. (1 is the best).  The land out there is rated a 9 or 10.   (10 is the worst.)
  • Every time you go up one number, the insurance costs go up. If you go from a 2 to a 3, commercial rates will go up about 10%.

So their fire rates alone will go up by 1.18, which is a little over double. I haven’t looked into where they’re getting water, sewer, and electricity from, but I bet at least some of that is from us, too.

Dude. You’ve already got 880 acres

Garber makes one last key point:  Why not develop the 880 acres first, and then come back for the other 1200 acres?  Have you looked for tenants for the current parcel?

The developer gives one of those mushy answers: It needs to be one cohesive project with all the same zoning.

Garber says: “One cohesive property? I thought the whole point was that you’re going to have a bunch of little tenants and projects. Can’t some of them move in the existing 880 acres?”

Developer: “They could! We just haven’t marketed that property yet because we’re still in process of zoning everything together.”

That is smoke and mirrors.  That is a worthless non-answer. That is stone-walling.

So P&Z voted to approve Heavy Industrial.

I think this was a mistake. Those who voted “yes” seemed to just trust and believe that the developer was operating in good faith. That the developer would be open to reconsidering the development agreement. I have not seen any evidence that this developer is willing to do anything they aren’t being forced to do.

Bottom line

The developer needs to establish themselves as good neighbors. Find tenants for the original 880 acres, and then come back for rezoning the rest, once the community trusts them a little bit.

Right now we’re giving the developer an unbelievably massive blank check.   We need to verify that they are:

  • Actually good stewards of the environment
  • How the property handles the first few really big storms
  • What are their labor practices like
  • How environmentally disastrous are the clients that end up building there

I don’t understand the rush to give the developer the entire massive 2000 acres. They’re not planning on building one cohesive thing there – it’s going to be subdivided among a lot of companies.  So let’s let them prove themselves first. 

Footnote:

The city used to have PDDs, where the city could find out and negotiate all the details of a project before it’s built. But we threw those out in 2018 with the new Land Development Code. This was a mistake, and I assume we did it because developers hated them. This kind of project should be a PDD.

Bonus: 2/13/21 Mini-meeting and 2/21/21 Workshop

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

2/13/21 Mini-Meeting

Last Monday, the 13th, they met and appointed people to various commissions. The most visible of these is Planning & Zoning.

There were four positions to fill:

  • Matthew Mendoza’s vacant spot has two years left on it, since he moved to council
  • Zach Sambrano is cycling off, and it sounds like he didn’t re-apply. (As far as I can tell – they didn’t put a packet online.)
  • Griffin Spell is reapplying for another three year term
  • Amy Meeks is also reapplying for another three years

Both Griffin Spell and Amy Meeks were easily reappointed.  (In general, I’m highly reluctant to criticize individual P&Z members on this blog, since they are citizen volunteers who are still mostly-private, as opposed to council members who have stood for public election. So I’m not passing judgement on Griffin and Amy one way or the other. I appreciate their service!)

So there are two other spots to fill.  Total, P&Z has nine people.  Including Griffin and Amy, the seven filled spots are not very representative of San Marcos:

  • Six of the seven are white
  • Five of the seven are male
  • I’d guess five of the seven are probably over 50 years old.

The two remaining spots are filled by Michele Burleson and Mark Rockeymoore, which helps balance out the whiteness (although the Hispanic community is still underrepresented).   I’m not familiar with Michele, but they gave a long list of community activism and participation. Markeymoore is familiar to me, though! Hi Mark, congratulations on your appointment. You’re a great pick.

Alyssa Garza is concerned with the process, and how we keep perpetuating a mostly older/white/male pool of applicants for committees. She’s bringing something forward next month to look at possible reforms.

…

2/21/23 Workshop: Bike lanes on Craddock.  The trial period is over, so how do we like them? 

Fears of traffic snarls turned out to be overblown.  To his credit, Mark Gleason mentions his own opposition, and how his fears have not come to pass.

The biggest effect is traffic-calming: cars have slowed down.  You can’t swerve around someone who is going the speed limit when there’s only one lane. There still isn’t much bike traffic out there. Arguably, that’s because the lanes don’t connect to other lanes that would help you get places.  

Craddock is a weird road. It connects two major roads – RR12 and Old 12 – but not in a particularly useful way. Usually either Old 12 or Hopkins is going to be a more direct route, except for a few residential areas specifically along Craddock. It probably didn’t need to be made that big in the first place. (Which is to say: there’s probably not ever going to be a ton of bikers on it.  But that’s okay.) 

Bike lanes are also coming to Sessom Drive – painted, not with a physical barrier, and it will be one lane in each direction. I think the long term plan is for proper, separated bike lanes. But in the meantime, they are going to just paint on bike lanes, which help slow cars down, because the lanes are narrower. This is called “traffic-calming.”

It seems harrowing to bike down Sessom, period, unless there’s an actual physical barrier separating you from the cars. Drivers, please please please look out for bikers. We are all so fragile.

Hour Five

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 23:  Whether to remove the supermajority override of P&Z.

Currently, P&Z hears zoning cases and other cases and makes a decision. If the applicant is unhappy, they can appeal to city council. It takes a ¾ supermajority for council to reverse a p&z decision.  In practice, this means it has to be a 6-1 vote.  This issue on the table is whether council should be able to override P&Z with a simple majority.  If it only takes a normal majority vote to override P&Z, then P&Z is strictly advisory and has no real power. 

Shane Scott brought this issue to the table.  His position was that there is a lack of diversity in the P&Z candidates – socioeconomic, as well as their beliefs.   Given that Shane Scott doesn’t actually care about diversity, he just means that P&Z is too NIMBY for the developer community.

 Alyssa Garza seconded it.  She cares a lot about diversity, and feels that since the application process is deeply flawed and only brings in candidates who perpetuate the status quo, something needs to be done, and maybe this is it.

Here is my stance: Reducing the override from a supermajority to a majority is similar to the issue of states’ rights.  No one actually ever has a principled stand on states’ rights – it’s just a stand-in for whether you agree with the current federal government. Here, if you agree with P&Z more than council, you want to make it hard to overturn their votes. If you don’t, you don’t.

Now here is the thing: just 10 short years ago, P&Z was super developer-friendly.  They approved The Woods, The Retreat, and The Cottages in quick succession. The town got very pissed and threw the bums one, including Shane Scott and Jude Prather.  (I really, really loathe The Woods so much.)

Because of the process to get on P&Z, the lean of P&Z lags a few years behind the lean of Council.  The city threw out the developer-happy council, and then a few years later, P&Z became super NIMBY. Now P&Z is still very NIMBY, but council has reverted a bit.  My point is that it is not a foregone conclusion that P&Z is always heavily NIMBY.  However, it is always a privileged group of wealthier-than-average, whiter-than-average, and older-than-average residents.  Broadening the applicant pool is a good idea.

Briefly, the idea of single-member P&Z districts came up. This is also a good idea.

So where do I stand on changing the supermajority to a majority?  A supermajority requirement builds in a lag and sometimes pits a newer council against an older P&Z.  Sometimes elections tilt council a good direction and sometimes in a worse direction.  So there is a legitimate argument that the supermajority requirement keeps the whiplash in check and does actually provide a check-and-balance function.

But more importantly: beware of a legislative body that is clawing back power that it once gave away.  In general, they’re not going to give it away a second time.  

In the end, Council did not want to pursue this issue. Alyssa Garza is going to take the lead on measures to broaden the applicant pool, however.  Single-member districts, clear rubrics for evaluation of candidates, and a stipend are good ideas.