Tag: SMART Terminal

Hours 0:00 – 2:03, 5/7/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Yowza, you guys. Most of this meeting was Citizen Comments. There were two full hours of citizen comments on Tuesday. A total of 40 speakers. Plus an additional 3 speakers at the 3 pm meeting.

So we are going to park it at Citizen Comment and unpack all this.

Topic 1: Malachi Williams.

We’re going to start with the most heartbreaking part, which is that the family of Malachi Williams spoke to council.  I cannot do it justice – you should go listen yourself.  Here’s the video. 
– Malachi’s grandfather speaks first, at 1:25:40
– His older sister, at 1:29
– His mother at 1:31
– His younger sister at 1:36
– His aunt at 1:38:30
– His third sister at 1:58
– His grandfather also spoke at the 3 pm workshop, here at 11:30.

You should definitely believe that Malachi Williams came from an incredibly loving, supportive family who is devastated by this loss.  They are desperate for some answers.

So what do we know?

Malachi Williams was a 22 year old who was killed by cops on April 11th, 2024.  You can read the basic facts here.

Here’s a video of Chief Standridge explaining the SMPD side. There is a transcript at the YT video, if you don’t feel like watching

The family has three requests:

  • Release the name and badge of the officer
  • Take the officer off duty until the investigation is complete
  • Let the family and their lawyer watch the bodycam videos, as well as gas station and HEB footage.

These are really reasonable.  In the video, Chief Standridge has a big long thing about how legally, the videos are evidence, and so they can’t be released publicly until after the grand jury and/or trials play itself out.  But the family is not asking him to publicly release the videos – they’re asking for family and a lawyer to see them.

The family’s comments are beautiful and heartbreaking. They’re an extremely close family. They just need answers so that they can begin processing this enormous loss.  

The rest of us will not know what happened for a long time. (But look: a knife is not a gun.  He was armed with two large kitchen knives. I have questions about how exactly Malachi could be close enough to pose an immediate risk to someone else, and yet it was safe to fire a gun at him.)

About 20 of the other speakers talked about Malachi Williams and called on Council for justice.

Topic 2: Ceasefire in Gaza.

There were 32 speakers calling on Council to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.  (Most of these speakers were also the same ones who talked about about Malachi Williams, and they connected these two topics under the same umbrella of state violence against civilians.)

There’s been some drama, because this appeared on the rough draft of the council agenda:

But then it was not on the final agenda, because Shane Scott withdrew his support. (It takes two council members, or the mayor alone, to put something on the agenda.)

Lots of speakers say that Shane withdrew his support due to a threat of some sort? Maybe! Or maybe he just didn’t feel like being in the hot seat. Who knows.

Anyway, 32 speakers is a LOT of speakers. The resolution for a ceasefire has been coming up for months – here, here, here, here, and here – but not this many speakers. Obviously this connects with the mounting protests at Columbia, University of Texas, USC, and so on.

And look, the protests are actually paying off. Biden has paused two shipments of bombs to Israel over the invasion of Rafah. Biden is slowly hardening on Israel. (He’s going too slowly for me to stomach, but he’s miles away from how Abbot or Trump would handle it.  They would escalate the destruction of Palestine to armageddon levels. )

Look, we’ve got a governor who is actively supporting Israel in a number of ways.

This ceasefire resolution is a municipal issue because city councils can amplify the voices of their community. This resolution would send a message to Abbott (which he would ignore) and a smaller message to Biden (which he seems to be responding to). So c’mon, Council, get your act together.

Topic #3: Miscellaneous

Finally, there were a few other topics:

  • The need for more teen programming in San Marcos
  • A great comment about “bro-dozers”. I love this one. You know the guys that rev their engines through town and startle you into spilling your drink, if you weren’t expecting it?

The speaker has an apartment on Hopkins, and so he got himself a decibel reader. When the bros rev their engines, it’s 90-95 decibels in his apartment.

We actually have a noise ordinance against vehicles!

But see, it only covers music coming from the vehicle, and not the engine itself.  

But consider:

Presto! Look how easy to fix!

City staff! File this away for the next round of code updates, please and thank you.

  • Remember the SMART Terminal? Oh yes you do. (Brush up on it here, if you don’t.)

It was originally on the agenda for tonight as well:

But it got pushed back to a future meeting. (Franklin Mountain is the SMART/Axis company.)

Noah Brock and Annie Donovan were two of the main activist organizers last time. They’ve submitted a ton of open records requests. Here’s what they’re saying about this upcoming issue:

Franklin-Mountain is apparently getting mad at Caldwell County, because Caldwell County doesn’t let developers do whatever the hell they want. Caldwell County requires all these planning documents up front, such as:

  • Subdivision plan
  • Water Protection Plan
  • Phase Development Plan
  • Traffic Impact Analysis
  • and more!

before they’ll process Franklin-Mountain’s application.

Whereas we were all ready to let the developer pinky-swear to be good-hearted, and we’d sign over all rights to do anything they wanted. We didn’t require any of those!

So here, the developer is moving roads around, in ways that seem to violate their good-neighbor promises. This roadway doesn’t match anything they’ve claimed up till now. This annexation seems like it would not benefit San Marcos in any way, but it would off-load costs onto the city.

Stay tuned! This might be on the agenda at the May 21st meeting.

  • Virginia Parker speaks again about the drought triggers passed last time, and asks if there’s any way to revise it.
  • One speaker talks about Purpose Built Student Housing, and has a number of recommendations to address tenants’ rights. Things like increased funding for code enforcement, a right to resolve late payments before evictions, a right to a public defender, just cause evictions, and no-net-loss housing ordinances.

Texas is very pro-landlord, so it would take some research to figure out what’s legal to do here, but I generally support all action in this direction!

Hours 0:00-1:39, 6/6/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment: We’re going to focus on the SMART/Axis Terminal here.  (It’s not otherwise on the agenda today.) There’s a group, Citizens Against SMART/Axis, which is holding a public meeting at the library on Sunday (6/11) at 3 pm.  Here’s their flyer, off Facebook:

Ie, if you’re reading this on Sunday morning and you’re free this afternoon, why not head on over? They seem like nice people.

The big day will be July 3rd, when City Council votes on the Heavy Industrial zoning.  If it passes, then we’ve given a massive blank check to a jerk who will then decide which industries come to San Marcos.  Right now, there’s a lot of money in batteries and tech fabrication plants and things involving toxic rare metals and lots of water, and Texas has very lax environmental restrictions.  That’s the kind of scenario that I’m particularly worried about.  (I also think the sheer scale of it is bonkers.)

And if the zoning doesn’t pass? My guess is that there’s a contingency clause in the development agreement – if the zoning doesn’t pass, it invalidates the contract. Then the company could either develop under county regulations, or walk away for a year, or come up with a different proposal. 

Have you all seen the yard signs around town?

I think they’re pretty effective. Partly because they put council members on notice that the community is willing to launch a public campaign: vote down Heavy Industrial, or the next public campaign may be against you.

Bottom line: Council shat the bed. It’s really astonishing how they passed this development agreement under so much quiet and stealth.  It’s 2000 acres, for god’s sake!

…

Item 6: Community Development Block Grant money.  (CDBG) The city gets federal money to spend on nonprofits. This year, we’ve got about $700K to distribute.  

Here’s the criteria that staff uses to assess projects:

And here are staff recommendations:

Saul Gonzales asked about Habitat getting $0 for Housing Counseling.
The answer: Habitat is really good at lots of things, but counseling ain’t one of them. Plus they’ve still got leftover money from last year. In general, we’re still partnering with Habitat, but just not for counseling. 

As for the Housing Rehab program getting $0: somehow this is good for the city, for reasons I didn’t quite follow.  

Alyssa Garza mentions that she hears a lack of trust in the nonprofit community about how these funds get allocated, and that increased transparency would help. I don’t have the expertise to read between the lines! But transparency generally sounds good to me.

…

Item 7:  P&Z is going to gain some new powers: the powers of AIRPORTATION.  Specifically, some height hazard zone regulations and compatible land use zonings.  A lot of this is regulated by the FAA, but P&Z will get to weigh in on the remaining bits.

Whenever the airport comes up, everyone speaks cryptically about scandals that I’m uninformed on.  We saw a snippet of it here. Even LMC weighed in on some convoluted past event from ten years ago. Frankly, I’m pretty sure I’m not capable of fully understanding whatever the hell went down.

….

Item 8: The city has a lot of 2 hour parking downtown.  Now some of those sites will be relaxed, to 4 hour parking.  Here’s where it will go:

Take your time! Shop around! You’ve got four hours now.

Council members asked some worried, nonsensical questions, as though we were tightening up restrictions instead of loosening them.  Everything will be fine.

…

Item 9:  We’re pretty terrible at paying parking tickets:

So the city is going to start putting boots on cars, if you have 3 or more unpaid tickets.

(We discussed this before, but now we mean it.)

The point is to force the worst offenders to get in touch with the city and come up with a payment plan (or maybe schedule some volunteer hours instead – more on this later.) The plan is not to turn the screws on someone who is teetering on the edge of economic catastrophe. Of course, it always just depends if the program is implemented in good faith or not.

Stay tuned! There is a lot more discussion of parking coming up at the end of the meeting. 

….

Item 10: This is the Oak Heights neighborhood:

via

The top left and top right roads are Craddock and Old 12, where The Retreat is. This is the Crockett elementary neighborhood. The speed limit used to be 30 mph.

Now it will have a new, lower speed limit of 25 mph in on these streets:

Good for them! Drive like a grandma, everyone. Your car is lethal.

….

This is Uhland Road: 

It runs from Post Road to I35, and then jumps north, and runs east to Harris Hill road.

Here we’re only looking at the part west of 35.  These lucky folks are getting some speed cushions here:

Good job! Drive safe.

Jane Hughson wraps up by saying, “All right! We do listen to our residents! …um …when we’re talking about speed cushions. And changing however many miles per hour you can go in a neighborhood.”

That is hilariously self-aware of Jane Hughson.  And it’s true: sometimes we listen to our residents.  Other times, we don’t.

…

Item 13: $250K more to GSMP to fund a small business program.  Seems fine, as far as capitalism goes. The only reason I noticed it was because Matthew Mendoza made a special point of praising this accomplishment.

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. 

Hours 0:00-4:50

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Items 6/7: The dreaded SMART Terminal

If you’re new here: Giant industrial park going up for zoning, out towards Martindale. Everyone very mad. Read the whole sordid backstory here.

Here’s the basic sketch of what happened Tuesday night:

  • A ton of community members showed up in and drowned council in a mountain of information, concerns, data, suggestions, and so on.
  • Council got the message loud and clear.
  • Council is going to revisit the Development Agreement
  • Then they’ll revisit the zoning in July.

Just a passing thought: these community members with these careful, well-researched, passionate statements to council? perhaps would make really great progressive potential future candidates for public office!

I’m just putting this out in the universe. Granted, a lot of the speakers live outside city limits, but maybe they were just annexed on Tuesday.

The City Staff presentation:

There was a small bit of new information given on Tuesday from the city:

(Crappy quality because it was not in the packet, so I had to screenshot.)

This fiscal analysis is supposed to happen before every annexation. I can’t remember ever seeing one of these before, and there have been a lot of small annexations. What happened here is that the community members noticed and spoke up repeatedly about it. In response, city staff put this together.

However, Noah Brock (one of the community members) independently did his own revenue estimate, using Amazon Warehouse tax revenue rates as a model. His estimates:

  • Year 5: $1.4 million annually
  • Year 10: $4.3 million annually
  • Year 20: $8.1 million annually

The city’s estimates favor the developer, and Noah’s is less rosy. Draw your own conclusions.

(You know what I’d LOVE to see? The fiscal projections from the Amazon warehouse in 2016, or the Outlet Malls, or Embassy Suites, and how those have panned out. I’m sure they’re sitting in some prospectus, aging like milk. I found the Chapter 380 agreement for Amazon, but not the fiscal projections, which leads me to suspect it was never made public.*)

Seeing the writing on the wall, the developer made some small concessions in the days leading up to the meeting:

  • Double the buffer zone required by San Marcos code (around creeks I think?)
  • They will only pile shipping containers 80 feet high in certain areas (in the yellow circle below)
  • At the purple arrows, they’ll put a 100 foot buffer between the SMART Terminal and residential homes.

100 feet is tiny. A typical house sits on 1/5th of an acre. If that lot is square, it’s roughly 92’x92′. I’ve probably made you read 100 feet of my blathering already, and it’s only Sunday morning.

The idea that these two concessions would mollify the community is pretty arrogant. This developer keeps rubbing me the wrong way.

(Who is this developer anyway? Two of the community members filled us in: Franklin Mountain is an investment conglomeration owned by Paul Foster, an oil baron who is the current chair of ERCOT and part of lots of GOP committees, boards, etc.)

What do community members want?

At P&Z, the question was “If we turn this down, will the developer build in the county, with zero environmental protections?” San Marcos River Foundation director Virginia Parker thinks this is definite. However, this is a convenient threat that developers levy all the time, to spook communities into concessions. Maybe both can be true.

Either way, the SMART Terminal fight has morphed. Community members probably still wish it could be shut down altogether, but they recognize that that ship has sailed. On Tuesday, the conversation was no longer about whether it’ll happen, but instead about how to mitigate the damage. They’re fighting for the least-bad option now.

Seven of the community members (Noah Brock, Annie Donnovan, Ana Juarez, Ramona Brown, Ezra Reynolds, Bruce Jennings, and Rocco Moses) put together this list of recommended changes:

To the list above, I’d add:

13. Labor Protections

We keep being told that the point of the SMART Terminal is:

  1. to increase tax revenue without raising property taxes
  2. to bring good jobs to the community.

There needs to be some labor protections in the development agreement. Otherwise you will get shitty, exploitative jobs.

In 2016, we passed an amendment that any company receiving money from San Marcos should pay minimum $15/hour, plus benefits. This is a good start, but there’s one crucial detail missing: it must be pegged to inflation. You should never set a safety net without planning for inflation-adjustment.

(Honestly, this is one of the most underappreciated near-misses of federal policy of the 20th century: not pegging the minimum wage to inflation.)

Other labor protections: regular schedules with advance notice, no drug testing, and there’s a bunch more here. But mandating that the minimum wage keep up with inflation would be a good start!

Other recommendations: Ed Theriot is a local developer who is usually trying to build the things that make neighbors mad. But this time he’s the neighbor, and also one of the Caldwell County Commissioners, to boot. So his perspective is particularly useful.

However, I don’t have his recs yet. He’s writing up a list of recommended changes to the Development Agreement, and I’ll include it here when he sends it to me.

One more thing:

There was one more very interesting thing in Citizen Comment, which doesn’t fit neatly anywhere. Bruce Jennings offered the following history of the land next to Gary Job Corp:

Let me tell you a story about the land you are about to annex. The area in question has significant history of prior pollution. Some of you may be old enough to recall that the airport and the Gary Job Corp property was Camp Gary, a military installation from 1942 to 1956. Now, one of the duties of the base was aircraft maintenance; engines had to be maintained, parts cleaned, fluids changed, detergents, oils, and degreasers disposed of. But in the 40’s and 50’s few knew about the potential of pollution. Camp Gary personnel dumped these chemicals into a landfill and creek at the back of the property…for years.

Those fluids ran downstream to a earthen detention pond before entering the San Marcos river, where they settled as heavy metals on the bottom of that pond. Later, in the 1970’s and 80’s most people had forgotten and the land was developed for residential use. People started fishing for bait in the pond fed by 2 creeks and springs from the hillside. One day I was approached by an elderly gentleman who told those fishing to NEVER eat what they catch in that pond. I was alarmed to say the least, and began to look for information.

We had city, county, state, and federal representatives on site multiple times. It was suggested that the property be identified as a superfund clean up site. Jake Pickle came out one day and walked the property with us.

The price tag for cleanup in 1981 was 5 million dollars. Options were discussed and a decision was made…to leave the contaminants in the soil. The contaminants were left under a 12 foot cap of mud.  And instead, let’s improve the sewage treatment and close the landfill that followed, by the ownership of San Marcos, who owned the landfill out on the back end of Camp Gary.  Where 69% of it was on two lots, where Camp Gary became Gary Job Corp.  That cost about 1 million dollars. So if I remember correctly, you all had to build about 10 test wells out there, and run them for several years!  

Now, at the time, the southeast part of the  property, where the San Marcos Municipal Landfill was, encompassed an area of approximately 353 acres, of which two Gary Job Corps Center tracts comprise about 69 percent. Hazardous chemicals found included volatile organic compounds (VOCs), polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), cadmium (Cd), iron (Fe), Ph, and manganese (Mn). Now these chemicals are in the soil out there.

If you do allow the cut and fill, you need to be testing the soil every time you penetrate for a slab out there, because what I understand is that you will be releasing PCBs that have been trapped in the compressed soil, and it will be leaching in the soil and then therefore go into the shallow water system that transfers through those creeks. I know this for a fact because I live two miles from that old landfill, and the pond at the beginning of my street is horribly contaminated! And y’all didn’t want to clean it up. Y’all wanted to just have a cap on it, and y’all went and did improvements over at Camp Gary, did your test wells for several years, y’all came and did tests at my pond for two full years. That shallow water feeds the creeks and the rivers. Any destruction of the soil could release the chemicals that were stored in the soil as hazardous chemicals. There would be a detriment to all of the flow of the water that seeps into and nourishes the river.

(That’s an amalgamation of his spoken and written comments, which he was kind enough to email to me.)

Here is the punchline, an environmental assessment on the land, prepared for the Department of Labor:

The San Marcos Municipal Landfill was once listed as a Texas Superfund Site in Reedville, Texas with the EPA Site # TXD980625222 (USEPA 2021). The landfill is not listed on the National Priorities List (NPL). It is currently registered as an Archived Superfund site by the USEPA (Homefacts.com 2021).

(Link and quote also from Bruce’s email.)

Just think, our very own Archived Superfund Site!  With hard work and a fair wind, we could really double down on the legacy of environmental damage here.

Last thoughts:

The point of city planning is to share decision-making with the residents of the city. Developments affect residents, so residents ought to have some decision-making power over what gets built where.

We are giving away our power. Franklin Mountain isn’t an industry, it’s a middle man. They want the power to decide what gets built there.

The SMART Terminal is phenomenally big:

Decision-making power is worth a lot of money on something that big. Franklin Mountain would like to make a lot of money, and so they are working very hard to wrest it from us.

The decision-making power will go to this middle man company. (Specifically, a company owned by a rich oil baron named Paul Foster, as mentioned above.) Then they will hold the power, and they’ll get to decide what happens there, and we’ll be stuck with it.

…

*On the Amazon Chapter 380 agreement, the lack of concrete details is amazing. Here’s the hilariously useless Official Payment Plan:

Have you ever seen an amortization schedule without any, y’know, numbers? Or even percents? Just “yes” or “no”? Me neither.

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.

Hours 0:00-1:13, 3/21/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:  Mostly of the speakers are people angry about the SMART Terminal. 

A big fight is (hopefully) brewing.  However, the development agreement was already discussed (in a pretty pathetic discussion) in January, and then approved back in February.

This is the same problem that happened with the La Cinema studio over the aquifer last year: by the time the public hears about something and has time to organize and respond, the development agreement has already sailed through Council.

With the SMART Terminal, the developer does still need more approvals. The new land isn’t yet zoned Heavy Industrial. So there are still intervention points. But the foundation has been set, and it’s very frustrating how quickly the basic agreement gets sealed.  

In February, the SMART Terminal went to P&Z to be zoned Heavy Industrial. Because so many community members showed up and spoke at that meeting, P&Z delayed the vote a month, to give the developer time to meet with neighbors and gain their buy-in.

The speakers this week described how the meetings are going. It sounds like the developers are being giant pricks about meeting with neighbors, let alone gaining their buy-in.

When they finally met, the neighbors learned some interesting things. First, recall that SMART stands for San Marcos Air Rail Transit. It’s located right where the airport, railway – and unfortunately the river – all meet.

Anyway, here’s what the developers said to the neighbors:

  1. There’s no rail.  There’s not going to be any rail. The developers haven’t reached out to the railroad company and have no intention of incorporating the railroad into any of the five stages to be built.
  2. There’s no air traffic, either. And no plan for any future airport tie-in. 

So basically they’re planning a 2000 acre truck loading and unloading industrial site, right on the river?  It’s gone from SMART to SMT?  (Maybe the R was supposed to stand for River. The San Marcos All runs down to the River Terminal. Wheeeee.)

In response, the developers say, “Look, back in 2018, council told us this was the right place for heavy industrial.”

But let’s check that for a second:
– First off, in 2018, it was 900 acres, and now it’s 2000 acres. 
– Second, clearly in 2018, the whole point was that the airport is right next to the railroad. Otherwise, you’re just building a massive industrial complex on the river.

So as best I can tell, that is the plan: a massive industrial complex on the river.  This really seems to be a terrible idea.  Unfortunately, this council (minus Alyssa) really has heart eyes for corporations. 

…

Items 16 and 18: Starting on next year’s budget.

Council and department heads had a big two day workshop, where they envisioned the city for the next year in broad terms.  This statement is the result, and it’s supposed to be the starting point for the new budget.  

Here’s what they came up with: 

Each of those has 5 or 6 sub-points, and then each of those has another 2-3 sub-sub-points. So for example, under Quality of Life & Sense of Place, it says:

The whole thing is pretty long. If you’re curious, read it all here. That document is supposed to be the scaffolding for the actual budget, which gets built over the spring and summer.

As for last Tuesday, there was not much more additional discussion. Max Baker spoke during the public hearing portion, and made some points:
– Weren’t you all going to do an Equity-based budget through a DEI lens?
– Annexing distant neighborhoods blows a hole in your future budget. As soon as they’re built, you have to provide fire/EMS/PD, as well as utilities, and it costs more to staff new far-flung firehouses than you’re bringing in with taxes. Sprawl is expensive for the city.
– Budgets are moral documents.

These are all good points!

Alyssa asks her colleagues to consider a participatory budget process next year. Get the community involved. This would be great. Maybe CONA reps could solicit input from their neighborhoods, and then contribute ideas when Council puts together their strategic goals.

(Because I’m a pessimistic jerk, I can also imagine neighborhoods coming up with goals that I’d find awful, like “let’s keep poor people far, far away.” So there need to be checks and balances.)

Hours 0:00-50:31

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

Hours 3:22-4:16, 2/7/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 20: Sean Patrick’s

You know, the Irish bar downtown:

Back in December, they applied to P&Z for a renewal of their alcohol permit. 

At the same meeting, Industry was up for a renewal of their alcohol permit, too.

Industry, of course, is right next to the Dunbar neighborhood.  A lot of people are very cranky about the noise coming from Industry.  In response, P&Z said “No live music after 10 pm.”

Then Sean Patrick’s came up. There haven’t been any noise violations against Sean Patrick’s. But P&Z made an issue out of it, kinda out of nowhere. They changed Sean Patrick’s hours of live music from midnight to 10 pm.

This seemed way off-base to me. Sean Patrick’s is not near houses the way Industry is near houses:

P&Z wanted to be consistent, which is understandable.   But the whole point of P&Z is to look at individual circumstances and make a judgement call. You do want consistency when it comes to values and ideology! Just not necessarily when it comes to outcomes. 

So Sean Patrick’s appealed P&Z’s decision, and Council agreed.  The bar gets its live outdoor music back, after all. At least until midnight.

…

Item 6: The SMART Terminal got revisited for about two seconds.

Alyssa brought the item up for discussion. She is a “no” on the SMART Terminal. But they’ve gotten a lot of complaints and questions over email. So she asks if the other council members – the ones who want the SMART Terminal – could respond to these citizen questions and complaints.

Translation: We all know this is going to pass, and we all know people are furious. Why don’t you all go on record addressing the environmental concerns and all the rest of it?

Jane Hughson said, “Why don’t we update a FAQ about the project? We can make it available to the public online!”

Translation: Or how about we don’t? Staff can script some soothing language about “dialogue” and “different stake-holders” and this will all go away.

And lo, that’s how it’ll go.

…

Item 24: Council appointments to all the various committees

This got postponed. Womp-womp.

It really is understandable. It was getting late, and Council has been there since 3 pm. It takes like an hour to go through all the committees. It’s also kind of a bummer, since many of the nominees have been watching for four hours, waiting for this.

Alyssa speaks up: she crunched the numbers on the applicants, and they’re overwhelmingly old and white. She brought this up last year as well. When are we going to take this seriously?

Jane defends city staff and how they worked hard to publicize the committee process.

That’s not really relevant – staff does work really hard! No one is criticizing staff! But what we’re doing isn’t working.

Jane says that she does think it would be better to push the process out a month and give more people time to apply.

That can’t hurt, but it also won’t solve the problem.

Alyssa says that only part of the problem is the publicity – the process also has to be demystified. It’s intimidating to sign up for a board or commission, especially if you consider yourself to be an outsider to the process.

Jane says it’s much better than it was five years ago. Also true, but not sufficient.

My opinion: it won’t change until we overhaul community outreach. We have to have relationships with the key individuals who work at churches, barber shops, and bars and restaurants that function as community spaces. And I specifically mean venues that cater to underrepresented groups in town: Hispanic communities east of I-35.

There is just no shortcut to building relationships. It’s time-consuming. It goes faster if your staff is also a part of the underrepresented communities, but that’s kind of a chicken-and-egg problem.

…

Items 25-26: Top Secret Executive Session

Obviously I don’t know what happens in the room where it happens, but the topics are very interesting:


1. Albian Leyva vs Ryan Harman and Jacinto Melendrez. This is the excessive force/tasing incident. This incident is pretty extreme. At the January 17th work session, one of the Mano Amiga representatives read outloud from the internal police investigation. (You can go listen here, starting at about 8 minutes in.)

It’s pretty awful. Melendrez is the second officer who also tazes Leyva.

This is from the Mano Amiga FB page:

2. Eric Cervini, et al. vs. Chase Stapp, Brandon Winkenwerder, Matthew Danzer, and City of San Marcos

I’m guessing this is the Biden Bus incident? It’s been two years. I am very interested in there being some consequences for this.

3. Repealing Meet and Confer. Obviously we know how this turned out. (This part of Executive Session was held early on.)

Plus some miscellaneous conservation of land items, and personnel things.

Hours 0:00 – 1:18, 1/17/23

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen comment: The big topic for citizen comment is the SMART terminal. Residents of the area are worried about:

  • Flooding
  • River pollution
  • Litter
  • Traffic
  • Noise and smells

Representatives from the San Marcos River Foundations also spoke, but they got super specific about policy proposals, so I’m going to save that for actual item.

Max Baker was the last speaker, and he railed against the community survey results and lack of trust in city staff. He also spoke out against the Riverbend Ranch, saying that HK real estate people operate and negotiate in bad faith. Finally, he says, “I’ll have more to say about the SMART Terminal, but I’ll save that for the public hearing.”

That last sentence is supposed to be me foreshadowing for you. Hey everybody, <waves hands>, for no particular reason, note that Max has said that he is planning to speak during the public hearing for the SMART Terminal.

…

First up is the SMART Terminal!

Items 20-21:  A few meetings ago, we got introduced to the Cotton Center and the SMART Terminal:

Yellow is the Cotton Center, the gigantic master planned community that was approved in 2016. Aqua blue is the SMART Terminal. The SMART Terminal is supposed to bring together the magic of a tiny airport, all our trains, and Highway 80.

How big are these things? The SMART Terminal blue bit up there is 900 acres. The Cotton center yellow bit is 2500 acres. The issue is that the SMART Terminal wants to take 600 acres from the Cotton center, and then also three more packets of extra land.

So here is the proposed future of the SMART Terminal:

The aqua blue is the old SMART Terminal. Yellow is getting taken from the Cotton center. Green is brand new.

San Marcos River Foundation is concerned because there are two creeks running through the property to the river. You can sort of see the creeks above, and in the map with my janky drawing, you can see the San Marcos river at the bottom.

First is a staff presentation. We learn that “SMART” stands for:
San
Marcos
Air
Rail, &
Transportation

So that’s a good start!

One detail is this little green box with the yellow highlighting:

That little yellow box lives in Martindale’s ETJ, instead of San Marcos’s ETJ. So we’re not allowed to make a development agreement for that little bit. (I’m guessing maybe that’s part of the mysterious Martindale fuss alluded to here.)

The total acreage of this new, SMARTER Terminal is 2,017 acres. That is huge. Google tells me that 2,017 acres is 3.15 square miles. Google also tells me that Martindale is 2.09 square miles. So the SMART terminal is going to be 150% larger than Martindale.  (More like SMARTindale, right?? …I’ll show myself out now.) 

Environmental standards

The developers want Heavy Industrial and Heavy Commercial. Here are the creeks that run to the river:

The blue striped parts are floodplain. The green is the creeks themselves. That’s a pretty direct channel to the river.

Here’s what the developer worked out with the planning department:

  • 70% impervious cover, overall.  This is stricter than the regular city code, which would allow up to 80% impervious cover.

  • Impervious cover can be patchy – up to 90% in some places, less in others, as long as it averages out to 70%

  • Total Suspended Solids (TSS):  Here’s my shaky understanding of TSS: when it rains, rainwater is nasty because it carries all the surface pollution with it.  So you retain rainwater in retention ponds to prevent flooding, but then you want to clean it before you release it.  So you either want to let it settle, or filter it, or whatever. TSS is how much you have to clean it.

    They’ve agreed to 70% TSS.  I don’t know what our code requires. (The developer claims their sand filtration basin system actually captures up to 89% TSS, but they’re only obligated to maintain 70% that by the contract.)

  • Water retention: what kind of flood do we want it to be able to handle? They’ve agreed to 1.25” rainfall. My memory is that this should be given as a rate: 1.25″ per hour, or 1.25″ per eight hours, or 1.25″ per day, or whatever. Not just a 1.25″ without any time frame. But in this agreement, there’s no time window given.

    My uneducated read is that 1.25″ without a specified time window will get overwhelmed any time we have a mildly disasterous rain, let alone one of the massively disastrous rains that we’re known for.

  • Run-off: they have to reduce run-off by 10%. This is stricter than the code – code says you can’t make run-off worse than it was before the development, but you don’t have to improve it. So that is good.

San Marcos River Foundation weighs in

Earlier, during Citizen Comment, SMRF made their case.  They’ve had good conversations with SMART. They want:

  1. Half of the floodplain acreage should be removed when calculating total gross impervious cover.  

    In other words, say you’ve got 100 acres, and 20 acres is super sensitive land where you can’t build on it. Suppose you’ve agreed not to pave over more than 70% of it.  Should it be 70% of the 100 acres, or 70% of the 80 buildable acres?

    SMRF is proposing to split the difference – allow them to compute the 70% based on 90 acres, in this analogy.
  1. The setback to the floodplain should be wider than 30 feet. SMRF observes that 30 feet is really pretty slim.
  2. Any acreage using 90% localized impervious cover be placed farthest away from the river.  In other words, the most-paved parts should be furthest from the river.

Council Discussion

Council begins asking questions, and then this very weird thing happens: Jude Prather speaks up and says: “I think we have one more public speaker…”

There is some fumbling around. Over zoom, you hear Max Baker say, “Is it my turn to speak now?” (Remember the foreshadowing, when he said he would be speaking during the SMART Terminal? This is that.)

Jane Hughson says no, Max can’t speak, because he didn’t sign up to speak the day before. She adds, “If you’re in person, you can just get in line to speak. But over zoom, you have to sign up the day before.”

What she means is that back in March of 2020, council had to set up zoom rules.  How will citizens get the zoom number? How will they get moved from the waiting room to the main room? Etc. So they said that you have to sign up to talk the day before, to help with logistics.

Now: Max clearly did sign up the day before, because he spoke during Citizen Comment, and so someone gave him the zoom link. Jane is arguing that Max should have signed up for each item that he wanted to speak on, even though it’s the same zoom link. And even though that was really not the intent of the original rule.

Alyssa points out that we’ve revisited Covid-era rules many times, and this one just hasn’t come up, but Jane is firm. “He’s allowed to speak, he just had to sign up yesterday.”

Here’s the thing: generally Jane extends a lot of courtesy and grace to ordinary private citizens who take the time to show up and speak. It seemed like this was a maliciously strict standard that only applied to Max Baker. It felt kinda vicious.

…

Back to the SMART Terminal: So what did our council do?

The whole thing was very, very cordial. Everyone emphasized continuing dialogue with SMRF and other stake-holders.  That makes me nervous, because the only thing that is legally binding is the Development Agreement being voted on.  Dialogue is very nice, but it doesn’t compel any action. Acting like you believe the developers are our friends is not reassuring when you’re negotiating a contract on behalf of San Marcos residents.

First, Jane Hughson asks about the added truck traffic.  The answer seems very thorough: you make some assumptions and do a traffic study before anything else.  If they exceed the assumptions, then they have to do more mitigation.  Widening roads, adding traffic lights, etc. They’ll keep updating and mitigating.  (Fine.)

Matt Mendoza asks about retention ponds.  They’re required to have them, so the developer just sort of explains what they are.  They talk about the 10% reduction in run-off, which is admittedly an unusual standard for San Marcos.  They commit to having more dialogue with stake holders.

Here’s the thing: environmental standards are very wonky and nerdy and specific. Every time Council asks an environmental-ish question, the staff answers in a very narrow, reassuring way. “Oh yes! We already did part of that!” and then the councilmember lets it go.

Example 1:  Jane Hughson asks about the list from SMRF. She seems to have this SMRF list in front of her:

She just references the list and says it includes a lot of things, like lift stations.

The engineer, Richard Reynosa, only answers about the lift stations, and nothing else. He says the lift stations haven’t been placed yet, but if they were in the flood plains, you’d have to meet stricter standards.

No discussion of the other nine bullet points.

Example 2: Jude Prather also vaguely tries to get at the environmental standards. He says, “Dialogue is really great and all, but should these environmental things from SMRF be put into the contract? Like the Dark Skies thing?”

In other words, he’s waiving his hand at the long list of technical standards, and the only one that’s coming to mind is the Dark Skies one. (Which was mentioned briefly during the SMRF comments, but is clearly not their primary concern.)

The planning department person, Amanda Hernandez tells him that he can definitely add any provisions that he wants! And says that the Dark Skies one is basically already in the code.

Jude asks, “What about the other environmental features?”

Amanda Hernandez answers that they worked with the developer, and in fact, many of these standards are from the 2019 agreement with the original SMART terminal.  (This is at 1:11, if you’d like to go watch this bafflingly useless non-answer.)

And Jude drops the issue. He doesn’t raise any specific line item from SMRF.

Example 3: Mark Gleason’s turn to act environmental-ish is next: on the 1.25” capture, he exclaims, “That’s above and beyond code, isn’t it!” (In other words, he’s just praising the developers.) 

Mark does specifically ask about one of SMRF’s concerns: “On the setbacks being 30′: is it longer in the recharge zone?”

Richard Reynosa, the engineer, answers, “There’s not a specific setback in the recharge zone.  You have a water quality zone requirement there, based on the size of the tributary.”

Mark says, “Thanks, that’s what I wanted to clarify!”

That’s what I mean: Everyone talked near the SMRF amendments and sounded like they liked them, but no one was willing to actually make a motion and require them. 

What the fuck? Every person up there claims to be in favor of the river. SMRF hands you a list of recommended asks from the developer. SMRF highlights the three most important ones, during citizen comment. No one proposes a single one as an amendment, or even discusses them in a meaningful way.

The vote: 
Yes: Jane Hughson, Mark Gleason, Jude Prather, Saul Gonzalez, Matt Mendoza
No: Alyssa Garza

(Shane Scott was absent)

So the SMART Terminal is coming.  City Council asked some softball questions and approved it.  It was kind of gross.

Now, Alyssa Garza also didn’t offer up the SMRF recommendations, but she voted against the entire project. You could argue that maybe she should have tried to get the amendments passed anyway, but in the end, she is one councilmember and the other five councilmembers wanted the SMART Terminal, and any of them could have pressed for the SMRF recommendations.

Does your friendly local Marxist blogger like the SMART Terminal?

I’m wary of it.  I can see why business people might see an opportunity what with the railroad and the airport being right next to each other.  (Full disclosure: I guess don’t see it. Why would you ever need your cargo to go from train to plane, or plane to train? I’m sure I’m just lacking enough business sense to understand.)  

Anyway, surely it makes logistical sense to business folks.  But here came SMRF with three specific amendments, and they were all roundly ignored. That’s enough to undermine my trust in anyone advocating for it.

Item 20: By the way, what happens to the Cotton Center planned community? Here’s the old 2,500 acre version from 2016:

Here’s the new 1900 acre version:

Wow, kind of a fragmented mess!

Okay, it’s making me laugh, the longer I look at it. What a soothing place to raise your kids. Ignore that gaping industrial black hole, please and thank you.