Tag: tenants

Hours 0:00 – 1:17, 10/21/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment: 

Just six speakers altogether. Main points made:

  • Four in favor of the Tenants’ Right to Organize ordinance.
  • But not the landlords from the Austin Apartments Associations. They want us to carve out protections for property managers.
  • Other speakers, in response: Please do not protect property managers. That would create a loophole. [Note: we didn’t.]
  • We need managed growth.
  • Update on the EMS thing?
  • You all need to stand for the pledge.
  • Excited for new City Hall proposal
  • How about making the new City Hall environmentally sustainable? Like a One Water approach?

Pretty breezy and quick.

…

Item 2: Tenant’s Right to Organize

We’ve seen this here, here, and here. This is the final stretch!

Lorenzo: Can tenant organizers go uninvited into apartment complexes?
Answer: No, organizers are required to play by vampire rules. They must be invited in. 

Lorenzo: Can we fix that?

Amanda:  I don’t think we should fix that.  

Amanda’s argument goes like so:

  • I wish this ordinance had more teeth
  • But Texas is a heavily pre-emptive state. (Meaning Texas micromanages its cities.)
  • Therefore I strongly recommend that we stick with the language that has held up so far in court.

City Lawyer: It would be weird to meddle in this way.  Some apartment complexes let in Domino’s pizza to put out fliers, and others have gates.  Organizers are held to the same rules as Domino’s pizza, and it would be weird to carve out extra privileges for them.

City Staff:  Plus, tenant organizers are not helpless. They can mail postcards to residents and see if one of the residents invites them in.

So we end up not changing anything.

The vote on Tenant’s Right to Organize:

It’s official!

Really great work by all the community activists! And I’ll single out Max Baker for kudos – he was really  the most visible driving force here.

Educational fliers for sharing: in English and in Spanish. (Via Amanda Rodriguez on FB.)

…

Item 10: Sights & Sounds

Last year we didn’t see nor hear the Sights & Sounds of San Marcos.  

But this year it’s back, baby!

And we’re spending $100,000 on it.

  • Half of that comes from Hotel Occupancy Taxes, which are supposed to be spent on tourism.  So S&S is a good fit.
  • The other half is for the lights, which are kept up all month long.

Sounds great.

Pro-tip: if you’ve got a kid who wants to win a hot chocolate, they might want to find out what year S&S was founded, how many light bulbs there are, and what most popular food is. It’s all very cute.

…

Item 17: ARWA

ARWA stands for Alliance Regional Water Authority. These are the folks trying to arrange water sources for us, for the next 50 years. It includes San Marcos, Kyle, Buda, and also Canyon Region Water Authority.

This started back in 2007, and it was a longterm plan to get water from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer. It came online this summer! So this is great. Almost 20 years of longterm planning!

Currently we are dealing with this:

That’s all I know!

(I do worry that “stress on the ARWA participating water supplies” refers to things like Kyle Bass trying to pump 16 billion gallons of water out of Carrizo-Wilcox.)

…

Item 18: New City Hall

Look, this is a super short meeting. This is the last item. So I had a little fun with it. Be prepared for an enormous number of photos.

Whaddya gonna do, go read some other local marxist city council blog?

Background:

Here’s the current City Hall location:

and here’s what it looks like:

via

It was built in the early 1970s, when San Marcos had 18K people. So cute! Little baby San Marcos. Now we have about 70K people.

Apparently in the past year, they’ve had to evacuate multiple times due to gas and water problems. And whenever something big comes up at Council, community members don’t fit in the chambers. People spill out into the lobby and listen from there.

So the old building has run its course. We’re looking to build a new one.

…

How is the Texas State Lege going to meddle?

The state won’t let cities borrow money to build city halls without voter approval. This makes everything complicated.

My pet conspiracy theory: this was done to deliberately manipulate cities into the loving arms of local private developers. This is called a Public-Private-Partnership, or P3.

So here we are, being driven.

…

The options:

Last April, Council was given the choice of Option A or Option B.

Option A:

In other words, keep it in the current location. They’d tear down the existing site and rebuild. Council would have to relocate during construction.

Option B:

ie move across the street, onto park land.

Option B was super unpopular! A lot of community members showed up to argue against it, because of this:

Both of these are heavily used and very popular!

City Council decided that they could keep the skate park where it is. They would just squeeze City Hall in immediately right up against the skate park, looming like a big shadowy Gotham City Headquarters over your rebel anarchist skater good time. (But the dog park would be relocated.)

In the end, Council went with Option B.

My $0.02: This is a terrible option and they got it wrong! Don’t use up your park land!

…

Now, what if there was a Plan C?

Intriguing! Over the summer, an unsolicited option came in.

Here’s the new proposal:

I love this location! There’s nothing particularly sentimental or historical there.

Let’s check it out!

This is the Hopkins view.

Building 1 is this:

No strong feelings from me.

Building 2 is this:

This is a cute old building! It’s been empty forever. It used to be an Ace Hardware store.

Before that, apparently it was originally Moore’s Grocery Company Building and then King Feed Co:

It’s cute! But it’s been empty for a long time.

Number 3 is an empty lot. It used to be a Mr. Gatti’s Pizza:

and then it briefly became this:

ie a fever dream of a diner, painted all black with neon flowers. Did we collectively hallucinate this?!

Anyway. Then it was food trucks:

and since then it’s just been parking:

Number 4 used to be where we had Tuesday Farmer’s Markets.

Back then it looked like this:

whereas now it looks like this:

Progress!

…

Back to why this location is great! It would be a really healthy for downtown businesses if our city employees all worked nearby.

Until around 2011, the county employees used to work here:

I liked to call it the Supermarket of Justice:

That is now where Industry etc are:

In 2011, Hays County built the new County Government building, out on Stagecoach.

All the county employees emptied out of the downtown business area. This was hard on the local downtown restaurants and stores – they no longer had a steady stream of pedestrian foot traffic during weekdays.

So moving City Hall downtown would replenish some of that.

This is all great!

….

What else?

The developers are local. They’re all graduates of either SMHS or Texas State, or both. That’s nice!

In 2020, they pitched an earlier idea to the city – a combination City Hall-hotel-workforce-housing. Jane Hughson says, “They wanted the hotel to face Hopkins and City Hall to go in the back, which was a nonstarter.”

What other projects do they have? Well, they have ideas. They have plans with Hays ISD to build some sort of workforce housing thing, and Lockhart ISD is looking at it, too. But there aren’t any lots or conceptual plans or signs of progress on their website.

As far as I can tell, they’ve never actually completed a project?

I think this is location is a great idea, though!

…

Two more bits that I want to note:

  1. We are paying them $767,970.00 for this conceptual plan. That is a hell of a lot of money for our broke government.

    Now, we’ve saved up about $12 million towards a new city hall, so that’s the source. It’s not displacing funding for something else. But it’s a lot.

2. They’re actually drawing up plans for this whole area:

Edited to add a corrected update: The map below is not the full scope of these developers. I got it wrong above! Sorry about that.

This map below is just showing the full scope of Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C, all together. The Plan C developers are strictly drawing up plans for the downtown piece. – TSM

WHAT IS GOING ON. Why is the Lion’s Club, and the stage area, the Veteran’s Memorial, the Activity Center, the library, the skate park, and the dog park all included??!

Why would these (probably very nice) bozos have any say in what happens to ANY of those public facilities? They do not have any experience in that. What the hell.

…

What does Council say?

First off, they’re only asking questions about this part:

and not the extended map above, that went through the parks and old City Hall.

Q: What about impervious cover?
A: It’s already all impervious cover. It can only get better.

Matthew: The old hardware store is historic, and I’m worried about the elevation drop.
A: Architects can handle the elevation drop.

Q: What would happen to the alleys?
A: We don’t know yet. Maybe some kind of open air space.

Alyssa: I’m having deja vu of their old proposal.
A: The 2020 proposal was much smaller.
Jane: Plus they had the hotel out front and the city hall in back. No.

Saul: I like it! But I need to see how much it costs.

Jane: Love a hometown developer!

The vote: Should we spend $768K on this conceptual plan?

I probably would have voted yes, because the location is great. I’m just wary because these guys seem inexperienced.

…

Final notes:

Somehow, this City Hall project is going to go off the rails. Really. Not because of this Plan C option, but because the math on this next slide does not make any sense.

This is from back in April:

Let me see if I’m following: we’ve saved up $12.7 million. We think we can get $15-20 million more from private developers. That adds up to ~$30 million.

But the whole project is supposed to cost $62-98 million! Where is this magical extra money going to come from?

These are the only options I see:

  • Voters will have to vote to approve a bond to borrow the rest.
  • This project ends up being about half as big as they’re hoping.
  • This project takes 25 years to complete
  • We end up selling our souls to find an extra $50 million from private businesses

In some way or another, reality is going to reassert itself.

Hours 0:00 – 1:15, 10/8/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

There were eight speakers, on diverse topics:

  • The first amendment is being trampled in the US right now.  (True!)
  • We need to be mindful of our budget and run San Marcos like a business.
  • Austin Apartments Association represents a bunch of landlords as members. They’re mixed on Tenant’s Right to Organize.
  • San Marcos Civics Club is holding their candidate forum on Thursday, and they also have their questionnaire available: Place 1 and Place 2.
  • Council candidate Chris Polanco echoes the first amendment crisis, and also talks about having a disability in San Marcos
  • Global issues – Ceasefire in Gaza and fascist tendencies of the state government.
  • The DR Horton homes in Cottonwood Creek were built so shoddily that foundations are cracking in the first three years. People up and down their street are finding themselves trapped financially because these homes are built so poorly. Can the city prevent DR Horton from building new homes until they stabilize the existing ones? Or something else?

That last one feels like lawsuit territory. This sounds awful. (Maybe this is a good candidate for participatory budgeting – see below.)

…

Item 9: Tenant’s Right to Organize

This is nearing the finish line! What should you do if you’re a tenant, and there’s mold in your bedroom, or your AC goes out, or you have no hot water, and your landlord refuses to fix it?

In Texas, you have very few options besides suing. You can talk to your landlord, of course. If they start to see you as a problem, you might be evicted. Filing a lawsuit is expensive, of course, and if you try to sue, you might be evicted anyways.

This is the point of this ordinance: tenants should be able to talk to each other about their landlord problems, and form tenant organizations, and bring issues to their landlords as a united front, without worrying that they’ll get evicted or face retaliation. (Discussed previously here and here.) 

Under the ordinance, here’s what’s protected:

(These are old slides from last month.)

Here’s what landlords are NOT allowed to do:

But they’re still allowed to do some things! Like so:

This is great! No tenant should fear eviction when they’re fighting for clean and safe housing.

…

Council Discussion

There’s one small discussion point: property managers.

Suppose property managers are the ones doing the intimidating, and the landlord lives 1000 miles away. Should the property manager be held liable? Or does it go to the landlord, since they are responsible for their employees?

Lorenzo proposes an amendment to exempt property managers. Unfortunately, this ship has sailed – employees are already held liable in similar situations. Even if we adopt Lorenzo’s amendment, it doesn’t really protect them. (The amendment fails.)

…

The vote on the Tenant’s Right to Organize ordinance: 

Hooray! (Lots of hard work on this from the San Marcos Civics Club and TAG, so thank you to both of them.)

This is just the first vote. It will come through for a final vote at the next meeting. 

…

Item 13: Participatory Budgeting

Participatory Budgeting is a specific thing. It doesn’t just loosely mean “survey the people or invite them to watch the budget process”.

It works like so: a city sets aside a pot of money, and asks for ideas from the public. The community develops proposals, and then the public votes on which project to fund.

Here’s the graphic from the website:

One of their taglines is “It gives people real power over real money.”  

Alyssa (and Max Baker, back when he was on council) have brought this up for years. It gained a little more traction at the visioning workshop back in January, and then was included in the budget that we tried to pass in September.

But then – I’m still cranky about it – Council sabotaged the budget at the last meeting.  One of the items that got axed in the carnage was $250K for participatory budgeting.

Apparently Lorenzo felt a pang of regret for driving us off the cliff? Maybe Alyssa was extra-furious about this part?  (I shouldn’t speculate, because I have no clue.) All I know is that Lorenzo went to the city manager and asked if there was any way to fix this. Can she find some money to restore funding for participatory budgeting?

And lo: she found some!  It’s displaced City Hall money.

In theory, we’re trying to sock away $1 million each year for that project.  But this year, we’re using the most of that $1 million to put an offer in on the land next to Centro. 

We’re expecting to have a little bit left over, and that’s going to be the Participatory Budgeting Pot of Money. Hooray! 

Gentle readers: this is your call. Start brainstorming ideas!

  • Is there something in your neighborhood that could be transformed?
  • Do the kids in your neighborhood need a place to play?
  • Or a community gardens?
  • What about opening up the Activity Center on Sundays, or having longer front lobby hours for the library?
  • Or hey: a coordinated lawsuit or mobilization against DR Horton?

Go think up great things! Your mom tells me you’re very clever.

….

Note #1: This was just a preliminary discussion.  Participatory Budgeting will come back around as a formal proposal.

Note #2: Since we mentioned the new city hall, let me say again that I hate this plan. They want to relocate City Hall across the street, and into our parks.

Don’t use up your park land! They’re not making more land.

…

There were a few tiny other items – scheduling the election, filling some commission vacancies, appointing a municipal judge. And that’s all! It was an extremely short meeting.

However! Keep reading, to hear about the river. The action was all in the 3 pm workshop.

Bonus! 3 pm workshops, 9/16/25

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshop 1: Tenants Right to Organize

This came up before here. Now we’re workshopping it.

The basic idea is that tenants should be able to meet up and talk about their landlord, or their living conditions, without fear of getting evicted.

This is the type of behavior that is protected:

Great!

And here’s the type of thing a Landlord is not allowed to do:

Sounds reasonable.

On the other hand, landlords also have some rights:

Seems reasonable.

Finally, you still have to abide by your lease.

….

My main question is about Rent-By-the Bedroom. We had a fantastic presentation on these, last year.

RBB complexes skirt rules by avoiding certain legal terms. Tenants don’t sign a “lease”, they sign an “installment contract”. So a lot of laws about tenants and landlords don’t apply to them.

Since that’s their game – swap out magic words to avoid legal status – we need to make very sure that our language is broad enough to include them.

I’m looking at the definitions section from the proposal:

“Dwelling” and “landlord” don’t seem broad enough to include “Installment Contracts”.

(Also: the definition of “Lease” uses the word “Landlord”, and the definition of “Landlord” uses the word “Lease” so things are getting circular here.)

Other than that, this is a great step forward!

…..

Workshop #2: SMPD Vehicle rental policy:

This has also been in the works – literally for years. Here’s where they’re landing:

Great!

….

Workshop #3: Update to the Airport Master Plan:

We have an Airport Master Plan that was approved in 2021.

(Honestly, I’m kind of guessing what they said, based on the slides. I was distracted. Sorry about that!)

This runway is going to get a glow up:

And it sounds like there will some day be a passenger terminal out front:

This will come around for approval during a regular council meeting.

Hours 3:27-4:14, 8/5/25

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 32: Tenants rights to organize

The Question: Should San Marcos pass an ordinance that would protect tenants’ right to organize?
The Answer: yes! Done. Moving on!

Okay, now let’s get into it.

Backstory: What should you do if you’re a tenant, and there’s mold in your bedroom, or your AC goes out, or you have no hot water, and your landlord refuses to fix it?

In Texas, you have very few options besides suing. You can talk to your landlord, of course. If they start to see you as a problem, you might be evicted. Filing a lawsuit is expensive, of course, and if you try to sue, you might be evicted anyways.

What’s the alternative?

Basically, tenants should be able to talk to each other about their landlord problems, and form tenant organizations, and bring issues to their landlords as a united front, without worrying that they’ll get evicted or face retaliation.

It’s this kinda thing:

via

We actually already have a great tenants organization here in town! The Tenants Advocacy Group, or TAG, has been working on all this with the San Marcos Civics Club, which is why this is here before council. (It’s part of a larger Tenants Bill of Rights that they’re working on.)

How do you protect tenants?

You pass an ordinance that protects tenants from retaliation if they want to organize. There are two parts:

  1. What kinds of tenant activities need protection?
  2. What kinds of landlord retaliation or interference needs to be banned?

Amanda prepared some helpful slides:

So that covers the tenants. And for the landlords:

The penalty would be a misdemeanor.

Are there any laws that already exist, that protect tenants?

It depends on where you live! City staff made this helpful chart:

So yes: Austin has protections. The state overall has no protections. There are federal protections, but only in subsidized housing.

The idea would be to use the Austin ordinance as a jumping-off point, and then modify it to fit San Marcos.

This brings us to Council Discussion

Jane Hughson brings up a few details – what if a property manager is interfering on behalf of the landlord? Should they be included in the language? What about trained organizers and other non-tenants who might need protection? Can we avoid having the fliers become litter?

Amanda: Great ideas! We should definitely workshop this.

Lorenzo: A Class C Misdemeanor requires a police officer. I don’t want to criminalize landlords.

Note: Historically, marginalized groups are over-policed and criminalized. Fortunately, landlords are not historically marginalized! They’re pretty much the opposite. They’re the marginalizators!

Groups that have historically held outsized power – like landlords, or wealthy people, or police officers, or elected officials – are generally under-policed. In these cases, cities need to be more consistent with enforcement, and not worry about criminalization.

Lorenzo: Can we work out the details in a subcommittee? I don’t want to modify Austin’s ordinance. I want to write ours from scratch.

Jane: I agree. Let’s get a subcommittee going, and write out something homegrown.

Note: These are both bad ideas.

  1. Don’t bury something in subcommittees. As Alyssa puts it, “Council subcommittees are where dreams go to die.”
  2. Don’t reinvent the wheel. If Austin has a workable model, then let’s build on it.

Amanda points out that Austin’s ordinance has also been around for years, without being struck down by the courts. So that’s a more solid foundation to build on than if we just improvised our own thing.

City staff suggests a workshop?

Eventually everyone comes around to this idea, so it will be held on September 16th.

My dear minions: Go forth and tell Council that you think tenant protections are a great idea!