Parts of the 3 pm workshops were interesting!
- The first one was on San Marcos Tourism:
How does it compare to other industries in the city? How does it compare to other cities? I have no idea! So those numbers are kind of meaningless without context, unfortunately.
- We have 29 hotels and 50 short term rentals
- We have a hotel occupancy tax, and we use it on the various festivals, mural arts, Sights & Sounds, and things around town.
Apparently we advertise outside of San Marcos, like so:
Whatever works, man. I guess Marketing knows best.
As a marxist, I’m mostly not a marketing and business person. But then they started talking about the river, which is more interesting to me.
So, who goes to the river?
They hired some consultants to track our cell phones, and see where we sleep at night.
So after we tube the river, where do we sleep?
This year, about a quarter were local, half were regional, and 20% were more than 50 miles away. Last year, 40% were local, a third were regional, and a quarter were from further away.
It would be nice to have some absolute numbers here, by the way. It was implied that we had more users this year, due to the drought, but you can’t tell that from the percents.
2. The second presentation was on Summer 2023 at the River Parks
We tried a new Park Ambassador program this year. We hired 8 staff members to wander through the river parks all summer long, and try to be helpful.
It sounds like they told a lot of people to put their glass bottles away, put their charcoal grills away, put their dog on a leash, and put their trash bags in the right places.
You can see those spikes right at the 4th of July weekend, and the weekend before school starts.
Apparently park use is up this year. In the first presentation, they speculated that it was because of the drought: local watering holes dried up and were closed, to preserve them, and so people came here instead.
This photo was taken by Christopher Paul Cardoza:
(I got it from the slide show, though.) It’s 5 pm on the 4th of July.
There’s a serious problem here:
- How else are you going to escape the heat on the 4th of July, unless you find some water? In our shitty world of capitalism, we’ve eliminated almost all free ways to have recreation and a little joy in people’s lives.
- But the river is super overused. This is extremely bad for the health of the river.
(Might I suggest overthrowing our capitalist overlords and breaking free from the chains that bind? No? Ah well.)
One of the biggest problems is the litter:
Pretty much every weekend, the river parks are trashed. It’s one of the biggest problems the parks department faces, and they have a ton of clean up efforts going simultaneously.
They spend $191K each summer on litter abatement alone. (That’s enough to buy 120 BolaWraps, for those of you keeping track.)
Anyway, the Parks Department has some suggestions:
My opinions:
- Single-Use Container Ban: yes. You’ve got to get the trash under control.
- Tube size limitation: yes. It’s super dangerous when these giant 8 person contraptions go over the falls and over people swimming.
- Paid Parking and Picnic Permits: The idea is to charge non-residents. It’ll be a headache for residents, though – you probably have to download some app and verify your address.
- Managed Access Points: I think this means that the park gets fenced in? That feels sort of sad. Maybe it’s inevitable.
Alyssa Garza asks about the ban on charcoal grills. What’s the history here? Why is propane okay, but charcoal not?
Answer: Until 2013, you could bring charcoal grills. We just could not get people to properly dispose of their charcoal. People dump it on the ground, other people burn their feet. People dump it at the base of the tree, the tree starts on fire:
The photo on the right is offered up as evidence that people dump hot charcoal on tree stumps and start fires, which is really pretty wild.
In 2013, we adopted the Habitat Conservation Plan, and banning charcoal grilling was part of that. Allowing propane grills was the compromise position.
These are going to go to the Parks Board, and then on to City Council very soon.
The San Marxist 