Tag: Utility Assistance

August 17th City Council meeting (Part 2)

by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

Third most interesting item:

Item 20: Project Robot! Great name, right? Project Robot is a three year property tax break that we’re giving to a giant laundry service that will go in next to the new Amazon facility, on the north side of town. It sounds like it’s mass laundering of hotel sheets and towels.

A lot of attention was paid to requiring the facility to maintain its Clean Green standing for ten years. This is good, but I am not an environmental engineer and can’t really weigh in on what’s greenwashing and what’s substantial.

Supposedly the facility will create 100 jobs at average salary of $44k, with full benefits from day 1. This sound suspect. To me, that sounds like 90 jobs at $25K and ten jobs at $500K. “Average” is not necessarily what you want to know about that situation.

What else was discussed?

  • Universal utility forgiveness passed unanimously, although Commissioner Derrick allowed herself a small “SURE I GUESS” through gritted teeth. Total price tag comes in at $581K.

(There was a hilariously petty exchange between Commissioner Scott and Mayor Hughson that basically descended into “am not” “are too”, like my kids do, over whether or not it is a sure thing that this won’t affect our budget score. Technically the bickering when “We’ll be fine” “We don’t know that” “I know that” “We’ll see” ad nauseum. I enjoyed it immensely.)

  • 390 acres of Whisper South were annexed, with only Commissioner Baker dissenting. There was no discussion and I have no opinion.
  • Electric Cab Bus Proposal was postponed for a month. I grokked that the entire council is mad about an extremely shitty proposal that was put forward, although I don’t know what went wrong. The proposers have a month to fix it, or they will go back to the pool of proposals to reassess.
  • Max tax rate was set, although the actual tax rate will come under that.
  • Some vacancies were filled. Amy Meeks will join P&Z.
  • Spear guns will come back around as an ordinance
  • P&Z and Council will be required to undergo CodeSMTX trainings

And while there were some other fiddly details, I’m declaring that to be a wrap! Thanks, folks, and see you in September!

August 3rd City Council Meeting, (Part 1)

by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

Item 42

Top billing of the night goes to Item 42, the update on the emergency utility assistance. At this point, the city has paid out almost half of the million dollars available for utility assistance. In addition, city staff seems to have stepped up its outreach, from last month when this program was stumbling along ineptly.

Shane Scott says, “Can’t we just forgive all debt?” He said this last time, as well.

The city staff, in their neutral way, is timidly-yet-STRONGLY opposed.
– This isn’t what the consultants recommend.
– This may affect rate hikes.
– This could involve cases where the tenant just plain moved without disconnecting the electricity.
– This could affect San Marcos’s rating with S&P which we need in order to levy bonds.

Scott points out, quite rightly, that the city owns the utility company and can move its money around.

Alyssa Garza and Max Baker are strongly in favor.

Jane Hughson and Mark Gleason are both convinced that people will not bother to apply for assistance until they get the shut-off notice. So they are opposed. Mark even calls it “a tax on everyone else”.

Melissa Derrick wants to know the consequences more thoroughly – how will this affect rates on everyone else? How will this affect S&P ratings?

Alyssa gives the speech of the night, about how detached City Council is from the actual experience of poverty and being buried in bills. That our “simple application” for relief may be simple, but when you’re getting multiple disconnect notices you stop opening envelopes. That no one is secretly sitting on cash, waiting to get a disconnect notice to sigh and finally pay. They aren’t paying because they don’t have the money, full stop.

(Max does say that he originally proposed this but everyone overrode him. He also notes that this is a drop in the bucket compared to the city budget.)

The vote: Shall we just wipe out all utility balances >30 days past due?

In favor: Saul Gonzalez, Shane Scott, Max Baker, Alyssa Garza, and Mark Gleason

Opposed: Melissa Derrick and Jane Hughson

Motion passes, 5-2!

Mark Gleason gets a prize for the weaselliest comment of the night: after being the most impassioned person against this motion, he abruptly says, “Well, since this is obviously going to pass, I guess I’ll vote yes.” Oh, do you like being on the right side of history once the writing is on the wall?

My own hot take:
This is clearly the right move. It’s relatively cheap and helps a lot of people in a way that aligns with our values.

One side point: the city has done a tremendous amount of outreach on the utility assistance program, and it is not reaching people. The number of outreach labor-hours saved by just wiping the slate clean is significant, and should be taken into account in the budgeting of this.

July 6th City Council Meeting, (Part 2)

by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

The next recurring theme was a large amount of money to be allocated, across different items.

  • Items 35-36, $9 million from American Rescue Plan Fund (and it sounds like there will be 9 million more, next summer.)
  • Item 40, $800K in CBDG proposals for the 21-22 fiscal year
  • Item 41, $1 million in utility assistance

So these were quite a lot of fun – feeling flush with cash and able to grant all the wishes to all these nonprofits. Down with austerity and belt-tightening!

  1. On the first, the American Rescue Plan Fund:

– they argued about whether tourism and marketing should get quite such a big cut. It seems that this sector is limited in where they can seek funds, and they did take quite a hit during COVID. But maybe not quite as much as was proposed. ($282K)

– they argued a bit about Briarwood, a neighborhood outside of city limits that suffers severe flooding, in part because of how San Marcos has been developing. There’s a 2.5 million stormwater mitigation project there. They managed to thread the needle on that one – postpone it by three months and fund it from several spots.

– A lot of small projects got some money: Southside Community Center, bilingual outreach and communications, KZSM, vaccination outreach, Nosotros la Gente, which provides shoes for local kids. Good feelings all around.

2. On the CBDG funds, nearly everything got funded besides Roland Saucedo’s proposal, which is seeemingly why they chipped in for him in the previous funds.

3. The Utility Assistance fund is interesting. They’ve paid out about 20% of what’s available, and they’re all concerned that people aren’t applying. City staff was put on the defensive about their outreach efforts.

– Everyone who is past due gets a letter with info on how to apply. If the city has an email address, they send an email too.
– The city has reached out to the Food Bank and SMCISD.
– The application was made fairly short – just one page.
– Disconnections have been suspended during the pandemic, but there will be a date set to resume disconnections.

Criticisms:

– how about going through the churches? Commissioner Gonzalez says that he has to KEEP directing city to this and they never do.
– Commissioner Gleason, Commissioner Derrick, and Mayor Hughson all feel like until you send them notice of disconnection, no one will be very motivated to apply.
– Commissioner Garza talks about how people (meaning the Hispanic community) are more likely to just tighten their belts, out of not wanting to take more than their fair share, and that they’ll want to save the funds for someone who REALLY needs it.

Commissioner Scott, actually, was strongest on this: “Can’t we just see who is past due and pay off their balance without them having to apply?”

Hughson concern-trolled about undeserving people who have the money and could pay. Nothing Texas hates more than someone receiving some crumbs when they could have scraped by without them. Garza is enthusiastic about this proposal.

Scott’s proposal – just pay off the deliquent accounts – has to be put on the agenda and brought back as an item, because it didn’t fit onto the existing agenda. So it still could happen.

…

As an aside: there’s an ongoing dynamic where City Council and Lumbreras are perpetually exasperated with each other. It goes like this:

  1. Council frequently acts like he has done something incompetent.
  2. He then defensively retorts that they tied his hands in the way they made the request.

I am not sure yet who is being a jerk, or if there’s blame to spread to both. Mayor Hughson herself is a generally prickly person, and it often doesn’t mean anything.

…

All three topics will be finalized at some point in August.