Tag: water

Hours 0:00 – 5:51, 5/5/26

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

Ten speakers. The two biggest topics are whether San Marcos should sell water to Kyle or not, and the Land Development Code.

Water to Kyle:

  • We shouldn’t be giving water to Kyle.
  • Only sell water to Kyle on the condition that they don’t then allow data centers
  • Don’t give water to Kyle, we don’t know how long this drought will go on.

We’ll get to this in Items 4 and 5.

Land Development Code comments:

  • Limit power plants to Heavy Industrial
  • Create a distinction between large load back up generators that data centers use, vs ordinary small scale back up generators, in terms of which require CUP.
  • 100 ft is too far for bar clean up radius.
  • Virginia Parker, director of SMRF:
    – Keep the Qualified Water Protection Plan presentation at P&Z, to allow for review by the public.
    – Fee-in-lieu for parkland should be restricted to purchasing new parkland, not maintenance
    – Fix the wording on impervious cover item

We’ll get to all these in Item 22.

Other comments:

  • The Uhland Bridge over the Blanco River has not been cleaned since the last flood. It’s full of debris and could be very dangerous if it floods again.
  • The Downtown Association of San Marcos is in favor of giving SMPD these four parking spots on weekend nights
  • We need to coordinate with Texas State, be business-friendly in the LDC, and be wise when we give tax breaks.
  • We need more accountability.
  • The city UniverCity course was great, and it’s too bad it’s being discontinued. You should put slides online.
  • A large portion of my land is being purchased by the city, please talk to the liason company so we can move forward.

Onto the meeting!

…

Itsme 17-18: Crestwood retail center

This is the Crestwood shopping center, out on Old RR 12:

Back in 2022, it came up that their septic tank was old and degraded and leaking nasty sewage onto a driveway nearby. Gross! Council mentioned back then that the county hadn’t dealt with the septic system for four years already.

Now it’s been another four years, and the septic system is still a problem! Basically they need to get on the city sewer.

That’s what they’re here for, finally. Crestwood is getting annexed and zoned into the city. Great.

…

Item 19: A little rezoning

There’s a little piece of property tucked away in this neighborhood:

Right now, it’s a pair of boarded up houses and an empty lot:

They’re going to redevelop it into four houses.

Note: people get really nervous about the word “infill”. The fear is that it’s a Trojan horse, and that if you allow “infill”, you’ll end up with a giant apartment complex in the middle of neighborhoods. (And sometimes that has happened! Developers can be jerks!)

But there’s also a good kind of infill: replacing two abandoned houses with four houses that families can live in. This is what we’re trying to encourage. This is good!

The vote: 7-0. Great.

…

Items 4-5: Selling water to Kyle

This sounds really bad! It’s not quite as bad as it sounds. But against a background of severe drought and data centers and reckless development, anything water-related deserves some scrutiny.

So let’s scrutinize! What’s going on?

It’s two slightly different things:

Item 4: Kyle uses San Marcos water in an emergency. In other words, if a water main breaks, or if they’ve got fire hoses on full blast to put out a fire, they tap our water so that they can maintain water pressure for their residents.

It’s an emergency back up, basically. We’ve had an agreement like this for the past ten years, but it expired in November 2025.

Details:

  • They pay $6.42 per 1000 gallons, which is our current wholesale rate.
  • This would last 10 years, with two 5 year extensions.
  • It gets used a few days each season, which works out to about $150K/year
  • Texas sets the rules for what constitutes an emergency.

In the past six months, they’ve used emergency water once.

Item 5: Kyle buys regular old everyday water from San Marcos, because they don’t have enough infrastructure yet to get enough water to their residents. The way it works is that we are allocated a certain amount of water from Edward’s Aquifer. We generally don’t use it all, so we sell them our unused Edward’s Aquifer water rights.

We sold them water back in 2023, and then again in 2024. (We might have done it earlier than 2023, but I wasn’t blogging yet.)

Kyle knows they’ll go over their allotted amount of Edward’s water rights, but they don’t yet have infrastructure to get enough water to the parts of the city that need it. Supposedly the infrastructure will be finished in 2028.

(For the record: back in 2023, they were sure the infrastructure would be finished in 2025. Just saying.)

So they need to buy Edward’s Aquifer water from someone. We generally go under our allotted water, so we sell the water rights to them.

Details:

  • We automatically get $732K from them, even if they don’t use any of our water
  • We get up to $1.5 million if they do.

Here is the big question: why is this happening? Is Kyle being irresponsible and allowing development that it can’t supply with water? Does Kyle allow its residents to be irresponsible with water? (Are we the most virtuous neighbors ever?)

Answer: We can’t really answer any of those questions satisfactorily.

Here’s what we can say: There’s a clause in both contracts that Kyle’s drought restrictions must match or exceed our drought restrictions.

That doesn’t entirely solve the problem, of course. Drought policies say things like, “Residents can’t fill their pools or water their lawns on Thursdays.” They don’t say things like, “Council should not approve a new development here, because the city lacks the water.”

Also, the two drought ordinances are tricky to compare, though. They don’t line up as neatly as you’d like. Also, Kyle is planning on revising their Water Conservation and Drought policy in the next month or two.

Bottom line: We agree to one year of emergency water, and postpone the Edwards Aquifer rights, until Kyle revises their drought policy, so that we can compare apples to apples, and decide how virtuous they are.

This should come back over the summer.

…

Item 21: Four police parking spots downtown

Last year, things on the square got disturbingly violent:

In response, SMPD is trying to ramp up its presence downtown. Texas State also kicked in some money to help cover the extra police time.

So officers have been parking in these four spots:

Starting in December, we reserved those parking spots for police cars only, so that cops can park there while monitoring the bar scene.

However, we also don’t want to take away daytime downtown parking spots! So they’re trying to thread the needle: these spots are public parking during the day, and then at night it becomes SMPD parking. (It’s like the Hannah Montana of parking spaces.)

The tricky part is trying to explain that in the parking signs. Here’s an example, the one on Hopkins:

Great. By day, you’ve got the two green signs. By night, you’ve got the red. (Not pictured: an extra sign with an SMPD number to call if you get towed.)

The downtown businesses are very happy with this! They like having the police presence downtown.

This has been a trial run. Does Council want to make these spots permanently designated?

What does council say?

Lorenzo: This is a mess. It’s too complicated. Why not just dedicate the spots to SMPD, day and night?

Amanda: I don’t want to remove them during the day, because of parking shortages.

Jane: What if we stripe them?

Josh: People will learn the hard way.

Alyssa: Are people learning? How many people have been penalized?
Answer: In the past three months, there have been 3 citations, 1 warning, and 10 cars towed.

Also SMPD says: We actually tow a ton of cars downtown. Ten cars towed is barely a drop in the bucket!

The vote: 7-0.

Spots will now be permanent! From now on, it’s green-by-day, red-by-night.

….

Item 22: Back to the Land Development Code

We last discussed this here and here. Last time, Council got about halfway through their amendments. Now we’re going to wade through the rest of them.

This item is super long. Sorry! Buckle up.

New Amendments:

1. Clean sidewalks

How far out should restaurants have to keep their sidewalk clean? 50 ft or 100 ft?
Answer: Council goes with 50 ft.

….

    2. Food trucks downtown.

    This is actually two different issues.

    First food-truck issue: San Marcos only allows 14 bars downtown. Each bar has an alcohol permit. Everyone else who serves alcohol downtown is technically a restaurant, and they have a different alcohol permit that requires them to serve food.

    This is one of the (many) reasons that the Rooftop got in trouble last year. They weren’t serving any food last summer. After they got in trouble for this, they added a food truck.

    The question: Is a food truck enough to make a bar feel like a restaurant, for purposes of the alcohol permit?

    Amanda: Yes. Look at Zelick’s – it feels like a restaurant, because people are sitting at tables and eating.

    Jane: What if the food truck operator gets sick and they don’t show up one weekend?
    Lorenzo: Then the business would be out of compliance if they tried to serve alcohol.
    Jane: That is naive!

    The vote: Should food trucks count as restaurants for purposes of establishments that need to sell food because they have a restaurant-alcohol permit?

    Yes: everyone
    No: No one.

    (Later on, Jane spends a LONG time being mixed up on what exactly they voted on. She and Matthew might have actually intended to vote “no”. But they don’t re-open the vote.)

    Food Truck Issue #2: What if you have a food truck that just sells alcohol and no food? Like a margarita truck or a beer truck? These exist – we have one at the outlet mall. Are these allowed downtown?

    Lorenzo: Every bar permit has a fixed address. So a bar truck would need to get an alcohol permit and could only sell alcohol at a fixed address, right?
    Answer: yes.

    The vote: Should Bar Trucks be banned downtown?

    So bar trucks are not allowed downtown.

    …

    3. Data Centers: Last time they didn’t quite nail down the definition.

    Staff came back with this suggestion:

    This passes.

    …

    4. The Waiting Period Loophole: Amanda wants to close this.

    Backstory: Say you want to build a development, and you apply to get the land rezoned. Council votes you down. How long do you have to wait before you can try again? It depends!

    Here’s how the loophole currently works:

    Situation 1: A vote to approve your rezoning fails.
    Situation 2: A vote to deny your rezoning succeeds.

    These sound like the same thing, but they aren’t the same. Situation 1 means no waiting period. The developer can zip right back to the city office and reapply. Situation 2 means the developer must wait a year before they can reapply.

    This is super misleading! Council deliberately uses this when a project is unpopular, but Council still wants to pass it. They’ll vote it down, but then give developers a backdoor to reapply.

    (This is what happened last August with the data center. Predictably, everyone got super mad and confused when there was no waiting period.)

    Amanda makes a motion to close the loophole. Both Situation 1 and Situation 2 would require a waiting period of one year.

    Jane: Council uses the loophole! Sometimes we want something to come back!

    Nobody ever seconded Amanda’s motion, so it doesn’t come to a vote.

    …

    5: Gardens and farms

    Amanda: Allow community gardens, urban farms, and plant nurseries all over San Marcos.

    Specifically:

    • Community gardens in all zoning districts
    • Urban farms in High Industrial and Business Park
    • Plant nurseries: limited/conditional in the kinds of dense, walkable neighborhoods that have businesses in them.

    Matthew has opinions: “I am going to vote yes, but I want to go on the record for being against community gardens in single family neighborhoods! I have seen the damage they can do!”

    Matthew has seen community gardens:

    and he watched some rotten shit go down.

    (“Rotten shit” is basically the point of a compost pile, so maybe he just misunderstood.)

    Anyway, the vote: 7-0. Great!

    …

    6. Four and five bedroom apartments.

    Right now, there’s a rule that you can’t have an apartment with more than three bedrooms. You can have a house with four bedrooms, but not an apartment.

    Why is this? What’s the problem with a four-bedroom apartment?

    This was the argument: “We have to get rid of four-bedroom apartments, because landlords use them for rent-by-the-bedroom. We’ll only allow with a special permit, in purpose-built-student-housing.”

    This has always been insane. Lots of people besides college students need four bedroom apartments! What if you have a family with three kids? What if the family has two kids, and a grandparent, all living together? What about coop living? What about people, generally, trying to share expenses and live together to save money?

    Furthermore: wealthy people get to buy 4- and 5-bedroom houses! Why would no one else need this?

    Historically, powerful people in San Marcos have cared a lot more about micromanaging students than about the unintentional consequences on poor people.

    So this is Amanda’s amendment: let’s fix this.

    The vote: should developers be allowed to put 4 bedrooms in a small multifamily, courtyard housing, or multifamily?

    Jane opposes it because of parking. She’s worried that if you allow 4 bedroom apartments, you won’t have enough parking spaces for everyone.

    However, parking is actually based on the number of bedrooms unless you’re downtown, and downtown is the one place that already has 4-bedroom units. So her argument does not hold water.

    …

    7. Professional Office Space

    Right now we’ve got some super weird rules about these:

    Got that? No upstairs offices, ya dirty crooks! And don’t you dare try to be mid-block, away from an intersection. You think we were born yesterday?

    Amanda proposes that we nix all of these. Staff agrees – they meant to get rid of these, because they’re weird and restrictive, but missed this instance.

    Alyssa: I’m a night owl. Can we scrap the 6am-11pm part, too?

    The vote: 7-0.

    (They did not yet scrap the 6am-11pm part.)

    …

    8. Maximum parking.

    Let’s talk about parking lots. Basically too many parking spots and too few parking spots are both problems.

    Too few parking spots mean that it’s hard for customers to find places to park. Too many means that your parking lot is huge. You’re paving too much of your city. It’s bad for flooding and walkability.

    So if a business really wants an extra large parking lot, they’re required to do some mitigation:

    • Use permeable pavers on the extra spots, so water can soak through instead of running off.
    • Provide shade trees and keep existing trees
    • Shade at least half the extra spaces with solar panels.

    Wouldn’t that make a big difference at Target or Walmart?

    The question is: when does this kick in? How much wiggle room should we give you to provide extra parking?

    Amanda’s amendment: “Extra Parking” means 30% above what’s required. If you’re required to provide 100 spots, and you provide 130, then you have to think about shade and solar panels and permeable pavers.

    The vote:

    Matthew voted no, because he speaks for the trees the floods. When no one else has the courage, he speaks for the water and the mud that just want to be inside people’s houses.

    Matthew speaks for the hot asphalt! for the smelly melting tar! In this busy modern life, Matthew remembers.

    …

    That’s everything that got voted on, officially.

    Other discussions – no vote

    Most of these will be formalized and voted on in June:

    • Major utilities, power plants, and large scale back up generators should require a permit from Council, and only be allowed in Heavy Industrial.

    This is mostly about data centers, but not entirely.

    • Public notices for zoning and permit hearings.

    Should city staff put the signs up, or should the applicant put the signs up?

    • Supermajority vs. regular majority to overturn P&Z decisions.

    Right now, it takes a supermajority to overturn P&Z. Sometimes when P&Z does something especially stupid (like ban live music at Tantra) it seems dangerous to give them so much power.

    Should Council be able to overturn P&Z decisions with a regular majority, instead of a super majority?

    My $0.02: This has come up before, in 2022. I was opposed to weakening P&Z then, and I still am. It’s a dangerous sign when a governing body weakens the checks-and-balances that are supposed to put some friction and dissonance in the system.

    If P&Z can be overruled with a simple majority, then P&Z does not actually hold any power. They just make recommendations. And I’ve been around long enough to have seen it swing the other way – a wiser P&Z and a more foolish rogue City Council.

    P&Z may occasionally make some dumb-ass decisions, but I generally think the principle of checks and balances is wise, and should not be weakened.

    …

    • Qualified Watershed Protection Plans:

    Right now, developers have to submit environmental studies, to make sure they’re not going to cause a lot of flooding or poison the river, or something. Part of that is a Qualified Watershed Protection Plan. This gets presented to P&Z. This gives other groups – like the San Marcos River Foundation – a chance to listen and make comments, in case there’s a concern.

    However, apparently it makes the whole development process stall out for 6 weeks, while they wait to get on P&Z’s calendar. This costs developers a lot of money, which drives up everyone’s costs.

    The question: can we find a way to make the study available to the public, without wasting 6 weeks of everyone’s time?

    …

    • The Business Park Zoning is not complete.

    This zoning is not very walkable nor part of a “complete streets” dream where everyone can get their basic needs met without driving.

    • Some zoning tinkering to put language in about neighborhood commerce and encouraging affordable ownership and ownership alternatives.
    • Permits for special events right now are phrased as “indoor AND outdoor space”. We should switch it to “Indoor OR outdoor space”.

    Discussions that will be continued, but not as Land Development Code amendments

    • Fiscal Impact studies. If a developer wants to build something in the middle of nowhere, will it cost the city more to maintain roads, utilities, and public safety than the neighborhood will contribute in tax revenue? It would be nice to know this! Right now it’s a big ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
    • Single stair apartment buildings: small scale apartment complexes are a sweet spot for places like San Marcos. They’re low profile, can house 8 units or so, and provide affordable housing in neighborhoods. They don’t get built often for big complicated reasons. But one reason is that the building codes for giant buildings often apply to them. One major one is needed two staircases. This is a thing that gets fixed in places like Austin. Can we fix it here?
    • Can we mandate water reuse systems for sufficiently gigantic businesses?

    I hope these don’t get shelved. They’re very important

    ….

    THAT’S THE WHOLE THING!

    They vote: 7-0.

    This was just a first reading. This will come back for a final vote in June!

    …

    Item 23: Housing Finance Corporations

    HFC stands for Housing Finance Corporations. These started off as legitimate attempts to create affordable housing, which then got hijacked by scammers.

    It’s supposed to work like this: San Marcos or Hays County partners with a nonprofit. The nonprofit gets a tax waiver in exchange for building affordable housing.

    The problem is something called “travelling HFCs”. Can a city 200 miles away partner with a nonprofit, and they build housing in San Marcos? So San Marcos doesn’t get the tax money, but they never agreed to anything? The housing may not even end up being affordable.

    So here’s what happened to us: Pecos is a city here:

    The city of Pecos partnered with the Pecos HFC, and built (or bought) The Grand at Stone Creek. This is the apartment complex between Academy and Crunch Fitness, near Target. They also had complexes in Kyle and Hays County (and a ton of others throughout Texas).

    This was costing us about $200K in property taxes. We don’t know if they actually offered affordable housing or anything.

    Anyway, we won! Or we settled. But we got the outcome we wanted, which is the tax money, plus a little extra in legal fees.

    There’s 1-2 more HFCs that are still tied up in lawsuits, which will hopefully also tip our way.

    …

    Item 24: We’re building a trail to New Braunfels!

    Or rather, we’re applying for Federal land along Hunter Road to build a trail.

    The goal is to put a hike-and-bike trail here:

    So that’s cool! It sounds like it’s supposed to tie in to a much bigger thing, here:

    The Great Springs Project, apparently.

    Great!

    Bonus-bonus! Second 3 pm workshop, 1/21/25

    by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

    Workshop #2: San Marcos Water Supply.

    (I love this one so much.)

    Where do we get our water from?  

    Until 2000, San Marcos exclusively got Edwards Aquifer water. Then we signed on to get some surface water from Canyon Lake, and in the mid 2000s, we joined ARWA water.  (More on ARWA in a moment.)

    “MGD” means a million gallons of water per day.

    …

    What is ARWA?

    ARWA is kind of crazy.  Basically, in 2006,  San Marcos, Kyle, Buda, and the Canyon Regional Water Authority got together and tried to figure out a longterm plan. They formed ARWA, the Alliance Regional Water Authority.

    They decided to connect to the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, which is over here:

    The crazy part is that this started in 2006, and they knew they wouldn’t be delivering water until 2023.  This was a very longterm plan! That is really good foresight by the councils that agreed to this.

    There was all sorts of infrastructure that had to be built. I think this is the whole project:

    So we’re getting all the water from the green oval on the far right. Then it has to be treated, at the blue dot, so that it’s drinkable. All those red lines are pipe that had to be laid down, and it gets run out to Lockhart, Buda, Kyle, San Marcos, and New Braunfels. That’s why it took so long.

    But now it’s here! This is great!

    ….

    So we’ve got all this water – Edwards, Canyon, and now ARWA.  Is it enough? 

    It depends! How many people are trying to use this water?

    This is the population projection, based on 2017 data:

    In other words, the black line is the projected population, and the red part is how much water we’d need. So in 2055, we’re expecting to have 140K people and need about 16K acre-feet of water each day. (An acre-foot means take an acre of land, and fill it with water that is 1 foot deep.)

    Here’s the water supply, according to when each of those sources kicked in:

    So this looks great! So in 2055, when we need 16K acre-feet of water, and we’ll have access to about 27K acre-feet of water. Through 2075, we’ve always got more water than we need.

    This is great!

    But then…. we had to update our projections.  Between 2017 and 2024, this region grew even more than expected. So we had to ramp up our projections, accordingly:

    So if we’ve got the same amount of water planned, but a ton more people, the graph now looks like this:

    Whoops. Now we are scheduled to run short on water in 2047.

    So what do we do?

    The good news is that we’ve got plenty of planning time, and we’re putting it to good use. There are basically two ways to address this:

    1. Find more water
    2. Use less water

    We’re going to do both.

    First, more water:

    Apparently Buda and Kyle are even shorter on water than we are. Everyone is interested in collaborating and shoring up supplies.  An ARWA Phase 3? Maybe a different source?

    Second, reduce water usage:

    The second two bullet points are huge: reclaiming used water. We’ve already got some reclaimed water already:

    (That slide is from a 2022 presentation, here.) All that purple is where we can send reclaimed water to. We currently have about 5.5 million gallons per day of reclaimed water.

    The problem is that it’s not drinkable. So you can use it to water the golf course at Kissing Tree (which they do!) but you can’t send it to people’s houses.

    The holy grail will be when we can get reclaimed water clean enough to drink. Then we can really ramp up our water re-use.

    (I read once that one of the grand failures of midcentury America was not double-piping all the houses, so that we weren’t mixing our toilet water with our sink water.  Then we wouldn’t be watering our lawns with drinking water, and we wouldn’t be trying to clean and re-use toilet water.)  

    Here’s what we think we can get to:

    Notice that the water supply hasn’t changed. But the red part – our water use – is smaller. The red part dips down again around 2050 because we think we’ll be able to get the reclaimed water clean enough to drink by then.

    What does Council say?

    Amanda asks if we have a problem with water leakage from pipes?
    Answer: We’re actually pretty good on this. It happens, but we’ve got one of the lowest rates in the state.

    Amanda: Can we get a graph of the top ten biggest water users?
    Answer: Yes! We don’t have it on hand, but we’ll email it to you.

    (I love this question. Amanda said she’ll send the graph over when she gets it, but she hasn’t gotten it yet.)

    Amanda: Do we still do rebates for rain barrels?
    Answer: Yes! Details here.

    The City Manager Stephanie Reyes also mentions this: San Marcos water rates are a little higher than those around us, but it’s because of all this advance planning. We are in a much more secure longterm position that most others.

    Hours 0:00 – 2:08, 4/16/24

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    ANOTHER FIVE HOURS MEETING! They’re trying to kill me over here!

    Citizen Comments:

    There was a full hour of citizen comments.   It was basically a repeat of last week:

    • Yes we love these Lindsey Street apartments! (9 speakers, but many work for the developer)
    • No, we hate them! (Seven speakers)
    • Ceasefire now in Palestine! (Four speakers)

    Also Virginia Parker, from the San Marcos River Foundation, but I’ll save her comments for that section.

    I mean, people did say some new stuff. I’ll save the relevant parts for the Lindsey Street discussion.

    And, really, pass a ceasefire resolution already.

    ….

    Next up we have some financial reports. 

    Items 1-3:  Q1 Financial reports, Investment Reports, CBDG audit.

    Here’s how our general fund is doing:

    Just a note: “2024 YTD” is weird and confusing! Just to be clear, we’re talking about October, November, and December of 2023. It’s Q1 of Fiscal Year 2024. And “2023 YTD” means the last three months of 2022.

    Anyway: The green bar is a little low. This is because property tax payments are coming in more slowly than last year. The speaker didn’t say why, but I assume it’s because Prop 4 passed in November, and so people got their tax bill later than usual. But the guy reassured us that it’s fine.

    There’s also six Enterprise Funds: electric, water/wastewater, stormwater, resource recovery, airport, and hotel. They’re all fine! Everything’s fine!

    Item 4: Short Term Rentals

    We discussed short term rentals here and here already. We used to ban parties and require that STRs be owner-occupied, but (I think) the courts struck this down and so we had to rewrite our rules?

    Loosely speaking, here’s what’s being proposed:

    • All STRs would need a permit. 
    • Owners can only have one STR.
    • Only one STR on a block, or at least 600 ft apart.
    • Short-term tenants can have parties, but not excessively noisy ones, just like any other resident.
    • Everyone who lives within 400’ gets a postcard with a hotline number to call if you’re having any trouble.

    At the March meeting, both Shane Scott and Alyssa Garza voted no, but they didn’t exactly say why.  Jane Hughson chided them to come back with amendments that make it work for them.

    To his credit, Jude Prather did come back with amendments to make it work. This is good governance! Let’s problem-solve! 

    Jude proposes that we strike the limit per block.  In other words, anyone can have an STR wherever they want.  His reasoning goes that everyone should be able to rent out their own home, regardless of whoever pulled a permit on your street already.

    Matthew Mendoza doesn’t like it.  You could have whole blocks which are full of STRs! It’s happened before, like on Riviera Street!

    This is Riviera Street: 

    You might recognize this backyard from the river:

    right when you’re floating here:

    I got those two images from the VRBO listing, so feel free to rent it yourself if you want.

    Riviera’s probably the only place in central San Marcos where backyards open up right on the river, so yeah, I can believe Matthew when he says that they’re all STRs.  (And he also says they each have different owners – it’s not a case of one outside developer buying up the whole block.)

    What do I think?  Eh, I think it’s fine.  I don’t think entire blocks are going to get bought up, in general. The other rule – “1 rental per owner” – is really much stricter than the “1 per block” rule, as far as preserving your housing supply. 

    And it seems reasonable to allow everyone to at least rent out their own homestead. If I had an ADU and I couldn’t rent it out because someone down the block was already renting theirs out, I’d be annoyed.

    The vote to strike the “1 per block” rule:

    Yes: Alyssa Garza, Jane Hughson, Mark Gleason, Jude Prather, Shane Scott
    No: Saul Gonzales, Matthew Mendoza

    The vote on the whole set of STR rules, all together:

    Yes: Alyssa Garza, Jane Hughson, Mark Gleason, Jude Prather, Shane Scott
    No: Saul Gonzales, Matthew Mendoza

    So there you have it. Done.

    …

    Item 7: Water Restrictions:

    We’re writing new water stages.  Twenty years ago, we got a bunch of money from the state to start up ARWA, which drills from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer and requires a little more treatment before you drink it.  

    That investment is finally showing up:

    I’m guessing that’s the reason we’re re-writing our drought stages? Maybe not?

    (Confidential to city staff who deal with water stuff: your slide is a few years out of date and it’s throwing me off, because I thought we weren’t getting ARWA water until later this year?)

    Now:

    The main thing that’s happening is that we’re going from 5 drought stages to 3 drought stages. This is supposed to make it simpler for everyone.

    But there’s one other thing I want to discuss.

    Last time, Virginia Parker from SMRF spoke about how the drought stage triggers were being recalculated.  The staff person said hey, no worries! We look at all the sources! The details aren’t in the ordinance, but it’s department policy. No worries! So I didn’t worry.

    This time, Virginia Parker spoke again and made the same point.  However, this time it was a different staff member, and his answer was VERY different.  So let’s dive in.

    Background for Parker’s concern:

    There are triggers that cause you to go from one drought conservation stage to the next. Under the old rules, we checked the Edward’s Aquifer level, the Comal level, and the San Marcos Springs level. If any of those were low, we moved to the next stage.

    For example these were the triggers for stage 4:

    (Full text here. ) The J-17 well is the Edward’s Aquifer. So we measured three sources, and if any of them were low enough, it would trigger stage 4.

    Under the new rules, the drought triggers are very different. What we do now is combine all the sources first, and then check how much of the total we’re using. So if one source is running low, another source can compensate, and we don’t enter drought restrictions.

    Here’s the specific text:

    It’s way less detailed than the old triggers.  Take Stage 2: “The average daily water consumption reaches approximately 75% of the rated available water production capacity for a seven-day period.”

    In other words, now we take Edward’s Aquifer, Comal, and our new water source Carrizo, and we add all those together. Any one of them can be really low, but maybe the others compensate. If we’re using 75% of the combined total, then we’ll go into Stage 2.

    You can see the scenario that Parker is worried about: The Edwards Aquifer could be way down, and our river is super low, but we’re not under any drought restrictions because the supply from Carrizo.

    Here’s the answer we were given this time:  

    We’re allowed to use a certain fixed amount of Edward’s Aquifer water until the Edwards Aquifer Authority says otherwise. And dagnabbit, we’re going to use it, because it’s the cheapest water we’ve got, and the way our pipes are set up means that we can’t easily switch from one source to another.  The EA water keeps our system pressurized.

    When the Edwards Aquifer Authority tells us we have to cut back, we cut back. But otherwise we just take the same amount every week.

    Jane Hughson: Would it be possible that Edwards Aquifer is in severe drought, like stage 3 or 4, and we’re still in stage 1? 

    Answer: Yes! That could happen.

    Jane: What about people in San Marcos on well water that comes exclusively from the aquifer? We’d be telling them that San Marcos is Stage 1, but they’d need to know that Edward’s Aquifer is in Stage 3.

    Answer: We’ll have to publicize both stages. But we include the usage of people on well-water in our budgeted Edward Aquifer totals.

    Jane does not like this. Neither does Jude Prather or Matthew Mendoza.  Neither do I!  It just feels icky to say that “haha, we’re going to use all this LUSH PLENTIFUL WATER no holds barred” in the middle of a drought, because we’re shipping it in from another part of the state.

    I see what the city staff guy is saying, too – our Edwards Aquifer usage doesn’t fluctuate. End of story. Conservation doesn’t help the aquifer and being wasteful doesn’t hurt it.  But he’s being a cold engineer about how real people internalize drought stages.  Drought stages are also about setting people’s expectations and communicating to people that we need to be good stewards of our environments. 

    Yes, we’ve planned well and gotten into a healthy water supply situation.  But if you zoom out, the entire state needs clean drinking water for decades to come, so let’s not be all “WE GOT OURS, SUCKS TO SUCK!” to everyone else. 

    In the end, everyone votes to approve the plan, 7-0. As Jane puts it, “I have concerns, but I’m willing to see where this goes.”

    Hours 3:18-3:28, 4/2/24

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Only one measly other item worth writing about! (It came during a small break in Lindsey Hill items, if you’re wondering about the time stamps above.)

    Item 12: Water conservation.

    We discussed the new stages at the workshop last time.

    We’re going from five stages to three stages.

    The director (Virginia Parker) of the San Marcos River Foundation has concerns. Basically, right now, when the Edward’s Aquifer gets low, it triggers drought restrictions. She’s worried that under the new rules, drought restrictions wouldn’t get triggered when the Edward’s Aquifer gets low. The issue is if the new formula for triggering drought restrictions would add together all the water sources (GRBA, ARWA, and Edward’s Aquifer) and use the total as a measure for triggering drought stages. In this case, GRBA and ARWA could compensate if only Edward’s Aquifer is low. Parker’s point is that if Edward’s Aquifer is low, we should go into conservation, regardless of the others, in order to keep the river healthy.

    A city staff member addresses this point and says no, Edward’s aquifer will be part of the formula on its own.

    It’s not spelled out in the ordinance, and I’m not well-informed enough to know if his answer was sufficient. But I don’t have any reason to doubt him, either.

    Bonus! Workshop, 3/19/24

    by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

    We get our water from a bunch of different sources:

    We’re actually in pretty good shape, because we invested in ARWA water about twenty years ago. That is water from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer. It took a while to get the drilling and treatment set up, but it’s about to start coming online.

    Here’s what our water supply looks like, over the next 50 years:

    The main point of the presentation is our drought stages: right now we have five, and life would be simpler if we only had three.

    The five:

    The three:

    Jane Hughson makes an excellent point: it used to be that Stage 2 was mild, and now Stage 2 is serious. It used to be that Stage 3 was Medium, and now Stage 3 is The Worst. It’s hard to get people to update their priors. This is going to require a high degree of messaging.

    (Nevertheless, it’s probably simpler to have 3 stages instead of 5.)

    Updated to add: Someone pointed out to me that the new proposal never bans sprinkler systems, even during the worst droughts. This seems like a bad move. Even if there’s plenty of ARWA water, it’s still resource-intensive to clean and treat it.

    …

    But listen: we can be doing more. Johnson City held an Ugliest Lawn contest, to promote the idea that it’s okay to let your lawn turn yellow. We could have Yellow is the new Green signs, or some other sort of messaging about letting your lawn go fallow.

    Traditional green lawns are an environmental disaster, right? Let’s change the discourse around them, and give people permission to quit watering.

    City Council! Tell the water guys to include this kind of messaging, stat!

    Bonus! Council Workshop 8/1/23

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    3 pm Workshop: This is very interesting! 

    The city acquired three derelict properties in 2020.  It’s these three:

    You can totally see it from the town square. It’s very close.

    It looks like this from ground:

    That is The Rooftop to the right, and to the left is Solid Gold used to be. (Let’s have a moment of silence for the closure of that store.)

    The city bought it because there were a bunch of contaminants in the ground.  It had been a dry cleaners for years and years. From the late 1940s-1980s, they were dumping some awful stuff into the ground. 

    So what do you do with a bunch of toxic shit in the ground? There are procedures, it turns out.  You need some information:

    • What contaminants exactly got dumped?
    • How far underground has it spread? How deep is it, and how far north/east/west/south?
    • Is it staying put? Or is it moving?
    • How exactly do you clean up these chemicals?
    • If you don’t clean up these chemicals, what do they decompose into, and how long does it take for it to decompose?

    It turns out we have answers to all these questions! 

    1. The chemicals: 
      Tetrachloroethene (PERC)
      Trichloroethene (TCE)
      Vinyl Chloride (VC)

    Chlorinated solvents are synthetic chlorinated chemicals, I’m told. Bacteria won’t touch them, but they’ll break down on their own over time.

    I have no background in chemistry, but if the chemists tell me to stay away from these, I’m going to believe them.

    1. Where are these nasty chemicals currently?

    We dug a bunch of different types of wells:

    I’ll explain the “MSD” acronym in a bit.  

    So here’s what you find when you drill down: 

    • The normal soil or whatever on top. Very dense silt and clay. No moisture.
    • About 22’-23’ down, you get fine sand.  It’s got groundwater in it. That’s called silten clay.
    • Below that, you get Navarro Clay.  The Navarro Clay is super thick and water doesn’t pass through it.  (The vocabulary word is aquitard, which sounds like an insult but isn’t.)

    The Navarro Clay is a shield, and then below is the aquifer water.  

    So the contaminants – the PERCs, the TCEs, and the VCs – they are all heavier than water, and they sink through all that wet sand and puddle on top of the Navarro Clay.  That tells us how deep these things are.

    Note: the geologists made it sound like the aquifer was hundreds of feet further below the Navarro Clay, so far away that we should sleep easy at night.

    But this makes it look not-so-far-away:

    via

    So we are really trusting the aquitardiness of that Navarro Clay.

    What about how far north/east/south/west?

    The skinny red line is the boundary of the PERC plume:

    And here the TCE plume:

    And the VC plume:

    1. Is it staying put? Or is it moving? 

    It is moving incredibly slowly in this direction:

    Because it’s resting on the Navarro Clay, and it’s all gunked up in there, it’s moving incredibly slowly. It won’t reach Purgatory Creek for another 89-8900 years. It won’t reach the San Marcos River for another 188-18,800 years.  

    1. How exactly would you clean this up? 

    They didn’t actually answer this. They basically said it would be impossible, because of all the sand in the way, and the gunkiness of the Navarro Clay.

    1. What would it decompose to?  

    The PERC is the stuff that was dumped by the drycleaners. The PERC breaks down into the TCE, which is also nasty. The TCE breaks down into two dichloroethylenes, also bad. That breaks down into VC, still bad. But then after that you get carbon dioxide, a little chlorine, and water, which is not nasty anymore.  This process will happen over the next 50-100 years. 

    Listen: I am sharing what was presented. I am not a scientist. If you are a scientist, and we are being told an overly optimistic picture, please fill me in.

    So what do we do?

    So if the PERCs and TCEs and VCs will all break down before they reach anything sensitive, what do we do?

    You declare an MSD: Municipal Settings Designation. 

    Back to this slide, which has the perimeter of the MSD:

    This means that within these borders, no one is allowed to drink well water.  Everyone has to be on city water.  

    It also means that within a few years, we can “achieve regulatory clearance”. 

    Congratulations! You have nasty stuff in the ground, but your regulatory conscience is clear!

    … 

    So what happens up top, where people wander around? This was the second half of the presentation.

    Again, this is what it looks like:

    It’s fine, as long as you don’t dig up that concrete.

    We’re proposing a short term plan: the left and right would be city parking, and the middle will be a little public area. Shade, seating, bathrooms, bike and scooter parking. Room for extra booths for the farmer’s market or Art Squared.

    Council was nervous about having a stage there, but liked the rest of it. So this will come back around as an agenda item in the future.