Tag: water

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.