Tag: zoning

Hours 0:00 – 3:39, 10/20/26

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

8 speakers. Assorted topics:

  • San Marcos River Foundation: The Sinai Church proposal on Hopkins is in very sensitive land. We’re okay with 30% impervious cover, but not 80% impervious cover.
  • The Sinai Pentecostal Church is beloved and serves the people of San Marcos. Please approve the rezoning for the new sanctuary.
  • We have too many contracts with Axon. (three speakers)
  • The new Veterans Clinic will be great for area vets.
  • The VFW floods easily, and it’s right next to the proposed Sinai sanctuary. (two speakers)
  • Some council candidates are delinquent on their campaign finance reports
  • We banned Flock, but why haven’t we brought in some other license plate reader company?

Moving along!

….

Item 15: New VA Clinic

Here’s how it works for veterans in San Marcos: the southern part of town is in the San Antonio district, and the northern part of town is in the Austin district.

This makes it very hard to get to doctor’s appointments! Some vets can just go to New Braunfels, but others have to go up to Austin, or even Temple. Arranging transportation is a big, ongoing problem.

But now, we’re getting our own VA clinic here in San Marcos. This is great!

Here’s where it will be:

Map of VA Clinic on Wonderworld near 123

Here’s another view:

Another Map of VA Clinic on Wonderworld near 123

There’s not much to say here. It only came to council on something of a technicality: they wanted the parking lot in front, instead of the back of the building. You want vets to have easy access to the front door, because many have mobility impairments. So now it’s been rezoned and the parking lot can go in front.

Everyone is very excited for the new VA clinic.

….

Item 16: Sinai Church Lot

This is a big, dicey item, and it’s confusing how it played out. Bear with me here.

Sinai Pentecostal Church is in Barrio Pescado, on Laredo St:

They have super deep roots in the San Marcos community. Everyone loves them.

They also own this land, right where Hopkins road switches over to being Hunter Road:

On Hopkins/Hunter, it looks like this:

That’s pretty hard to see…. here’s just the field:

Anyway.

They want to build a santuary here. Sanctuaries are very expensive, though.

This brings us to Pennington Funeral Home!

Pennington used to be here:

right by Little HEB.

It just got demolished recently, to build some apartments. They’re looking to build their new home.

Pennington reached out to Sinai Pentecostal and offered build a joint sanctuary-funeral home on the field on Hopkins. This sounds like a great partnership!

Here’s the problem:

San Marcos gets two kinds of floods. In 2015, the Blanco river flooded. Since the Blanco and the San Marcos river converge, the San Marcos river backed up. Between these two rivers, there was a lot of flooding around Highway 80 and Blanco Gardens.

But back in 1998, it was Purgatory Creek that flooded. Across central Texas, 31 people died. I’ve heard that there were apartment complexes near the river where the second story flooded.

I couldn’t find photos specific to San Marcos – everything refers to it as the Central Texas Floods. But here’s footage of Purgatory Creek flooding during normal-ish minor flood in 2018.

The Sinai property is the most sensitive possible land for flooding – it’s not just a flood zone, it’s a floodway. Building there will make flooding worse.

The P&Z Meeting, September 22

The church and Pennington Funeral Home asked for a rezoning. Right now, the church can build a sanctuary, but they can’t have any commercial businesses, like Pennington.

This affects the amount of impervious cover: currently the church is allowed to build up to 30% impervious cover. If they get commercial zoning, they can up to 80% impervious cover.

P&Z took both sides very seriously:

  • the mission of the church, their decades of service to San Marcos, and this opportunity that they’ve prayed for
  • the risk of increased flooding to Dunbar neighborhood, directly behind the church.

One commissioner grew up in Dunbar, and recalled a little boy who died in a flood in the 1980s. She said that she could not, in good conscience, possibly approve something that could make the flooding worse.

P&Z denied the rezoning request.

(I literally emailed them afterwards to tell them I was impressed by how gracefully they handled this item.)

This week: Sinai and Pennington appeal to Council

A few facts to keep track of:

  1. Since P&Z denied the request, Council has to get 6 votes to overturn it. Otherwise the P&Z denial stays.
  2. Right now, the church is allowed to build a sanctuary, and they are allowed 30% impervious cover. It’s only Pennington that can’t join in, because they are a commercial business.

Finally: since the P&Z meeting, a new deal was struck – what if Sinai and Pennington agree to stay at the 30% impervious cover, instead of going up to 80%?

My reaction: this is great! This addresses the flooding, while allowing Sinai to partner with Pennington to build the sanctuary/funeral home. Win-win!

It did not go so neatly.

What does Council say?

Josh: They haven’t drawn up plans yet, right? It’s possible that the floodway may still prove to be impossible to build on?
Answer: That’s right. Getting the re-zoning is the first step, but this would still be a very tricky process.

Matthew: I’m really concerned about the VFW next door. They really are basically on a river bottom. I’m worried about toxic chemicals in the case of a flood. I’m willing to have faith and vote for this, but I ask them to think about the VFW.

Amanda: I’ve known Pastor Montoya since I was a child. This is tough.

  • I don’t like overriding the Comprehensive Plan
  • I’m worried the deal that is being proposed is not as enforceable as I’d like.
  • I’d feel better if it were a Restrictive Covenant.

I’m sorry, but I’m a no, under the current proposal.

Lorenzo: P&Z never saw the new proposal. They only voted on the proposal for 80% impervious cover. Why don’t we send it back to them? If they approve it, then we only need a simple majority, instead of a supermajority.

Everyone likes this idea. This seems to solve everything!

Sending it back to P&Z would delay the rezoning by about 5-8 weeks. Council asks Pennington: is that kind of delay okay with you guys?

Pennington: Actually, no. We’re terribly sorry. We’re renting temporary space and we absolutely have to move forward now, or else we’ll bail on this partnership altogether.

Well shit. Back to square one.

Amanda: I’d like to rescind my 2nd on the motion to send it back to P&Z. I don’t believe in jerking people around. If that will force Pennington out, then let’s not do it. Let’s make a decision tonight.

She then asks for a brief recess so that she can wrestle with her decision.

…

I have thoughts!

  • Maybe it’s okay – maybe there are six votes on Council, and Amanda can be the sole NO vote.
  • Amanda did say that she’d be okay with a restrictive covenant, instead of the current deal. Maybe that can be proposed tonight, and that’s how they get to six votes.
  • If Penningtons can’t handle a five week delay, how on earth will they make it through an entire construction process? There’s no way. As my grandmother used to say, “Double the costs and triple the time.” A five week delay is nothing.

Council goes in an entirely different direction.

…..

Back from recess, nobody seems to remember that Amanda had rescinded her 2nd on the motion to send it back to P&Z.

They go in circles for awhile longer:

  • Is Penningtons super duper sure that they can’t wait even five weeks? (Yes, they are super duper sure. No, they will not wait.)
  • Is the time schedule urgent for Sinai? (Yes, they need to plant trees in their prayer garden.)
  • Can we add teeth to the deal, and make it stricter? (Yes, but nobody actually proposes anything.)

So it’s time for Council to vote.

This is where we went off the rails: Council voted on… whether to postpone and send it back to P&Z?! Up until this moment, I thought it had been rescinded.

I was so baffled that I went back and double-checked, a day later. But yes:

Here is the outcome of the vote:

Knowing that Penningtons would bail on the deal, Council sent the rezoning back to P&Z anyway. I feel like I must have misunderstood something! This makes no sense.

Either:

  1. we killed the deal, by forcing Pennington out, or
  2. we called their bluff, rudely, and they’ll figure out a way to stick around, or
  3. I totally misunderstood the last few minutes of this item.

It’s a bizarre and unsatisfying outcome!

….

Item 9: SMPD Contract with Axon

This is the next strange and complicated item! This originally came up at the September 1st meeting.

Axon Enterprise is the Taser company:

Its initial product and former namesake is the Taser, a line of electroshock weapons. The company has since diversified into technology products for military and law enforcement, including body-worn cameras, dashcams, computer-aided dispatch software, and Evidence.com, a cloud-based digital evidence platform. As of 2017, body-worn cameras and associated services comprised a quarter of Axon’s overall business.[3]

They do not have anything to do with Flock or license plate reader cameras. But the kind of person who doesn’t like Flock is often also the kind of person who doesn’t like Axon. Axon is cop-adjacent. Also Axon does a lot of maybe-controversial business with the county.

More background:

Every time SMPD seizes a phone or a computer, they have to deal with all the data, files, and video. All that digital evidence need to be stored. It’s a wild amount of data. SMPD has a contract with Axon to buy cloud storage for digital evidence. They want to renew it for another year.

This first came up in September. Here’s what I wrote about it, back then:

Alyssa: there’s a bit in the contract about using data for product enhancement. Can we opt out of that?
Answer: Yes we can!

This will come back around with that provision.

Council postponed signing the contract, because of data privacy concerns. Now it’s back.

This meeting:

Alyssa and Amanda dig in:

  • We’re concerned that we contract with Axon for such a wide range of services.
    Answer: This is tied to the body camera footage. We’re already uploading that footage to them. Also the county uses Axon, which makes it easier to coordinate with them.
  • Is the data ours?
    Answer: Yes, we retain all control, etc.
  • What about the metadata?
    Answer: these guys are as secure as any of the other hundred online vendors that San Marcos uses. They may all have problems, but this is no worse?
  • What was the thing from last time, about using our data for product enhancement?

This last question is where things went off the rails.

Here’s the issue: in the contract it says, “Axon may retain data for purposes of improving the customer experience, unless you opt out.” Like I mentioned above, back in September, Council was like, “This is terrible. Please opt out.”

So Alyssa asks if we’ve opted out?
Answer: I think so!

Alyssa: I’m sorry. Could you point me to where we opted out? I just can’t find it.

It turns out that you have to click a link – https://www.axon.com/sales-terms-and-conditions – and then go to page 17, section 1.3, on their website, to get to this paragraph:

Opt Out
Customer may opt out of ACEIP Basic at any time via aceip@axon.com. Axon endeavors to implement opt outs within fifteen (15) calendar days. Transformations of Customer Content cease when Axon implements the opt out. Axon may retain Transformed Content created before it implemented the opt out request.

So we have absolutely not opted out. This is just a generic paragraph with instructions on how to do so.

Chief Standridge gets very defensive and says, “You didn’t tell me to opt out. You told us to come back with information. Which we did.”

Alyssa: Come off it. You didn’t come back with information. I had to pry it out of you. You know our constituents are mad about this. We’re trying to build trust here! You guys could have put this information in the presentation, instead of burying it.

Chief Standridge: the constituents could go back and listen to the first presentation and read the review form in the council packet.

Alyssa: The council packet is a billion pages long! Why wouldn’t you just make it easier for them?

Assistant City Manager Anderson: We’re very sorry.

Lorenzo: Don’t we have a current contract? It looks like we’re 10.5 months deep into one already. Why didn’t we ask you guys to go opt out of the current one?

Nobody has a good answer.

They discuss a few more things:

  • What happens if Axon goes out of business or we terminate the contract? (we have 90 days to download our data)
  • Do we really have 128 people who need access to the data? (yes)
  • What is the policy that governs how officers interact with Axon? (sort of in their manual)

Amanda makes a motion: As soon as possible:

  • Opt out of data retention for the current contract
  • Opt out of it for the new contract
  • Ask if we can reclaim old data from the past 10.5 months

The vote: should we opt out of letting Axon use our data and see if we can reclaim old data?

Shane Scott feels strongly that your data should be used for improving the customer experience!

Goddamnit, you know how he loves improving the customer experience. Don’t make him choose.

…

The overall vote: should we sign this contract with Axon for cloud storage of digital evidence?

So there you have it.

…

Item 21: Library and Parks and Rec Fees

The next thorny issue!

All fees automatically adjust yearly with inflation. But they’re also reviewed every three years to see if they make sense. Library and Parks and Rec fees are being reviewed.

There are a billion Library and Parks fees:

Library and park feesDownload

The proposed fees (in red) are based on a comparison study. The study tried to figure out:

  • What do our peer cities charge users for libraries and activity centers?
  • Can we recoup some of the cost to the General Fund?

Last time, Amanda asked that we postpone this item, and see if we could take the poverty statistics of San Marcos into account.

City staff brought back some information on the poverty rates of the comparison cities:

poverty statsDownload

(But they did not go back and propose different rates.)

Amanda: I’m really struggling with this. Is there no way we can review the fee increases in light of the poverty rate, compared to our comparison cities?

City staff: I mean, you all haven’t been willing to raise taxes in years.

Amanda: I’ve taken a lot of unpopular votes on taxes! I’m not willing to make up revenue by passing the costs on in the form of fees.

Amanda specifically calls out the Activity Center yearly membership fees:

“These rates are going up almost 50%!” she exclaims. “This is really going to hurt our residents!”

“Technically 41%,” says Lorenzo.

Amanda: How would you all feel about raising rates 5%?

Josh: Yikes. And we’d eat the other 36%?

Amanda: Ok, what if we split the difference, then? Go halfway between the adopted fee and the proposed fee?

Lorenzo: This works out to:

  • $111 for resident adults (for 1 year)
    $ 72 for resident seniors
    $ 55.50 for resident youth
    $ 180 for a resident family

Josh: Will this make or break the city budget if we do this?
Answer: No, not at all.

The Vote: Raise resident memberships by half as much as proposed?

Matthew was present, but chose to abstain. (He didn’t say why.)

Shane Scott really wants you to pay the MAX for your Activity Center membership. He’ll vote for lower taxes, lower impact fees for businesses, lower utility rates, but goddamnit, he’s got to draw the line somewhere: ACTIVITY CENTER!

Anything else?

Lorenzo: Are we really charging 20¢ for a black and white copy? The university charges a penny.
Answer: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The vote on the entire package of fee hikes:

I have no idea why Matthew voted no. He was entirely silent during the discussion.

…

Item 21: The Olympic Torch

The Olympics are coming to Los Angeles in 2028!

Whoops, that’s Paris. Anyway, the torch will go from Paris to Los Angeles.

Are we interested in being one of the cities along the way? Are we curious to learn more?

Josh: Hell yeah! I love the Olympics.

Amanda: Hell no! I’m lukewarm on the Olympics.

Jane: Seems like everyone agrees! So we’ll find out more.

….

Item 22: Centerpoint Road

There are two Centerpoint Roads. Some day they will connect, but right now they don’t.

Jane: It’s a problem for EMS when you have confusing names for roads. You don’t want emergency services to go to the wrong one.

  • I tried to get everyone to change the name back in 2022, before people lived on Centerpoint, but it didn’t happen.
  • Now there’s a whole apartment complex of people living out there. You have to get 50% of residents to agree, if you want to change someone’s address.
  • We really need to change the name now, before more people move there!

Amanda: Do we? Really?

Jane: Yes! If you have two roads with the same name, it’s a safety issue.

Amanda: I’m just thinking about staff time, determining if 50% of the residents want to change their address. And then all the residents would have a huge hassle: change their addresses on their license, all their bills, all their contacts, etc. What did EMS say?

Answer: EMS said they weren’t worried about it.

Lorenzo: What if we left the main Centerpoint as “Centerpoint”, and just re-named the La Cima one “West Centerpoint”? That way fewer people have to change their address.

Jane: That’s how it is, currently.

Lorenzo: Then what’s the problem?

Jane: I want to call the main one “East Centerpoint” and the new one “West Centerpoint”.

Nobody is following Jane on this.

Jane: When I google 1600 Centerpoint, it sends me to 1600 West Centerpoint.

City Staff: Why don’t we reach out to Google Maps, and get that fixed?

Everybody is on board with this.

Jane: Also do Apple Maps and Mapquest.

Staff: You got it, boss.

…

And with that, Jane closes out her last meeting as mayor.

Hours 0:00 – 1:35, 10/7/26

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment

No one spoke at the 6 pm Citizen comment! And just one person at the 3 pm:

  • We have two young daughters who love the library, but there are too many incidents with homeless people that make us feel unsafe. There was a guy sleeping in the entrance with his pitbull off the leash, and another guy with a knife on his belt.
  • I demand a safety action plan within 60 days or I’ll be back with more notes!

I will note that I am a frequent library user, and this does not match my experience.

But also: this is a great example of how everybody wins when we take care of homeless people!

  • Imagine if everyone had a safe home with air conditioning and space for their dog, and access to mental health services.
  • Imagine if there was a social work emergency line to call if someone is acting weird in the parking lot.
  • (Also I’d like a pony.)

Anyway: there is a lot of transition of leadership at the library right now, so I’m pretty sure there will not be a safety action plan within 60 days.

…

Items 1-2: Quarterly financial report and update:

How was the budget from March-June last year? Did we actually bring in the money we expected to, and did we limit spending to the amounts we expected to?

We did! Green is healthy. None of the funds are yellow or red. Great.

…

Item 17: New apartments on North LBJ

Suppose you’re heading north on LBJ, north of campus.

You pass Treff’s Tavern on the left, and Grins on the right:

You pass these apartments on the right, with the charming mural on the retaining wall:

And then you pass these apartments that I’ve literally never noticed before:

They’re fine! Totally nondescript. I’m told they were built in 1979.

What if there were bigger, better, and more urban apartments there?

A developer wants to tear down those vague brown buildings and rebuild shinier versions. This is partly because of the North Campus Area Plan: we’re being intentional about what parts of the city should feel walkable and urban. This is one of those areas.

Sadly I don’t have any renderings of what it might look like, but here’s the generic ideas from the city code:

The biggest difference is that the buildings will be by the sidewalk, and the parking lots will be in back. This is much nicer for pedestrians. It makes your street feel more like Sesame Street and less like a sad parking lot.

I’m guessing there is one other major difference. Zooming in to the photo above, of the current 1979 buildings:

Looks like there are nine total units there. I’m guessing the new building will have a lot more!

That’s fine! Building more housing is good, and this is a good spot for it. (It’s only going to be 3 stories tall, anyway.)

Great.

The vote:

Great.

…

Items 18-21: La Cima

Here’s La Cima:

It’s enormous. It was first approved in 2013.

The 2014 plan looks like this:

In 2026, the plan looks like so:

If you’re curious about the journey, go here.

…

It’s only partly built, so far:

This is the whole point of today: they want to start building out these red sections:

I don’t love La Cima very much!

I don’t love how residents pay an extra $1600-$2700 yearly, which feels like a property tax and contributes to the idea that property taxes are out of control, but is not actually a property tax and goes exclusively to La Cima. I don’t love the sprawl. I don’t love how these huge decisions get locked in, back in 2012, and last for decades. I don’t love how it’s over the aquifer, which is super environmentally sensitive.

That said, it’s not the absolute worst:

  • A lot of land was set aside for conservation, on the aquifer.
  • They are going to build apartments out there, so it’s not exclusively single family homes.
  • There are significant constraints on impervious cover.

Anyway: we’re 13 years deep into La Cima. Give that, today’s bit isn’t particularly controversial. They want to annex and zone those bits in red, above.

The four votes:

  1. Annex the northern bit (22:21, using time stamps in the lower left)
  2. Rezone the northern bit (30:52)
  3. Annex the southern bit (35:14)
  4. Rezone the southern bit (41:35)

Sure.

…..

Item 3: Meeting minutes

They’re approving the minutes to the September 15th meeting. Amanda flags some inconsistencies about what time people are recorded as being present.

It sparks a brief conversation about how the process for meeting minutes actually works. How do meeting minutes actually work?

It turns out: staff draws up the minutes, which then go to the Mayor, which then come forth to Council as a whole.

In the future, they’re going to bring Council the redlined version, so that everyone can see the revision process, and determine which version is most faithful to the meeting. (This matches the procedure that we use for other revisions, anyway.)

Great.

….

Item 16: Hays Caldwell Economic Development Partnership

There used to be something called Economic Development San Marcos, which was supposed to go out and court businesses and make life better for businesses. We used to give them $400k every year.

Now their name is the Hays Caldwell Economic Development Partnership, and we give them $200K per year, and we have an in-house economic development person who works for the city.

There’s going to be some changes coming next year. Right now, Hays county puts in $400k, and has less board representation than we do. It sounds like they’re frosty about this.

But for today: do we want the status quo for one more year, until the changes are proposed?

The vote:

Great.

…

Item 22: Habitat for Humanity

Back in the 60s and 70s, the city acquired this little lot:

For years, it was home to the Community Health Services Clinic:

In 2023, they announced they were vacating.

Shortly thereafter, Habitat for Humanity asked we had any properties that they could develop?

Council said:

  • don’t demolish the existing building
  • don’t spend one dime of city money

So they sold the existing building, and the buyer moved it a few blocks away. Great.

The city’s aerial photo shows that it’s gone:

but google maps hasn’t been updated yet.

Habitat for Humanity has a lot of rules, like the future owner (or a relative) must work on the house for 200 hours. (It’s called Sweat Equity.) If the owner sells the house in the future, it must stay affordable. If Habitat ever dissolves or the property stops being a Habitat property, it reverts back to the city.

It’s going to be a duplex. Sounds great!

…

Item 25: Arts Commission

Two vacancies on the Arts Commission get filled – congrats to Nancy Slitz and Steve Wilson.

Note: I usually don’t post when vacancies get filled. This is because it all happens out loud, and they mumble the last names, and then refer to the applicants by their first names. The names of the nominees aren’t written down anywhere (until the minutes get approved at a later meeting). So I’m usually stuck.

However: today they said the first and last names very clearly, and even spelled S-L-I-T-Z.

Hours 0:00 – 4:21, 6/16/26

by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

Citizen Comment

The biggest topic was the arrest and ICE imprisonment of Gerardo Reyes and SMPD treatment of his son. Five people spoke on this topic (including Gerardo himself, his wife, and his daughter).

Since the last meeting, Gerardo was released from ICE, but there’s still a lot of issues left:

  • Legal fees have piled up, the family has been traumatized, and they have lost 77 days of income
  • There was never any crime committed in the first place. The son was a minor and was treated inhumanely as well, and is still facing charges.
  • The officer has not faced meaningful consequences, despite evidence that he violated SMPD protocol
  • SMPD and San Marcos have stonewalled the family. Release the bodycam footage.
  • The family deserves apology, remedy, and transparency

(Petition and family GoFundMe if you’re so inclined.)

A few speakers on the Land Development Code:

  • Still a lot of concerns with data centers. The constraints on water and noise are insufficient, and you need a decommissioning process for when they fold and walk away.
  • Restrict electric and gas offsite generators to Heavy Industrial zones.
  • Regulate the sale of water to other communities
  • Form an environmental commission

Other topics:

  • The two El Camino Ways are very confusing. Please rename one of them until they are connected in the future.
  • Apartment complexes should not give the location of the complex on parking permits, for safety reasons.
  • Good job on the budget town hall. But the public did not show up. You should update the downtown cameras for safety.

….

Item 1: FM 1978 Water Treatment Plant

Let’s talk about indoor plumbing. You flush your toilet or wash your clothes, and the water goes down the drain. If you’re on city water, it flows down city pipes until it gets to a water treatment plant. The water treatment plant cleans up the dirty water, and then releases it into nature.

We’re getting a lot of development east of 35, so we need a new water treatment plant.

Here’s where it will be:

From what I understand, there are a few different kinds of water treatment plants. From worst to best:

  1. Multiple small package plants. These are bad because they cause algae blooms in the river.
  2. Regular water treatment plant.
  3. Reclamation water treatment plant.

We’re doing option 3! This means that we get gray water back out. You can use it to water a golf course or flush toilets or irrigate crops. It’s not clean enough to drink, but it replaces drinking water.

Eventually it will produce 2-8 million gallons per day. This is great! (It’s 100% bonkers that we use pure drinking water to water our lawns and flush our toilets. Or to cool a data center.)

…

This will be our second water reclamation facility. We already have one that’s been up and running for years.

Here’s some of the places that we already run gray water out to:

via

The Kissing Tree golf course, the Hays Energy power plant, and a lot of the irrigation downtown and at Texas State are all on gray water. This is great!

…

How much will this second water reclamation plant cost?

It’s not cheap. This is why City Hall will cost $80-100 million. It’s just expensive to build things.

Everyone thinks this is great.

…

Item 13-14: Student Housing

The neighborhood around Little HEB is kinda getting bulldozed.

Here are the student apartment complexes that Council has approved recently:

(2024 project:  Feb 27, April 2nd ,  April 16th,
2025 project: April 15th)

You can’t lower housing costs without an abundance of housing. But at the same time, it is a bummer to see a cool part of town lose its soul.

One other irritating thing: this is all the same developer. They hired Shannon Mattingly, who was the San Marcos Planning Director, and now they’re running the same playbook over and over again. It feels like we’re a buffet table for them.

Today they’re back for this piece:

I admit that it is a very good spot for apartments!

What’s there right now?

That main building is the Pennington Funeral Home:

Or rather, was the Pennington Funeral Home. (We’ve discussed how it has already been demolished.)

You see that little house to the right? The back half of it is white.

If you walk around the corner, this is the back half of it:

So this corner house and the yellow house behind it will be demolished, too. Or they already are!

…

Okay, fine. What’s going to get built?

They can already build apartments here. They can already sell them as rent-by-the-bedroom, as well. They do not need council approval for that.

However, they would like two perks:

  1. They would like to have up to 5 bedrooms per units. Right now they’re capped at 3.
  2. They would like to have 7 stories instead of 5 stories, so that they can fit in a lot more apartments. The height wouldn’t change.

Both of these mean that they can fit more students into one building.

In exchange, Council could ask for different things:

  • Make the building LEED-certified, which means more environmentally friendly
  • Make up to 10% of the units affordable housing
  • Make up to 20% of their units “workforce housing”, which means slightly less affordable but still below market rate.
  • Include a childcare facility, or retail space on the ground floor, or extra public park space.

Council could get creative! They have some cards to play here!

….

There is one extra important thing that Council cares a lot about:

In 2023, both Sanctuary Lofts and Vistas Apartments were sold to Texas State and converted to student housing. But Texas State doesn’t pay city taxes. So the city lost about $750K in yearly taxes, with this sale. Everyone was pretty salty about this.

Consequently, there is a condition that these new apartments can’t be sold to Texas State for 12 years.

….

For funsies, the developer made some drawings of what it might look like:

That’s nice!

…

What does Council say?

Amanda: I’m a no.

  • This doesn’t benefit local residents.
  • It doesn’t provide any affordable housing
  • A 12 year delay on selling to Texas State is not long enough.
  • We don’t have enough protections for tenants in place yet.

Matthew: I’m a yes!

  • Keep students next to campus, and away from our neighborhoods.

Nobody: Why don’t we ask for more concessions, like affordability, Leed-certified, or extra green space?

The vote:

(There were two separate votes – one for extra stories and one for 5 bedroom units. They both went the same way.)

…

My $0.02: I probably would have voted yes, but I think we should have asked for more concessions. We gave away too much in 2025, as well.

…

Item 10: back to Operation Triage

[Note: I got this story garbled when I first published it. I think the current version below is correct, now.]

A few meetings ago, Council was going to give some money to Operation Triage and Mission Able, for home repairs. The Mission Able part got derailed by one specific home owner, who told a harrowing tail of how her foundation repair became a nightmare.

Today, this item took about 30 seconds. Everyone just said, “We got everything squared away! We’re giving the money to Operation Triage. The home owner is getting help.”

The vote:

Lorenzo wasn’t convinced, I guess.

….

Item 17: Land Development Code amendments

Background: The Land Development Code is where all the detailed rules live that govern how things get built. Every few years, it’s time to make updates. Previously discussed here , here, and here.

Last time they passed 5 amendments, but they weren’t done with everything yet.

Today’s topics are:

  1. Banning Data Centers
  2. Alcohol permits downtown for bars and restaurants
  3. Signs posted to announce upcoming hearings
  4. Council overturning P&Z decisions on alcohol permits
  5. Regulating large scale electric and on-site gas generators
  6. Strike a weird bit about businesses being limited to corners

Let’s dive in! I’ll keep this brief-ish.

…

  1. Banning Data Centers

Backstory: Back in April, Amanda made a motion: all data centers should be banned in city limits.

The April vote went like this:

So it failed.

Council then spent two more meetings wheeling and dealing about how to regulate data centers. Do they get permitted from P&Z or Council? Which zonings are they allowed in? What regulations do we put on sound and water and electricity? Etc. Many hours were spent.

This meeting

So I was not expecting it, on Tuesday, when Lorenzo said, “I’d like to re-open the vote on whether to ban data centers.”

Clearly there have been off-screen discussions!

They spend barely 30 seconds debating it. Jane and Josh both say: “I’m a no. I’m hoping the technology gets better and so we can allow them without destroying the environment.”

Lorenzo: “I actually feel that way, too. But we can always go back and un-ban them.”

The new vote:

So there you have it: no data centers in the city limits.

All the wheeling and dealing clearly occurred outside of Council meetings. It was weird and mysterious.

…

Is this good? Some thoughts:

  • This is democracy! Residents of San Marcos do not want data centers! It is healthy for city council to reflect the will of the people.
  • The technology for sustainable data centers already exists. They can use reclaimed water for cooling and solar for electricity. Texas just isn’t willing to regulate businesses.
  • The data center problem isn’t a city problem. It’s a county problem. Counties can’t regulate data centers. The overwhelming majority of data centers are outside city limits. Until Texas law changes, the data centers are going to cannibalize central Texas.

As always, the problem with San Marcos is Texas.

…

2. Alcohol permits downtown involving food trucks.

Lord. We spend about 30 minutes listening to Jane go in circles. Back in May, she got flustered and upset about this topic and never really recovered.

The issue: do food trucks count as restaurants that can sell alcohol?

I keep deleting my explanations, because it’s truly too boring to read. Yes, food trucks count as restaurants that can sell alcohol.

In the end, they add a definition: mobile truck unit.

…

3. Signs for public hearings:

When there’s going to be a public hearing for an alcohol permit or a rezoning, you have put up signs like this:

via

except it says “San Marcos” instead of “Temecula”.

Up till now, the city has put them up. Should we have the applicant put them up, instead?

Council decides no. Double-checking the applicant’s work is more work than just doing it ourselves.

…

4. P&Z decisions for alcohol permits

P&Z grants permits to restaurants to serve alcohol. If someone doesn’t like the decision, they can appeal to Council. It takes a 6-1 vote to overturn P&Z.

This played out with Tantra in 2024. P&Z put a severe noise restriction on their CUP. (It was ridiculous.) Tantra went to Council, and there was a huge community outcry. Council overturned the decision.

Amanda wants to kill the supermajority requirement to overturn P&Z on alcohol permits, so that the Tantra situation can’t happen again.

The vote:

So it passes.

…

Note: I strongly disagree. This is bad governance. The Tantra situation was a very unusual edge case, and edge cases make bad policy.

Much more often, it goes like this: a business wants to renew their alcohol permit. They’ve been extremely negligent about paperwork. For example, they let their permit expire 8 years ago. P&Z puts some constraints on their permit to get them back on track.

The business says, “Wah! But I’m just a baby!” and calls up every member of Council to complain and piss and moan. Then Council reverses the P&Z decision, and lets them get away with negligence.

Listen – two things can be true:

  1. Sometimes P&Z makes crazy decisions that need to be overturned. (Tantra)
  2. Sometimes businesses are trying to use their connections to get out of consequences.

The second scenario happens WAY MORE OFTEN than the first scenario. But Amanda has now tilted the playing field towards those businesses. Boo.

(Also, it’s generally bad when a government body weakens a check-and-balance mechanism.)

….

4. Cleaning up weird code

There’s an odd clause all over the Land Development Code:

No one knows why it’s there and no one enforces it. So we’ve removed it.

…

5. Regulating gas and electric generators

Originally, this was part of all the data center discussions. Data centers all have large scale back up generators, which can cause a ton of pollution and noise and mess.

But now, we’ve banned data centers. Do we still want to regulate generators?

Answer: Yes. Someday data centers might be un-banned, or there could be another reason someone is using large scale power generation.

…

And with that, the Land Development Code updates are complete! Good work, team.

…

Item 18: Fire Station No. 3

This is Fire Station No. 3:

It’s down on Hunter Road, near Miller middle school and across from the HEB distribution center.

They’re getting an apparatus bay, workout/fitness room, storage areas, new driveways, and interior renovation. It’s costing about $5.6 million.

Someday soon, kids, it will look like this:

Great!

…

Item 21: City Hall Steering Committee

The whole 3 pm workshop was about City Hall. At that workshop, they decided to grow the steering committee.

The steering committee was originally chosen back in November 2024. Every councilmember picked two steering committee representatives.

It was the last meeting of Mark Gleason and Jude Prather. In a jerk move, council voted to let the outgoing council pick the members, rather than the incoming council. So Amanda and Lorenzo have never had representation, and new councilmember Josh does not either.

Now we’re fixing this. Amanda, Lorenzo, and Josh will each pick a steering two new committee members. The committee will get six new members.

Would YOU like to be on the committee? If so, you can apply here. Or you can just email Amanda, Lorenzo, and Josh directly, at arodriguez7@sanmarcostx.gov, lgonzalez@sanmarcostx.gov, and jpaselk@sanmarcostx.gov.

…

Item 22: El Camino Way

We’re going down just past the high school for this next one:

In that area, there’s a road called “El Camino Way”, which is partially built:

The problem is that the two halves of the road don’t connect. This causes all sorts of problems for delivery trucks and people using google maps.

Eventually they will connect! Some day. Just not today.

In the meantime, we’re going to pick a new name for the new one.

Some ideas:

  • Crested Cara Cara Way
  • Wild Wind Way
  • Old Johnson’s Farm Road
  • Heritage Road

Someone named Carla spoke at Citizen Comment, because she lives over there, and explained the whole situation to Council. She joked that Carlita’s Way would be a good name.

Everyone on council agreed! You can’t say this town doesn’t have a sense of humor.

P&Z gets to recommend a name. They can pick whatever they want, but Council’s gonna overturn them in favor of Carlita’s Way.

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!

    Hours 0:00 – 7:27, 2/3/26

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Citizen Comment:

    The biggest topic of the night is the data center. 12 people spoke:

    • 1 in favor
    • 10 opposed
    • One neutral board member from Crystal Clear Water, who says some interesting things.

    I’ll summarize everyone’s comments when we get to Item 11.

    Other topics:

    • The Teacher Re-use nonprofit in San Marcos sounds great.
    • San Marcos is busy, and needs more businesses!
    • Loose pit bulls attacked my dog and me, and neither SMPD nor Animal Control nor the animal shelter was willing to do anything about it.
    • The KZSM issue (2 speakers)

    The KZSM issue: KZSM 104.1 is the local non-commercial FM station in town. (They’re great! Check them out here!) As the speaker says, “We bring the voices, music and culture of San Marcos to the airwaves, streaming and podcasting.”

    The city used to also have it’s own radio station, KZOS. In 2022, the city agreed to shut it down and transfer the assets to KZSM. This was a big generous move, and everyone was happy.

    But the city didn’t finish the transfer. Like, it fizzled out and lost momentum? You can still listen to KZOS here, and the city is apparently still paying streaming fees and music licensing fees.

    The speakers say: “We have tried for more than a year to explain the facts to City staff, to ask them to correct the website and to keep its promise. That is, to transfer the hardware, software and music library to KZSM. That will turn off the KZOS stream… We could use the money the City is paying for this, since we have to pay these fees out of whatever we can get from donations.”

    I gotta say: I’ve never heard of KZOS and it’s wild that the city is running a tiny, redundant little radio station.

    …

    Item 9: Historic Preservation Plan

    Last time, community members had a lot of concerns about the plan. The plan has good details, but it is short on the implementation part. What’s prioritized? What’s first? Is this all going to get shelved and forgotten? Etc.

    Staff brought back a summary of all the complaints:

    Basically, they’re adopting all the red and blue comments. If you want to read all 39 pages of comments, knock yourself out, here.

    There’s going to be an oversight committee that governs the rest, and quarterly reports to Council.

    The vote:

    I think Matthew and Lorenzo did not yet trust the implementation process.

    If you’d like to read the plan yourself, enjoy it here.

    On we go!

    …

    Item 10:  Post Road and Uhland

    About a year ago, this little strip came to Council for rezoning:

    It was these eight plots of land:

    And the owner wanted to convert them to condos.

    Notice how the top corner lot is missing?  That brings us to today:

    There it is! It’s the missing corner lot. They want to rezone this corner to match the rest.  Great!

    Everyone is fine with this.

    ….

    Item 11: The Data Center

    Back story: Discussed previously here, here, here, here, here.

    Super short version:

    • March 2025: Maberry wants to rezone his land to build a data center.
      There is a huge outcry from the public. P&Z denies the rezoning.
    • August 2025: The rezoning goes to council.
      It needs 6 votes to overturn P&Z. Maberry only gets 5 votes.
    • January 2025: Maberry re-applied for his rezoning to P&Z.
      This time P&Z approves it.

    Now it’s back to council. No vote tonight – it is just a public hearing.

    Two notes:

    1. Every step of the way, there has been a massive outcry from the community. There are hours of citizen comments, town halls, letters written, etc. A lot of people are furiously opposed to this data center.

    2. There are a lot of data centers being built in Hays County.

    These are the local data centers I know about so far:

    1. Maberry, the one that Council will vote on.
    2. Carson properties, see below
    3. I don’t know who. These guys call it the “Doster property“
    4. Cloudburst Data Center (already being built)

    None of those, besides Maberry, can be stopped, because they’re all in the county.

    And here are the ones in Texas:

    About 400 so far.

    …

    Public Hearing:

    There are 14 more speakers: 3 in favor, 11 opposed. (Some speak twice.) I’m combining all the major points from earlier in the meeting and this public hearing.

    Here are the major points from the activists:

    • Data centers use an unbelievable amount of water. We’re in a severe drought.
    • They use a ton of electricity, and electric plants also use a lot of water
    • This is not going to create many jobs.
    • You’re ignoring the comp plan!
    • You’re ignoring hundreds of people.
    • It’s extremely difficult to win lawsuits against companies that use more water than they’re allowed to use.
    • This will cause ERCOT to grow the grid, which uses more water.
    • Crystal Clear Water is in water-debt and in financial debt. But they’re legally obligated to provide water that they literally don’t have.
    • This is a violation of the Land Development Code
    • The optics of this are horrible.

    And the arguments from the supporters:

    • These will be union labor jobs!
    • We’re willing to make lots of concessions. You can’t negotiate with any of the data centers in the county.
    • This petition thing is bullshit! (more below)

    One neutral person speaks: he is from the Crystal Clear Water Board. Crystal Clear is the folks who would be providing water to Maberry. He says:

    • Maberry claimed that he’s putting water use in the restrictive covenant, and that the water use is about half of what it would be if he built homes out there.
    • As a board member, I would like to clarify: he only has a residential use agreement. He’s not allowed to substitute for commercial, industrial, or agriculture uses. Strictly residential.

    …

    Two technical points that might swing this decision towards the activists?

    1. The waiting period.

    (There has been confusion about Council’s non-denial. If Council denies a rezoning, there is a one-year waiting period. However, Council did not technically deny the data center last August.)

    But there was a second technicality pointed out!

    This is from the Land Development Code, section 2.5.1.2.F:

    Maybe this does apply. Maberry did withdraw their zoning request after that meeting in August.

    2. The Valid Petition

    In Texas, there is something called “a valid petition“. This is a way for neighbors to prevent a rezoning. If 20% of the neighbors within 200 yards sign a valid petition, then the rezoning requires a supermajority at City Council.

    So this is what the neighbors have done.

    This might be a game-changer, because the data center can probably get 4 council votes, but not 6 council votes.

    One side note on the valid petition

    It is mostly signed by residents who own farms next to this site. But the last signature on the petition is not from a home-owner:

    Carson Properties signed the petition. They also want to build a data center, right next to Maberry.

    The home-owners are the ones who did the hard work of collecting signatures. But the petition definitely benefits Carson’s ability to build their data center.

    …

    Let me address the activism directly:

    The activists are in an impossible position, because Texas politics is very rigged:

    1. They care deeply about the environment and critical drought in central Texas. (Me too!)
    2. Data centers, as an industry, pose a real existential threat to the water resources in this state.
    3. Texas has entrenched systems that make it virtually impossible to fight the data center industry.

    This is a slow-motion trainwreck, and it’s really awful.

    Maberry is a lightning rod for all this activism and anger, because he uniquely made the dumbass decision to get his land annexed into the city. So out of 400 data centers in Texas, this one can be fought.

    A victory against Maberry is symbolic, but not much more than symbolic.

    Here’s what Council’s decision is:

    My two cents

    I am a little exasperated with the activists, because I don’t like extremely hyperbolic language. I hear lots of people overstating the situation – “people will die!” and “the river will run dry!” and “there is literally no reason to vote for this!” – and none of that is accurate.

    But far more than that, I’m angry at the state government. We’re in this no-win situation because they refuse to do their job.

    I think the real path forward probably involves following:

    • Legal battles from water districts who are legally obligated to supply water that they do not have.
    • Legal battles from counties that have no mechanism to regulate natural resources
    • Activists and environmentalists who are extremely concerned about the drought.
    • ERCOT needs to continue to transition to low-water energy sources like wind and solar
    • the Texas Water Development Board needs to step in to help coordinate all this.

    My sincere hope is that the activists see themselves as part of a much larger fight than just Maberry’s data center.

    What does Council say?

    Barely anything! There’s no vote tonight.

    Here’s where we are on the timeline:

    The big discussions and votes will happen on February 17th and March 3rd.

    That is when all the wheeling-and-dealing will take place. Stay tuned.

    …

    Sidebar: Valid petitions are also called Tyrant’s Vetos, and they are generally not good:

    Valid petitions are an obscure zoning procedure that have been used to try to obstruct a Dallas hospital expansion, student housing in Bryan, and Habitat for Humanity houses in Austin.

    Lefty groups generally do not like them because they are anti-democratic and a big NIMBY problem. They make it incredibly easy to block things (like affordable housing) that a city needs to support its residents. Last year, the Texas legislature fixed it to some extent.

    …

    Item 12: Rooftop on the Square

    This is one of those clubs on the square.  It’s located here:

    and looks like this:

    They first opened in 2012. Based on their webpage, it looks like this:

    It advertises “first class vibes”, and looks like a good place to get blackout drunk and get felt up.  Maybe that’s your jam!

    It is NOT the jam of P&Z.  

    So, the Rooftop first pissed off P&Z back in August, 2025. The Rooftop is technically a restaurant and not a bar. (Can’t you tell?) So they have a restaurant alcohol permit, not a bar alcohol permit. This means that they’re supposed to be selling at least a little bit of food and pretending that patrons are not merely trying to get blackout drunk.

    They were not selling any sort of food.

    Here’s how Code Compliance writes things when they are really fed up with a business:

    In August, due to all these shenanigans, P&Z gave the Rooftop a 3 month alcohol permit.

    They were supposed to:

    1. Get some sort of food service up and running
    2. Get that nasty health violation stuff cleaned up.
    3. Keep your nose clean for three months.

    December, 2025: they did not keep their noses clean!

    1. The food stuff is fine: first they worked out something with Bagel Bros, and then replaced Bagel Bros with a food truck.  Great!

    2. The health inspection stuff is so-so: they mostly got this stuff cleared up, but Matthew Mendoza toured the place and found it disgusting, even after they’d been working on it for awhile. He reported seeing these little buzzballz liquor bottles stashed all over the place:

    3. Did they at least keep their noses clean? No. They got NINE police calls during that same three month window. 

    To be fair, some of those were initiated by Rooftop staff. You don’t want to ding an establishment for calling the cops themselves. But the one that is a really big problem is Halloween weekend.

    If you remember, that was the night that a person was killed downtown. That killing did not specifically involve the Rooftop, but a bunch of other stuff did.

    So what did involve the Rooftop?

    Here’s the police report from that one night:

    Here’s the fire marshal report about why the Rooftop was shut down that night:

    The fire marshal said to the manager, “I can either close you down, or we can empty the place and count how many people leave.”

    The manager said, “Let’s empty the place out, and count!”

    No one can recall the exact number of people who came out of the Rooftop, but the fire marshal decided it needed to be closed down.

    Finally, and most damning of all, this police bit from after the shooting:

    I mean, dude. DUDE. You’re letting in underage dudes with guns in their pajamas! While you’re on probation! If you’re trying to smooth things over with the grown-ups at P&Z, this ain’t the way.

    Over the next few weeks, there was some mixed communication between SMPD and the manager, as SMPD tried to locate the Rooftop surveillance video for the night. It got automatically erased after seven days.

    Bottom line: due to all this, P&Z denied the alcohol permit.  No booze for you, Rooftop.

    …

    Which brings us to tonight!

    The Rooftop is appealing the P&Z decision. This means that it will take a supermajority of councilmembers to overturn the P&Z decision. In other words, it takes 6 votes out of 7 to overturn the denial.

    At the public hearing, there are four people from the Rooftop who all try to plead their case:

    • We’ve gotten LOTS of renewals since 2012!
    • Sometimes WE’RE the good guys who called the cops!
    • On that crazy Halloween night, all the bars were shut down, not just us!
    • We have metal detector wands and dress codes.
    • Listen, it was a mix up about the security video from Halloween night.

    And then there was the lawyer, who was mostly very repetitious:

    • This is arbitrary and capricious!
    • This is hearsay!
    • Quasi-judicial setting!
    • Not clear and substantial new evidence!
    • You can’t make decisions on emotions! P&Z does everything emotionally!

    She seemed to be mostly threatening to sue if they were shut down.

    Ok then.

    What does Council say?

    Matthew is a hard no: “When I toured your establishment, you all were very dismissive of all these problems. There were ball bottles stashed everywhere. There was a nasty patch in the kitchen that still wasn’t clean.”

    SMPD:

    • This was not arbitrary and capricious.
    • It’s not hearsay when it comes from a police report.
    • We were at the Rooftop because of a fight – not arbitrary nor capricious.
    • The fight spanned two locations.
    • They were the only bar closed for overcrowding, before the shooting. All the other bars were shut down because of the shooting.

    Manager:

    • We wand and pat down every person that enters!
    • Two separate lines for 18+, 21+
    • There’s a dress code! No baggy pants, no sweatsuits, no jerseys, no do-rags.

    Alyssa: Sounds a little bit racist!

    (I had that same thought.)

    Code compliance:

    • We flagged a LOT of problems in September.
    • Since then, they’ve been very cooperative. Almost everything code-related is cleared up.

    Lorenzo does his very Lorenzo thing, where he gets bogged down in overly technical amendments. “What if they try to outsmart us and serve food during the daytime and not serve food at nighttime? We should require two full time periods! No, we should limit their hours of operation! But what about the Superbowl on Sunday? Are they trying to pull a fast one on us?” None of this goes anywhere.

    …

    Other amendments that they consider:

    • Making the alcohol permit last 4 months. (this passes)
    • Make them 21 and up (this does not pass)
    • They must hire more off-duty cops (I don’t remember).

    At one point, Josh Paselk asks SMPD Chief Standridge point blank: “Can you all work with this business? Do you feel okay about them?”

    Chief Standridge: “We can work with ANYBODY. We will always do our best to keep the community safe! That said, the rest of the downtown businesses are sick of underage kids getting blackout drunk and puking everywhere.”

    I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but that’s the gist of it. The Downtown Business Association would like to see some accountability among the bar owners.

    Two hours later, the vote to restore the alcohol permit for the Rooftop:

    <drumroll…> (Remember it needs six votes to pass)

    That’s not a supermajority! IT FAILED.

    The Rooftop has lost it’s alcohol permit.

    ….

    How long until they can reapply and reopen? The city lawyer said he needed to stop and look it up, but then we never found out. It might be one year.

    (I hunted around the Land Development Code and couldn’t figure it out, either.)

    …

    Item 13: Whisper PDD

    Whisper PDD is this development, way up north:

    PDD stands for “Planned Development District” and it means that there are all sorts of fiddly rules about what they can and can’t do.

    What these guys want to do is….

    a FOURTH HEB?! what? Didn’t we just break ground on our THIRD HEB?

    Guys, this is like an embarrassment of riches. We’re going to be swimming in HEBs. You’re going to have so many high quality groceries from this good-hearted company, you’re not going to know what to do with yourself.

    Here’s where it will go:

    Everyone is a hard yes.

    Just one thought: they’re not going to try to shut down little HEB, are they? It’s so well-loved.

    …

    Item 5: New train bridge!

    Maybe you’ve noticed that we have a lot of trains in San Marcos. Here are the railroad lines through town:

    source

    This is why the trains sometimes completely stop – they’re merging or crossing tracks or avoiding another train.

    Here’s the south side of town:

    The tracks are running parallel to I-35. When there’s a train stopped, you have to go to Wonderworld to go over it (or find the end of the train and go around it).

    But change is a-coming! Good news, Centerpoint fans! YOU get a train bridge!

    You lucky dogs. Now don’t spend it all in one place.

    …

    Item 8: Downtown security

    SMPD is trying to keep downtown from spinning out of control on the weekends.

    They struck a deal with Texas State PD: Texas State is kicking in $150K to help pay for officers downtown.

    Just this once, though! It’s not an ongoing deal.

    …

    Item 15: Appointments to boards and commissions

    We were already six hours deep in the meeting, and I didn’t know any of the names of the people being appointed, and so I didn’t listen very carefully to this bit.

    Sorry about that!

    Hours 0:00 – 2:35, 1/20/26

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Citizen Comment:

    Only six speakers! (Contrast that with P&Z – about 100 speakers. We’ll get to that!)

    Topics covered:

    • Community Action is stoked about renewing the lease for the senior citizens center
    • Please postpone the Historic Preservation Plan
    • Oppression is violence. Your neglect is violence against us.
    • A list of names of people killed so far by ICE
    • Reappointing the chair of the San Marcos Housing Authority

    That was about it!

    ….

    Item 17: River Bridge Ranch PID

    River Bridge Ranch is way out here:

    It came up in December, here, when it shrunk to the new, smaller size.

    They want to put homes out here.   It’s part of this larger cluster of developments that have been in the works for years and years:

    I have never liked ANY of these, whatsoever.  They all fail four of the five criteria:

    Price Tag to the City: Will it bring in taxes that pay for itself, over the lifespan of the infrastructure and future repair? How much will it cost to extend roads, utilities, on fire and police coverage, on water and wastewater?

    Hard fail.  Cities lose money on remote developments.  The developer may cover the initial cost of infrastructure, but the longterm maintenance is on us.  Plus running fire, EMS, and police services way out there.  The property taxes will not cover the cost to the city.

    Housing stock: How long will it take to build? How much housing will it provide? What is the forecasted housing deficit at that point? Is it targeting a price-point that serves what San Marcos needs?

    It’s claiming to provide affordable starter homes. This is something that people want, yes.  

    Environment: Is it on the aquifer? Is it in a flood zone? Will it create run off into the river?Are we looking at sprawl? Is it uniformly single-family homes?

    Not on the aquifer. Somewhat close to the river. But it’s textbook sprawl, and sprawl is bad for the environment.  Most likely entirely single-family homes.  

    Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?

    Not meaningfully mixed income.  Not close to any schools or amenities.  Not walkable. Council gave away potential nearby commerce spots in 2023, in exchange for more sprawl. 

    The San Marxist Special: Is it a mixed-income blend of single family houses, four-plexes, and eight-plexes, all mixed together? With schools, shops, restaurants, and public community space sprinkled throughout? Is it walkable?

    Ha, no. 

    River Bridge Ranch also has a weird backstory.  Here’s what seems to have happened:

    2008:  There’s some 563-acre property called The Mayan Tract, and the owner wants to be annexed into San Marcos.  Martindale agreed to this.

    2014: New owners buy the property.

    2018: The new owners file a lawsuit to challenge the validity of the annexation.  Martindale joins the suit.

    2020: The suit gets settled in 2020.  This thing called a PID is formed as part of the settlement.  (We’ll get to what a PID is.)

    Max Baker described the settlement as “They strong-armed the city into forming a PID.” He was on council then, so he was there. But he also tends to use inflammatory language to describe things. So that may not be the universal opinion – I have no idea.

    2021: Lennar Homes purchased the land and they get the PID. 

    In other words, people have been trying to do something with this land for 10-15 years, unsuccessfully.

    …

    So what is a PID?  

    PID stands for “Public Improvement District”.  What this means is that all the home owners will pay a surcharge on top of their property taxes.  That extra money is used to make the neighborhood nicer. 

    Here’s how much people might pay:

    So that is on top of your regular property taxes, which is 65.15¢.

    I don’t love PIDs. They are a little bit of a shell game – you can list houses at a cheaper price, because you didn’t have to include the cost of the neighborhood improvements. Instead of paying extra on their mortgage, the homeowners will pay extra in yearly taxes.

    It’s fine as long as all home-buyers are perfectly wise and have access to enough wealth. Late-stage capitalism, eh?

    Why is this coming to council?  

    Lennar Homes wants to change the terms of the PID.  They want to reduce the size to match the new smaller footprint, and then increase the dollars.  

    The new size:

    (Also discussed in December.)

    The new PID budget:

    Like I said earlier, I think this project is terrible sprawl. It will cost the city more to maintain services out there than we’ll bring in, in property tax revenue.  

    No vote tonight. The PID changes will get voted on at the next meeting.

    ….

    Item 18. San Marcos Historic Preservation Plan

    We’ve seen it before, back in October. We’ve been working on this for awhile:

    They tried hard to get community input:

    What’s it supposed to do?

    Great! What else?

    • If we adopt this plan by mid-February, we qualify for a $5K grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
    • We’re out of money, anyway. We’re using some consultants and we’ve given them just about the whole sum.

    HOWMEVER!

    The letters have been coming in, and people have a lot of complaints.

    Here’s what I gathered: What’s here isn’t bad, but it doesn’t give a clear roadmap of how to proceed.
    – What should be prioritized?
    – What’s the order of operations?
    – How do we implement this big list of lofty ideals, on a shoestring budget?*

    Staff protests that they’ve had a TON of outreach, and that these complaints can be addressed, even if we pass the plan first. They seem worried that this will drag out forever.

    Bottom line: Staff is going to compile a comprehensive list of all the proposed changes, and try to categorize them as short term or long term, and bring it back.

    * Hat tip to Ryan Patrick Perkins for walking me through this.

    ….

    Item 19: Rezoning

    This church is right by campus:

    It’s used by Christ Chapel and United Campus Ministry currently.

    It’s right between campus and mini-Target:

    It sounds like it will be a 6-story apartment complex, owned by the church, with church things on the ground floor.

    The minister gives his pitch:

    • The church is going to keep owning the property. We won’t sell it.
    • They’ve thought hard and long about this
    • It’ll be great!
    • If we don’t get this rezoning, we’d have to sell it. Who KNOWS what you’ll get!

    Will the old church building itself get torn down? No one asks this question. I assume it’s a goner. (Maybe they’ll let the new building eat the church, like Sanctuary Apartments did, a few blocks over?)

    What do I think? Let’s check the five criteria!

    Price Tag to the City: Will it bring in taxes that pay for itself, over the lifespan of the infrastructure and future repair? How much will it cost to extend roads, utilities, on fire and police coverage, on water and wastewater?

    Very low cost to the city – this area is all built up and well-supported already.  I don’t know if it will bring in much tax revenue, because it’s still owned by the church.  But no concerns here.

    Housing stock: How long will it take to build? How much housing will it provide? What is the forecasted housing deficit at that point? Is it targeting a price-point that serves what San Marcos needs?

    I have no idea on any of this.  It’s a pretty tiny lot.

    Environment: Is it on the aquifer? Is it in a flood zone? Will it create run off into the river? Are we looking at sprawl? Is it uniformly single-family homes?

     All of Texas state is uphill of most of San Marcos, and it’s mostly paved over.  The pre-existing situation is terrible for flooding.  This does add more pavement. 

    Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?

    Extremely walkable and close to the university.

    The San Marxist Special: Is it a mixed-income blend of single family houses, four-plexes, and eight-plexes, all mixed together? With schools, shops, restaurants, and public community space sprinkled throughout? Is it walkable?

    Well, no, but you wouldn’t really put a San Marxist Special in the middle of downtown. 

    On the whole, I’m fine with this! You want density in your downtown.

    The vote: 7-0.

    …

    Item 12: Hays County Senior Citizens Center

    This little Senior Center is run by Community Action:

    It’s tucked away in Victory Gardens:

    They do a lot of great things!

    They lease the building from the city. It’s time to renew, for another ten years. It’s an old building, so they’ll let us know if there are any concerns on the walk through.

    Great!

    …

    Item 20: Bitcoin scams

    What’s the opposite of a warm, nurturing senior citizen center? Maybe scamming old people with a bitcoin ATM?

    Apparently there are Bitcoin ATMs:

    You can buy and sell cryptocurrency on these.

    Google tells me they’re all over San Marcos:

    As a crotchety old Marxist, I don’t like it. But here we are.

    Apparently the scammers are here, too:

    We’re going to require stores to put little warning signs by all the BTMs, saying “hey! Here’s some red flags that you might be getting scammed!”

    It’s better than nothing, but wouldn’t it be nice if we had a functional federal and state government that cracked down on predatory scams?

    [Sidebar: I don’t understand how bitcoins are untraceable. Isn’t the whole point that it’s a block chain that grows a little bit longer with every transaction, recording its whole history of where it’s been so far?]

    …

    That’s it for the regular meeting! Now comes the spicy stuff.

    Hours 0:00 – 1:17, 12/2/25

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Citizen comment:

    There were 12 speakers, and only one topic: Flock Cameras

    • 10 people: they’re authoritarian and hijacked by ICE. Hard no.
    • 2 people: they keep us safe! yay cameras.

    Lots and lots of details when we get to that item.

    …

    Item 10: The Downtown TIRZ

    TIRZ stands for “Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone”.   What this means is that we’re going to put more resources into a fixed area.  TIRZ #5 is the Downtown TIRZ.

    Here is the boundary of it:

    Boundary of the Downtown Tirz goes from Texas State, through downtown, to I-35

    Here’s how a TIRZ works: First, you fix a baseline year. For the downtown, it’s 2011. Back then, the whole region had a taxable value of $103 million.  

    San Marcos always gets to keep the taxes on  $103 million.  But the value of the land keeps growing. San Marcos agrees to split the taxes 70-30 on all the value added above $103 million, until the TIRZ runs out. (Hays County is also part of the deal.)

    So in 2025, the land is now worth about $550 million. San Marcos keeps the taxes on the $103 million base, and then splits the taxes on the other $447 million. All told, the TIRZ gets about $1.2 million from San Marcos, and another $600K from the county, in 2025.

    What does the TIRZ do with the money? The rules are that they have to spend it all on enhancing the downtown, which is supposed to increase its tax value all over again.

    Today they’re adding a little bit extra to their plan. Here’s what they want to do:

    The TIRZ expires in 2027.  After that, the city keeps all the tax revenue on that district.

    Fine! Everyone likes it.

    …

    Item 12:  Rezoning 24 acres on Wonderworld and 123.

    Here’s a little patch of land:

    Here’s what it looks like if you’re going south on 123, on the Wonderworld overpass:

    The developers want to make it CD-5.

    What is CD-5?

    In theory, CD-5 is supposed to feel like a cozy, dense downtown area where you have shops and apartments and all kinds of nifty things, kinda like on Sesame Street:

    But inevitably, it always ends up looking like this:

    Relentlessly giant apartment complexes. 

    …

    What about some stores and restaurants?

    I’m not actually opposed to giant complexes! Housing is great.  But this intersection is a great spot for some stores and commerce, no? It’s a constant drumbeat that the east side needs more commerce.

    Jane brings this up:  “Will you all put in some commerce?”

    Developer: “Who can say? We’re so mysterious!” 

    Jane: “It would be really great.”

    But then no one on Council actually does anything.

    COUNCIL!! You have powers!  There are zoning overlays and Planned Development Districts, where developers agree to make some portion of a development into commerce.  

    But here’s Council:

    So Council just tells the developer, “Fingers crossed! Thoughts and prayers for commerce!” and leaves it at that.

    ….

    Is this re-zoning a good idea? Let’s be a little systematic about it:

    Five Questions For New Developments

    Price Tag to the City: Will it bring in taxes that pay for itself, over the lifespan of the infrastructure and future repair? How much will it cost to extend roads, utilities, on fire and police coverage, on water and wastewater?

    There’s a lot of development around this already, and this will be dense.  This is a good financially for the city. A+

    Housing stock: How long will it take to build? How much housing will it provide? What is the forecasted housing deficit at that point? Is it targeting a price-point that serves what San Marcos needs?

    We’re still in a housing deficit, and more housing is good.  So I’m fine with this.

    Environment: Is it on the aquifer? Is it in a flood zone? Will it create run off into the river?Are we looking at sprawl? Is it uniformly single-family homes?

    Not environmentally sensitive, not a flood zone. And it won’t be sprawl, because CD-5 has to be dense.  So doing well here, too.

    Social: Is it meaningfully mixed income? Is it near existing SMCISD schools and amenities?

    I doubt it will be meaningfully mixed income.  Developers don’t care.  It drives me crazy though – wealth segregation is a societal problem.   

    It is very close to two elementary schools, Goodnight middle school, and SMHS, and also Bonham pre-K.   There are some restaurants near those schools. 

    The San Marxist Special: Is it a mixed-income blend of single family houses, four-plexes, and eight-plexes, all mixed together? With schools, shops, restaurants, and public community space sprinkled throughout? Is it walkable?

    This is literally what CD-5 should be.  A Marxist blogger can dream.

    My $0.02: If I were on Council, I’d push hard for a zoning overlay that guaranteed some commerce. But if that was impossible, I’d vote yes, anyway.

    …

    The vote on rezoning:

    Everyone: YES!

    No one: no. 

    So there you have it. 

    …

    Item 6: Mural at the Price Center. (Cousin to Panic! at the Disco.)

    This item is peak ridiculous, in all the best ways. This is why I love local politics: everyone’s a regular person, and regular people are totally absurd.

    This is the Price Center:

    It’s right behind Tantra, facing San Antonio St:

    It’s mostly a public event space – there are concerts and shows inside, people rent it out for parties, there are market days where you can buy stuff from vendors, etc.

    Here’s the front steps:

    No one ever uses this entrance.  You walk around through the garden to go in.

    Today’s item is about a mosaic mural to go on the front steps.  In other words, it’s a single picture that will be cut into strips, and go on the risers, like this:

    Maybe you’ve seen a photo of the proposed mosaic! If you haven’t yet seen it, I’m going to withhold it until the end of this item, for maximum comedic value.

    Because this is what Jane Hughson posted to the message boards ahead of time:

    This mosaic definitely involves cacti, and Jane is NOT a fan. 

    During the meeting, Jane brings up more points:

    • The mural is beautiful! But the cactus? Hard no. 
    • We’re trying not to have spiky plants like yucca downtown, because they are hazardous if someone falls in them.
    • We’re not Arizona. Feh, Arizona!
    • Cacti are prickly and unwelcoming.

    Lorenzo agrees: it does hurt to fall in a cactus.

    City Staff:  Some artists like cacti!  It’s subjective.

    Amanda:  Cacti stand for our cultural heritage in Mexico!

    Alyssa: I love ’em. Also they’re delicious.

    Shane:  If we asked the artist to take out the cactus and re-do it, and they said no, what are the sunk costs? 
    Answer: $1000.

    Saul: I guess I’m a yes, because I don’t want to waste $1000.

    …

    ARE YOU READY TO SEE SOME CACTI?

    Pause for a second.

    Before you see it, I want you to picture an unwelcoming, prickly mayor cactus.  Get a good visual image in your head, before you scroll down.   What kind of cactus would be too hostile for the front steps?

    ⋮

    ⋮

    ⋮

    Ready?? 

    ⋮

    ⋮

    ⋮

    ⋮

    ⋮

    ⋮

    ⋮

    ⋮

    READY??

    ⋮

    ⋮

    ⋮

    Here’s the proposed artwork:

    Guys. GUYS. It’s so beautiful.  It’s mostly prickly pear flowers, more than anything else.  There’s nothing remotely hostile here.

    This is the mural that we almost killed for being too prickly!  What a world.

    ….

    The vote on the beautiful mural:

    Yes, we love it!! :  Amanda, Alyssa, Saul, Shane, and Matthew

    Ow, thorns: Lorenzo, Jane

    So there you have it. Small town politics, eh?

    Hours 0:00 – 2:04, 11/18/24

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Citizen Comment:

    There were five people who showed up to talk.

    Tonight’s the night that Council determines their HSAB grants, and so almost everyone speaking was representing nonprofits – one speaker from School Fuel, and three from Southside. I’ll save it for that item.

    One last speaker talked about Meet and Confer, and whether or not it was okay for Council to make recommendations to the negotiators who represent the Council in the negotiations.

    …

    Item 13: Rezoning a little street in Blanco Gardens

    Here’s Blanco Gardens:

    It’s a very cute old neighborhood with gorgeous trees.

    Here’s a close-up:

    Blanco Gardens has come up a lot over the years in the blog. They were ground zero for the 2015 floods, and they’ve gotten some some flood mitigation projects since then. They got some speed bumps and parking permits. Most recently, they were the first neighborhood to get its neighborhood character study. It’s also the closest neighborhood to Cape’s Dam.

    For an old neighborhood, there’s a surprising amount of undeveloped land in the middle of it:

    (I wondered briefly if that was because homes had been torn down after the floods. But nope, you can see on the 2014 satellite image that there’s just always been space there for years.)

    Over the years, developers have occasionally tried to put something in part of it, but so far it’s always gotten nixed.

    Today’s proposal is about this bit:

    A developer wants to build houses on it.

    They would look and feel like duplexes, but they’re technically different, because of how they can be bought and sold. The property line runs through the two halves of the house, so you can purchase one half of it, while someone else owns the other half. (It’s called a “zero lot-line house”.)

    Basically it’s a good way to fit more, smaller homes onto a street, and they tend to be a little cheaper, too.

    What does Council say?

    Question: will fit the character of the rest of the neighborhood?
    Developer answer: We have good intentions!

    (One block over, there are some extremely modern houses. The neighborhood is salty about this.)

    Question: Will the alley still exist?
    Answer: nope.

    …

    Nobody really asked about flooding. The 2015 floods are starting to fade from memory for the rest of San Marcos. But not in Blanco Gardens – they were the epicenter of the floods.

    I would have liked to know what the 2015 flood water line was for nearby houses – I bet it was about 3-4 feet of water deep. How elevated will these houses be? Will they be above the 2015 water line?

    My memory is that, in a 100-year flood plain, you have to build 1-2 feet above the Base Flood Elevation, based on FEMA flood maps. Does that get you to 3-4 feet off the ground? I just don’t know.

    …

    The vote on this cute row of sorta-duplexes:

    Yes:  Everyone
    No:  nobody

    The good news is that Council is enthusiastic about infill housing. (When I first started blogging in 2022, Council wouldn’t let a home owner build two small houses on a subdivided lot, on Lockhart street. That was crazy.) They’ve definitely gotten the message that San Marcos needs more housing.

    As long as the homes are safely elevated, I’m okay with this project. But the flooding risk makes me very uneasy.

    …

    Item 14: HSAB Funding

    HSAB stands for Human Services Advisory Board.

    These are city grants to nonprofits, for things like food assistance, eviction prevention, domestic violence help, mental health services, etc. For the past few years, we’ve given out $500K in grants. This year, Council bumped it up to $750K. (Of course, federal funding has gotten slashed, so the need has also grown. THANKS OBAMA.)

    It’s always a grueling process. All the nonprofits all do incredibly important work.

    In the past, we kinda made non-profits cagefight against each other. [Read all the gory details for the past few years.] The process was murky. The recommendations would come to council, and council members would start horse-trading around.

    It was a bad look! It always seemed very fickle – “Oh, we’ll take $20,000 from those guys and give it to these guys!” It felt like the main criteria was being friendly with council members.

    We’ve been working on tightening the process. It’s a super time-intensive:

    • the HSAB board meets weekly from August to October
    • They hear presentations from all 32 applications
    • Each one gets discussed and each board member ranks them on a bunch of different criteria
    • Eventually they recommend how much of each request to fund.

    Here’s the criteria:

    After all the ranking and discussion, they bring it to Council.

    …

    Just for funsies, let’s add up how much other non-HSAB money is getting allocated in this meeting!

    All this was approved in one single vote, on Tuesday:

    • “On-Call Title Research Services Contract with Hollerbach & Associates, Inc., to increase the price by up to $200,000.00, resulting in a total contract amount not to exceed $299,999.00”.
    • “RMO P.C. for legal services associated with land acquisitions to increase the price by up to $300,000.00, resulting in a total contract amount not to exceed $699,000.00”.
    • “Change in Service to the agreement with Baker Moran Doggett Ma & Dobbs, LLP for legal services associated with land acquisitions to increase the price by up to $300,000.00, resulting in a total amount not to exceed $600,000.00”.
    • “STV Incorporated to provide On-Call General Engineering Services for various projects in the amount of $900,000.00”.
    • “Halff Associates, Inc. to provide On-Call General Engineering Services for various projects in the amount of $900,000.00”.
    • “a 2025 Ford F550 Crew Cab Chassis from Rush Truck Center, through a Sourcewell Purchasing Cooperative Contract, in the amount of $82,043.63, and outfitted by E.H. Wachs, through a BuyBoard Contract, in the amount of $156,865.65, for a total purchase cost of $238,906.28”.
    • “SHI Government Solutions, through Omnia Partners, for a City of San Marcos job application tracking software system in the annual amount not to exceed $112,000.00, and up to four one-year renewals with a total amount of $560,000.00”.

    It comes to about $2.95 million. I’m not saying any of those were a mistake! I trust the city officials. Most likely, those are all totally reasonable.

    I’m just pointing out who gets scrutinized, in society, and who doesn’t. We approved almost $3 million without blinking, when it goes to those contracts above. But if it’s hungry kids, homelessness, mental health emergencies, etc, we rigorously grind these applications into pulp.

    …

    Back to the grant grind!

    There were 32 applications, and the total amounts requested added up to $1.2 million.

    Here’s the full list of scores and funding:

    In the presentation, they went through all of them, and why the committee might not have fully funded the request.

    For example:

    The rest of their thoughts are on pp 435-437, here.

    They were very thorough.

    …

    Back to Citizen Comment

    Three speakers from Southside show up to talk. Here’s what they say:

    Southside is in a funny position. In 2024, the city gave Southside $800K of Covid money to implement a Homeless Action Plan.

    They came up with a plan and put in all the work to get it up and running. Now they’re trying to sustain it over time. They asked for $100K from HSAB, but were only granted $50K.

    The $100K is for their homeless prevention program – giving families $1000-2000 to get through a one-time financial crisis, so that they don’t get evicted.

    …

    Let the horse-trading begin!

    Matthew kicks it off. He wants to try to get Southside back up to the full $100K that they asked for, for homelessness prevention.

    Matthew proposes:

    • Take $4500 from Rough Draft
    • Take $5000 from Lifelong Learning
    • Take $10,000 from Hill Country MHMR

    Give that $19,500 to Southside.

    Ok, what are these things?

    Rough Draft:

    Their funding would go to $0.

    Lifelong Learning:

    Ok. Their funding would go from $9000 to $4500.

    Hill Country MHMR

    Their funding would go from $60,000 to $50,000.

    ….

    What does Council think?

    Question: How many people would Southside be able to help, with this $19K?
    Answer: About ten families. Average cost to stabilize someone after a financial emergency is $2k.

    It’s actually a huge bargain. If they’d been evicted, it would cost $15-30K+ to stabilize a family once they become homeless. (Plus, y’know, becoming homeless is awful. This is way more humane for the families.)

    Question: Are you all applying for other grants?
    Answer: SO MANY. Funding is scarce, and federal funds have been slashed.

    Alyssa: The entire premise of horse-trading these dollars is problematic. Most agencies didn’t send someone here tonight to answer questions. We don’t have context and expertise. This is haphazard. I am not on board with any of this.

    Amanda: Matthew, what about moving some money from the School Age Parents Program? They said they’d be able to keep the program open on $7,500, but they’re being awarded $15K.

    Matthew: How dare you. Abso-fucking-lutely not!

    [I’m paraphrasing. Matthew just said something like, “They do great work!”.]

    Amanda: I’m trying to throw you a bone here!

    Matthew: Hard no.

    Amanda: Well, I’m a no on Hill Country MHMR especially. Their work is desperately needed. We are in a mental health services desert, and this program will fund teenagers without insurance.

    Alyssa: I’m a NO on all of this, but especially NO on Hill Country MHMR. Homelessness and mental health are completely intertwined. There’s so much need here.

    The votes are each held individually:

    1. Move all $4500 from Rough Draft to Southside Homelessness Prevention?

    Yes: Matthew, Jane, Amanda, Lorenzo, Saul

    No: Alyssa, Shane

    2. Move $5000 from Lifelong Learning over to Southside?

    This motion dies without getting a second. So it never comes to a vote.  That kinda surprised me.

    3. Move $10K from Hill Country MHMR over to Southside?

    Yes:  Matthew

    No:  Everyone but Matthew

    4. Amanda throws in a vote on the SMCISD School Age Parents Program:

    They get $15K.

    Should we take $5K from them, and give it to Southside?

    Yes: Amanda, Saul

    No: Matthew, Lorenzo, Alyssa, Jane, Shane

    So that fails.

    ..

    Me, personally: It’s an awful decision to make. I probably would have taken money from Rough Draft, Lifelong Learning, and maybe SMCISD School Age parents. But not Hill Country MHMR.

    ….

    So that’s where it lands. Southside picked up $4500 more, and Rough Draft went to $0.

    The final official vote on HSAB funding passes 7-0.

    …

    One more note!

    We just spent $750K on the poor and vulnerable.

    But we also spend $1.1 million on tax breaks to home owners every year:

    About 30% of San Marcos owns their own home. That $1.1 million is just for them.

    Also, remember that Kissing Tree is keeping $46 million of San Marcos tax dollars, for nice streets and trees that are then gated off from the rest of San Marcos! You can’t go visit the tax dollars. Sorry.

    This is why I get cranky about this:

    People who want to slash property taxes never seem to appreciate how much of their own lifestyle is being subsidized.

    ….

    Item 19: Dunbar Recreation Center

    Dunbar was named for Paul Laurence Dunbar. He was the first black poet to get widespread recognition. (He was not from San Marcos in any way. He’s from Ohio.)

    Here’s one of his poems, from 1895:

    via

    Originally, the Dunbar neighborhood did not have a specific name, besides being called “the colored neighborhood”. The school was called The Negro School. In 1961, that was renamed after Paul Laurence Dunbar, and then gradually the whole neighborhood came to be known as Dunbar. So the Dunbar Rec Center just got the name “Dunbar”.

    Would we like to include the poet’s full name here? Everyone says yes.

    Great!

    Lots of interesting history on the Dunbar neighborhood here and here!

    ….

    Item 20-21: Jorge’s Mexican Restaurant.

    Jorge’s is on Hunter Road:

    Separately, Miller Middle School is on Foxtail Road:

    Their front doors are far apart:

    …but they share a back fence.

    This causes all kinds of problems for Jorge’s, because there are extra-strict rules for selling alcohol within 300 feet of a school.

    This means that Jorge’s has to do a lot more:

    • Renew their alcohol permit every year, instead of every three years like everyone else.
    • Renew their distance variance every year, which grants them an exception to the 300 foot rule.

    The main problem is the fees – both of those cost $750, so Jorge’s is paying $1500 every year.

    Why is it so expensive?!

    Mostly because of postage. The city has to notify everyone within 400 ft. The rest of the cost is to cover staff time, to process the paperwork.

    Everyone wants to at least refund half of Jorge’s fees, since the city can save costs by processing both the alcohol permit and distance variance at the same time.

    They’re going to try to come up with a long term solution, too.

    Hours 0:00 – 3:04, 9/2/25

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Citizen Comment:

    Some years, citizens get fired up and angry at the budget. This year was the opposite. 

    Three people spoke on the budget, and they all praised council for increasing funding for the Human Services Advisory Board. (HSAB grants are how the city helps fund all the nonprofits that help kids, people in poverty, vets, the elderly, etc.)

    It was pretty short!

    …

    Items 20-24:  Welcome to our $371 million dollar budget!

    It’s budget time. So far this year, we’ve talked about this back in February, then in March, again in May, and just now in August.

    We’ve got several big problems:

    1. We’re bringing in less money from sales tax and property tax.

    Sales tax peaked in 2023 and hasn’t returned.  Property taxes have been flat.  Actually, they’ve gone down on existing properties, but they’ve been propped up by new builds. 

    (That slide is from the May workshop.)

    1. Everything is more expensive, due to inflation.

    City department budgets were flat two years ago. This past year, they cut $100K collectively.  But everything is getting more expensive, so even holding things flat means you have less purchasing power.

    1. The State Legislature is always, always trying to knee-cap cities:

    This past session it was House Bill 73 and Senate Bill 10. City staff implied that there were a few others. All of these cap city spending or cap city taxes.

    The concept isn’t new – we already have caps on tax hikes. But these new bills are brutal in their severity.

    All these bills were still up in the air last Tuesday, when city council met. Since then, the special legislative session ended. As far as I can tell, none of these passed? But Abbott could always call a 3rd session, or these could return in 2027. So this is always looming.

    (Can you imagine how relaxing it would be if our state government wasn’t so hellbent on wrecking Texas cities?)

    1. We have three HFCs that are tied up in the courts

    “HFC” stands for Housing Finance Corporations. These didn’t used to be scams, but they’ve become scams. For example: “Pissed” city leaders urge lawmakers to close loophole costing millions in tax revenue.

    We’ve got three apartment complexes that were purchased by HFCs, and we’re losing about $630K in tax revenue from them.  (They’re tied up in lawsuit appeals, so it could still tip our way.)

    1. There are almost $4 million worth of new expenses that are kicking in soon, over the next 1-2 years.

    The ones with the checkmarks were funded from federal Covid money, which is expiring next year.

    6. Council also has some new priorities, which cost money:

    • Increasing HSAB funding by $200,000
    • Increased funding for tenants rights and tenants legal support
    • Start an office of community support and resource navigation.
    • Probably more that I’m not remembering

    …

    Because of all this, tax rates are going up.  

    I mean, we don’t really have a choice, right?

    If you own a $365K house, here’s how it affects you:

    If you own a smaller house – say $200K assessed value – then you’d pay like so:

    Last year: $1,115 per year, or $93 per month.
    This year: $1,252 per year, or $104 per month.

    We always focus on home owners here, because it’s easy to compute their tax costs. But rest assured: landlords cover the cost of property taxes by passing it on to their renters.

    My back-of-envelope estimate is that an average renter pays about half as much: $640 per year towards their landlord’s property tax bill, or $53 per month.

    …

    Your utilities are also going up:

    This is mostly based on CUAB recommendations. CUAB stands for Citizens Utility Advisory Boards.

    Basically, if you don’t raise rates for a few years, you’ll get into a big financial hole. Then your bond ratings tank and it gets more expensive to borrow money, and you’re in even bigger financial trouble. To get out of it, you’d have to shock the community with a giant rate hike in order to right the ship.

    So the idea is that it’s better to nudge prices up gently every year, to keep up with inflation. CUAB is the one that has to figure out the new rates. This is that.

    …

    One funny detail: The goal is to stabilize our budget going forward. We could have scrapped by this year, but then we’d be in a big hole next year. The looming expenses will kick in, and we’d have to raise taxes a lot, or cut services significantly, to handle it.

    But because we’re being proactive, we actually will have $1.3 million of breathing room in the meantime.

    City staff went to all the city departments, and asked about things like deferred maintenance projects or other ongoing needs. Here’s some possible ways to spend the money:

    Council will hash this out later.

    …

    Finally: my yearly rant about taxes.

    Taxes are good! This is how we can take care of our most vulnerable people. This is how we can solve collective problems, without someone trying to extract as much profit as possible.

    The problem is that our taxes are not fair:

    via

    So yes: you do kind of pay way too much in taxes! We don’t charge our rich Texans their fair share.

    (Also we Texans turn down about $5 billion every year by refusing to expand medicaid, and we turned down $350 million this past summer that would feed hungry kids.

    We do this in order to prove a point, or something? The feds can’t force us to feed our kids or get medical care when we’re sick, dadgum. )

    Look, the United States can easily afford for every person to have a safe home, free healthcare, and access to healthy food and education.  This country is extremely wealthy.  Collectively, we can afford to lift everyone out of basic poverty.  We just choose not to. 

    Stop electing Republicans who are in the pocket of extremely wealthy Texans.

    (End of rant. Thanks for playing along!)

    …

    Back to council. How did the votes go?

    The votes on the tax rate and the budget:

    Lock step, baby!

    The votes on the various utility funds:

    That’s the votes on Trash & Recycling rates, Electric Utility rates, and Water and Wastewater rates, respectively.

    The votes are dropping like flies! Hang in there, councilmembers! They all passed, though.

    ….

    Saul asked some interesting questions about our water supply:

    Q: How much water do we sell to other cities?
    A: We sell to Kyle, to County Line, and we sell reclaimed water to Buda and others.

    (I don’t know what “County Line” means, and when I try to google it, I just get a bunch of BBQ joints and maps of counties. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

    [Updated to add: “County Line” is this special utility district. Thanks to Diane Insley for filling me in!]

    Q: What happens if they don’t use the water they buy?
    A: Our contracts are “50% take or pay”. So they have to pay for at least 50% of the water we’re setting aside for them, even if they don’t use it.

    Q: Were we ever in danger of not getting our water from Canyon Lake, due to drought?
    A: Both Canyon and Edwards water have tiered drought restrictions. So we always get some water, but they require us to use less water during a drought. Before the July floods, Canyon Lake was Stage 4, but now they’re Stage 1. Edwards Aquifer has been between Stages 3 – 5 all year long. They’re about to tip into Stage 5 again.

    …

    That’s all of the budget talk for today! The official, final vote will be at the September 16th meeting.

    …

    Item 25: Just one tiny rezoning!

    This is 906 Chesnut St:

    From the street, it looks like so:

    That’s if you’re standing on Chesnut looking back towards LBJ. Vie Lofts is on the right.

    The developer wants to rezone it as CD-4. (Basically, they want to tear it down and build small apartments.)

    Everyone says okay.

    I’m okay letting it go, as long as we take a moment to pour one out for this wallpaper:

    I mean:

    I’m not made of stone, people.

    Also this window treatment:

    and maybe this pink trim:

    ok, and this built-in cabinetry and paneling:

    I take it back! Save this house! It’s too pure for this fallen world.

    (Enjoy the full zillow tour here.)

    …

    Honestly, the rest of the meeting was pretty zippy. A few quick items:

    • postponing the new development by the high school
    • funding for the new water reclamation facility
    • funding for CARTS
    • setting some dates for elections and city council meetings next year.

    On CARTS, we pay about $621K, and the federal and state government combined pay about $1.75 million. That’s great! Redistribution of wealth at work.

    …

    One last detail: Executive Session

    Finally, Council discussed this land in executive session:

    That’s the land that SMCISD is selling. There’s a big petition and movement in the community for the city to purchase the land, so that they can dedicate it towards the Mexican American and Indigenous Heritage and Cultural District.

    So I don’t know what happened in Executive Session (obviously), but afterwards Council directed city staff to ask SMCISD about delaying the deadline of the sale, so that the city can get its ducks in a row.

    I think it all comes down to timing:

    • Can the city speed up enough to meet SMCISD’s budget crisis timeline?
    • Can SMCISD delay long enough to accommodate the city’s due diligence and bureaucracy?

    Also Hays county is somewhere in the mix, too. We’ll find out the details eventually!

    Hours 0:00 – 7:58, 8/19/25

    by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

    Citizen Comment:

    There is only one topic, but there are over two hours of comments. It’s all data center, baby.

    There were 14 speakers in favor. Here are the main arguments made by the people who want us to approve it:

    • These are all over the place already.
    • San Marcos needs the tax revenue.
    • I am the property owner, or I’m going to work in some way on this project, and it sounds great to me

    There were 29 speakers opposed. Here are the main arguments made by the people who oppose it:

    • We’re in a drought, and data centers use a massive amount of water.
    • Data centers use a massive amount of electricity. Our rates will go up, this is bad for the environment, and the grid can’t handle it.
    • Don’t sell out the San Marcos river to greedy corporations
    • Cyrus One is secretive and unwilling to answer basic questions.
    • Anecdotally, people have stories of odd illnesses from living next to data centers.

    There were another few speakers opposed at the 3 pm workshop, and then another 25 at the public hearings. (The vast majority were people speaking more than once, though.)

    This will take up the vast majority of the meeting, so we’ll unpack all these points. Stay tuned.

    …

    Items 10-13: But first! we have the quickest little rezoning.

    Have you ever been driving south on I35, towards New Braunfels, and noticed these guys?

    They make concrete, and they’re here:

    The owner wants to zone two little blocks of land, between Heldenfels and I-35:

    He wants these to also be Heavy Industrial.

    No one is fussed. Everyone says okay.

    …

    Items 14-16: Ok, it’s time for the AI Data Center. This is a doozy.

    Background: We are talking about land here:

    The property owner wants to zone this land Light Industrial, so that he can sell it to Cyrus One, a data center company.

    Let’s talk about data centers

    Apparently there are 300+ data centers already in Texas. Of those, 40 are in the Austin and 49 are in San Antonio:

    via

    Not counting the one on tonight’s agenda, there are apparently two being developed in Caldwell County and three more in Hays.

    Data centers have two big problems: they use a lot of water and they use a lot of electricity. Texas makes this worse, because counties aren’t allowed to regulate use of natural resources. (Virginia Parker, director of the San Marcos River Foundation, said we’re the only state with this particular idiocy.)

    So as long as data centers stay outside of cities, there is currently no way to regulate how many get built.

    This specific data center

    The owner is a guy named Mayberry, and the property has a funny history. (Not funny haha.)

    Back in 2022, he asked the city to annex most of this land into San Marcos. He wanted to sell the land to a developer, to build single-family homes out there.

    This was always a weird, terrible idea! First, the sprawl would be insane. It’s farm land out there, not close to anything.

    Second, there is a massive power plant next door:

    Council had endless discussions about whether it was fair to build homes next to an extremely loud, bright, flashing power plant. In the end, they settled on a mandatory disclosure to potential buyers and some fencing.

    It’s been three years, and clearly no one wants to build these houses. So Mayberry has moved onto the next idea, which is this Data Center.

    But since most of the land has been annexed into San Marcos, he now has to get permission from the city to rezone.

    In this one data center, and only this one, we now have a say.

    Back in March, Planning and Zoning denied the rezoning. (In fact, this was Jim Garber’s last meeting.) Planning and Zoning had a ton of concerns.

    When P&Z votes down a rezoning, it takes a supermajority at Council to overturn them. So tonight, the data center will need 6 votes out of 7, in order to pass.

    We’re going to cover these topics next:

    1. Noise and lights
    2. Water
    3. Electricity
    4. Impact on San Marcos, and the Restrictive Covenant
    5. Property taxes

    Buckle up!

    1. Noise and lights:

    Staff basically says, “Look, plenty of data centers are in residential areas already and everyone seems to be chill with it. Look!”

    “Isn’t that so close? See?”

    “And also, what if Mayberry had built those homes! Wasn’t that an even worse idea?”

    (For the record, Jane, Shane, Mark Gleason, Saul, Alyssa, and Jude Prather voted yes for those homes, in 2022. Max Baker voted no.)

    The comparison to the imaginary, nonexistent homes is silly. The homes don’t exist.

    …

    Here’s the real argument the city should have made: this data center is next door to the Hays County Power Plant.

    Seriously, the noise, lights, and weird vibes that come from this data center will be dwarfed by what’s already coming from the power plant.

    2. Water:

    Data centers run hot, and so they use a lot of water to keep the computers from overheating. A traditional, evaporative system uses maybe 550,000 gallons/day?

    Technology has gotten better, and now they use a closed loop system. You fill up the building one time, and then it keeps re-using that water for the lifespan of the building. After that, the only water needed is for employee bathrooms and kitchens.

    Mayberry says that the initial fill up will require 60K-70K gallons of water per building, and there are 5 buildings. So roughly 400,000 gallons will be needed to fill the buildings, one time.

    After that, he says that each building will use about 4-7K gallons of water each day. That’s pretty normal for a business:

    3. Electricity:

    The electricity is insane.

    Mayberry says that each building will use about 75 megawatts of power. So over five buildings, they will use 375 megawatts.

    City staff says that all of San Marcos, at peak usage, is about 150 megawatts. Every single one of us, on the worst day in August! That’s insane. On a typical October day, all of San Marcos uses about 25 megawatts. So these data centers really do gobble up a ton of energy.

    Two questions come up:
    – Will this drive up water use, indirectly?
    – Will this drive up rates?

    Both answer are yes, sort of.

    Producing electricity requires water. But it’s not using San Marcos water – it would be from any power plant, in the entire state. All the electricity from all of the power plants gets dumped in the grids, and it gets blended around. When you draw electricity, you’re getting a random blend of all those sources.

    (Also, not all energy sources require water. Gas, coal, and nuclear all do, but wind and solar don’t.)

    The same is true for electric utility rates: all 300 data centers are putting a huge strain on the grid. More power needs to be generated, and that is going to cost money. But that cost is going to get spread across the entire state.

    Electric rates are spiking and will continue to spike, over the entire state.

    4. Impact on San Marcos and the Restrictive Covenant:

    This data center will not use San Marcos water or San Marcos electric. Water would be supplied by Crystal Clear water, and they’d get electricity from Pedernales.

    All data centers in central Texas are harming all of central Texas. The bad effects are distributed pretty evenly. We’re all using the same water table and tapping into the same electric grid.

    This specific data center does not specifically damage San Marcos or the San Marcos river.

    The Restrictive Covenant: A restrictive covenant is a legal contract of all the hoops that the developer is willing to jump through, for the city.

    Since getting knocked down at P&Z, Mayberry is trying to do whatever he can to get approved. Here’s his offer:

    and

    5. Why even do this?! (Property taxes)

    Allegedly, it would bring in an enormous amount of money.

    To put that in perspective: This past year, we’ve had a budget crisis, and city departments had to make cuts. Total, across all departments, we cut $100,000, and it was a huge strain. $9 million would go a very, very long way.

    My two cents

    I’m out of step with my readers here, and I apologize. I think we should take the money.

    Data centers are run by greedy, irresponsible corporations that do not care about local resources. They will exploit and destroy all the beauty in this state, if they can. Texas desperately needs to regulate this industry and limit the number of data centers that are being built.

    And yet!! I think we should hold our nose and let them pay us lots of money. There is so much need in San Marcos, and so much poverty.

    Rejecting this does not move the needle on the actual problem. Take the money.

    Here is what Council says:

    Matthew Mendoza goes first, and he is fired up. He says:

    • I voted against putting houses by the power plant. Terrible idea.
    • We didn’t annex SMART/Axis because of local activism, and now they’re building anyway, except unregulated. I get complaints every day from people who live in Pecan Park. Annexation means regulation, and that’s good.
    • We cannot run this city on tax income from neighborhoods. It’s not sustainable. You all don’t pay enough in taxes for how much it costs to run a city.
    • We need opportunities in this town. My blood is in the river and soil! Jim Garber was my scout leader!

    Jane Hughson goes next:

    • I have a ton of water cred. I was the first chair on the board of the Edwards Aquifer Authority, senior board member of ARWA, etc.
    • I’ve got some concerns, but I also am open to negotiation.
    • Listen up: you think you hate living next to a data center, but you would really hate living next to manufacturing. I’m trying to keep that from happening to you.
    • The amount of power needed is crazy. I have a lot of questions that we’ll get to.

    Saul Gonzales goes next:

    • No. I’m a hard no. I listen to my constituents, and they know more than me. Everyone knows my reasons why. No.

    (Ahem… everyone knows his reasons why)

    Amanda Rodriguez goes next:

    • I’m also a hard no. I’m not going to dismiss the voices of this many people.

    …

    Let’s pause and talk strategy:

    This item needs 6 out of 7 votes to pass. Saul and Amanda are voting no. Therefore it can’t pass.

    But everyone pretends like this didn’t just happen! We proceed to have a detailed discussion for the next hour. It was a little weird.

    However: the ending is not black and white, so I’m going to force us to walk through all this slowly.

    …

    The nitty-gritty questions

    Q: Can the restrictive covenant be changed?
    A: Yes. This is just a first reading. Staff can bring back changes for second reading.

    Q: Is the property owner willing to make the covenant permanent, instead of expiring in 20 years?
    A: Sure.

    Q: How can we enforce the covenant?
    A: A bunch of different ways:

    1. The biggest items are how buildings are built. We withhold occupancy permits until it passes inspection. We have a lot of leverage there.

    2. We can require them to submit their monthly water bill to the city, and make it publicly available.

    3. We have an (overworked, underfunded) code compliance division who will make the rounds out there and check for things like noise violations.

    4. For any other violations, we’d take them to court and get an injunction. Court orders them to stop doing whatever they’re doing.

    Q: How do you end up using 4-7K gallons of water in each building, each day?
    A: That’s pretty standard for a regular office building with a bathroom and kitchen. Nothing major.

    Q: If you ever had to drain the closed loop, what would you do with all that water?
    A: It’s got a ton of awful chemicals in it. It would need to be disposed of as a hazardous waste. That can’t go down the drain.

    Q: Can they build their own gas power plant and get around ERCOT?
    A: Not if they’re in the city limits. They’d need approval from P&Z. If they’re outside the city, yes.

    Q: Why does everyone have stories of how this will cause electric rates to rise?
    A: Electric rates will definitely rise, because of the 300 data centers across Texas. Whenever there are new grid costs, those costs are spread across the entire state. So we’re already facing this. This particular one doesn’t affect us any more than the rest.

    Q: Can you use reclaimed water on all your landscaping and stuff? Will you be sustainable?
    A: Sure.

    Q: Can you fill the original big amount of water using reclaimed water?
    A: Probably not worth it, to run pipe across the street for a one-time use.
    Q: but could we use a water truck?
    A: Yes, that would solve the pipe problem. We don’t know if it’s okay for a data center.

    Q: Go back over the part about how much water it takes to make electricity.
    A: It does take water to make electricity, if you’re using non-renewable energy. But not for wind or solar. But all the electricity goes into a big mushpot. So data centers just draw a big blend of energy. It’s not coming from the San Marcos river or anything.

    Also, if you’re starting a new power plant, you have to show ERCOT that you’ve purchased the water rights before you connect to the grid. You can’t just start using the Edwards Aquifer for your new power plant.

    Q: Remember that KUT article about how we’re running out of water? It was factually incorrect and scared a lot of people.
    A: I know, right?! That was crazy. It was like the author missed the part of the presentation with the good news. We reached out to them, but they ignored us.

    Q: Go back over the electricity usage again.
    A: Each building uses 75,000 MW of power, and there are 5 buildings. So they use 375K megawatts, altogether. On a typical day in October, San Marcos uses about 25K megawatts, and our peak usage is about 150K megawatts.

    HOLY MOLY.

    A: But keep in mind, they’re not on San Marcos power. But also keep in mind, the grid costs are shared by all Texans.

    Q: How easy would it be for them to go through disannexation from the city, and build here anyway?
    A: It’s actually pretty hard to disannex. They’d end up having to sue us.

    Q: So is Cyrus One backing out of the project? Why are they not here?
    A: No. They said they are “withdrawing from the zoning case.”

    Translation: Cyrus One does not want to deal with San Marcos residents. To be super duper clear, they are 100% assholes who will screw over everyone and anyone. (I’m still okay taking their money.)

    The vote

    By this point, it’s well past midnight.

    It’s finally time to vote:

    So it fails! Remember, it takes 6 votes to override P&Z.

    Remember an hour ago, when Saul and Amanda both said they were “no” votes? Lo! it hath come! As heralded.

    The vote has failed.

    …

    SO IS IT DEAD???

    No. This is where it gets murky.

    Council dabbles in entertaining the notion to send it back to P&Z. The argument goes like this: “P&Z didn’t see the restricted covenant. Maybe they would have approved it, if they saw the current version! And if they approve it, then council only need 4 votes to pass this, and not 6 votes.”

    However, Council cannot just send it back to P&Z. Either Saul or Amanda have to agree to reopen the issue. They both say no.

    Amanda, in fact, is quite angry: “You lost a vote. Quit trying to find a workaround.”

    (I mean, I’d be furious if I opposed the data center, as well.)

    Council does not quit trying to find a workaround! They have a giant conversation about it. In fact, they break out the giant rule book of technicalities, to figure out what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. Will the developer have to wait 6 months or 12 months to re-apply? Or can they waltz in tomorrow with this exact paperwork, and re-apply, and go to P&Z for approval?

    Answer: [This answer takes a while. Picture much shuffling of paper, scrutinizing all these detailed scenarios, double-checking what exact words were said. But eventually…] There is no waiting period. They can waltz in tomorrow.

    So there you have it.

    …

    Bottom line: This application is dead. But Council left a trail of bread crumbs for the applicant to re-apply to P&Z and get a better outcome.

    …

    Item 19: Upcoming budget details!

    We’re beginning budget season. At this meeting, Council sets an upper bound for the property tax rate for next year.

    In many ways, this is a continuation of the 3 pm workshop conversation.

    Normally there would be a big presentation. But it’s 1:30 am by now. I’m just going to zip through some key details.

    Our property taxes are down:

    If you add in newly built property, it’s a little better, but you can still see the problem:

    Here are the different property tax rates that Staff proposes for Council:

    and here’s what that means in terms of your property tax bill, if you’re a home owner:

    Council ends up choosing ¢67.69 as their upper bound.

    There is a really long discussion of how they got to this number at the 3 pm workshops. So if you’re curious, keep reading.

    …

    Item 20: Changes to the LDC

    “LDC” stands for Land Development Code. All year long, staff makes notes about all the little improvements that anyone ever mentions. There are also things they have to change, based on the new laws passed by the legislature.

    This is a big, long complicated process that will take months.

    Everyone is exhausted, and they don’t go through the details. It’s going to come around a few more times, though, so we’ll unpack it before it passes.

    …

    The meeting was finally over at 3:11 am.

    In other words, council members just spent TWELVE HOURS sitting in those chairs, up at the dais. That’s rough!