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Behind those stories.

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As we go on the record with Randy Beamer.

Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us for On the Record.

I'm Randy Beamer, and this week we are talking about everything from the city budget to the Spurs arena to THC and recovering from the flooding up in the hill country.

Starting that off is Eric Walsh, the city manager.

We're not talking THC with you, but the city budget.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thanks for having.

Me.

I know it's a very busy time right now for those people who want to know about the city budget this year compared to last year.

We had heard talks about budget cutting for the city.

First of all, why did we have to worry about budget cuts this year when we haven't in recent memory in recent years?

So generally speaking, the really three things are driving it.

One is our our sales tax has been relatively soft this year, and I think it's more of a function in a lot of Texas cities are dealing with this more function of kind of a wait and see economy, uncertainty.

So that's impacted us.

Secondly, we have seen a decline in our base taxable values.

Property values, property values.

Yeah.

And we have not seen that since 2010 after the, the 2008 2009 recession.

So, you know, nobody wants to pay property taxes.

Everybody takes advantage of their ability to appeal.

But globally when we look at it across the city, we're seeing about a 1% decrease in property tax value.

And then thirdly, with those adjustments on our revenue, our expenses were growing faster than our revenue.

So in the proposed budget that we laid out to the council last month, it includes about $112 million in reduced expenses over the next two years.

Really, to kind of get those things back in line.

I mean, I'm, I'm, things like sales tax are always cyclical.

And, you know, we'll look forward.

We're being a little bit conservative as we look out into 26 and 27.

But those were the main driving.

Factors and federal money coming in.

That's it's waning Arpa money the kind of thing or is that an issue?

Well, we plan for that money.

The Arpa money was one time in nature, and so we did one time things with it.

In terms of in terms of any impacts at the federal level, about a million and a half dollars in some funding for a metro health grant and about $20 million in a solar grant that we had.

But all told, Randy, me, we get 200, over $200 million a year from the federal government.

And those those aspects are generally cyclical anyway.

So we've not seen any real impact on on changes at the federal level.

So looking at the pie chart, how much more is it being spent on this kind of thing and that kind of thing?

Where are the cuts if you can break down what you had to spend less on and where the priorities were for this council?

So, our budget is only growing by 1.6%.

And, which in our $4 billion a year corporation is is certainly manageable.

We made cuts everywhere.

We talked to the council yesterday in our budget work session.

We had a number of parks programing that had low attendance.

And so we eliminated that funding.

We are taking, areas where, we would normally reinvest back into projects and taking that savings.

And probably, you know, from my from my perspective, it's a good exercise to go through because, in an organization our, our size, the, the, the ability to constantly go back in and make sure, making sure that we have money that is in production and not sitting there, benefits everybody.

When you say you would normally reinvest back into projects, what kind of things are we talking about?

So like, if we have, savings in a project, we would do additional projects.

And in this case, what we did is we went through the we prepared this budget, either savings we piled back into operations and making sure that this.

General fund.

General fund money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, public works that you're doing a couple of new departments.

What are those about?

So Public Works is our largest non-uniform department and is responsible for building and maintaining all the infrastructure in the city.

And so we had we had a group come in and look at how we're structured earlier in the year.

So what I recommended to the council was that we have a capital delivery unit that does nothing.

From from the minute they wake up in the morning to the minute they go to bed focused on construction and, and public works is going to focus on the maintenance of all that infrastructure, which is in and of itself is a huge job.

Part of what we want to make sure that we're doing a better job of is communicating to the neighborhoods or the business corridors.

We're talking.

About things like Broadway Bay, Saint Mary's Strip, or in the past where it's taken years literally to get things.

Done.

Yeah.

And I think and I think in those cases, it's really the coordination with the utilities.

And the council took some actions earlier in the year to reset how we work with those CPS and Saws.

And, and but I'm talking beyond just the utilities and the projects that that we know about.

Whether we read about or do we get gray hair about.

Right.

I'm talking.

About.

Yeah, I'm talking about, making sure that we are consistently communicating, managing and executing and completing those projects.

And so there's a heightened focus on that.

And this this group will be doing that.

I've appointed somebody to to take charge of that, department.

And he's hit the ground running.

Homelessness is another issue.

This council I guess, in in budget surveys, it's coming either 1 or 2, the number 1 or 2 issue for the past three years.

So you've also started a new, department about that.

Yeah.

And and at no cost.

Right.

Because we've taken, we had, we had folks that were responsible for this within our Human Services department, but but Human Services is responsible for a lot of things, social service wise, that the city does.

And I felt like, given that it continues to be a heightened, issue for the public and the council that we needed some focus on it.

And so, Mark Carmona is going to lead that effort for us.

And it's both the outreach and, the work with our park partners like a haven for hope.

But one of the things I've charged Mark with and I've, we've talked to the council about is, you know, globally, from a community standpoint, we need, a plan for where we're going.

We can do outreach and we can do low barrier shelters, and we can do hope with Haven for Hope.

Commitment sweeps.

You call them to get rid of a, you know, an encampment for, you know, at least a couple of weeks.

Yeah.

We're doing we're doing 1400 a year, 1400 encampment cleanups a year.

And so, you know, the the when you look at the spectrum of what the need is and it goes beyond, I think the city, the spectrum of need is you've got mental health issues, you've got substance abuse issues, you've got the capacity of our current systems.

And so, conceptually, the city, University Hospital System, center for Health Care Services, the county, you know, globally.

What what are we going to do to address this issue?

Because we need to make sure that there is not just a haven for hope, but it bleeds over into bigger issues like transitional housing or permanent supportive permanent supportive housing.

And, and hopefully that is a kind of a broader conversation we bring back to the council for them to weigh in on in the spring, but it's really developing that plan, beyond the city's purview, with our partners.

Now, you have, published the proposed budget the council's been looking at, you know, all summer.

They vote on it next week.

You got a couple more budget sessions.

Where are they in the process?

And can they change anything in that?

If you go online and look at where we are?

Yeah, absolutely.

But we've been going through budget work sessions.

But next Tuesday and Wednesday, the council will start coming together on amendments that they'd like to make.

And they're scheduled to make those amendments that adopt the budget next Thursday the 18th.

So, you know, there's been talk about, additional funding for street lighting, in the budget.

I think that'll be a topic of conversation.

The council members have talked of the proposed budget, included a 2% across the board for all civilians in the in the city, police officers are scheduled to get a 4% based on their collective bargaining agreement and firefighters and 8%.

And speaking of that, how about more firefighter, more police?

We talked about that.

That's one of the amendments that I think we'll talk that the council will talk about next week.

The proposed budget includes 25 new patrol officers to add to our increase in our proactive response rate.

But we also added 28 new supervisor positions for the new South Side substation that will be under construction next year.

We'll need to get those positions in and trained for for that new substation, and there will be converting 65 park police positions to SaPD.

So next year in the in the in the in the budget for the first time ever the the police department is going to run six academy classes.

Usually we top out around 4 or 5, but we've got to keep those positions filled.

Spurs arena a lot of talk about that.

7 or 4 votes on that council wants you to go ahead and continue negotiations after the Spurs, after the term sheet was signed.

How are the negotiations going and what should we expect next.

So we have executed the term sheet.

And it's online, on, on, on the city's website.

And that term sheet is going to sit there, and, and we'll see what happens on the, the, the November ballot.

So you're basically waiting for the county's vote because if it happens, if it passes, then it's good.

If it if it goes away, that term sheet goes away.

It does.

And we we'll have to figure out what we do next.

And ultimately that'll be up to the council.

But the term sheet contemplates as part of that, the county venue contributing $311 million.

That's the matter.

That's before the voters right now.

And, some of the you were talking about misconceptions from people out there about where the tax money is coming from, and would it be able to go even to general fund things that people want?

Yeah, that's a good question.

And I've gotten that question a couple times here the last couple of weeks.

The, the visitor tax, can't be used for police officers or streets or sidewalks or, drainage projects.

And it's yeah, it's restricted by state law.

So there are there are certain things that that cities in Texas can use that money for.

This is one of them in the state, people don't really understand the PFC.

There's a Ters tax increment and reinvestment zone, and the PFC was allowed by the legislature.

What is that?

So the project finance zone captures the state hotel occupancy tax, within a within an area.

And we can only use that money, for the convention center, the Alamodome and an arena.

We can't use it for anything else.

We can't use it for police officers, streets, sidewalks or drainage projects.

It is restricted to those three facilities only.

And if we don't use it there, then that money goes back to the state.

What's it like now working with the new mayor and new council?

What's the vibe down there?

I think in the media we get maybe a different, you know, we focus on conflict.

Is are you all getting along down there or what's it like moving forward?

The media focuses focuses on conflict.

With the Spurs arena project.

Let's say, that's just on hold right now until about.

Well, so we've we've executed that term sheet.

So we're we're meeting but we're not we're not to do.

Talking about specifics of those.

Now we'll wait until, the voters decide later on in the fall.

And I suspect we'll have a lot of conversation next year with the council.

You know, to your question, transitions are normal, right?

And, the council and the mayor and working through that, the budget, as we've had more council meetings in the last five weeks than we've had during normal times because of all the budget work sessions.

And so, those things are natural.

But personalities sometimes, you know, affect policies and things like that.

You've been through that before.

Sure.

Are they are y'all getting along well?

My job is to do what the 11 say.

Right.

And so and my job is to make sure that we run an organization and oversee 13,000 people and make sure we're spending $4 billion in an efficient manner to taking care of the the public's needs.

The, the, the getting long part.

That's part of the mayor and the council gelling.

And those things take time.

And, I'm, I'm confident that they'll, that they'll find a path.

Spoken like a politician, which you're not technically, I guess.

Thank you very much.

Eric Wall, city manager, come back and we can talk about more, more stuff besides the budget for next.

There's people in the Hill country are recovering from the deadly flooding over the summer, and they are cleaning up debris.

There's talk about how to recover what should happen to the river, where we've had recurring flooding and how to prevent that.

You're going to talk about that is Brian Hummel, who is an infrastructure sustainability expert who has worked with the EPA and FEMA and other groups, and Joint Base San Antonio here.

First of all, a little about your background and how you, know so much about what to do with nature and really preventing flooding like this on a river.

We were planting a lot of trees out in the hill country trying to bring, bring the land back to health.

And one of the things that we would do is we'd plant this tree and we'd surround it with this big donut of mulch.

And everybody, you know, said, make this big, don't donut a mulch around each tree.

But what I noticed is as the water came towards this tree, it came and hit the thing of mulch and just went all the way around.

So it's a very young child.

I realized, you know, like six years old.

I was like, well, that's silly.

You know, a donut is not healthy for the tree.

Let's make a banana on the downhill side.

And banana's way healthier for the tree than the donut.

So now is the water comes, it hits that banana of mulch.

It makes a small little pond over the tree and it deeply infiltrates into the tree roots.

So then I started making those bananas longer and longer and longer and connecting the different bananas, and basically making these little flood speed bumps to keep the water on the land.

I did a lot of work for large scale wind energy farms, and we did work to, protect their road infrastructure.

And I started working for Joint Base San Antonio.

And during that time we did several projects on all of our military bases to slow that water down, to spread it out, to sink it in the ground.

And including people may not think of camp bullets in Camp Stanley that's out there right off the edge of the Hill Country, where it's important.

Very important.

Yeah.

One of the one of the projects that really I'm most proud of is some work we did out at Camp Bullis.

So we were doing a about a 3000 acre land clearing project to make more room for military activities.

And we wanted to, clear a lot of this ash juniper tree.

So we cut down about, 2800 acres of these juniper trees, leaving basically everything else.

So we laid all the tree, this tree, down on perfect contour all the way to the hilltop.

So in rows, we slowed it, we spread it, we sunk it, we soaked it, and we store it in the landscape.

And that project ended up yielding about, just these series of mulch berms, these mulch speed bumps to help slow that water down.

They were about 18ft wide and about 18 18in tall.

And the troops would drive over them.

They basically became nice, smooth roads instead of the rocky stuff on either side.

And that particular project has basically had zero runoff since it was installed in 2010.

So instead of having this.

This water rushing down the hillsides, we invited to stay and soak into the ground.

That's exactly what you're talking about doing up in the Hill country.

And when you saw the flooding, what did you think and what did you think should be done now?

Okay, well, the sort of what what is done is done.

But I'd really like to explain to people a little bit about the dynamics of a flood.

The river starts at the hilltops.

So if you want to slow down a flood and mitigate a flood, you have to start near the top of the hill.

And as the water comes down, you just always want to slow that water down before it makes it to the river.

Once it's in the river, you cannot stop the flood.

It is going to do what it is going to do, and it is going to be, damaging.

During the cleanup process, they've they've generated about 860,000yd³ of, debris.

Some of it is trash, like the RVs and the, tires and just stuff that was human made debris in the.

River, remnants of cabins and things like.

That.

That's exactly right.

And because of the human made debris, when the cleanup crews came, they just took everything out of the river, all of the woody debris out of the river.

So now their generator, a tremendous amount of wood mulch, in fact, they estimated that the amount of debris in these debris management sites is enough to go from hunt, Texas, to the Capitol and back about 236 miles of debris in a six foot wide and three foot tall pile.

So if we can take some of this mulch that's being generated at the river and use it to make our watershed into a better sponge, we can literally start slowing down the rain drops before they ever make it to the river.

But all that's, you know, private land up there, most of this part of the land.

Have you talk to anybody about their size.

How feasible is that?

And what's the reaction?

Absolutely feasible that, the Kendall County judge is, is open to it.

The county commissioners and the previous county commissioners are for it.

There are tons of ranchers that I'm in contact with right now that are waiting for this mulch.

I finally just got approval from the EC to do beneficial use application on these, ranchers land of this very clean wood mulch.

And now we're looking for them.

So yesterday, I was making calls with Tim, the Texas Division of Emergency Management, all the way up to their Texas, their state hazard mitigation officer.

And I believe that we are now going to get approval instead of hauling this mulch, 1.2 million miles and doing 40 mile, you know, 140 mile round trips, we're going to be able to take it just 1 to 9 miles away.

Keep that that mulch in the watershed and basically mulch people's landscapes.

The biggest issue with flooding in the hill country is all of the bare land.

So people understand parking lots.

People understand when it rains on a parking lot, like the June floods, the reason the June floods in San Antonio were so bad is water landed on a parking lot and there's no place for it to go.

So we and we engineered a system that rushed it off quickly.

I just want to make a comment that the river needs that debris.

That debris is a natural part of the river.

The river that we love has flooded hundreds and hundreds of times over thousands and thousands of years.

And there was never crews of hundreds of people going in there and removing all the debris.

So the river that we love today is because of these previous floods leaving that debris.

Now that now that we've removed that debris, our river scape is smooth like a slip and slide.

So that means the next flood is going to be faster, more ferocious, and unfortunately could be more fatal.

Unless you put some of that debris up in the hills.

If we slow the water down before it gets to the river, which has to be above that high water mark, the debris line of this flood between the debris line.

That's the new river.

So to slow the river down and to mitigate the next flood, we have to slow the water down above that debris line.

And we should really be starting on the tops of the hills, and we should be covering up basically any possible bare spot with mulch or with vegetation.

Thank you very much.

Brian Hummel, infrastructure sustainability expert.

Good luck with all that.

We will be following it.

Thank you much.

On reporters roundtable this week from THC to the McNay Museum.

A couple of interesting stories here covered by the San Antonio Current.

And the editor in chief, Sanford Nowlan, is here to talk about those stories.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Pleasure to be here.

First, the THC, regulation ban that didn't make it in the legislature, two sessions.

The governor this week just decided to issue an executive order.

What does it mean compared to what they could have done?

What he's interested in seeing is regulation around the hemp industry in Texas, which has grown to about $8 billion a year estimated, employs thousands of people.

The medical marijuana program that Texas has is so restrictive compared to what's available in the rest of the country.

And so this hemp industry has sprung up where people have figured out how to increase the THC levels, THC being the stuff in pot that gets you high.

And right now it's an unregulated market.

The document that people have seen, Abbott appears to be ready to sign off on would require a 21 and up to purchase.

It would require, businesses to check IDs to prove that business is a sell.

Hemp products would have to be a certain distance from schools.

There would be labeling requirements.

So you know what?

You're getting the outcome here.

When you see the governor prepared to do and which is, you know, hand down this executive order came because Abbott, vetoed the the ban that came down.

He did it at the last minute, you know, surprised a lot of people.

But there was a letter writing campaign of folks who were using this stuff to deal with PTSD, to deal with chronic pain and said, you know, the the existing medical marijuana program is not robust enough to help us out.

And the polls showed Republicans even lower the polls absolute lutely showed there were a lot of people that think this stuff should just should be available to people.

So, you know, you basically had this this showdown between Abbott and Patrick, Dan, Patrick's baby, he was Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor, is just dead set on having a ban on any THC containing product in Texas.

And at the end of the day, Patrick kept digging in his heels and we, you know, we had we had a session in two special sessions and they couldn't come to an agreement.

And I think what you're seeing is, is Abbott saying it's better to have some kind of regulation than to have no regulation, which is the ironically, the end result of Patrick demanding a ban is he gets nothing in the regulation from the governor is less than it could have been from the regulation, say, from the House or some of the other bills where they they wanted to regulate, cotton candy kind of stuff that was marketed toward kids.

And it would be, well, I want to restrict I don't know that you can say that because something is sugary.

It's marketed towards kids.

I think we know that stoners like to eat sugary foods too, right?

So don't ask me, okay, take my word for it, okay?

If they perceive that that stuff is too much, too close to being marketed to kids, then you know, they probably could.

Who could have included that in the bill?

You're right.

Yeah.

Interesting story about the McNay Art Museum and something I guess touches on politics and of the day.

This exhibit.

Yeah.

The McNay, just opened an exhibit called that do not Meddle with it.

Print censorship in 19th century Paris.

These are primarily prints drawn from, the McNally's own collection.

And, it's pretty fascinating because it looks at, 19th century Paris, which we tend to think of as being this sort of politically volatile, very creative time when people were writing great works of literature, creating great works of art.

At the same time, the ruling class in France was not exactly real thrilled to see printed caricatures of political figures or prints that depicted government, malfeasance or mistreatment of, folks.

And so they basically created, a system in which if you were going to print something with a lithograph, a government censor had to come and approve it before it could go out into the marketplace.

But these prints were things that people could hang up in shop windows.

They could hang up at a cafe or whatever.

And even if somebody was not able to subscribe to a political journal, even if they were literate, they could see these political figures much.

Well, thanks very much.

Sanford, now an editor in chief of the wide ranging San Antonio Current.

And, it's its array of topics, science.

And thank you for joining us for this edition of On the Record.

You can see the show again.

You can watch any previous shows, download the podcast, go to klrn.org I'm Randy Beamer and we'll see you next time.

On the record is brought to you by Steve and Adele Dufilho