City Manager Brings His Drive And Passion To Improve The Quality Of Life In San Marcos

San Marcos City Manager, Bert Lumbreras  – a Texas State alumnus – has come back to San Marcos as city manager and hopes to develop workforce housing in the city…

By Autumn Wright

After almost 36 years of experience as a city manager or asst. city manager (ACM), with the last 11 years in Austin as an ACM, Bert Lumbreras  – a Texas State alumnus – has come back to San Marcos as city manager and hopes to develop workforce housing in the city.

Bert Lumbreras has been the San Marcos city manager for about 8 months since August 2018. Lumbreras talks about where San Marcos is now in comparison to some of the other cities he’s worked in and the strategies he hopes will soon be in effect.

What are some of those challenges you think San Marcos is currently facing?

“We’re obviously one of the fastest growing cities in the country. Obviously, the university is growing and there’s a lot of challenges that come with that. It’s a city that has rich history, but has experienced terrible floods and has a lot of issues of with storm water and flooding.”

“It’s got challenges because we are growing and we’ve got a lot of great economic development activity, that we also have a big need for workforce housing. It’s a beautiful city, rich in history and culture. It’s got a lot of potential but I think ultimately, we got to start focusing in on those challenges.”

“Whether it’s drainage, water management, workforce housing, or how do we work closer and better together with our partners. Essentially, focusing a lot on quality of life issues that are important to our residents.”

Could you expand a little bit on some of those issues?

“Sure, well it’s one of our five priorities. We identified five key point priorities, one of them was workforce housing, when we say workforce housing it’s not subsidized housing and it’s not higher end or executive type housing, it’s for the general workforce that are out there making a living, it could be some of our professionals like some of the teachers and staff at the university. And maybe police officers and firefighters. People that need a job, you know to make a living every day.”

“The other one is drainage and storm water; and that is capitalizing on the federal funding that we’ve received for disaster relief through the Department of Housing and Urban Development.”

“The third one is public transit, we currently have a shuttle system through the university (Texas State) that is for the students and then we have a bus system through the CARTS program that has limited capabilities in terms of the service.”

“So, we want to focus on what we call a seamless public transit system that doesn’t distinguish a student, resident or someone that needs to get to their job, the grocery store or key locations in the community.”

“The other one is around city facilities, we’ve got many challenges with facilities that have been around for many years and we’ve got to do a better job of planning for our facilities, not only does that include functions for our public service departments but also for city hall. When I was going to school here, this has been the same building for city hall for years and we’re growing. We’ve been adding staff so we’re in a very tight situation.”

“The last one is community partnerships, and with that we’re going to focus on three areas; one is our partnerships with the school district and county. How do we collaborate and work together? How do we work smarter in terms of the issues that are problems in our community? The aspect of that partnership is working directly with the university, work with them and on the issues, that are of common interests.”

How do we create a community that is resilient to regional and localize flooding events?

“We recognize that solving our flooding problem is not just going to be city limits. We’re going to have to think regionally about how do we work with the county on the water that is coming from upstream through the dams. We also want to create a sustainable storm water utility that effectively and equitably funds the improvement.”

“So, one of the things that the council has taken some initial steps on, that I’m excited about, is the drainage utility fund they’ve committed to increasing. For storm water and drainage improvements, our drainage utility fund is going to be critical on us focusing on our priority projects every year and get them. The council has committed to increasing that 15 percent for the next five years. That’s going to make major improvements in the case that when we have flooding events it’s less impactful to our community.”

Can you expand more on workforce housing?

“So, it’s not subsidized/public housing or high executive housing. But it’s for people that are working class and they’re out there, maybe in one or two income households. Essentially people that are part of our school system like teachers, staff, or even police officers and firefighters. The thing that we recognize is that San Marcos has an unbalanced ratio of about 70% renters and 30% homeowners in our total community.”

“For a community to be very healthy, strong and have quality neighborhoods, you want to have a stronger balance of home ownership. So, we are going to work on many strategies, one is we need to update and consolidate our housing policies so we’re going to be doing a housing study to see what the housing supply looks like, what the demand is and what are the right choices for that true group of people who need workforce housing. We’re going to define workforce housing so everyone can know what our target is.”

“One of the things I’m proud of with Code SMTX is to allow more housing options for single family occupied units in our community. However, at the end of the day, it’s with the development agencies, neighborhoods and the city to bring in strategies that will improve the quality of life for our communities.”

Have you done anything like workforce housing in any of the other cities you worked in?

“Both in Waco and Austin. Affordable housing has been a substantial part of my work that I’ve done in communities. I’ve had specialized training in this subject. It’s my area of expertise and big passion that I have because I firmly believe that if we don’t solve the housing issue then the community is going to be dominated by renters and we start losing the true quality of our neighborhoods and the culture in them.”

“Austin went through the same issue, they have a very large community and we worked closely with the school district and they were facing the issue of hiring 800 teachers every single year. One of the primary reasons for that was people couldn’t afford to live in Austin. Essentially what teachers would do is they would drive into Austin to teach and then drive back home, but after a while that becomes extremely challenging. So, people would do that for a year and realize it isn’t working out for them. The school district would literally have to hire 800 teachers every year because Austin was becoming unaffordable.”

“When I came to San Marcos, I talked to the city council and we agreed that San Marcos is where Austin was a long time ago. San Marcos is a unique opportunity, we know we got these challenges so if we start working on these challenges and coming up with effective strategies, we’ll make an impact because we’re at a point where we can manage it. Even though we’re one of the fastest growing cities we can lay down a good foundation with good policy and strategies.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re going to solve them but we’re going to start chipping away at the problem. Every year as this project goes on we’ll talk about the progress we’re making or how can we adjust it if it’s not working. We’re going to hold ourselves account because we really do believe we’re going to make improvements in the community with these strategies.”

In terms of partnerships, are you looking for partnerships with other businesses like apartment complexes to possibly offer space for workforce housing or maybe purchasing land and developing a building for that purpose?

“I think both, one of the things I’ve noticed in my experience, when it comes to workforce housing the city can’t do everything by itself, we must work with the university, school districts and businesses.”

“When we look at economic development, folks are wanting to hire hundreds. There’s partnerships we need with other businesses like Amazon to discuss on this issue. For example, Amazon hires thousands of people and employers, but we need to ask the question is there an opportunity to sit with those employers and if they would want to work with the city in regards of workforce housing.”

“I think in many and all, it takes a lot of people to create this improvement. It takes neighborhoods, nonprofit organizations and more to create a substantial community.”

Do you see this project being a foundational thing in the next five or ten years?

“I think so, these are foundational things but workforce housing is a thing we’re going to do from here on out because of my level of expertise and then also my passion around that. I think we got a lot of work to do around that but I see that as something that will be in it for the long haul.”