Four Rivers Association Of Realtors Hosts Annual Debate For Mayoral Candidates

“We are in a City Hall that is 45 years old. It’s crumbling; it’s very outdated. It’s small, and we need facilities and upgrades to just house the current staff that we have and the citizens that come and interact with us,” Thomaides said.

By, Terra Rivers, Managing Editor

On Tuesday, September 25, the Four Rivers Association of Realtors partnered with the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce to host the first debate for candidates for San Marcos City Council at the activity center in San Marcos.

Ten individuals filed to run in the November 2018 Election; residents will vote for the Mayor and City Council places 4, 5 and 6.

Hays County Candidates were in attendance to give opening remarks before the debate began. However, two candidates were unable to attend: Omar Baca, Candidate for County Commissioner Precinct Four, and County Commissioner, Mark Jones.

In order to allow all City Council candidates to speak, Hays County candidates did not answer any questions during the debate.

Candidates were asked 3 questions and given 90 seconds to respond. Place 5 candidate Mark Gleason did not attend the event due to a prior commitment with Planning and Zoning Commission.

Mayor

• John Thomaides, Incumbent
• Jane Hughson

The Four Rivers Association of REALTORS® is a 501(c)6 non-profit membership organization established in 1960. Its current configuration includes a merger that represents members from the former New Braunfels/Canyon Lake Association of REALTORS®, Seguin Board of REALTORS®, and San Marcos Area Board of REALTORS®.

The event was held from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM. The annual debate allows members to meet the candidates for the upcoming November election.

Below are the questions and answers given to the Mayoral candidates.

Mayor John Thomaides

The public-private partnership process is something that the City Council is very interested in working on. It’s something that I support because it gives the opportunity for us to accomplish some of the difficult goals that we’re going to have with the city, namely facilities.

We are in a City Hall that is 45 years old. It’s crumbling; it’s very outdated. It’s small, and we need facilities and upgrades to just house the current staff that we have and the citizens that come and interact with us.

From a public-private partnership standpoint, that’s going to give us the ability to create those facilities, to get things built, but also lessen the burden on the taxpayers because we’re going to have a partnership where the private sector will be able to utilize some of that space, maybe bring jobs or companies into those facilities that are built.

I just want to say that the public-private partnership, the P3, is something that I’m very focused on. I’ve been researching it, working on it for about a year and a half now, and I look forward to seeing it through to fruition, especially with our city facilities to save money for the taxpayers.

Mayoral Candidate Jane Hughson

Rapid growth means we need more infrastructure. We need more of a lot of things in order to support everyone, business and people. So, supporting growth, anytime we can partner with someone to meet our needs that’s beneficial to both, I think that’s worthy of review.

John mentioned City Hall. Our staff has probably doubled in size since City Hall was built in the Municipal building in Public Works, so people are pretty well crammed in there. We do need a new City Hall or expansion of what we have.

So, P3, public-private partnership is how many other cities have met that growing need. South Fort, Sugar Land, some of the others have built beautiful complexes, so I think that’s something that we need to look at. It’s not limited to City Hall. There’s other ways that we can use partnerships with others, whether it’s building a bridge that someone else built and we pay for it as time goes on. It’s just something we need to look at, can be beneficial. Thank you.

Mayoral Candidate Jane Hughson

The spirit of TOMA is a very important one, and it is a principle with which we should all agree: more than a quorum at the public officials of any governmental body should not deliberate with one another in private, either together at one location, or separately through a series of private conversations.

This should not be controversial, as everyone in our community, no matter their viewpoint, has a stake in our government’s deliberative process being open to the public. In short, deliberation between elected, appointed officials should not occur behind closed doors.

In City Attorney Michael Cosentino’s opinion, it is not sufficient for elected, appointed officials to stop short at deliberating in private. His advice is also that they cannot, and should not, communicate in private with their own constituents or those interested in doing business in our community.

This interpretation of TOMA is concerning, not only because it unnecessarily stifles the right of our citizens to speak with their elected officials and restricts the officials’ access to information critical to their decision making processes, but it is also inconsistent with the practice of every local government entity in our area.

Citizens should be able to visit privately and without hesitation with local officials. This allows government to work, and our elected, appointed officials to do their jobs. Local government, and any government, for that matter, is effective only to the extent that information and perspectives are allowed to be communicated directly and fully.

With that stated, what are your views on TOMA, and your practices in regards to maintaining accessibility to private citizens and those interested in doing business in our community?

For now, that is what our City Attorney has told us, and we need to abide by the rules that our City Attorney says we need to enforce.

In January, I believe it was 2015, there was a Council workshop with two experts on this topic and we worked through a lot of this, but that rule didn’t change.

When I was first elected, I met with some potential developers, ensuring that they were not meeting with more than three Council Members.

Afterwards, I got to thinking: did we really want folks meeting with all Council Members and the Mayor individually, getting different information? And I’m hoping that promises that can’t be delivered aren’t made.

I’m not sure how that should work, and still working through that. I do meet with constituents often, again, making sure that the Open Meetings Act is not violated. So, I think that citizens do have the opportunity to meet with their Council Members, we just need to be careful in how we do it.

I’m not sure what you mean by “it’s restricting access to information,” unless you just mean the information that someone may present to us.

However, we’ve got citizen comment; we’ve got other ways citizens can send a message to the Council as a whole, we just can’t have those individual conversations with them.

But if someone has information they would like for us all to know, I say go ahead and send it to all of us. Just be understanding in that we can’t have four of us respond.

Mayor John Thomaides

I think citizens have an expectation that, when you’re an elected official, that you will meet with them and that you will listen and learn. Over the term, time, that I’ve been Mayor for the past two years, I’ve done just that. I’ve had almost 250 meetings with citizens on virtually every issue you can possibly imagine. It’s been enlightening and very interesting.

But, there is nothing in TOMA that says that you cannot meet with anyone about any issue. It just doesn’t say it. That is the reality. Now, I believe Miss Hughson’s correct; you certainly can’t meet with a quorum of your Council colleagues, but everyone knows that. It’s very unlikely that that’s going to happen, and that would be against the law if it did.

The reality is that I think people have an expectation. I think it’s something, if it’s still unclear… You can call the Attorney General’s office. I did.

They’ll tell you the Open Meetings Act division. But if it’s still unclear and if we can’t clear this up, let’s get a written opinion.

All we have to do is ask the county officials to request that, and that’s something that might help clear it up for us in the future, but the reality is there’s nothing in TOMA that disallows an elected official or any citizen to meet with their elected officials.

Mayor John Thomaides

Well, the rental registration is something that started out as a kind of a bad actor program. It has been added to our new land development code.

One of the things that we really run into a lot in this city, we have a lot of out-of-town property owners, a lot of out-of-town landlords, out-of-state landlords, some out-of-the country landlords who, oftentimes, don’t care as much as the rest of us in this room about what goes on in the property that they operate in our neighborhoods.

Really, I would keep the focus on a couple of key things. One is to make sure that it is used specifically to allow our neighborhoods and to allow surrounding property owners to have a good quality of life as well. Nobody should be disrupted by anybody’s rental property.

The second thing is, there’s no requirement, at least in our current ordinance, that would require any type of inspections or anything like that, whether it be for health or safety.

Now, I can tell you as the Mayor of the city, having run through this recent fire, that may concern me with older multi-family structures, but that’s still already currently allowed in state law, so that’s something we probably don’t have to add.

Mayoral Candidate Jane Hughson

Currently, rental registration is registration only.

I don’t know how many people who are in property management know that the Council passed, after the floods in ’15, that you need to tell your tenants, if you’re in a flood-prone area, you need to let your tenants know that.

We’ve got people who move in from all over the place, have no idea that that river that’s nice, and maybe it would seem to be a ways away, could get to their house.

The document is required, and we also suggest that they sign up for WarnCentralTexas.org, as everyone should, in order to get notifications from the city when there’s an emergency. If everyone who had rental property were registered, we would be able to ensure that that information gets out there. Whenever we finished Code SMTX, we had a list of next steps, and the Rental Registration Committee wasn’t on there.

So I made the motion to ensure that the committee got on the list. We have appointed a committee. I was disappointed I didn’t get on the committee, because I think there’s some amendments that we could make to the rental registration to make it a bit lit onerous.

I tried to ensure that there would be property management officials or property management folks on the committee. I was not successful in that. I would hope that the committee will reach out to property management folks before that committee finishes its work.