San Marcos City Council members host Town Hall

Sierra Martin | Managing Editor

SAN MARCOS – On Dec. 10, 2021, at 6:30 p.m. San Marcos City Council members Alyssa Garza and Maxfield Baker held a town hall at the Dunbar Center.

Councilmembers hosted the Town Hall to help residents better understand how the San Marcos local government operates and share their thoughts or concerns.

San Marcos residents brought up topics such as the new City Manager, traffic in neighborhoods, fostering better communication through the community and understaffing issues.

According to Councilmember Baker, on Feb. 1, 2022, Stephany Reyes will officially be made Interim City Manager.

Many community members discussed wanting to see better communication and outreach to residents in San Marcos and making sure that the marginalized population is informed.

For instance, with the COVID-19 pandemic, city council meetings were conducted online over zoom, which were inaccessible for community members who did not have the resources or knowledge to access them.

In response to a community member discussing their concern on open communication with city leaders, Councilmember Garza agreed that increasing outreach is an issue.

“I feel that like 100% I have found it on multiple occasions. On record live during meetings, and I think that there is a severe lack of culturally and linguistically responsive outreach, said Garza. “In general, not just on boards and commissions but even on community resources.”

Garza said she hopes the new Director of Communications and Intergovernmental Relations, Lauren Surley, will increase non-traditional community outreach to groups throughout the city by using fliers or resources accessible to all residents.

One community member raised the concern of hearing that many city offices are understaffed. An example used is eight open job positions at the Animal Shelter and the San Marcos Police Department being understaffed.

“We have, you know, seemingly a lot of money in our general fund, especially in our rainy-day fund. And it seems, in my mind, we have the money, but for strategic reasons we don’t want to use all of it,” said Baker.

The community member asked if there was a lack of available funding or outreach leading to the issue.

“We have heard a little bit about market pushback about how much we pay as a city,” said Baker. “Looking at some of the positions that we have lost, like in our planning department and stuff, we are seeing them move to cities that are paying them higher and that really is it.”

Garza said that some of the staffing shortages could be contributed to the pandemic.

“I think some of that might have to do with the pandemic, we were really trying to minimize spending and non-essential spending and so our staff were navigating and operating with a smaller workforce,” said Garza.

Council members encouraged people concerned with the staffing issue to bring it up during their budget meetings.

According to Garza, council members plan to hold similar Town Halls in the future. San Marcos Corridor News will do our best to inform the public of future Town Halls when the dates are made available.