Conducted by, Jarrett Moehn
Editor’s Note: The only portions of the interview below that were extracted was nonessential conversations that took place.
SM Corridor News did not correct any candidate on grammatical errors in the text below.
Question 1: Earlier this year, the current council members voted themselves a raise. If you’re elected and this comes up on an agenda, how would you vote and why?
Scott: Well, if you recall, I actually voted against it. I voted against it because I wanted to stop exactly what you just asked. I don’t want every council every time to sit there and get pay increases for something that’s supposed to be a voluntary public service. Now they’re trying to max out and doing when we’re not even close to that type of growth. I wanted to put a cap on it. I voted against the last one although the last one was basically a long time coming.
Before I was on the council there was a long stretch in between they’d ever had a raise. By agreeing that perhaps you all deserve one more raise, but I’ll support it if you put a cap on it. They weren’t interested in doing that.
Any more increases I would have to deny.
Question 2: San Marcos is currently growing in population and business growth. Do you want San Marcos to continue this path and why?
Scott: For the very same reason I’ve joined the GSMP to help get the type of growth that we’re getting. When I graduated from college here I couldn’t run my business here and I had to move it to Austin to make a living. Now we’re in a position that we can actually make a living. Small businesses can actually survive in San Marcos just at the very edge right now. If we continue growing they’ll be able to thrive and do well.
Question 3: If elected and the development for multifamily, single family and manufacturing came up for a vote, where would you want that development to be located to vote in favor, or vote against, on all 3 types of development?
Scott: What works the best for the student, the student project. What works best for an employee center and basically what works the best for transportation reasons.
It’s got to be based on one of those, what’s going to work best for the community. Period. All of those other factors make that decision.
Everything is so different. You can’t just put yourself in a box. It says in the book it’s this way, well you don’t do it that way. So much room for change if it’s done right.
Question 4: Currently San Marcos is giving ‘incentives’ to businesses that want to relocate here. This benefits San Marcos, bringing more tax dollars into their coffers and it gives a chance to the lower income portion of our population to get better jobs, able to make more money, and receive better benefits.
One area the city council is overlooking is the small businesses that are popping up all the time, the entrepreneurs, i.e. the 1 to 5 employees or 1 man entrepreneur who takes on tremendous risks. If elected, what could you do for this entrepreneur group?
Scott: Well, the growth in itself stimulated the entrepreneur group. I am one of those people. If you don’t have enough volume to buy your products or whatever services you’re providing, your entrepreneurship is going to move to Austin like I did to make a living. If you’re asking directly what’s the incentive side of things that you’re working on, we’ve actually started that whole process and working with the GSMP. They’re spinning a division out from that that’s going to focus on small business in 10 markets to help with small business loans, expansions, gear loans.
There’s a whole world that we’re going to open up in that that actually I’ve spearheaded initially, was to go ahead and have 1 dedicated person from the GSMP [inaudible 00:05:57]. Literally goes to each business and says, what do you need? How do we make it easier for you to expand your business, to hire more people locally? Go on, go to each business. There’s not a whole lot, in some of the surveys that went out, there has not been a whole lot of the small business people out there that have felt they needed any extra help beyond what they do themselves.
But, still, I want to make sure nobody is being left out and all of those doors are still being hit. Have the opportunity to be part of the, even the larger group should be able to network so that they’re [inaudible 00:06:38] even more. That is in the process. It’s in the works. It’s definitely a long term plan of mine. It’s slow moving, unfortunately, But yes, since I’m a small business owner, I have 3 different companies, they’re all small. I am a big advocate of making sure that they stay in the city and grow here without being flushed out by larger areas.
Unfortunately that statement would never be true because larger development in this area only helps smaller business, period. I would disagree with anybody that says that’s not true.
Question 5: Earlier this year the current city council had a tough time agreeing on the Greater San Marcos Partnership contract. The GSMP contract comes up for renewal again around September of 2016, please explain why you would vote for or against renewing their contract and would you want to adjust the amount of funding the city invests with GSMP?
Scott: I’d vote for it. I’m a huge advocate of GSMP. My reasoning is Amazon, Epic Type, Core Composite and all of the other companies that we’ve got here because of that contract. Because of that deal of hiring them to be the advocate here in San Marcos and to represent us. That’s like your own personal valet to go out there and do all of your work for you and bring you somebody. That’s exactly what they do. They go out there and they hustle like you wouldn’t believe. I would not want that job.
I see it. I shadowed it. There is no way I would want that job. The people in the GSMP, especially Adriana Cruz, she hustles like you wouldn’t believe. There’s just no way I could even handle what she does. Just flying all over and talking to companies and just say, hey, San Marcos rocks, you need to come here, come take a look. That’s a whole world of it’s own. Yes, I would give more money to hire more people to do that because it’s such a tremendous workload. But, it’s very effective and we have results.
As far as the contract amount, I would increase it.
They really represent stuff 90%. What happens is they go get a deal, I shadowed them, this is how I know, this is first hand. They go into a company, they say hey, we know you’re moving to Texas, this is San Marcos, isn’t it great. They say, yeah, but we need this. They go, well the next closest thing and they try to benefit San Marcos from that, would be Kyle or whatever. They find and they have those partnerships vote guide and they’ll put that big business there. That just allows other people here in San Marcos to go work there as well.
Shorter distances, they keep bribing these shorter distance to be able to have a job so that you’re not clogging up the highways, you’re not travelling back and forth. I used to commute every day for 20 years back and forth to Austin. It’s so nice not to have to do that anymore. The traffic in Austin is just maddening now.