Melissa Derrick is the challenger in the race for Place 6 on San Marcos City Council.[/caption]
Melissa Derrick is a small business owner in San Marcos and has lived in the city for more than 20 years. Derrick said she became interested in running for public office after seeing rent-by-the-bedroom apartment complexes popping up throughout San Marcos. Student housing is necessary throughout the city, she said, but officials need to take a closer look at where they are allowed to be built.
The Memorial Day weekend floods were the tipping point in her decision to run, Derrick said. The Woods apartments, near I-35 and River Road, exacerbated flooding in some areas, she said.
“I wasn’t entirely set on running before the floods,” Derrick said. “Once the floods happened I just had to shake my head and say, ‘We told you about this.’ I spent a year every Tuesday night either at a planning and zoning meeting or at a council meeting expressing my concerns along with many other concerned citizens.”
Derrick said her previous experience managing budgets for Texas State University prepared her for the responsibility of serving on City Council.”
Why are you running for the place 6 seat on San Marcos City Council?
I’ve been interested for a while. I’ve been attending city meetings and studying our codes and speaking to other citizens about their concerns. Really I’d say several years ago I got involved in really paying attention to what was going on in the city when we started getting rent-by-the-bedroom apartment complexes in the neighborhood because they just didn’t seem to be a good match. I just started getting concerned about the direction our city was taking with that sort of development. I was also really concerned about a lot of developments that they wanted to put on our tributaries to Spring Lake. Eventually they approved the Woods apartments—Cape’s Camp—which was a very poor decision.
That’s when I realized you can go up to City Hall and practice your right to speak for three minutes about any issue, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to vote the way you want them to vote. If you really want a vote up there then you have to put in the sacrifice and run to be a candidate.
I’ve met a lot of citizens who have the same concerns I do, and I want to be their voice. I want to be their vote on City Council because what we would like to see happen is not going to happen unless we have someone up there who is going to make the right decisions.
What is the biggest issue facing the city?
Growth is the umbrella for which everything else falls under. We have all kinds of serious issues due to growth. As you know we are repeatedly voted the fastest-growing mid-size city. We’re seeing that growth and I think planning for that growth in our master plan, A River Runs Through Us; that’s a good master plan. It provides predictability and it let’s developers know up front, ‘This is where we want this kind of development. This is where we don’t want that kind of development.’ I really think we need to keep updating our land development code to reflect the master plan. We need to get out of this era we’ve just come out of where the developer comes in and says, ‘I want to rezone.’ We need to tell them, ‘Well no, for your kind of development we’ll direct you to this area to look.’ I really stand firm on making no exceptions unless they are to the benefit of the city and all the citizens, and there aren’t a lot of people who are upset or think it’s not the right thing to do.
Also we have the immediate issue of the areas that were flooded. FEMA is now increasing the area that’s in the floodplain. Instead of just putting band-aids on things like, ‘You need to raise your home’ or ‘You were flooded. Here take some FEMA money.’ What we really need to do is get some engineers, hire them, really good floodplain engineers to direct that water away from the neighborhood, so it won’t be a constant problem. It continually floods and eventually what’s going to happen is it’s going to flood again [and] again, and that neighborhood will be lost. It’s one of our oldest neighborhoods, and we’ve got families that are the backbone of the community who have lived there for generations, and it doesn’t have to happen. We can fix it.
How would you have voted on the Cape’s Camp development if you were on Council at that time?
I would have absolutely voted no for apartment complexes. I don’t think that was the highest and best use of that land. The City Council actually placed a ballot proposition for us to vote on, and 74 percent of voters voted that they would like to have Cape’s Camp as a public park. Although the people who voted yes for it will tell you that we did get parkland out of it, we could have had parkland larger than what we have at Rio Vista. Now we only have three acres. It’s just too small to be counted as a true public park with 1,000 students living right on the banks of it. I don’t see that as an advantageous gain of parkland for us.
Some have said called that attitude the “no-growth” attitude. How would you respond to that assertion?
I think it’s rhetoric coming from individuals who support building these apartment complexes in single-family neighborhoods. It’s not the only rhetoric. People like myself who have protested the development of incompatible apartment complexes in neighborhoods, they say we hate students; we’re no-growthers. They say a lot of really unattractive things about us. These allegations are not true. I am for responsible growth. I would like to see us attract some really good employers, build some more single-family and executive housing and housing for young adults who don’t want to have the responsibility of owning a home. I am for development in San Marcos, but I’m not for putting a 1,000-bedroom, college, resort-style apartment complexes in the middle of single-family neighborhoods where people have to work in the morning, and they have young children. It’s just not a compatible mix.
What are your thoughts on the GSMP contract negotiations earlier this year (was anything left out of the contract that you would have liked to have seen added)?
A lot of people were kind of suspect [of the partnership’s contract with the city]. There wasn’t a lot of transparency. You don’t want to have that mistrust in any entity that works closely with your government. They are our economic development team. Their contract was not real tight. Transparency was lacking, and I know that Shane Scott initiated looking into the GSMP with the idea of cutting their funding because it didn’t seem like they were producing as we had hoped. Then he changed his mind and said he didn’t know what they did. So he decided that maybe they needed more money. I, as a city council person, would not vote to fund an entity if I didn’t know what they did. It did offer the council a chance to shine a light on that and see where the improvements needed to be made. I think they really got it right with the contract. There are deliverables. There are expectations. Transparency is going to be there.
Shane Scott has served on City Council since 2010. Scott said he is running to continue the work that has been set in motion during his time on the council.
Scott said he believes it is important to make San Marcos a welcoming place for businesses and positive developments in the city. Developments like the Woods are positive for San Marcos because it provides housing for Texas State University’s growing student population, he said. The council’s 2013 vote to allow construction of the Woods also secured additional parkland that otherwise could have been developed on, he said.
“The reason why we voted for the Woods is because if we didn’t vote for the Woods we weren’t going to get that parkland,” Scott said. “That’s the deal I made. To get that parkland for the community, because Rio Vista is already overgrown. We need to create a new Rio Vista down there for more people in San Marcos.”
Scott said he would also like to see more residential development downtown. Providing downtown residences for San Marcos residents—students and non-students alike—would lessen traffic in that area, as long as the city ensures there are adequate sidewalks and bicycle lanes, he said.
“I would love if we had condos downtown,” Scott said. “When I get old I want a condo downtown so I can walk around. I love the concept. It makes sense.”
Scott has lived in San Marcos for more than 20 years and served in the U.S. Air Force for six years. He graduated from Texas State University in 1990. In addition to serving on City Council, Scott has volunteered with various organizations, including the National Runaway Hotline, Special Olympics, Boy Scouts and the Christian Federation of Police Officers athletic leagues.
Why are you running?
The main reason is that there is a lot of stuff in motion that needs to continue. Without it we’re going to slow down and bottleneck. The growth isn’t going to happen in this area the way we need it to. So I want to continue the push to have the growth and sustainability for the citizens and students that come to San Marcos and stay here … things like Amazon that are coming in, Epic Pipe that’s now here. The list goes on. We’re not the small town we used to be. We need to stage this growth in areas that are going to work for our citizens.
What is the biggest issue facing the city?
Our biggest challenge to me is reputation to promote growth. Having the city’s reputation to lose the attitude of, “Not here, not now, not ever,” which is famous little jargon on the signs that they like to run around the city. I’m so anti-that, it’s unreal. That’s pretty much that reputation. With that [attitude] developers don’t want to come here. Many wealthy people have moved out of San Marcos because of it. A lot of business owners have moved out of San Marcos because of it. That’s got to be won over once and for all. I’m ready for the last battle.
If the Cape’s Camp issue came up again, how would you vote for it?
I would do it again. I fought to get [the property on] both sides of the river, because they can’t build on that anyway. But I couldn’t get the rest of the council to go with me on that. I could only get the right of first refusal. But nobody wanted to pay for it. I was willing to make this deal with that included. We probably could have gotten it if I had gotten the other council members involved and understanding what I was talking about. Only now do they understand. Once it’s all happened, they go, ‘Well maybe we should have gotten both sides.’ Yeah. That’s why I said it back then. It’s foolish not to own both sides. Everyone is talking about the dam now. The reality is we’re going to have to rebuild it like Rio Vista, and it’s going to be more for the citizens, parks, barbecues for families like we have now. That was my original intent. It wasn’t to give the college kids sole access. In fact, they weren’t supposed to have any more access than the citizens have.
The Woods is very good. There are no transportation issues at the Woods because the students are shuttled, one, we keep them out of the neighborhoods because they’re in concentrated areas, two, and we got more parkland for the city and future growth, three. So yes, I would definitely do it again, but [additionally] I would include both sides [of the river].
Some Blanco Gardens residents have said the Woods was built too close to their neighborhood. Would you disagree?
All that stuff has been addressed. The way they built it, with the frontline keeping all the stuff on the inside, you’re not going to see wild parties along the road and all those things. Everything is geared toward the front and the inside of that place. People said they’re going to run their cars through the neighborhood. You don’t go anywhere if you go through the neighborhood. If you want to go to Wal-Mart you take your car all the way down River Road. Or you turn left [on River Road] if you want to go into town.
What are your thoughts on the GSMP contract negotiations earlier this year?
I wanted [the contract] to last two or three years. My opponent’s goal is to basically not have the GSMP. They basically want it all in-house. I wanted to look into [the contract] a little deeper. Once I figured out what was really going on and what they were trying to do … Amazon is now on board because of the GSMP. That’s a very good example of why we keep the GSMP and why we fund them. [My opponents] don’t get it. It drives me up the wall.
You helped initiate the GSMP discussion and review of the contract but decided later you were happy with their performance and the city’s funding amount in the contract. What changed your mind?
Oh yeah. I admitted I was wrong. I thought it wasn’t good. I found the truth out, and it is [good]. I don’t have any problem saying when I’m wrong. I was led to believe they were abusing the money, like it was some big party they were doing all the time. The way they laid out the information to me it kind of seemed that way. You can kind of connect those dots. The reality is that’s not what’s going on.
