Council punts vote on TMP to Dec. 4

The scheduled public hearing was held, but the council vote on the first reading of the city’s new Transportation Master Plan (TMP) was postponed Tuesday night.

“I know it says scheduled for a public hearing,” City Manager Bert Lumbreras said. 

He suggested going ahead with the second of two public hearings, but, “One of the things that I suggested to the mayor, because we definitely wanted to provide the council the full extent of the information with the appendices in the backup, so if it’s okay with the council we’d like to go ahead and conduct the public hearing as scheduled and then take up postponing the item for a future meeting to give council some time to look at the additional backup.”

In the council’s agenda packet (sometimes called a backup) for Tuesday night, the TMP was 1,767 pages. 

During the public hearing, Sarah Simpson and John David Carson were the only two to speak. Simpson said that she was speaking in general support for the revised TMP, noting that it had been revised to include a discussion of induced demand, the need for safer streets and other elements that the initial draft lacked. However, she urged revisions to the Thoroughfare Plan, which she said still resembled the plan created in 2004 and appears to plan for a “business-as-usual future” for San Marcos. She urged council to adopt a thoroughfare plan that minimizes sprawl and buildout and emphasizes roads that serve the city’s existing intensity zones, among other measure to make the plan harmonize with more sustainable land use plans. Carson emphasized the need for safer streets and the prevention of traffic deaths, urging the city to adopt a “Vision Zero” policy — transportation planning based on the idea that the only acceptable number of traffic fatalities is zero. 

After the public hearing, council voted to postpone a vote on the TMP until Dec. 4.