 Welcome everybody to our monthly Make-A-Part Neighborhood Association meeting. I'm Joni Brooks. I'm the board president. And I'm Camus. I'm the secretary. Thanks. I know. Come on. Steven, say who you are. Oh, I'm Steven. I'm the vice president. No, you're the first one. I'm the vice president. I don't have a title. I don't have a title. I don't have a title. I don't have a title. I don't have a title. I don't have a title. I don't have a title. I don't have a title. They don't have a client. So we're glad that y'all are here today. So we have on our agenda today, Camus that's going to talk to us about the board of adjusters meeting that we had yesterday where we actually had a win for our neighborhood. So she'll tell you about that. We have Cruz Chong here. Soon to be tomorrow. Yes you're going to be starting Thursday so if you come up here tomorrow you're going to be supporting Thursday and your two councilmen persons. and then you can come up tomorrow. Tomorrow night for district two. No, tomorrow or Thursday? Tomorrow night or something. Tomorrow ending, Arneson Theater open to the public. Six o'clock first? Oh, come on. I'm drinking water in the park all the way down. I think it's six o'clock at the Arneson Theater. He definitely needs a cheaper staff. Definitely. So he's going to come in, introduce himself, and talk to us a little bit. And then we have Garrett Phillips here from the San Antonio Planning Department. He's going to talk about the planning process. We're in the Midtown region. We didn't know that we are, and it's starting at the planning process for the San Antonio Comprehensive Plan. So that's starting up. In fact, it's starting next week at kickoff. So he's going to talk a little bit about that and then answer any questions that you might have. And then we have Tom Crystal here. That's from the Brackenbridge Conservationing. And then he's going to discuss feral and abandoned cat issues, the effecting Brackenbridge Park and surrounding neighbors. Emily and Bob at the Executive Drive. But she was here last time. Last time. Y'all were following it. She sure would make sure I stayed between the lines. Never happened. So now I'm going to turn it over to Canvas. Okie dokie. Well, it wasn't really planning on talking, but Joanie asked me to about 20 minutes ago. Maybe it was two hours ago. Anyway, so there's been a lot of traffic on the web page over the past couple of days about things that are upcoming. And wouldn't it be nice if somebody would go and tell those folks at the city how we need to have things happening in our neighborhoods? So I hope some of y'all have been contributing to that traffic here. No couple of y'all are. So I wanted to tell you a little bit about some of the process, how things go, and in particular the Board of Adjusters. So we were present for, actually there were two cases at the Board of Adjusters that were from Banky Park. So there are a number of different boards. There's a zoning commission that makes decisions about how a particular property is zoned. And then the Board of Adjusters makes decisions about whether or not to grant variances. Our NCD, our Neighborhood Conservation District, is posted on our website so anyone can go there and look and see what are the requirements for buildings, for fences, for whatever. There was an instance just yesterday? Maybe before yesterday? Yesterday, I think. Yesterday. Someone who'd noticed a fence going up here their property said, hey, I don't think this fence meets criteria for the Neighborhood Conservation District, and took it upon themselves, very, very thoughtfully and rightly so, to contact the city and say, hey, we don't think this meets. And it did not. So we have a co-compliance officer. What's his person name? My name is Mystie. Mystie. Yeah, he's in charge of making sure that our NCD, he's with the city, he's in charge of making sure our NCD is being followed. So he goes to the checks. Of course, he has to be alerted. So anyone can alert him. Anyone can write in. Anyone can send to the city. This person wasn't quite sure where it went, sent it to several places. It found its way there. So if you see anything going on that you don't think meets the criteria, that's what you do. Contact Michael Lodesti. And in this case, he put a stop work in. And that person now can go and ask for a variance if they want to do that. Similar thing that had happened, I guess, a couple of years ago in the house next to me, they'd put stucco up on it, which was not for the NCD over the brick. And we got that stopped and they had to clean it off. So then if someone does want to do something that doesn't meet those criteria, they can go to the board of adjusters. There is, however many of you live on the south side of Mankey Park, so on Bracken Ridge, has anyone seen that big empty space that's going on Bracken Ridge? OK, so PSW, which is a construction company that's also building homes in Alamo Heights on Harrison, so right the street that goes into Central Market, had purchased that property. And they did the right thing. They came to the board and said, hey, we want to create a set of town homes here. And we have 33, and it's going to look like this. And what do you all think? And we said, gee, we'd really like to see a plan. So they came up with a plan. Next time when the plan came, it had 38. And then they said, well, by the way, we're going to try and buy that tail end of Bracken Ridge and put some more up there. So then the plan became 45, two in three story town homes. When we looked at the plan, we saw some concerns with it. First off, those streets up there aren't narrow. Their comment was, well, it's all big, monolithic apartments. So we said, that's one of the reasons they want to cross the street from us. One of the reasons why we don't want to let this go unchecked because that happened. And second of which is, yeah, there are families who have children who might like to be out walking in the streets. And if we want to have 45 times two or times one and a half more cars in that area, that's something to think about. The plan had saved a beautiful green space right in the center of it. But it had buildings that were against our requirements. Some of them were much longer than they were allowed to be. And there were different things that were out of variance. So we worked with them as best as we could. And they said, OK, we're going to take this to the Board of Adjusters and request these variances. The first one was to decrease the distance behind the buildings to the property line, which in that case backed up with Fort Sam. Well, if Fort Sam doesn't care, we don't care. So we're not going to post that one. The second one, we have a rule that says that the parking has to be behind the facade. And they were having parking garages underneath so that they would be in front of the facade. We chose not to post that one because they were in the buildings and the rear would not be visible in the street. So we were not so concerned about that. The next one, though, was that the buildings in the rear would be 120 feet long. Our NCD says they can be 80 feet long. So that was 50% greater than they could be. And also that instead of the required 20 feet in between buildings that are more than four units long, there's a requirement for 20 feet between them. They wanted to reduce that to 11 feet. So if you can kind of imagine 420-foot buildings with 11 feet behind them, that's kind of canyonizing and monolithic. Those were at the back of the property. The ones at the front, they were going to be 62 feet long and would have, I think, was 10 feet in between them. So again, we kind of felt that in two stories tall. So we thought that would kind of look a little monolithic. So we went and spoke at the Board of Adjusters. We have a land use committee that helps us that looks at propositions like this and helps us decide what to do. So Daniel Lazarine and Isabel Garcia were two architects who were on the committee and who both gave us some really thoughtful input, as did some past board members and past members on that committee. So Isabel Garcia and I went to the Board of Adjusters meeting yesterday. What you do is you, anyone can go down there. Anyone can speak. You go to the one-stop shop, which is in 1901 South Alamo. You sign in. You see I'm here to speak on this cause that I have an agenda out there. So you can see the number or put your name in there and you get three minutes. Of course, by the time hours rolled around, it was an hour and a half in. The meetings always start at 1 o'clock. They start promptly and they run pretty well. But there's a lot of cases. I think ours was six. So it was probably about two by the time that came up. So the developer gets to present what they want to do. And then anyone who's there gets their three minutes to speak. So Isabel Garcia and I were there to speak and we said kind of those things. And we thought it looked monolithic. He said that it canyonized the streets there with the big three-story ones on the other side too. And then they both, you have to have nine votes to prevail. The developer has to have nine votes to get the variance, which I had not realized I thought it was a 50-50. So they got the ones that we did not oppose and the ones that we oppose, we prevailed by a 74 and an eight-three vote. So that was a positive outcome. They cannot build those buildings that close together. They cannot build them that length. We did not get an opportunity to talk with Mr. Corbell before he left because he kind of shot off to talk to his folks like a rocket, I think. And it didn't turn out the way that he wanted, but the point of it all was he came to talk to us, which we did tell them that he was present, he spoke to us. We just couldn't agree on these two things and that was why it was there at the Board of Adjusters. So now they can either change it, work with the NCD, use the NCD requirements as upheld by the Board of Adjusters and do something else. And that's really important. So I think the reason why Johnny wanted to tell you about that is, you know, I mean, I live here. I don't live on that end of town, but I don't want to see, I've been watching those apartments go up and I didn't want to see any more. Any of y'all can go and speak and say your reasons why. I mean, the reasons I spoke about were more neighborhood. This was very inwardly oriented around a green space so those people wouldn't have a whole lot of reason to come and be a part of our neighborhood. To mention that, you know, that I was out of concerns about people being able to age in place here in this neighborhood. Everyone's property values are going up so rapidly. Kids being able to be safe, walk into school, and et cetera. So we put those things there and that's what the Board of Adjusters decided. So anyone can do it, I would encourage you to. And those, they're posted online where they send us an email telling us what's coming up. Yeah, and the main thing too is that, you know, we all have to have eyes out there in our neighborhood. And even if you think 1%, 2%, that something may be against the NCD, contact the Board and we can tell you who to contact because we can't be out there seeing. So more and more, and then with Garrett coming up in a little bit, he talked to us about planning. You know, we're in a hotbed of developers. Crown zero. Yeah, wanting to come in and scoop up and build and density. We're talking about density and we do have NCD. Is it historic? No, it's not historic, but we do have some standards. And so it's really up to all of us to have our eyes out and then report it so that we can keep our neighborhood, which reason that we all live here, right? Because we love this neighborhood. So, but thank you for going, Camus, and taking three hours of your day. Yeah, so, so let's have Mr. Shaw come on. Good evening, everyone. For those who don't know, my name is Wade Shaw, but people call me Cruz. Where does Cruz come from? Okay, I'll tell you. My mom's name is Cruz. My mom raised me. So it's pretty much my, I tried to take my last name when I was a kid, but she wouldn't let me. So she's called Cruz. That, she called it in a different name, but when I talked about it. But, we were just elected as the new, the council of district tubes, we're swearing tomorrow. And it was, it was, it was a hard journey, but it was worth the effort. One thing that I wanna make sure that we do as a district is bring the district back together again. Because right now the district is very big. We can probably fit Washington DC inside the tube. And we have probably already the biggest or the most diverse district in the city. Economic, social, economic, ethnic. It's just, we have a very diverse district. So I wanna make sure we bring our district back together on the issues that we all have. I was a chairman of Zoning, so I understand that the procedure of zoning very well. And I want everyone here to understand the procedure. So I'm glad that planning's here today because it's a very, it can be a very complicated tool if you don't know how to read the language. But once you know how to read the language it's very simple. And we need people involved. Our staff is going to come to you all for assistance. We had work for you all. And I brought some staff members. I want them to introduce themselves to you as well. But at the end of the day, you're our bosses. And so we need to hear from you. We're gonna have a 48 hour turnaround time. Not on a call. I'm sorry, did you write that down? Yeah, 48 hours on time. If we get a call or an email, we'll return that call or email within 48 hours. We may tell you, we have to look into your question but we're gonna acknowledge the fact that we were seeing your email or your phone call. It's really huge. I practice law for a living and that's the ethic violation for those if I don't return a phone call. So that's just the way I run my office. I plan to run city councils at the same point. I'm really excited. I'm really excited. I'm extremely tired because we won when last Saturday. When? I don't even know. We didn't have 10 days to get ready. So I'm hiring our turners from my law office getting my staff together, getting our office together, paperwork, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, more meetings. So everything is kind of happening very quickly. But the other day, we're here to serve. We're here to serve. I want to bring up Ms. Berry. She's gonna be my chief of staff. I'll give her a few minutes just so you all know who she is. We all see her in the district. Yes. Hi everyone. My name is Bryncia. Like husband Shaw said, we are here to help you all. So please feel free to come talk to me. As you see me, give me your contact information and maybe sure to follow up on any issues that you may have. And I also wanted to let you all know of course, the nine regions tomorrow, it's at 630 at Arneson on the river. So please come and celebrate with us. Celebrate our new councilmen. And yeah, just come say hi and we will work with us together. I'm excited. Thank you. We have Jarvis Swallow. Jarvis Swallow has been in the district for quite some time. He's worked with councilman Sheila Mcnails, where as well as a councilman, councilperson Ivy Taylor. So he'll be our director of constituent services. He's gonna be out there in the field working, talking to folks, getting, you know, what's going on in our communities. That's a pleasure. I guess, like I said, my name is Jarvis Swallow. Councilman kind of my past experience came from the state. I've worked for TYC, Tribunal of Justice. But prior to that, I was a council aide for those over constituent services for councilman Taylor when she was in the council person for district two and Sheila Mcnails during her two terms as well. So, what's it called? The councilman was able to talk me into coming back, coming back. It wasn't that much. I've been working in the district since 99. So it's, you know, it's really second nature, you know, just like, you know, we're just here to serve, you know, serve you know, you know, juvenile offenders for the last five years. So we're kind of coming back, you know, to some community work. Thank you guys. It's great to have you here. Like I said, we're still working on phones, emails, all that stuff. Once we get that, we'll get the impression to you so you'll have it. Office hours, all that kind of good stuff. Right now, like I said, it's very chaotic. Hope this will sell down, you know, Monday or Tuesday, but we're here to serve. That's our main purpose. We're here to serve. Any question or anything, that's what we're here to answer. All right? Thank you. Besides here, all right, so now we have Garrett Phillips on the Planning Department City. So he's going to tell us about the master plan and what's going to be happening. Hi everybody, thanks for having me. My name's Garrett Phillips and I work for the City of San Antonio Planning Department. Otherwise, notice the Department of Planning and Community Development, if you like more words. We are the department that has worked with neighborhoods over the last couple of decades to create neighborhood plans. Mankey Park updated theirs last, I think, in around 2001, 2003, and many other neighborhoods got to participate in that program where people would come together, articulate their vision for the future, what kind of development should happen, and the Planning Department helped put that into a plan. More recently, in the last couple of years, we worked on the Essay Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan, which was a bigger picture look at the entire city of San Antonio, thinking about how we can take advantage of and grow in the right way, considering that families are growing and people are moving here to the tune of over a million people over the next 25 years or so when you combine those two things. So that being a reality, how do we respond to that as a city, as a whole? And so that plan was finished last year. Thousands of people participated and gave us ideas, and the plan is now online, and you can look at it, it's called the Essay Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan. One of the outcomes of that plan was that it said, now the Planning Department is supposed to go out and make more detailed plans for smaller areas of the city again, because we couldn't get into all the detail that we needed to, looking at the whole city. It's just too big, over 500 square miles. So it's essentially say go back and with several neighborhoods at a time, think about some more detailed ideas for the future, because now it's been a couple of decades, in many cases, since a neighborhood has done a neighborhood plan. Many neighborhoods never even got to participate in that program and don't even have a plan. So the idea now is that we're working with several neighborhoods at a time to make new plans and Mankey Park is one of the neighborhoods that I'm gonna be working with throughout this year to make a new plan. Mankey Park West Fort Alliance, a small part of Government Hill near Broadway, Tobin Hill Community, Five Points, and a small neighborhood near Frederick, all together on a new plan for the future. And it will take about a year to complete. There's gonna be technical analysis. I'm, can I finish and we will definitely do some questions afterwards. There's gonna be technical analysis. There's gonna be public participation, different kinds of public participation for different kinds of people that wanna participate in different ways. Not everybody likes a meeting, not everybody uses web pages. We need to have diverse ways of doing that kind of thing. So we're about to start. We haven't started yet. Over the last couple of months, I've been out speaking with many people in the community, just starting to get to know the area myself in a preliminary sort of fashion. We're gonna have a advisory team that we're calling a planning team. And it's gonna have somebody from each neighborhood association board and somebody from one of several stakeholder organizations, like San Antonio College, for example, and Methodist Hospital. They're a large employer over at Tobin Hill. So that team is gonna meet several times throughout the next year to advise us on how we're doing with the plan. So after doing a bunch of public participation, analysis and planning team meetings, we will bring a plan to the planning commission and ultimately city council asking for their approval, at which point it would become the new official plan for this area. The plan that you've already created, albeit somewhat older, has a lot of useful information probably. And we're gonna ask you to tell us how useful it is and what in there is useful. And what you think is still really good information for us to be thinking about. We don't wanna reinvent the wheel on that front. The plan, I'll tell you what's gonna be inside of it. There'll be a land use plan. So it'll be a map with different colors, categorizing what kinds of uses and development should happen in the future. It's a precursor to zoning, less specific than zoning. But zoning ultimately does get based on the land use map. We're gonna have a transportation and mobility section where we try to prioritize the highest priority projects for the next 10 years or so. We're gonna have a housing strategy and economic development strategy, parks, open space section. And we're gonna have a section on catalytic development sites. So those are the topics. It's a lot. It's still gonna be somewhat broad. We're not gonna be talking about every detail and every project. We're thinking comprehensively about all these things together for a pretty big area. So, pretty soon we're gonna have a webpage posted where you can find information specific to this plan that we're gonna work on together, including dates of meetings that we're gonna have and other online participation opportunities. Right now you can go to essaytomorrow.com to look at the city-wide comprehensive plan and get a sense for why we're doing this and how this came to be. And you're welcome to contact me, any of you anytime throughout the coming year. My business cards are in the back and I will be back to more neighborhood association meetings. I put a sign-in sheet on the back table. I'm sorry to have to ask you to do this twice, but if you would like to leave your email on it, it has some light blue and orange colors on it. You want to key in on that on your way out. You can leave your email and you'll be added to a list where we will send you an email anytime there's an event happening, public meetings, or some kind of online engagement opportunity. And you get occasional updates on the progress that we're making. If a draft document knows coming out or something like that. I think I'm going to leave it at that. I'm sure I forgot some important things so I'm happy to answer any questions that you have for now. Yes, thanks for waiting. What standing will our current plan after this? When this process is complete and the Midtown Regional Center Master Plan is adopted in about a year, it will replace the existing neighborhood plans. And so that in that way, we want to make sure that we capture the things that are useful and still valid after 15 years and incorporate that into the new plan. But this plan will be the new official city land use plan and priorities document for this area and other neighborhoods. So basically there will be no neighborhood plans. There will be large area plans. There will be larger area plans, yes. Which will be the desire to have the individual name? Well, we think that we can have a process that addresses the neighborhoods concerns and issues and that essentially takes into account bigger picture issues as well, bigger picture opportunities and brings them together into one document. So I understand your concern and we have heard it from other people. And, yeah, theoretically a larger plan means less attention for one neighborhood. But it's important to keep in mind that not every neighborhood even got to make those plans because it was really hard to keep up. Chris, did you have something you wanted to add? Chris is my colleague at Supervisor from the planning department. Yeah, I was just gonna add partly to address your concern. It's one of the reasons we wanted to make sure we had a neighborhood representative from each of the affected neighborhoods on each of our sub-area plans. But more specifically, we are going to have a section in the plan that basically, and we're coming up with exactly the right term, but it'll be something along the line of neighborhood action strategies or something like that, where it will be a couple pages specifically devoted to Mankey Park, where you all say these are the things that are most important to us in Mankey Park, the things that we really wanna prioritize. We'll do that for the other neighborhoods that Garrett mentioned. And then hopefully, there's at least some synergy between those that we're gonna kind of elevate at least some of those to be priorities or key investments for the entire midtown area. So although the plan does replace the individual neighborhood plans, so that we can do this more efficiently in the future, there will definitely be recognition of and acknowledgement of the priorities that are really crucial to each neighborhood. And from what I understand and have been told from Rudy and all our discussion, our NCD will still be intact. Yes, this is not gonna affect overlay districts. As Garrett said, one of the key aspects of it is to do the future land use map, which will eventually drive potential zoning changes. So in certain parts of the city, one of the big frustrations over the last number of years has been that land use plans were put in place, but as I'm sure you saw, a lot of times zoning wasn't updated to kind of match that and align to that. So as a department and working with development services following the years, after we do each of these plans throughout the whole city, we'll try to go back through and either update the UTC to reflect these things or update specific zoning codes to reflect this so that as you all move forward in the future, you have your NDC and you have zoning that's updated to reflect the future land use for the midtown area. We're gonna give you a little bit more personal. That's where it can get a little bit more personal. Through our NCD, we actually have a CCR. Our NCD isn't enforced now. We're enforcing it. We're disenforced it yesterday. We enforced it at the board. We're doing our best to try to enforce it. We're doing our best, but the city does not enforce the NCD. If it did, it would not be to rise on the premise of all of those plans. That's a gap in our NCD. It's a gap and that's a gap that we're looking at filling. We have a CCR out. I need to talk to Mr. Cruz about filling that gap. Well, it's gonna be critical for all the neighbors to be actively involved in the planning process to the greatest extent we can be. Yeah, it's very important. We've taken a frang. We've taken that whole issue with the city. It's a gap in our NCD. I know that I've been to your one group, but I also know that the NCD ignored my city staff. If city staff took the NCD as a primary document to use, these plans would never get as far as they do. It wouldn't be a board of adjustment hearings because they just wouldn't get that far. There would not be parking pads suddenly appearing. And that's true and that's why we have to be enforcers. We have to be employees. It's also part of the tier one coalition agenda to get staff specifically tasked to be working with neighborhoods on the NCDs or other issues. Because you're right, they don't have the staff to monitor what's going on in all the neighborhoods across the city. At staff who are not part of the development services. That's right, so we have to actually have it. We would like to see the city have staff specifically tasked to work with the neighborhoods. So hopefully with a new regime as a city holiday, they will get it. Yeah. Other questions about the midtown master plan? Hi, I would like to, I have a concern. I mean, we are ready to get justice in this neighborhood that took us a year to make this one plan because we too are a very diverse neighborhood. We have various areas that have people's needs that have different interests. What I'm now hearing is there's more than just one hundred, one more area, we're throwing several others together. And then we have one delegate for that area that's already diverse in itself to help you to create this new document that actually replaces everything else. That's a concern of mine. Thanks for sharing that. I mean, it is a big task for us to bring multiple diverse neighborhoods together that really do have a lot of differences even within their own boundaries. And achieve some consensus and a common vision for the future. It's not a small task. And we are asking one representative from each neighborhood association board to be on the planning team. But like I said, we're also doing a lot of other public outreach. Not only to people that are, you know, that come to neighborhood association meetings and people on the neighborhood association board, but we're gonna try to find people that don't participate with the neighborhood association. Such as at our college, what are the times of entities will be on the advisory board? So I heard two questions. We'll actually ask for your help to identify people maybe that aren't part of the neighborhood association that we should try to find and reach out to. And maybe even ideas for how to do that. Other people who are gonna be on the planning team until they finally confirm, it's not final, but San Antonio College, how we've asked Methodist Hospital, University of the Incarnate Word, a couple of developers, Esperanza Peace of Justice Center, a small business owner on St. Mary's, a small business owner on Thread Road. Is it teams you can work with? No. We haven't asked them. What about any of the museums? We've asked the Whitty Museum and Bracken Ridge Park Conservancy. And unfortunately, it leaves out all kinds of people that we need to be talking to. We wanna have a group that's small enough that we can have some really productive and detailed conversations. And to do that, not everybody can be on that team. That leaves a lot of people that we have to go out and speak with in interviews and phone calls and focus groups and make sure that we're communicated with them anyways. There's- I'm concerned about the one person and how that one person is chosen. Is this gonna be one of those things behind closed doors that nobody knows how that one person is chosen? And it seems to me that if there's one person who tells them that there needs to be a lot of transparency about that choosing process I'm concerned because I see in my neighborhood that things pop up that don't have transparency where we understand how the choosing process happens. Can I jump in on that? The same point would be about the planning team, the advisory team. That needs to be transparent. The operation of that team. I just think we need to know how these things are selected and that it's not just three or four people who can say that they fit the person they want. It feels like sometimes things get a little bit of a negative effect. So the SHRL Copperhead plan, of course, and the over 300 pages that it has found some space to identify who's supposed to be on the planning team in some categories. I did say that somebody from each neighborhood association is supposed to be on the planning team. And we're leaving it to each neighborhood association board to decide who that's gonna be. When it comes to other people on the planning team, it's in chapter 17. There's a few different categories of the kinds of organizations, large employers and the like, who, or large educational institutions that have some influence over the future and have plans already that we need to be aware of and thinking about how all of this stuff fits together. So that's essentially how it's chosen. The planning team meetings, we're hoping that your representative from the neighborhood can do some reporting back to you. I'm also available to come and speak with you on a regular basis essentially to update you on how the planning process is going. As much as you ask me to be here, I can be here. The only way that wouldn't work out is if another neighborhood meets on the exact same night, I would have to find some balance, for example, if they're asking me to come to all of their meetings too. So Gary, can I address a little bit of your concern? So this is all new to us and how we're gonna do this. If anyone is wanting to be considered to be part of the planning team, email us. Because though we're gonna have one person that's gonna be the representative, that one person can't do it all and we're all like, who's that one person gonna be? Because that's almost like a full-time job. So we're looking at how can we orchestrate this. There's gonna have to be people behind that person that are gonna take some of the load from that person to do the communicating out because one person can't do it all. So please contact us and then we'll be as transparent as we know. And also if you wanna be involved in helping choosing who that person is, contact us at that info, at the info, email. Can that go into the newsletter? Can what go into the newsletter? That last thing you said, if anybody is interested in figuring out how that person will be identified through the contact point and the contact point. And we put into the newsletter before about all of this coming down and about needing people to participate. So we have done that and asked people to contact us because it is gonna be a big job. I want to thank tier one for ensuring that there will be neighborhood representatives. I understand that y'all have a lot to do with placing neighborhood. And you also mentioned that they're going to be like more broad public update meetings. How often do you guys plan to do those? I think we're gonna have three to four open house workshop type meetings and look for the first one probably in August. But keep an eye out in general for our webpage. Please in a few weeks look out for him and please add your name to the email list. If you follow us on Twitter or Instagram or I think we're gonna be doing Facebook and next door. These are also ways that we're gonna be announcing meetings as well. What's the handle for the Twitter? SHM, I actually don't know exactly. I should, I think it should just be essay tomorrow. I think it's essay tomorrow of 2040. Essay tomorrow of 2040, okay. I will text the person who knows right now. So please be involved. I look forward to hopefully seeing every one of you again maybe multiple times in the coming year. It is important to participate and be aware and contribute to the plan. Well thank you, thank you for coming. Thank you. Neighbors just to the West. Long business history food will reach companies and he has also had a long history with helping the society in a number of ways. He's been on the board of directors of America's Second Harvest. He's been chairman of the San Antonio Regional Food Bank. He's active with United Way of San Antonio. He's a board member of the Bracken Ridge Park Conservancy and is now an officer of the Conservancy. But to tonight's point, in 2011, he founded, what are the organizers of, the Bracken Ridge Park Community Cats Project. If you don't know it, long unfortunate history of Bracken Ridge Park being a dumping ground on one of pets. And what Tom and a number of other volunteers have done is help to make those pets have a reasonable life in Bracken Ridge Park and can be done finding them homes outside the park. The crystals have six cats, five of which came from Bracken Ridge Park. I have three cats, all of which came from Bracken Ridge Park and formed it into my yard a couple years ago. And so I'd like to turn the floor over to San Antonio's premier cat lady, Tom Cat Lady. In fact, listening to all the discussion about planning and we just went through the Bracken Ridge Park master planning process. That brought back some kind of interesting memories and we're not done, it's an endless lifetime of planning at Sam's once you get involved in these kind of circumstances. I wish you guys. And we take that with Garrett as well and we're all in this together. Yeah, you're our neighbors. So yeah, and indeed I have a home in Carmel by the Sea of California, which there is no more contentious real estate or issues with, as you just described, than our lots are all standard 40 by 100 feet and everybody fights over everything. And we're becoming more like California and hopefully someday California's gonna become a little bit more like that. So at that, let's talk a little bit about the cats. The Bracken Ridge Park, actually it's the Conservancy's Community Cat Project. And I'm just wanting a long line of people that have been involved in this. So this has been a generational thing. Cats have been in this park forever as you'll learn as I kind of work through this. So we operate under, with a memorandum of understanding between the city, Animal Care Services, San Antonio Parks Department and the Conservancy has been our home. It's the Conservancy that really gave us a standing to deal with all the entities that are involved in the park. Our goal really is to take care of the situation. Unfortunately, we're pioneering there. There's not another park in the United States, an urban park, a major urban central park like ours that has the kind of animal abandonment problem in San Antonio does. The closest place you can go to to find a situation like ours is in Maui. And then there's a couple of places in Seattle that are somewhat similar. So we're pioneering here. So when I say our goal is to build the best practice, other people are watching what we're doing. You know, so just so we're all on the same terms, you know, what's a community cat? It's a cat without license. It's a cat without a home. An ear tip is a good thing. When you see a cat that has a tear tip, that means it's not intact, it's not gonna reproduce. It's kind of falls secondary down to our list of concerns. They're free roaming. In the case of Brackenridge Park, primarily they have been abandoned in that park. Why am I involved? You're right, I'm a business guy. I mean, we, you know, long story about that, but I just couldn't stand the fact that people abandon animals in Brackenridge Park. It just, it just makes me very angry. And somebody had to raise their hands to do it. Howard Peake introduced me to the situation. Lila Powell, who's our prior executive director before Lynn Bobbitt is with us tonight. Kept me involved, got me involved. And it's just a passionate thing for me. I mentioned master planning. Brackenridge Park has gone through a master plan, as some of you all very well know. In that master plan, one of the first things we did was a biodiversity study. In that biodiversity study, of course, for one of the first things they found were that there was, you know, there weren't enough small mammals that weren't enough frogs and wizards and, you know, whatever, what happened? Well, there were a lot of cats there more than when they did the study than there are now. And so the plan pointed out that, you know, invasive animal species are a problem. You've got to reduce the thrill of cat densities, move the feeding stations away from wildlife, basically just reduce the number of cats. And positively affect the situation, which remains difficult. In my business career, which spanned a lot of time in a lot of companies and, you know, large companies, I really have run into a problem more complex than this. This is a topic. All the way back to 2009 when the Conservancy, the Brackenridge Park Conservancy, was first founded. So they're organizing concerns right up front were for feral cats. Like I said, the cat situation has been top of mind with a lot of people in the park or in the neighborhoods for a long time. Your neighborhood, for example. You mentioned, the gentleman mentioned the 2001 Mackey Park plan. Well, in that plan, one of the, you know, under safety and one of the first, the first objective under safety was animal care. You know, what are you going to do to get stray animals off the street? And further along, of course, and we're thankful for this, is the Fort Brackenridge Park is a major and then it's your neighborhood. So we're partners in this. And I think, as Paul mentioned, when I walked in, he sees cats that go back and forth and certainly I'm sure there are those that do. Although it's kind of hard to put a number on that. What we did put a number on was working with animal care services. You know, if you can't measure it, you can't approve it. And I went into this as a business guy trying to figure out, you know, what are we going to do? How big is the problem? Are we unique? Or what? So ACS shared all their data with me for calls. You can't, you cannot count cats. Not in a large area. It's just not possible. It's not scientifically possible. So what we did is we got all the calls into 3-1-1 that concern cats. They gave us this information. You figured that if there's a call then there's probably a number of cats nearby. And we plied it out on a heat map and where were that circle right there was basically the neighborhood. Nike Park, Records Park, River Road, Tobin Hill, et cetera. And you can see that the red spots are high density of calls. The highest density of calls. Can you see that? All right, you're going to turn off one of those lights, cruise maybe the first one for somebody. Yeah, maybe that'll help a little bit. It's not a real easy charge to see. So that was city-wide. And then when you narrow it down to the neighborhood, Records Park itself is not problematic in terms of public concern about the cats. No one really calls. The only calls that really showed up in Records Park were from pet shops and the Paul Jolly Center were. So if someone was looking to adopt an animal and they were bitten or scratched that has to be reported by law. Then there's the occasional cat that's hip, injured, whatever it calls in. But the park itself is not really seen as a major safety concern. But if you look at your neighborhood over here, Macon Park, it's a high density deal. And this goes back to, this was when ACS first started this in 2011 to 2015 when I did this. So it's problematic. We hear a lot of cats in this part of the world that it's unfortunate for the cats as well. So our goal is to reduce the number of free roaming cats in Records Park. Now, when I first got involved, I thought, well, in fact, this can't be too hard. We'll get it down to zero and I'll go play God. But it doesn't work that way. It's now, I understand, it's down to the minimum number possible and no one really knows what the minimum number is. We have helped in this. A guy named Dr. John Boone is a PhD from Washington, George Washington University. We engage to help us understand this. He is the preeminent expert on free roaming pets in the world. It goes all over Turkey, London, I mean, now, you know, wherever there's a problem, he's there. And he basically said, Tom, you're always gonna have cats in Records Park, no matter what you do. Which I found unfortunate, but anyway, I guess he knows. So what do we do? Well, we mainly care for the population that's there 365 days a year. You know, no matter what the weather is or anything else, Christmas, Easter, we're there taking care of those cats. We provide wet and dry food for them. We, the volunteers that we have have to bring in their water. The cats really need water. Oftentimes when I go in to feed and I still feed once a week, you put the food out, the cats are thirsty. They're gonna go to the water. Not all of them are living near the river, so. It's a challenge. And importantly, our volunteers observe and they record and report. Because if we have an injured cat, a sick cat, they watch those cats over time. I'll show you one at the end here what happens. And new cats. New cats that are not your pets. It's an all point bulletin. We gotta go get that cat. Because the last time we want us to have a bunch of kittens born in Records Park. There hadn't been a litter of kittens born in Records Park in two years that we know about. So that's pretty good. Feral cats, you know, cats that are just not social are trapped and they're fixed and they're returned. There's nowhere else for them to go and it's, you know, sanctuary someplace else like wildlife rescue might be something that can happen down the road that it didn't happen now. So they go back to the park. Actually, that doesn't happen very often. Social cats and kittens, unfortunately, kittens are a big part of the deal last year. We rescued 52 kittens from Records Park. Had they been born, had we not been there to take care of them, remove them? Had they grown up there and you probably wouldn't be able to catch them all. You know, Records Park would soon become an attraction just to go see the cats like some island in Japan. So, unfortunately, we've been able to remove those cats for adoption. We have to work like hell to find those for them. The Humanities Society's been very helpful. Animal Care Services has their own sure of issues. Crucial learn a lot about all that as time unfolds. It's a problem. We have cats that have been there all their lives. Some of those cats were born many years ago before we were really active. And they're social, they're sort of social. They understand people you can pet. I've tried to take some home, but they're not happy. They don't want to be in a home. The park is their home. So those cats are left there to live out their lives, which is only about eight years. So the attrition rate is actually pretty high for cats in the park. All of our efforts are volunteer. We have about 20 people that volunteer to help us. We're always looking for volunteers when handed that out. Basically, you show up, you know, tell you how we divide it up. Bring your food in, bring your water in, clean the area up, check the cats out. And on the way you go, they're always greeting you. They're certainly happy to see you whenever you arrive. We have 12 active managed colonies in the park and these three locations have been there forever. I mean, why, I don't know. This is where people fed the cats and where they kind of consolidated. So we have, we've broken up into the main park and the tea gardens and also the Oggy's Barbecue Place, which is the hotbed for abandonment, unfortunately. So the tea gardens and Oggy's are together with 48 cats, that's the highest number. And then Avenue A, which has actually seen it decrease over the years as you'll see. So that's how we break it up and we have teams. We have three teams of volunteers. So they're volunteers in the main park, tea gardens and then people that just take care of Avenue A. To tell you how bad the problem was, and again, I go back to, you know, if you can't measure it, you can't approve it. There were records that were first kept in 2000, starting in 2005 to 2009, but the situation was so bad that the Parks Department started to kill the cats. Well, that got everybody's attention and they changed their tune and decided that the best way that this is when Trappin' New Return first started to come on the scene. So there was a mass traffic. People, volunteers went in together with ACS and veterinary groups and they trapped a total of 370 unfixed cats during that period of time. Now, the animal shelter, how many, most of y'all know that the pound, our animal shelter, was in the park for 62 years. That's the reason that Brackridge Park is considered sanctuary. That's the source, the stock for all these cats that are there. People would abandon them there overnight when the facility was closed, just leave them on the front steps. The cats would go off into the park, kittens, the whole thing, and then their caretakers. You know, the average last pound of animal going to that old pound was 45 minutes. They took two tons of carcasses a day out of that pound. It was the deadliest pound in North America, for sure. But that went away in 2008. Unfortunately, they put Paul Jolly back, which further just solidifies the park as a sanctuary and people are abandoning the animals there. So, and they find their way to the park. So the G-Garden's always been up 180 for a number, that's the highest number, 119 in the main park, 27 on hand today. And Broadway still is a, that's Mission Creek for me to go worry about cats on the other side of your neighborhood. I mean, I want to get together with ACS and find a way to work with them to help deal with this problem. So here's what we've done since I got involved. When I ran back in 2010, we have 181 total of cats in the park. Today we had 96. Unfortunately, there's a slight uptick there. For the first time since I've been involved, we couldn't keep up with abandoning. And primarily, as you see in the main park, we had a little uptick there with the G-Garden and in that area over there behind the barbecue area is just people just drive up, throw the cats out in the lake. It's an easy deal. And there's no enforcement. We begged parks department to help us and the park police, first time I met the park police with the head guide, great guy, sweet as he could be. Listened and telling, you said, Tom, and you said, I thought the park was a sanctuary for cats. And it's just the way this has been ingrained in our culture in San Antonio. So we've done a good job and I'm concerned about the fact that we aren't able to keep up with it. Talked about master planning. One of the things I worked hard on was to get this into the Brackens Park master plan and get ideas. Basically, you can see how the G is gonna get it. Domesticated species population management. Anyway, within this document, hopefully there's gonna be a kernel of energy to help us deal with the abandonment problem because that's really the crux of the matter. If it were just about population management right now, there'd probably be 20 cats in Brackens Park. The more we've done a great job on population management of the cats that are there, but abandonment and rehoming, we're just treading water right now. If we can just maintain the number that's there, that's probably a good thing. Why is all this happening? Well, the city went to no kill. Went to no kill, what? 2012 in Harvard is their last deal. Went to no kill, which I'm certainly not against. I'm proud of San Antonio for what that means. However, it doesn't really mean that the cats are gonna go find a home. It's a numbers game. The cats go in, their ear tips, and as the states, as an alternative to euthanasia, the city can opt to sterilize, vaccinate, and return healthy stray shelter cats to the site of origin, or them out. So the cats that we have now showing up in Brackenridge Park are all ear tips, for the most part, already. So they've come from some shelter someplace, and someone, perhaps, a shelter or a colony caretaker in some other area just as overwhelmed, can't stand it, and the cats end up in Brackenridge Park. We find them all the time. This is the best that I've been able to get from the city, and I don't blame the city. The city's got plenty to worry about, and this isn't high on their list, the sign on the left was the old sign, and I jumped up and down and learned the new sign, and I wanted it to be more explicit about dumb abandoned, and this is what I got. So next Tuesday, I'm meeting with ACS, and I'm hopeful, to get some attention to what comes next, because if I don't get some help, I'm gonna quit doing just this ridiculous amount of time and energy that we spend on. I'm sorry for the cats, but, you know, it's just, you can't swim upstream. Can't fly a city off. This is an example of, over by the Zulot, when the frees came in and the foliage died back, somebody had built a cat condominium complex over there, and it, what it was, somebody had abandoned animals, and the people that abandoned animals often feel guilty about it, and they will come back and care for these animals, or try to, because we see random feeders all the time. And this guy, we ended up finding out who it was at one point, abandoned some cats there and built this whole shelter and came back and fed them every day. Well, of course, the parks department hauled that off at some point. He was, you know, he was all up in the arm, you know, but what can you do? But that's the kind of thing that happens in Breckenridge Park. Abandoned happens all the time, and we've actually caught this young lady abandoning a mama cat and six kittens. Nothing happened to her. You know, we had the license plate, we had hernet, we did all that kind of stuff, because we didn't call 3-1-1, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you really couldn't prosecute. So, you know, how often this happened happens all the time. There's a cat abandoned in Breckenridge Park. I wouldn't surprise me if it was here every day. This is what it's like to care for these cats, and especially going and trapping. I mean, I'm the head tracker. I'm one of the best cat trappers ever. And it's interesting. I mean, it's a challenge to go deep into the park and try and find these cats, especially kittens. And that's what it looks like when you go in there. That's my wife. Those are mosquitoes on her back going in the feet of that park. And that's what I have to work when I go in deep into the park to go after an animal. I mean, it's a, it is not a hospitable place. So this is a good day to go off. That's our return on investment right there when we can capture all the kittens that we believe are there. So I'm just gonna give you an example of what happens to an animal. Someone that's, for example, you know, was thinking that this would be a great thing to do. This cat was ear tipped. I first saw it in January, January the 30th, actually. And I knew it had not been there before. I know all the cats. And it was a very attractive animal. So I took a picture of it and then I made a point of taking a picture of it periodically or almost on every feeding trip. And as you can see that cat, it's already started to look a little odd. And this is about three months later and it didn't look too good. It wasn't getting along. I mean, it was getting along with the cats. It was eating regularly. And then it showed up looking like that. And this is when, you know, I can't see it. I gotta go trap the cat. And you can't imagine how difficult it is to trap one cat out of a colony of, say, 20. That's the cat you wanna go get. I mean, you can put black traps out all day long and everything, but anyway, I had to get that cat. And I did. And that's a drop trap that I have made for us. We have several of them. And that way you can pluck it on your foot, you prop it up, you got a hinge on it, and you put food in there. You sit there with a string for as long as it takes till the right cat goes in there. You can catch two or three cats in there and ferret them out the door. So anyway, we caught this cat. We named it Libby. And you never know what you have when you can get a cat from the park. You might think it's feral, as I thought this one was. And they're traumatized by that experience, especially if they're social animals. And so we get this cat back and, you know, I'm wearing gloves and I don't really know what's gonna happen. And that's what happened. The cat is just so relieved to be out of that environment in Bracken and Tupac. Slept for, I don't know, how many days. Ate like a horse. We decided that it looked so bad. I mean, his hair was just so terrible. We decided to give it a bath. So we gave the cat a bath. And it took it pretty darn well. I was really surprised at that. If you've never given a cat a bath, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. So this is Libby after her bath. And you can tell how grateful and happy that this cat was to have come out of that park. I mean, it's turned out to be a beautiful end. Now she started to look back, look like a royal cell. We have three foster cages, these large enclosures that we can put cats in, volunteers, you know, just to observe them or if they're coming back from surgery or whatever it may be. You know, we, last year, we had 1,113 foster days of cats. The average stay is 20 days. The average cost per cat that we have in the situation is $264. And the Conservancy and myself have helped raise this many grants from the Erie Foundation and also from donations. This cat ended up finding a home, believe it or not. This lady can't remember how she saw it. You know, we post on everything. She and her husband live in San Marcos. He's a PhD in piano from the University of Texas. They came and got Libby, so Libby hopefully will live happily ever after and not end up in this park. But for every cat like this that has had the ending up, Barry, a lot of my good friends in that park, dogs, owls, they just finally just give up, can't stand it, can't make it. So I would urge you to, if you have any interest at all in helping us, because I can't do this forever. I'm almost 70 or too hyperplacent. So somebody else has to pick up a dog when I run, whether it's at some point. So the more people we can get, the better off the cats. And as long as we keep doing our job, eventually the cats will be at a minimal population and those that are there will always be all. So anyway, thank you for your time. I appreciate it and good luck with your plan too. Thank you so much. Yeah, I might just say Tom's done a decent job and he has raised about $30,000 from the area foundation to help us. And we do have a shed now in our, we have the food. And so we do take care of the ear tipping and spanking it around and take them back and forth to the vet. So you don't have to buy your own food. But we could use help with feeders, we could use foster and we can train you how to trap. So call us, thank you. Thank you. All right, well that's all we have. I wish anyone has any comments or comments. How was Senator Hernandez's office? It was really, really quick as we're at the end of it. Okay. All right. Good evening. I'm going to let you know that Senator Hernandez is having a series of five legislative briefings. Two in your area will include one on the, this Saturday, June 24th at the Yemini and one in Lupe, from Missile Hall, from Saturday 10 a.m. to 11 30 a.m. These are not political events. These are legislative briefings open, free and open to the public. The other one will be July 8th, 10 a.m. to 11 30 a.m. against July 8th, a Saturday at the Via border. I have flyers and I have to share with everyone, including our contact information if you have any questions. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, well thank you all for coming. Let me stop with your chair. That'd be great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right.