10.15.19 Regular Meeting - Laserfiche WebLink

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City Council reports. Meeting Minutes October 15, 2019 Rachel Sanborn, runs the Water Quality Testing Program with River Rangers, stated that they have 75 volunteers and they have large samples of the water quality. She provided the Mill Race runs more slowly and that they pick up a lot more sediment. It is one thing to have two banks that erode, but it is a lot more when you have four banks. The water quality is degraded because of the divisions of the river. She stated that they think that the Mill Race area is probably impacted by the Woods Apartments and runoff in that area. She stated that when dams are removed, water quality improves. They have seen important water quality changes when dams are removed. She provided that this river is extremely historical by its very nature. The depths and springs make it historical. Kyle Mylius, made the following comments: "As most of you know I own the Root Cellar Cafe. The Coffee Bar, and Rhea's Ice Cream downtown. I am also a member of the Parking Advisory Board and here to talk to you specifically about our 6th official recommendation to Council. This is the allocation of $50,000 from the downtown revitalization funds to immediately subsidize 120 off-street parking spots for residents of downtown. This would be ideally in 2 large sections at the Hitch lot and old Frost Bank lot. Both property owners have expressed interest in a bulk discount as many spots are currently unused due to a combination of them being cost prohibitive and weak enforcement of the current 2 -hour parking downtown. Through the bulk pricing, and matching dollars with these funds, we can bring the current price from $50 per spot/per month, down to $20 per month for a resident, employee, or business owner downtown. An equitable system for allocating these spots would then be created and this money would fund these spots for 18 months as part of our phased -in transition. This would immediately unlock 120 prime spots throughout our downtown for patrons. This is very important because when an employee or resident parks on -street downtown, they are often there for 8 hours plus unlike a customer. It is easy to quantify the Return on Investment (ROI) of these dollars spent. We know that the average person spends around $20 per trip downtown in towns our size. This would translate to $2400 per day, spent downtown. That's if each car only had one person in it and those 120 spots were filled just once a day. Conservatively we can expect 3 turns on a given day. This would translate into $7200 per day and $216,000 per month in additional revenue for downtown. That would translate to almost $3.9 million dollars in additional downtown revenue over the course of the 18 -month program. This would create over $320,000 worth of sales tax for the City and State. Another important note is City of San Marcos Page 6