During its April 9 meeting, Hays County Commissioners Court voted 4-1 to approve the BTX Small Business Market to take place on the courthouse grounds.
The market will take place every fourth Saturday of each month and is organized by Triple Elevation Custom Creations and began in Buda. It will include music and around 30 vendors selling different products.
Rachel Rodriguez, owner of Triple Elevation Custom Creations and host of the BTX Small Business Market, explained why she wants to expand this event into San Marcos.
“I’m all over trying to help, not just our business, but other businesses in the community grow,” Rodriguez said. “Now we’re [Triple Elevation Custom Creations] a little bigger, we kind of want to branch out to other surround areas.”
Commissioner Walt Smith opposed the market taking place on courthouse grounds.
“I was going to vote for it until you said ‘we bring all these out-of-county vendors and then reimburse them for mileage.’ If we’re promoting, not to sound protectionist, but if we are trying to use our facilities to promote small businesses here then incentivizing it in some way, I’d be up for it. But I see there could be a path that I just couldn’t support,” Smith said.
Judge Ruben Becerra said the BTX Small Business would bring the community together in the courthouse.
“It’s a mixture of things we do on our courthouse grounds, and bringing people together is the general spirit of it,” Becerra said.
During public comments, several community members asked the commissioners to stop the adoption of the Jail‐Based Competency Treatment Program.
According to the San Marcos bid postings website, “Hays County, Texas is seeking a well-qualified and experienced vendor to provide a Jail-Based Competency Treatment Program for the Hays County Jail. The 10-bed program must be aimed to reduce wait times and admissions to state-operated facilities, provide a cost-effective alternative to competency restoration, reduce the demand for state hospital bed days, and minimize the stress of incarcerated individuals possible for the participants in the program.”
San Marcos resident Elle Cross said the tax money that would be used on expanding incarceration systems should be allocated to providing care to residents with mental illness.
“In the 1970s, we saw mass deinstitutionalization of psychiatric facilities with the purpose of funding community-based resources, but those community-based services were never funded,” Cross said. “Instead, we got the war on drugs, which robustly funded the carceral system and ended up creating a system where we pick up people who are self-medicating because they were dropped from services from deinstitutionalization. This has by default funneled people into the prison system and transformed it into the default mental warehouse.”
The final vote on this will be taken by the Hays County Commissioners Court in May.
Hays County Commissioners Court meets on select Tuesdays at 9 a.m. each month. For more information, visit its website.
