San Marcos City staff present outreach results; council members question representativeness of survey responses

San Marcos City staff presented results from recent community outreach — including an online survey and in-person "dream sessions" — and council members raised concerns that the responses are not representative of the whole city, pointing to a concentration of replies on the West Side and sparse participation on the East Side.

City staff said the materials are intended as feedback from the outreach methods used, not as statistically generalizable results. A staff member said, "not saying that it's generalizable, not saying that it's attributed to the entire community, but it's another tool of information that we can give y'all to know that with the methods that we have undertaken, this is what we've heard from those particular things." The staff member described targeted in-person outreach that included handing out information at the food bank and direct outreach to public housing authority residents and noted a second phase of the online survey was live.

A commenter who identified a background in academia criticized how the feedback was presented, saying, "I just think it's bad methodology," and urging clearer disclosure of who participated and how the sample was collected. A council member said they had contacted long-standing members of the neighborhood commission, who were surprised by some of the sentiments shown on staff slides and did not feel those slides accurately reflected discussions in their meetings.

Council members asked staff to provide geospatial detail on responses so the council could see concentrations and gaps. One council member requested a GIS-style mapping of where survey responses came from and pointed to a concentrated cluster of participation around the Kissing Tree area as an example: "You cannot tell me though that that accurately depicts what most people in this city feel." Several speakers said the East Side had very low participation and urged more targeted outreach there.

Staff described the engagement as an early effort tied to the city's strategic plan and to supplemental budget requests, noting the outreach was also part of educating residents about draft goals. The staff presentation listed community safety among the strategies under the strategic plan and identified the Office of Violence Prevention as one listed strategy. Staff emphasized this was an initial round of engagement and said they are learning from the process and modifying outreach methods accordingly.

No formal votes or council directives were recorded in the transcript excerpt. Council members and staff discussed next steps informally: continuing phase 2 of the survey, expanding outreach to underrepresented neighborhoods, and returning with more detailed spatial data about who responded.

For now, staff characterized the materials as descriptive feedback from the specific outreach activities rather than a definitive community-wide measurement; council members asked for additional information to judge how much weight to give the results when tying them to budget or strategic decisions.