CITY OF SAN MARCOS
The November election will see candidates for San Marcos mayor on the ballot. Mayor Jane Hughson, will be running for re-election against current San Marcos CISD Board of Trustee Juan Miguel Arredondo. Hughson plans to run for her final term, if elected.
When she’s not busy with mayoral duties, which takes up the majority of her time, Hughson likes to crochet and loves to watch live music. However, there’s one place that she feels right at home, literally.
“I like being at home. My late husband and I built that house to be a comfortable place for us with plenty of storage,” Hughson said. “I have no desire to travel or do a cruise or any of that.”
While she may not want to travel, she is interested in trying new things. Skydiving was never on her bucket list, but she did go recently, which was a proposition that began at the fire department's annual dinner when a fireman who is a regular skydiver began asking people to join him.
“He looked at me and said, ‘Why don't you do it?’” Hughson said. “I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, if you can get [the skydiving company] to donate to the Women's Center auction… I'll bid on it.’” Hughson is currently finishing her 16th year as mayor or a member of council, so she’s no stranger to the task. She began as a council member from 1996 to 2001, took a break, then was a council member again from 2014 to 2017. She became the 4th woman to be mayor of San Marcos in 2018.
“I've got the knowledge, experience and commitment to do the job. This is what I do. I don't have children. I don’t have grandchildren. I do have cats, and they're pretty independent. So I have the time to do it. Institutional knowledge and memory is a really good thing,” Hughson said. “I would be able to say, ‘Look, this is what we tried 15 years ago. I'm not saying we'll have the same results. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, because this didn't work. But you need to know what didn't work in order to address that so that the next time we do it again, if we're going to do it, it'll be more successful.’ I think that we need that. We need some more long-term people, and with Jude [Prather] and Mark [Gleason] not being on the council [after November], I think that's even more of a reason that we need somebody who's been there for a while to hang in there for two more years.”
The accomplishments she’s achieved during her time on city council that she holds in highest regard are the comprehensive plans that she has worked on, of which there are several.
“I was on the committee in ‘95. One of the reasons why I ran in ‘96 was to see that plan through,” Hughson said. “We didn't do another comprehensive plan until 2013, and I chaired the Citizens Committee. I wanted to see that through, [which] was part of my [decision to run in] 2014. And then guess what? We're about to finish another comp plan, and I think I need to do two more years.”
Hughson is particularly proud of how the city of San Marcos spends what could be considered a limited budget compared to larger cities in the area.
“We don't have the type of money that a city like Austin has to do a lot of the social service things that they do,” Hughson said. “We do spend half a million dollars on our Human Services budget, which benefits the Food Bank and the Women's Center and PALS and all kinds of different organizations. And some of our CARES and ARPA dollars, we [used that and] doubled that half a million one year. That helped a lot of people… Most cities do not have a social service budget.”
Hughson said a struggle as mayor is to help the many people in need in the community with less money going toward sales and property taxes than would occur in a city with a higher median income.
“We are not a rich community. We are a low to moderate income community. Therefore our houses are smaller and our dollars are smaller, so we don't have the property tax and the sales tax that we might have if we were a city where we had more people who were of higher income,” Hughson said. “The most frustrating part is that we just don't have enough money to help people. We can't help everybody, and there's just so much need in our community… I'm proud of how we spent the ARPA dollars and the CARES dollars, like the $800,000 that we did for the housing rehab; that is making a difference. I went to the fundraising dinner for Mission Able, and they had a lot of videos of the people that they had helped. This includes putting in a handicap ramp for somebody because the most affordable home that you can have is the one that you're in.”
If elected, she’d like to take the goals that she has already had even further.
“It’s really the same ones that we’ve had — managing funding, so that we can provide the most benefit to the most residents, finding other ways that we can bring in dollars and diversification of our tax base,” Hughson said. “Generally speaking, and I learned this years ago, $1 of tax money that comes in costs you about $20 if it's residential, because you've got people using the library, the parks, police and fire services and all of that. If you've got $1 that comes in for commercial, it costs you about 75 cents. Industrial costs you about 40 cents. So that's why, whenever you've got a ‘bedroom community,’ a lot of residential, they'll have a higher tax rate because you need that in order to serve that community. So diversification of our tax base with more commercial and some industrial is what is going to help us address that.”
Hughson wanted the public to know that she is “ready, willing and able” to continue doing the job that she’s already doing and that it will be her top priority.
