Marfa City Council talks new water meters, Visitor Center improvements, PD grants, hears from concerned citizens on Gaza

MARFA — Marfa City Council members met this week to tackle regular city business including new automatic water meters, Visitor Center improvements, grants for the Marfa Police Department and to hear from a group of citizens calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. 

Automatic water meters 

City Council members voted to put out a request for proposals (RFP) for a company to conduct a city-wide water meter overhaul this year. The city’s current meters are old and break often, causing issues for the two public works employees that read around 2,000 meters a month for utility billing. 

While the entire cost of the project will be determined through the bidding process, the city budgeted around $100,000 for the meter upgrades this year. The RFP is geared towards a full-service company, who will ideally bid and be selected by April, City Manager Mandy Roane said.  

The new “smart” meters will be automatic, as opposed to manually read, resulting in more accurate reads and less arduous work for the already over-stretch public works employees, said Mayor Manny Baeza. “The main thing is with reading meters, it’s not good on your knees, it’s very time-consuming, and there’s always inaccuracies — just human error,” Baeza said.
“So this will hopefully alleviate this issue.” 

Roane said the upgrades will be time consuming and detail-oriented, ensuring each meter is switched over correctly, but the new system will be turnkey, fully integrated with the city’s existing technology, and the company they hire will train city staff on all aspects of the new meters. “How do we upload it? How do we check for errors?” Roane said. “They will come in with the complete package so we’re not going to have to be guessing and hoping that we do it right.” 

Visitor Center upgrades 

The USO building will gain new outdoor bathrooms soon as council members voted to approve the purchase of a prefab ADA-accessible bathroom unit for $181,000. Baeza said the city has been aware of the need for outdoor restrooms for some time, and it was great to finally make progress on seeing them installed. 

Without outdoor bathrooms, people looking to just rent out the USO’s outdoor pavilion must rent out the entire facility to have access to indoor restrooms. Roane said outdoor toilets, which will be placed on the alley-side of the pavilion, will be funded with hotel occupancy tax (HOT) funds. 

The Marfa Saturday Market has been displaced by rental events taking place at the USO in the past, but making the two rental spaces separate should alleviate some conflict, Tourism Director Jennifer Conners and Baeza said. 

“It’s gonna be great to have restrooms out there, instead of having conflicting schedules if the USO is rented that weekend,” Baeza said. “This is just trying to alleviate the situation out there. And we’re trying to make that space more welcoming.” 

Marfa PD grants

Council members passed several resolutions that will make it possible for city administrators and the Marfa Police Department to go out for federal and state grant programs. They passed a resolution allowing Marfa PD to participate in Operation Stonegarden — a federal border security initiative — for 2024-2025 as well as several other resolutions for state law enforcement grant programs.

“Instead of Stonegarden and Lonestar, which we’ve kind of used to cover everything and which are also very paperwork heavy, this year we decided to go for a couple of individual grants that would supply the PD with any different types of equipment,” Roane said. 

The state grants Marfa PD will apply for include a $23,000 ballistic shields grant, a $13,000 rifle-resistant body armor grant and a $25,000 body camera grant. The department’s current body cameras are older refurbished cameras with subpar video quality, Roane said. The other items are designed for active shooter situations and come with training.

“I hope that we absolutely never ever have to use it,” said Roabe. “But this grant funding is available. I think we should do what we can to arm our officers to keep them as safe as possible, which will keep our citizens as safe as possible.” 

Gaza 

Resident Eileen Myles, one of four citizens present to call for the ceasefire, addressed council members during the public comment period. They relayed recent horrors from the news on the war in Gaza, citing the statistic that of 30,000 killed, 10,000 were children. 

“We’ve been meeting as a group and talking, and we’re all horrified and disturbed and don’t want to support this as citizens, don’t want to support this as human beings, don’t want to watch this and want it to stop,” Myles said. “And the question is: what can we do?”

Myles said they were against the state of Texas spending “billions of dollars on bonds supporting Israel,” and asked that City Council members consider what other cities across the country are considering — a city-wide resolution supporting a ceasefire in Gaza.

“No city in Texas has done it yet,” Myles said. “I feel like there’s lots of Texans who don’t want to see this kind of death happening. This is an opportunity for us to say something strongly and powerfully.”  

Myles said the group is starting a petition to bring more evidence of local support to the council, and it held a Valentine’s Day bake sale this week to raise funds to get one family out of Gaza. They urged City Council members to take action within the next couple of weeks because if they wait too long “there could be no Palestienians left.”  

Resident Kate Sterchi followed Myles comments, stating the city-wide ceasefire resolution was a “baseline moral gesture,” people on all sides of the war supported out of a desire to not see “more civilians, women and children, innocent people dying.” 

“I think if Marfa could come together as a city and say ‘no more.’ I think that really could be a powerful gesture in a very large state that does hold a lot of financial sway in the country,” Sterchi said. 

Per public meeting laws and procedures, council members did not respond to the citizen request right away. In a follow-up with The Big Bend Sentinel, the group said they intend to approach other local municipalities with the resolution idea. Roane said the group will have to follow the usual procedure to get an item on the City Council agenda — have a council member sponsor the item so it may be publicly discussed at the next meeting.