Oral History Transcript - Emmie Craddock - October 16, 1985
Interview with Dr. Emmie Craddock
Interviewer: Gay James
Transcriber: Gay James
Date of Interview: October 16, 1985
Location: City Hall, San Marcos, TX
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Begin Tape 1, Side 1
Gay James: This is Gay James. On October 16, 1985, I am going to be interviewing Dr. Emmie Craddock at the City Hall in San Marcos, Texas. She is currently Mayor of San Marcos. She is going to be starting with a brief outline of her family history and how she came to this area, and we’ll move on to her political career in San Marcos.
Emmie Craddock: I was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on July 26, 1915. My father was William Purceville Craddock, who was in the oil business at the time and spent all of his life in the oil business after his marriage. My mother is Anna Kilburn Craddock from St. Francisville, Louisiana. During my childhood, we moved quite frequently because my father, as I said, was in the oil business. We lived for a while in Shreveport, in Greenwood, Louisiana; in St. Francisville, Louisiana; in Corsicana, Texas; in Greenville, Texas; Marlin, Texas, and from there we moved to Houston. There we stayed longer than any place else. My brothers and I went through grammar school, high school, and college there. I lived in Houston until World War II, when I left to go into the United States Navy, and I never returned to live there. I visit there frequently now because I still have two brothers and their families in Houston.
James: Would you start and basically outline the years you were mayor? There were some years of separation in these years as to when you stepped down and—
Craddock: Before that, Gay, would you want to know anything about my education or anything of that sort?
James: Sure, where did you go to school?
Craddock: Well, as I said, when I went to Houston, I was in the fifth grade. Woodrow Wilson Grammar School. Then I went to City Lanier when it was first opened as a junior high school, then I graduated from Lanier. I went to St. Agnes Academy in Houston, where I graduated from high school in 1932. Then I enrolled in Rice, at that time Rice Institute, in the fall of 1932, and I graduated from Rice with a BA degree, with a major in English and a minor in political science in 1936. The following year, I think, I took a few courses at the University of Houston, in education, to try and get a teacher’s certificate. Much to my dismay, I was offered a job at Missouri City, which was just south of Houston by about fifteen miles, with a hundred population. I went down there and was head of the fifth grade, about which I knew absolutely nothing, but that’s been the story of my life. I stayed in Missouri City for five years. I went there in 1937 and left in 1942 to go into the United States Navy. They were five great years of my life, and I still have very fond memories of that time and my friends there.
Now, when I went into the Navy in ’42, I was called into duty in December of 1942, much to the dismay of my family, my mother in particular. We left Houston on the train about the eighteenth or nineteenth of December and arrived in Northampton, Massachusetts, which I had never heard of before, three or four days before Christmas, only to find that the whole staff, virtually the entire staff, had been given a holiday for the Christmas season, and here we were, brand-new seaman without any warm clothes particularly and with six feet of snow on the ground where they had shoveled it. I had borrowed a coat from Katherine Pearson in Houston, which was a Red Cross coat, which I kept so long, she finally had to wire me to send it home to her. There we were, and most of the instructors had been given, as I said, holiday leave. So, the poor remaining staff, wondering what in the world to do with all these brand-new seamen who were homesick, many of them, and nothing for them to do. But anyway, we managed to survive. I went through the school at Northampton and was commissioned an ensign in March of ’43. I was very, very fortunate to be kept on the staff there, and I stayed on the staff as a teaching member of the staff until the midshipmen’s school was demobilized in 1944. I was transferred at that time to Washington, D.C., and spent the next two years as Head of Women’s Reserve, the WAVE contingent in Washington, particularly, the Bureau of Naval Personnel. I was stationed in the Bureau of Naval Personnel until the end of the war. I was out of BUPERS, Bureau of Personnel in Arlington, the night the lights came back on in Washington; that was a glorious and wonderful experience.
As I said, I was demobilized in 1946. I went back to Houston, which had been my home. My youngest brother, Tommy, was still in Houston, and we decided that we’d come to the University of Texas and enter the graduate school. Tommy in physics and I in history. Because during the war, it occurred to me, “How in the world did we get into this terrible, terrible conflict? What went wrong?” I thought, “Well, the only thing that I can think to do when I get out is to go back to school and study history.” Maybe I could get some clue as to how this terrible calamity had come about, and that’s how I happened to go to graduate school at the University of Texas. There was my great, wonderful fortune to meet and to work for Walter Prescott Webb. He was a marvelous, humane scholar. I had for him the greatest of admiration. He was plain as an old shoe, and his office was a mess. It had cowboys’ boots and saddles and guns and cowboy memorabilia all over the floor. His desk was cluttered with all kinds of stuff. But I was enrolled in his Great Plains class, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I was going down the hall one day when I saw him dash out of his office and stop me, and he says, “I wonder if you’d be willing to grade for me.” And I said “Dr. Webb, I would be pleased to grade for you.” So I began to grade for him the second semester I was there, and I graded for him the whole time I was at the university. I did my master’s under Dr. Webb and received my master’s degree in 1949. One of the great things that Dr. Webb did for me, and he did many wonderful things for me, was to introduce me to James Taylor, who was chairman of the then-Social Science Division of Southwest State Teachers College in San Marcos. I was sitting in class one day, in a political science class, taking an exam, a final exam, and Dr. Webb appeared at my desk and asked me if I could step in the hall for a moment. I went out there and that’s when he introduced me to Jimmy, and Jimmy was looking for a teacher to come down here to teach for one year while one of his regular teachers was on leave, Betty Brooke Eakle. So I came to San Marcos, and I stayed two years. I officed with Retta Murphy, one of the great legendary figures of Southwest Texas State College. She was a marvelous Presbyterian, a wonderful history teacher, straight as a die, and not afraid of anything, the devil included. I officed with Dr. Murphy for two years. I taught here, then I went back to the University of Texas to work on my doctorate. I stayed there two years, and I was immensely fortunate by the time I finished two years of work on my doctorate, everything except completing my dissertation, Jimmy had a vacancy here, and he offered me the job, and that’s how I happened to come to San Marcos.
It was one of the greatest pieces of good fortune that I’ve ever had in my life. I have been here ever since, and I have loved every minute of it. At the time, San Marcos was very small, it was operated as a general law city, which meant that it was operating under the general laws of the State of Texas without a local charter. As I recall, it had a five or six-member council, and I was not particularly interested in it because I was busy traveling at Southwest Texas and getting myself moving backward and forward between here and Austin to finish my doctorate, which I did in 1954. So, when Jimmy offered me a permanent job and I came down here—well, let me back up just a second, when I was a student at the University of Texas, I got interested in the League of Women Voters, and John Stokes and his wife, his first wife, lived not too far from me. I don’t recall how I met his wife, but she was very active in the league, and we would go to league meetings together. I enjoyed her very much indeed, and I met John and their two very, very young children at one point while I was in Austin. So, when I came to San Marcos, there was no league here, but nonetheless I had studied government at Rice and also at UT. The whole thing interested me, and then I’d also been interested in how the world, once again, we’d gotten into World War II, so government was a very interesting field. When I came down here, I wasn’t particularly interested in politics locally, but it operated, as I said, a general law city. Some movement was afoot here to start a League of Women Voters in San Marcos. I was a charter member of that group, and we worked very closely together and began to look at various forms of government and so forth, and the league was very much interested in the city’s government, as well as government in general. I remember standing in line at the old Wuest Grocery Store, the first one ever built here, which is now where the San Marcos Telephone Company is located, and Caesar Damon, who was on the council at the time, the city council, was ahead of me. He turned around to me and he said, “Emmie. You know, what this town needs is its own charter.” And he says, “I think the league can play a part in bringing this about.” I thought, He’s right, so the league, the League of Women’s Voters’ members, took the lead, as I recall, in fermenting some interest in getting a local charter, a home rule charter adopted. A charter review commission was appointed by the council, and I was very fortunate to be selected to be a member of that commission, along with Gene Jennings, and a number of other local citizens. Gene was, at that time, rector of the San Mark’s Episcopal Church. So, the charter review commission began to meet, and we looked at various types of charters from communities, which were of somewhat similar size or maybe a little bit larger than San Marcos, and developed a charter, which was presented to the voters in the spring of 1967. At the same time the charter was voted on, the voters elected the first council under the charter. There were to be seven members on the council. I was elected in that election to the council. So, I came on the council in the spring of 1967 under the new, brand-new home rule charter. Ellis Serur was mayor, and he was mayor for many years thereafter. I served until the end of 1970, late ‘70. I had to get off the council because a suit was brought in the State of Texas alleging that no one who held a state, a position under the state, could at the same time hold a public office. The case went to the Fifth Court of Circuit Appeals in Austin, and the judge rules that in fact the constitution did prohibit that kind of service. So, I along with hundreds and hundreds of people across Texas, were immediately put off of various public bodies. That included people who were members of drainage districts, highway districts, county judges, and county commissioners, and the whole works, there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people across the State of Texas affected by that decision. Well, for many people in Texas that just did not seem a reasonable thing at all, it seemed quite unfair; in fact, I think the provision in the Texas constitution did not intend to include that kind of thing. I think it included primarily military people. But anyway, the movement began to get the constitution changed, and the constitution was changed a few years later, which permitted people to serve on public bodies. So, as a result of that, I was re-elected in 1970. Am I right on that? (Pause) Excuse me, I, no, I came back on the council in 1970 and then had to get off, I believe. No, I had to get off at the end of 1970 as a result of this, then I was re-elected in 1974 and stayed on until 1977. Then I came back on the council 1981, and I’ve been on it to the present. So, that’s how I got on the city council.
James: You mentioned getting the charter started and changing from being under the laws of Texas to being home-ruled, and what is so important, what does that mean to the citizens of San Marcos to be under home rule?
Craddock: Well, it’s very important for the city to have its own charter because that specifies the duties, and under Texas law, it gives the council considerable more authority than under a general law city. Under a general law city, you simply operate under the general laws of the State of Texas, and there are some things that you cannot do. For example, as I recall one thing specifically, a general law city cannot annex property, whereas a home rule city operates under the general annexation laws of the state and you can in fact bring in property. There are certain other abilities that a city has under a home rule charter that are far more significant and effective than a general law city. The city has more control over its own affairs, it has more control over its destiny, it has more control over adjoining territory, which is farther than its territorial jurisdiction. So, and there’s a certain other benefits which I don’t recall at the moment, but they are very clear and very specific.
James: During your time as councilwoman and mayor of the city, what are some of the major controversies that stand out in your mind that you have had to deal with?
Craddock: Well, there are always controversies over the budget, at least to some extent. I can’t recall; I know we’ve had major controversies but they seem, in retrospect, rather insignificant.
James: What about some of the major ones you’re having now as far as the environmental disputes and the industries coming around San Marcos?
Craddock: Well, there are a number of concerns we have now that are very significant and I think the public is very interested in. One is the protection of the San Marcos River, and I think everybody agreed on that. I don’t think there’s any constituency in the city of San Marcos, regardless of who they are, that would not say, By all means, we need to protect that precious national treasure. The question is: how do you go about it, and how restrictive should it be, and we, in developing the present San Marcos River Ordinance, in which city received a national award recently from the Texas Chapter of the American Planning Association, the second one, incidentally, that the city has received within the last three years. The first one was for the master plans. But in developing that ordinance, there was give and take on both sides. To begin with the ordinance was probably, at least from the developers’ point of view, too restrictive, too onerous, too burdensome, and the council made some adjustments to that and was able to come up with an ordinance that was generally acceptable by the developers and the real estate operators, as well as by the citizens.
I want to say, too, that this ordinance, like so many things in the City of San Marcos, was developed not just by the council or the city staff but widespread involvement through the neighborhood associations, through various committees and groups, the chamber of commerce, the environmental group, everybody participated in this. That’s one thing, I think, about San Marcos, which it’s not necessarily unique, but it’s very impressive; there has been a tremendous amount of influence and information that has gone into various, very important policies developed by the council, or approved by the council, in which the citizenry itself has been very, very much involved. One of the things, as I recall, that stimulated this was the tremendous program that originated, I believe, under Lyndon Johnson’s administration in Washington. The Community Development Program of the 1970s. We got $14 million out of that program, fantastic. The city manager at that time was Jim Baugh, a very able young man. Jim Baugh went to Dallas for the meeting on this Community Development Program, and he called me long distance from Dallas one night, and he said, “Mayor, you won’t believe it, we have just gotten $14 million. Do you know what we can do with $14 million?” Why, we couldn’t even imagine that was so many million, so many times the San Marcos budget, it was just like having manna from heaven. A program was very carefully devised, under the guidelines set up by the Congress, which were very good guidelines. That program demanded, as I recall, that the citizen groups in every segment of the community, and the city was divided into so many segments, five or seven segments, but in every part of San Marcos there must be citizen participation in how that money was to be spent. That was a marvelous provision because it not only gave the council an opportunity to hear from local groups, but it tremendously stimulated public interest in what the council was doing and how the money was being spent, and that citizen involvement has continued right now to today. I think it was a marvelous development. Without citizen contribution as to the use of that community development money, and most of it was to be spent in lower income areas, it could not be spent in high income areas. It not only allowed the citizens to tell the council what they needed and how it ought to be spent, but it educated citizens in the fact that this government here and this council are responsible to the citizenship. We ought to be doing and operating in a way that is satisfactory to the citizens. The citizens need a vehicle whereby they can come to the council and present their concerns and make proposals as to how things should be done, and I think that’s great. I am very much an advocate of citizen participation, of local participation. But was a great program, now we had some problems with it. Some of the most traumatic experiences of my political career occurred in respect to the use of these monies. Do you have time for me to speak to one of them in particular?
James: I was going to say, do you care to share that with us?
Craddock: Yes, I do, because I think it’s important, and I think it may be revealing. It was decided among other things, well, just of all San Marcos has some very severe drainage problems, very severe. We are on the eastern edge of the Edwards Aquifer, and I have been told that the most catastrophic rains in the world occur on this eastern edge of this aquifer. We do have, we can go for months and months without any rain and get it all in one night, and it gets to be really rather dangerous. So, we were having severe drainage problems, and particularly badly affected was the Dunbar area, the area occupied primarily by the Negro population. So, one of the major proposals was to create a big drainage project, starting back behind the library where the water comes down of the hills and pulling that underground through the library parking area and down West Hutchinson going east towards the city, town, and then down Comanche and then, as I recall, it went then back towards to court house in front of what used to be White’s Auto, I think it’s Rain’s Auto now, and then down Fredericksburg and all the way across the Dunbar area into the Purgatory Creek. It was a huge project, huge project. You can imagine how disruptive it was. There were these huge bulldozers digging these huge trenches and putting in underground pipes and so forth. Well, would you believe that that year, once that project started, we had fifty-two days of rain, off and on. Fifty-two days, that’s more than we’ve gotten in a whole ten years. Every time they opened up a great big ditch and busted everybody’s pipe, here comes fifteen thousand inches of rain, and it was just absolutely traumatic. I never shall forget, I’d get calls from people, especially down Fredericksburg, if you know Fredericksburg, it is a very narrow little street, and there’s a good many houses on very small lots, and every time they pulled down a piece of dirt out of Fredericksburg Street, they broke people’s water pipes. The man who was directing this project, he just got so darn tired of broken water pipes, he’d just go on home a night and go to bed and leave all these people without water, and consequently, we were getting calls all hours of the day and night from these poor people who were cut off without any water at all. At least they could have run hoses into their houses to get them water, but it was dreadful. As it turned out, after we got through these terrible months of constant rain and constant irritation and disruption of services for these poor people in that area, it has been a wonderful project. We have not had a major flooding in that area since then it had been very, very, well done. Excuse me.
Pause in recording
[Phone rang for Mayor Craddock, the recorder was turned off for a few minutes.]
Craddock: Two other projects that were done with that money. One was the development of Sessom Drive and sewer connections underneath that street, with which we’ve had some recent problems that have been resolved. But Sessom Drive gave access to the university and that whole region up in there, which hitherto went right through the university campus, right through on the main street there. Another street that [was] put in was C.M. Allen Parkway, that was part of that community development money. So, Uncle Sam, through urban renewal, which helped us remove people out of this area around the southeastern part of town, bought out houses and moved people into other areas, in that flood-prone area. Also, we did the depressed area at the junction Interstate 35 and Seguin Highway, that area right in there was redone. Some very, very, substantial improvements in this community were done with federal money through the urban renewal program and later on by the community development program. We have been very, very, fortunate in receiving funds from Uncle Sam, and in my opinion, the funds have been extremely well spent and have created assets for the community we simply could not have afforded otherwise. Because San Marcos is about 40% tax-exempt, and that means that 60% of the population is having to carry the financial burden for civic improvements. We’ve not had the money to do that, so Uncle Sam’s large assets in these two programs in particular have just given us immense assistance, as has revenue sharing, which we are going to lose next year.
James: That 40% pertains basically to the student population from the university?
Craddock: It’s university property and church property and various other charitable institutions which are, I believe, tax-exempt. Texas makes no provision, as does Uncle Sam, for compensation for that.
James: One of the other controversies or concerns in San Marcos has been the fact that we do not have our own garbage disposal, and the growing population has worried about that.
Craddock: I think that’s an unnecessary worry. We had some worries when we were operating our own garbage dump, or they have a nicer name for it now. But fortunately, when Camp Gary closed down after the Korean War, the City of San Marcos came into some properties, which were given to us by Uncle Sam. Some of those properties, much to the dismay of our neighbors, are not in Hays County at all but in Caldwell County. They pertain to Gary Air Force Base, when the State of Texas began to impose more severe restrictions on how garbage disposal and such could be handled. When I just came to San Marcos and was traveling a good deal between Austin and San Marcos, because I was in college at the university as well as teaching here, you could tell when you were getting close to San Marcos because the garbage dump was out on one of these hills just north of town and we burned it. You could see the smoke miles off, going up in the atmosphere. Well, the environmental legislation which Congress passed, I guess during the sixties, put an end to that. You could not have any open burning dumps. It had to be buried. So, when Richard Beam was City Manager here, when the charter was first adopted, and Richard was the city manager, and I was on the council, and the council decided to open up a so-called “landfill” out on part of this Camp Gary property. That was done, and for years up until very recently, that area was used for garbage disposal, and it was covered every day in conformity with federal guidelines and so on. But it did create anxiety for people living out at Reedville, for example, and in some of these other areas, for fear it might be contaminating underground water, so constant monitoring of that was done.
But eventually that landfill was filled, and by that time the legislation said, “You cannot do this anymore.” I don’t think legislation necessarily said so, but we ran out of room, there was no place else to put it. So, we found a piece of property out not far, just on the other side of Martindale, and the council had in mind a regional landfill. It was a very good piece of property. It had no underground water, so no danger of contaminating water sources. It was far from town alright, but then after all some cities are hauling garbage, one hundred miles every day, and this was relatively close. We had in mind servicing Martindale, Kyle, Buda, Wimberley, perhaps other areas, and make it a regional landfill so that all these would contribute something their proportion to the cost of the operation. Well, our neighbors in Martindale didn’t like the idea, and there was considerable opposition to it. So, finally the council said, Alright, we’ll just get out of the business; we’ll go to a professional, whose business is handling garbage disposal. So we went with BFI, and our service with BFI from all I can understand has been excellent. They have a huge landfill in Austin. The stuff is hauled out of San Marcos to Austin every day. It is less costly to the tax payer than what we would have to pay if we had to operate our own landfill. So, from that standpoint, I think the solution was an admirable one and very workable and handled probably in many ways better than we could handle it ourselves and certainly for not any more money, actually in the long run less money from the tax payers. So, I think it is a very admirable solution.
But one of these days, we’re going to have to find out what we can do with garbage, we’re going to be buried in it, and to bury it is a temporary solution, but it is not a permanent solution. We are going to have to come to terms with how we can handle these immense amounts of garbage that we are destroying every day. There was a possibility of, we did consider briefly, the possibility of creating a kind of disposal of garbage, which would develop immense heat and perhaps even electricity or whatever, but that did, steam operation, but that did not materialize because you’ve got to have some litigation for the product, for the steam. The best utilizer would be, the user would be Southwest Texas, and we just couldn’t figure out where to put the plant where it could be feasible, so BFI seemed to be an admirable solution at the time being.
James: Are there still studies going on about possibly letting Southwest actually use that?
Craddock: I’m not aware that we are actively pursuing that at the moment. But everybody in this nation is going to have to pursue that item. What in the world are we going to do with our garbage? We are immensely wasteful here. We are all using paper containers, paper this and paper that, and disposable bottles, and that is the mark of an affluent society, and as long as you can afford to do that, well and good. But the time is coming when I don’t know what we’re going to do with it. We are going to have to find other means of disposing of it, or at least be more conservative in our own use and waste.
James: San Marcos and the surrounding areas are beginning to draw the attention of industry. Are we going to be going into an industrial-type city or just catch the overflow, do you think?
Craddock: That’s a very great interest of mine. About some months ago, I was not, and I think the council generally, was not pleased with the fact that we were not attracting the kind of industry that we want. So it was my suggestion that we create an economic development council and committee to behind to seek actively the kind of industry that we want, and the council agrees with me that the kind of industry we need in this town is industry which is non-polluting, both in air and water, and industry which will hire primarily locally. We have, one of the things that the bonding people in New York told us on a bonding trip to New York not so long ago, which we incidentally got a very good bond rating, not as good as we’d like but very good, but one of the things that they mentioned about that is a liability, and that is we have such a low average annual income. It seems to use that what we really need are industries which will hire locally, train people who are now at low skill levels, and in the process elevate their economic income and their opportunities. So, with this in mind, a local economic development group was founded, and it is working now and has been working actively ever since, to one, come up with a budget; number two, seek and interview possible persons to be the executive director of our economic development program, and that has been done. The committee has within just the last month been interviewing applicants; we got a good many applicants for the position. The city has pledged $30,000 per year toward that budget, and the county, I believe, is matching that, and we are trying to get it up to one hundred thousand where we can operate an office and pay an excellent, very active economic development executive to seek out the kind of industry we want.
One other factor that in my opinion, and I think the council agrees, it is very important that whatever industry comes in here has got to be water-conservative. This whole development of this entire area is utterly, utterly, utterly dependent on the Edwards Underground Aquifer. Number one, it must use conservatively, we must not waste water, and secondly, we’ve got to keep the aquifer non-polluted. Without it, Central Texas is dead, that’s all there is to it. I’m convinced in my own mind that irrespective of how much we conserve and how careful our industries are, there is a maximum population that this area can sustain. That is because of the limitation on water. In dry years, we are skirting with trouble. In wet years, we are very well-off, but anybody who projects we can go ahead and use water and develop the area based on wet years is totally unrealistic. We are, as Dr. Webb said, “on the edge of the desert, and sometimes the fingers of the desert move in and sometimes they move out.” Last year, the fingers moved out and it appeared we might be going back into a drought cycle. This year, we’ve been fairly fortunate in rainfall, particularly in June and then just recently. But the amount of water available in this area is limited. There’s no question about it, and we need to keep that matter constantly in mind when it comes to industrial development.
James: Have you had any major industries looking into this area that you know of?
Craddock: Yes, we have several at the moment that are considering this. We are in the process now of hiring an executive director for this development.
James: So, it’s not a distant, it’s right here.
Craddock: No, it’s imminent; it’s going to be in operation, I hope, by the end of the year.
James: Are there any other major controversies, or major times during your experience as mayor, that you would describe as your best years or worst years that you would like to share?
Craddock: I guess the best years are the years we’ve gotten sizable grants from Uncle Sam. They’ve allowed us to do some tremendously wonderful things in this community that the local tax base simply could not afford at all. Oh, we’ve had our traumatic experiences, there’s no doubt about that. There have been controversies in the city which have been unpleasant and sometimes traumatic, but you know the solution arrives, and the compromise comes, and then you forget about it. I think somebody said, “We move from controversy, to compromise, to forgetfulness, and the best part of it is the forgetfulness, next to compromise.” We’ve had councils that were sometimes not completely muy simpático, “very nice,” but that’s par for the course. I think we’ve had good councils in San Marcos. I think everyone that I have served with, while I may not have agreed with them on all issues, and I certainly don’t intend to, and they certainly don’t agree with me, and they’ve told me so in no uncertain terms. But on the whole, I think we’ve had members of the council who are genuinely interested citizens, they are intelligent. This is a very extraordinary community in many ways. It not only is beautiful with a wonderful physical location, but it is a very educated community on the whole. The members who’ve served on the council and the leadership, I think, have been experienced, and they’ve been interested, and they are strong minded and strong-willed, and we fuss and fight and argue and disagree, but ultimately we come back to some kind of workable compromise.
I think that city government has certain authorities and abilities to do things that county governments yet do not have, and that I would hope that eventually the county governmental structure can be strengthened. Because there are many other items that the county deals with that impact very dramatically on the city. For example, the Edwards Aquifer is more in the county than it is in the city. We certainly need that aquifer to be very protected at all times against any possible contamination, and as we are a very rapidly growing area now and much of the growth is beginning to extend out into the county, which the city does not have very much control. Hopefully, the county can exercise control in that area, and if it does not have the necessary power then the legislature needs to attend to that. Because what happens in the county very dramatically impacts on the city itself, and this is particularly true in respect to traffic, in respect to absence of taxation, in respect to the protection of our Edwards Aquifer, and so on. In many states, for example, cities have the right to license vehicles which are coming into the city and using its streets; this is true in Kentucky, for example, among many other states. Texas does not provide for this. So people living outside of the community, which are assets to us many ways economically, they are also users of our facilities for which they do not pay any money. I am thinking of particularly street usage, and various uses, and library, and lots of other things we are happy to provide, but we’d also be very happy to have some assistance in maintaining these facilities.
Pause in recording
[Phone rang for the mayor and tape recorder was turned off for a few minutes.]
James: I was interested in finding out how the city actually passes ordinances, and they come into law in the city?
Craddock: Well, ordinances appear on the city council agenda as a result of staff action, they can be requested by the city council itself, they can grow out of citizen concern and citizen recommendations, such as the citizen advisory committees commission, which is not a permanent commission but it works effectively. It can come out of things like the committee that was set up to have a look at all the various city activities, and where we were deficient and where we needed improvements, and so on. When an ordinance appears on the agenda, and that is the only way they can be considered, there must be public notice over a certain period of time to conform to state and federal law, and when they appear on the agenda then the council may act on that ordinance. On first hearing, it may hold a public hearing, if it is a controversial issue or if the staff requests a public hearing. The ordinances are normally passed on three different readings. They may be passed on emergency, but I would not permit anything to be considered on emergency unless it was in fact an emergency, in which case it requires five affirmative votes. An ordinance can be put on the agenda at the request of a council person. Certain items require public hearings, franchise agreements, zoning changes. Well, there are several others, I don’t recall them all, but these are required to be public hearings. Or the council itself may request for a public hearing. The City of San Marcos is blessed, one again, with a very active, interested, intelligent citizenry. We have a great number of city boards, city commissions, almost all of which are appointed by the council, and their influence and their information and their interest is essential to good city operation. The City of San Marcos is once again, has been very fortunate in having a large number of citizens who are interested, they are interested in the sense of wanting good government and good administration. They are not interested in pursuing their own little individual activities, although certainly that would play a part in it. But we have been very, very, fortunate in having literally dozens and dozens and dozens of citizens who continually assist the council and the staff in bringing before the council and the staff certain problems or making recommendations and seeing that this river’s protected, that the environment is protected, that we have good streets, that we have good drainage, and so forth and so on. We could not function without these citizen committees. Sometimes things get put on the agenda as a result of citizen activity. The mayor controls the agenda, and that is one of the few authorities that I have. I have one vote among seven, but I do control the agenda. It is my policy not to deny anything on the agenda unless it is frivolous, unless it has not been properly pursued or investigated and so on. But we try to give everybody an opportunity to say what he wants to say, and to say it publicly, and it’s recorded for future reference and so forth and so on.
James: Do you have any other right, besides the agenda control and one vote, that makes you different from the other council themselves?
Craddock: Well, I’m the spokesmen for the city. I suppose the mayor’s position holds some small amount of prestige, I don’t know how much. Depends on how the citizens feel about it. I represent the city on public functions and so forth. I suppose the mayor’s position depends on the person who holds it. It depends on whether or not you have any influence at all, and whether or not the citizens have any confidence in your position and your integrity and so on. I would hope that the citizens have some confidence in me, but one again that’s something I cannot judge accurately.
James: Let me stop that for just one moment.
Pause in recording
[The recorder was stopped when the mayor’s secretary opened the door for a message.]
Craddock: One somewhat unusual, in retrospect, rather amusing, I guess it’s amusing, situation happened some years ago when I was on the council, I guess I was mayor. A lot of people here are very concerned about the cemetery and how it’s taken care of, and so on. People are now concerned less, for years we’ve had a very fine young man to maintain the cemetery, and we’ve had very, very, few complaints in fact, complaints have almost disappeared; that’s not always been the case because people are very sensitive about it. Anyhow, some years ago, I don’t recall the exact year, I think it was in 1970, some questions came up about some trust funds, some monies they’d invested specifically for cemetery financing. So, Earl Williams, who’s a marvelous financial director here, and under his tutelage, the city received seven certificates of merit from the American Accounting Association, and we’ve already received our eighth but it has been presented publicly. But Earl Williams and I decided to go down to; presumably all these trust monies were in trust at the Frost National Bank in San Antonio, so Earl Williams and I went down there one day to see what we had. Well, we went to see the Vice President of the Trust Department at Frost National Bank, and he looked around and investigated his records, and he says, “We have no trust fund for the City of San Marcos.” Well, Earl and I were just absolutely dismayed. So Earl said, “Well, where might they be, where are these securities?” So, the vice president thought around for a minute and he finally, he says “Why don’t you go down to the basement to the dead files.” Or the dead box or whatever they call it. “There’s a lady down there that’s been there for years and years and years, and maybe she can help you.” So, we went down to the basement, and this quite elderly lady came forward, and we told her what we wanted, and she said, “I believe I do remember something about that.” So she went back and fiddled around in the dead box, or whatever they’ve got, and she brought forward this box and here were these very securities. One of them I recall, and my memory may be failing more here, but one of these securities was a government security which paid 3.5% interest. It was quite a lengthy security, say ten, fifteen, twenty years, whatever. Well, as I recall that money came from, as I remember, when they began this Interstate 35 highway system. I believe the city council was under the impression that they would have to buy the right-of-way. So they sold a bond, they sold a bond issue to get the money to buy the property. Well, as it turned out, they did not have to buy the property. So, they had this money available, so they invested it in this long-term Treasury note. I’m not at all sure we’re not still drawing 3.5% interest on that Treasury note. Anyhow, we got a full listing of all of the documents and securities which were in that file, so now it’s being handled; we know where it is and what it is. Those were the days, but things operate a whole lot differently now, a whole lot differently.
James: Okay, I’m going to go ahead and bring this to a close because I know you have appointments waiting for you. I’d like to thank you for your time and your recollections.
Craddock: You’re most welcome. I hope they’re reasonably accurate.
End of interview