City Council decides to ditch most committees

During a workshop this evening led (some might successfully argue that "pushed" might be the more appropriate term) by Mayor Todd Webster, the City Council rewrote the rules for serving on the few city advisory committees that will be left once Webster’s purge is complete.

Mayor Todd Webster

By the end of the three-hour, 20-minute workshop only five of the current 21 committees were guaranteed to survive although some, such as Planning and Zoning, will be regarded more as a commission than a committee. The four left are Economic Development, Parks & Recreation, Public Works, and Public Safety. (The Youth Advisory Committee will remain intact, but since its members are nominated by three area high schools, it fell outside the purview of the workshop’s discussion.) The council decided each committee will consist of seven members with two alternates appointed to two-year terns (with the possibility of holdovers if a new committee member isn’t named when a term expires). Prospective committee members must be registered voters living within the Kyle city limits (another, albeit somewhat discussed, change) for the last 12 consecutive months. A committee member, under the new proposal, which still must be written as an ordinance and formally approved at regular City Council meetings, may serve a maximum three terms.

Webster, in the fifth month of his three-year term, advocated abolishing all the committees and then re-establishing those that served a specific function through individual council resolutions. The resolutions, the council agreed, would also include the specific assignments the committee was created to complete. District 6 Council member Tammy Swaton seemed reluctant to do away with the Community Relations Committee, but decided to wait until the issue was on the council’s agenda before she made up her mind on the issue.

"The current system is simply too complex," Webster said. "What we needed is structured order. And we need committees that have a limited shelf life, not ones that live forever without anything to do."

District 4 Council member David Wilson argued, and the rest of the council present (District 5 Council member Samantha Bellows-LeManse did not attend the workshop) agreed, the committees should serve in an advisory capacity only, as not as quasi-legislative bodies.

"We are the ones who were elected, not committee members," Webster said in support of Wilson’s recommendation.

After the meeting adjourned Webster and District 3 Council member Shane Arabie agreed that much of the work currently assigned to committees should be handled by the city’s staff. "To be honest," Webster told me, "this unwieldly committee system was established simply because, at the time, the council had a lack of trust in the staff."

Webster came into the meeting in an ebullient moving having earlier in the day attended a ribbon cutting for a new rehabilitative center that promises to add 250 jobs.

"That’s 250 jobs that will be in working in Kyle everyday and having lunch in Kyle everyday and not 250 jobs going north on 35 to Austin," Webster said.

During the workshop, Interim City Manager James Earp revealed the possibility of the City acquiring a software system that will, among other "amazing" things he could not reveal because those subjects were not on the workshop’s agenda, significantly enhance council members’ abilities to track the entire committee application and appointment process. Webster said he happened upon a demonstration of the software’s capabilities and to say he was "amazed and impressed" would be an understatement.