Johnson out as city attorney

City Attorney Ken Johnson got the boot tonight.

Now that’s not going to be the official word from City Hall and the minutes of this evening’s City Council meeting will state that after an excruciatingly lengthy executive session (close to three hours), Mayor Todd Webster announced that Johnson had submitted his resignation during the session. And if you believe Johnson did that voluntarily to pursue greater opportunities in the private sector, I have some unregulated water wells near Wimberly I’d like to sell you.

After the meeting was over I asked Mayor Webster, who knew what I was going to ask before the words even started coming out of my mouth, whether Johnson’s resignation was 100 percent voluntary. "I can’t talk about that," he said, which is exactly the right answer an official must give if they have just fired someone during an executive session. And one of the reasons the statutes allow for executive sessions (during which a quorum of a legislative body can meet in private without obstructing open meetings laws) is so that city officials can be fired without the stain of public embarrassment. Let’s face it, if your boss was about to recite a laundry list describing your wretched job performance, would you want it televised live, even on C-SPAN?

On the other hand, if Johnson’s resignation was entirely voluntarily, don’t you think the mayor or one of the other council members I asked the same question of (and who politely gave me exactly the same, word-for-word, answer) wouldn’t take the opportunity to praise the attorney for his service to the city and wish him all the best in the pursuit of his new endeavors?

And does anyone really think that Johnson would voluntarily resign from a position he has held for just a couple of days more than one year? Not likely.

One more clue pointing to the fact that this was not Johnson's idea: After the council emerged from executive session, the attorney was nowhere to be seen. Vanished. Keyser Sozed. I'm betting if he resigned of his own volition, he would want to stick around and gloat...er, brag...er discuss his greener pastures. Doncha think?

Besides, this is not a bolt out of the blue. Although no one has told me outright they wanted to see Johnson go, in conversations I’ve had with elected officials I could sense quite readily they were not all that happy with some of the advice he has been giving them. This was especially true after the Feb. 17 session when Johnson led them off-course during a discussion of what should have been a routine item requesting state legislators support increased funding for Texas park land. (Incidentally, after being tabled last week because of the city attorney’s interference, that item reappeared on tonight’s agenda and passed unanimously with virtually no discussion.)

Johnson’s "resignation" overshadowed other items on the agenda, including one that raised the allowable height for buildings in Kyle and another what was almost wrecked by protesting wreckers.

The council unanimously approved the construction of buildings of, for all practical purposes, 14 stories on a case-by-case basis in those areas along I-35 that are zoned RS (retail services). The reason this came up in the first place is because a hotel is planned, according to assistant City Manager James Earp, in the vicinity of the Lowe’s Home Improvement store on the northeast side of I-35 and Kyle Parkway. The city’s current height restrictions of four stories were too restrictive for the hotel’s developer (whose identity I could not learn). The city had awarded a variance to Seton Hospital of 100 feet or nine stories for its facility on Kyle Parkway and Plum Creek also won a similar variance to construct the ACC campus, so the thinking was to just make that 100 feet the new citywide limit. And that’s exactly what Planning and Zoning had recommended last week.

But Mayor Webster felt 100 feet was too restrictive and recommended the limit be set at 150 feet, which, to be precise, is the equivalent of 13.85 stories. However, I’m betting no one’s going to quibble if someone wants to go to 14 stories. I’ll even go so far out on the limb to predict there won’t be any screaming, wailing, rendering of garments or gnashing of teeth if a developer presents a plan for a 15-story mixed-used development on or near the proposed Kyle/Buda train station of the Lone Star Rail District or, for that matter, in any other RS section of town.

After Mayor Pro Tem Diane Hervol was assured that the fire department did not consider such a prospect as a potential towering inferno, the 150-foot limit passed unanimously.

The angry wreckers showed up to protest the passing, on second reading, of an ordinance amending Article IX that regulated "commercial towing and wrecker services." Several individuals associated with these services spoke against the ordinance change during the public comment section at the beginning of the meeting, which was the reason Mayor Webster said he pulled the item from the consent agenda. (It passed on first reading at the last council meeting.)

Apparently the city’s Public Safety Committee recommended changes to the ordinance late last year, changes the protesting wreckers had no problem with. Now, of course, the Public Safety Committee, just like all the other city committees, has absolutely no legislative authority whatsoever so all it can do is recommend ordinances be changed, but cannot authorize those changes. That’s solely the purview of elected officials and the elected officials assigned to that task by Kyle’s charter is the City Council.

So the council took the recommendations and, according to council member Samantha Bellows, realized there were things in there that she, as well as the city’s staff, figured just wouldn’t work. For one thing, Ms. Bellows said, the proposal as recommended by the Public Safety Committee would allow for wreckers’ storage facilities to be located as far away as inside the city limits of San Marcos and Ms. Bellows thought Kyle might face some problems trying to exert regulatory control over facilities in San Marcos. The ordinance up for adoption tonight required the storage facilities to be located inside the Kyle city limits. Her other problem with the ordinance recommended by the committee was that it would require dedicating one police officer to doing nothing else but enforcing the ordinance and she believed police officers were needed for more important duties.

Many of the wreckers in attendance weren’t satisfied and when the proposed ordinance passed on second reading, several of them stood and shouted at the council that, among other things, they were passing an ordinance that violated state laws. A couple of police officers came forward to forcibly remove the protesting wreckers, but they marched out of the chamber voluntarily, if a bit defiantly, with one of them screaming for the city to anticipate a lawsuit over the matter to be delivered to council members soon.