The Kyle Knight Rises

The first two words in a recent Austin Chronicle story about Electro Purification and its attempt to pump water in Hays County were "Lila Knight." The Kyle resident has been working tirelessly to protect the county’s water supply and to bring a reasonable solution to a controversy that I am not going to detail right now.

For reasons not necessary to explain and are too painful to discuss even if they were necessary, I could not attend tonight’s Planning & Zoning Commission (or the Charter Review Commission that followed it). But I have attended enough P&Z meetings to know how they operate and tonight’s gathering promised to be a real "wham-bam" affair. The entire meeting, if it had gone as the city had planned, would have ended in less time than it will take me to describe how short the meeting should have been.

The first three items on the agenda are always the same: Call to order, roll call of the seven commission members, and citizen comments. When it comes to that third item, chair Michael Rubsam usually gazes for a second at all the empty chairs in the city council chambers and closes the public comments section the meeting five seconds after he opens it. Then if the staff has taken the time to prepare minutes of past meetings, they are routinely approved. Then comes the consent agenda.

For the uninitiated, the consent agenda can be a tricky deal. Theoretically, it is supposed to contain only those items that need not be debated or discussed. They are supposed to be routine, non-controversial items, not requiring individual consideration. By grouping them all together they can be passed by one motion, one second and one vote. There’s no limit to the number of items that can be placed on the consent agenda. I have attended city council meetings (not in Kyle, by the way) where it is routine to have as many as 85 or more items grouped into the consent agenda.

At tonight’s P&Z meeting, the consent agenda consisted of just three items, two of them consisting of approving the final plat of a new 22-acre subdivision located on the northern side of Windy Hill road, about a mile off I-35 in northeast Kyle. Now it did not say so on the agenda itself, but in the materials accompanying the agenda it said the city of Kyle would provide wastewater service for the subdivision but that its water would be "provided by Goforth Water Supply."

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Goforth is one of the three entities – the other two being the City of Buda and the Anthem subdivision located in Mountain City – to contract with Electro Purification for water. But because of the efforts of the aforementioned Lila Knight, a grassroots organization called Save Our Wells, state Rep. Jason Isaac and other watchdogs, that effort seems to have been nipped in the bud. Thus, the Goforth Special Utility District, which was contracted to receive three million gallons of water per day (more than the other two entities combined) from Electro Purification may indeed need to be scrounging elsewhere for its water supply.

But even if EP gets to pump water to Goforth, it is estimated that it will take about a year and a half to construct the pipeline from the wells near Wimberley. Now the way I understand it, there can be absolutely no doubt of the existence of a water supply for the final plat of a subdivision to be approved.

That’s why, at tonight’s P&Z meeting, the opening of the citizens comments section of the agenda was not met with stone cold silence. Ms. Knight stood up, strode to the podium and quite gently and politely, I’m sure, let the commissioners know there might be some question about the availability of water to this subdivision. And it was absolutely certain said water supply could in no way be "certified."

Thus, when it came to the consent agenda, these two items were pulled for individual consideration during which commissioners tried to question staff about whether any of this about :certified water" was true.

The flummoxed staff, however, couldn’t summon up an adequate answer, so the commissioners tabled the items. Which means they will rear their ugly heads at least one more time at a future P&Z meeting.

Watch this space.