The city council passed by a 5-2 vote last night proposed amendments to the city’s Commercial Towing and Wrecker Services ordinance, proposed and shepherded by council member Damon Fogley that Police Chief Jeff Barnett said "will help improve our partnerships with our wrecker companies and improve our service to our citizens."
Some last-minute additional changes were made to the proposed amendments. One, suggested by Mayor Todd Webster, clarifies that individuals employed by the wrecker company could be held accountable for criminal activity. Additional minor changes are expected when the proposal comes up for its second reading on May 3.
Fogley said his actions were driven by three major concerns he had with the ordinance. One of those involved the towing of 18-wheelers. He said local wreckers are preferred by the city’s dispatch system when it comes to hauling away pickup trucks and cars, "but we don’t have a local preference for heavy wreckers. So what we have is large vehicles being towed outside the city limits to Austin or to San Marcos and those citizens are incurring increased costs because they are going outside the city limits."
It appears, however, Kyle does not have a lot where 18-wheelers can be towed inside the city limits and Mayor Webster noted that finding such a spot could be problematic because of neighborhood objections.
Fogley’s second concern arose, he said, over the increased number of multi-vehicle accidents in Kyle, especially on I-35. "The way (the ordinance) is written now," he said, "the same wrecker company can tow all three vehicles." That, he said, can cause major delays in clearing accident scenes because the one company summoned doesn’t have enough wreckers at its immediate disposal to haul away that many vehicles. It also keeps police officers at the scene of the accident longer than they need to be there.
"We’re clarifying the rotational pull system," Barnett added. "As council member Fogley mentioned today, if we have a three-car accident, the next-up wrecker on rotation that we maintain at our dispatch center — as long as they are physically able of picking up all three passenger cars with the one wrecker — we’re going to let them pick all three of those vehicles up. They may put one on a flatbed, they may lift one, they may pull one — whatever they can get, they get. When it gets beyond them, we’ll call the next company.
"What we have seen," Barnett said, echoing Fogley’s earlier remarks, "is that this extends the time our officers are on the scene and it extends the amount of time that we are blocking the roadway. And when that’s the interstate, that has an impact on our community. So we’ll just go back to what we used to have — the rotation was that each wrecker company gets one vehicle. So, if it’s a two-car accident, we’re going to call the next rotational wrecker and then the next rotational wrecker. Each of them will be assigned one vehicle. That way the roadways are cleaned up a lot faster."
Fogley’s third change involved the aforementioned criminal background checks. "What I am proposing is that those companies that have employees, managers or owners who have convictions on their record related to their (wrecker) jobs can no longer do business with the city. We should protect our citizens and make sure we have the best qualified towing companies with the city."
The proposed amendments, however, said companies convicted of a crime would be excluded, and Mayor Webster’s accepted change spelled out the ordinance referred to the individuals working for those companies with wrecker-related criminal convictions.
"Section H (of the ordinance) just refers to a conviction of the wrecker company," Mayor Webster said to Fogley. "I think your intention was any convictions of the workers at the company. My thought is that section needs to be changed so that it reads something like this: ‘the owner or a current employee of the wrecker company.’"
The mayor said the term "current employee" was necessary to give the wrecker company the opportunity to dismiss any employee found to have such a conviction before punitive action is taken against the company.
Council members Diane Hervol and Daphne Tenorio voted against the proposed amendments,
"I would like to see more feedback and input from the actual towing companies," Tenorio said, which is strange because that’s sort of like asking the NRA to draft gun control legislation. But it is not unprecedented: Developers were largely responsible for writing Kyle’s horrendous PID ordinance and I still maintain the day will come, sooner I expect rather than later, when the city will rue the day it ever passed that ordinance.
Chief Barnett, however, did say he would schedule a meeting before the second reading of the ordinance to get public input and would present those findings in a report to council members. Personally, I would like to see input from the unfortunates who have had their vehicles towed by Kyle wrecking companies. I think they, not the wrecking companies, are the customers the city should be concerned about. But that’s just me.
(Updated information begins here)Late this evening, council member Fogley told me via e-mail "When I was on the public safety committee we decided to only regulate PD contracted tows which includes rotational tows (traffic accidents, DUIs, major offenses etc) and not private party tows which includes cases where a vehicle may be parked on private property and a property owner requests that the vehicle be towed from the property. One of the things that we spent a lot of time discussing as a committee was the concept of ‘local preference.’ This was brought to the table for discussion with many of the wrecker companies and many who were on the committee at the time felt the need to have this local preference in order to (A) give preference to companies that hire locally, (B) keep some of the sales tax revenues within the city limits and (C) not inconvenience those being towed by having a local VSF (towing yard). We came to find out that some of these companies would have to jump through hoops to try to get a towing yard within the city limits. At the time there was very limited land for this type of use.
"We also discovered that the amount of sales tax that the city would receive would be nominal since sales tax is only charged for certain storage fees and not the actual main charge for the wrecker service," Fogley wrote. "Therefore we decided to allow for a 15-mile radius from Kyle City Hall for the wrecker companies to operate a VSF. This draft was forwarded to the city council at the time. Then council member (Samantha) Lamense requested that it be changed back to within the city limits. However, this change was not discussed with the committee which was frustrating for some of us. Nevertheless it is not my desire to change this requirement back to a 15-mile radius."
Fogley also wrote "At the time of the draft ordinance there were no heavy wrecker companies operating within the city limits. None of the companies came forward to express interest in the heavy wrecker service, therefore we allowed for the heavy wreckers to be dispatched from other cities. This includes Saucedos Towing out of San Marcos and Southside out of Austin. Now that we have many companies that have come forward and have expressed the desire to operate a heavy wrecker service and have a VSF (to planning standard) within the city limits, we should have a local preference priority for these companies also just as we have for regular vehicle tows."
Fogley said a meeting involving wrecker companies and the Police Department is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. tomorrow in city council chambers and that he plans on attending that meeting.
(Resuming original post)Last night’s meeting moved along rather well (although two speakers during the Citizen Comments section blatantly abused the three-minute time limitation, especially an attorney for a wrecking company who consumed twice the allotted time). However, a 2-hour, 14-minute executive session, after which no action was taken, left a scar. Other items of note on last night’s city council agenda included:
- Council member Hervol’s presentation to Rosalio Tobias Jr., who survived an Oklahoma plane crash 50 years ago and went on to make valuable contributions to the Kyle area, particularly as the first Hispanic elected to the Hays Consolidated School District’s board of trustees. What set this presentation apart from similar ones was Tobias’s moving remarks after accepting the proclamation in his honor. "One of the things I really appreciate about this commemoration is that were are remembering the 82 lives that were lost that day," an obviously emotional Tobias said. "They were all 18, 19-years-old, just starting out on their lives and they never got to live their lives." Tobias said he is attending a special ceremony this weekend at the airfield in Ardmore, Okla,, where the crash occurred and he plans to show the proclamation to the other crash survivors attending "to show them what a wonderful community we have, what a wonderful city we have in Kyle — that they are able to come together and do this commemoration in their honor and in the honor of those 82 servicemen that died."
- A unanimous vote to appoint Bradley Growt to fill a vacancy on the Planning and Zoning Commission. As I noted last week, the commissioners were supposed to make a recommendation to the council from among two applicants to the commission, but abdicated that responsibility. As a result, according to city spokesperson Kim Hilsenbeck "In the absence of a recommendation from the P&Z Commission, the mayor is making a recommendation to council to appoint Bradley Growt to the commission."
- Considering all the protests this proposed action attracted earlier, the council without any hubbub or major displays of citizen opposition, voted 5-2 (Hervol and Tenorio dissenting) to expand the city by annexing 529.6 acres, most of it located south of the current city limits, Strangely, a companion piece calling for the voluntarily annexation of a much larger tract of land was not on last night’s agenda.
- Another unanimous vote to approve a wastewater effluent reclamation project agreement as well as a longstanding lawsuit agreement with Aqua Texas, the company that had been the owner/operator of the city’s wastewater treatment plant until the city purchased it last October. "This is an item that has long been awaited," City Manager Scott Sellers told the council. The legal dispute, according to Sellers, involved "a billing issue," and, he said, he and the person who "manages the affairs of Aqua Texas" had several meetings to "discuss a potential settlement options. We finally landed on one that we were able to work through and when I informed our legal counsel I was met with a hug, I’m not expecting a hug tonight but it really is a big deal that we are able to settle this without going through a full litigation." Under the terms of the agreement, Aqua Texas will purchase from the city treated wastewater, or effluent, released from the city’s wastewater plant and then inject that effluent into an aquifer for subsequent resale to, for example, hydraulic fracking companies that use that type of water for injection purposes in their oilfield operations. It also frees up some $1.3 million the city was holding in an escrow account in case it lost the billing dispute.
- That $1.3 million could come in handy, especially after City Engineer Leon Barba informed the council about the two options available for repairs to Windy Hill Road. Barba said the Halloween floods severely damaged Windy Hill Road at the point where the Richmond Branch flows under the road, near the Dollar General store just east of the intersection with Indian Paintbrush. The first option, Barba said, "is to repair the structure to its pre-existing condition. The general scope would include some guardrail repair, some limited channel regrading, pavement repairs and some striping, of course." He said outside contractors would be needed and FEMA would not approve any of the contractors the city is currently using so delays would occur because of the time needed to request additional proposals for these services. He said the total construction cost of this option would be $360,000. He said 75 percent of these costs could be reimbursed by FEMA, but if a subsequent flood event caused additional damages, FEMA would not pay for any additional repairs. "The second option: We build a structure to a 10-year design frequency, which is recommended by TxDOT guidelines." He said, under this option, the city would need to replace the two existing box culverts and replace them with five larger box culverts. This option would cost $960,000, 75 percent of which might also be reimbursed by FEMA. However, "there is no guarantee we would get the 75 percent or any percent from FEMA," Finance Director Perwez Moheet told the council. "So we have to make sure we can fund the entire 100 percent. FEMA takes 12 to 18 months to even cut us a check. The last experience we had with them, our claim took close to 18 months to get reimbursed. So regardless of what option you choose, we would have to secure 100 percent of the funding up front. For option one, we do have a funding source identified for it. That would be from the fund balance in our Road Improvement Fund, which is approximately a half million dollars." He said option two would require funding jointly from the Road Improvement Fund and the General Fund or "unused balances in other funds." Moheet emphasized the half million dollars in the Road Improvement Fund should not be confused with the half million dollars the council set aside in the current budget for on-going street maintenance. The council voted unanimously to instruct the staff to pursue the second option.
- Sellers additionally informed the council that between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday, April 30 Kyle residents in possession of prescription drugs they no longer need may dispose of them at Kyle Police Department headquarters during a Drug Take Back event.
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