The city council finished tinkering with the city manager’s proposed budget tonight, adding a provision to start a process toward creating a veterans’ memorial in Kyle but leaving intact the provision to create a much-needed stormwater utility. A stormwater fee schedule, however, still has to clear a couple of hurdles and at least one council member said tonight it may not begin to be included in homeowners’ water bills until the beginning of 2017.
All that’s left, in terms of approving the budget and the accompanying tax rate, is for the city’s ordinance writers to take City Manager Scott Sellers’s proposed budget, adjust it according to the amendments made tonight and a week ago tonight by individual council members, and put it in the form of an ordinance or two. That (those) ordinance(s) will have a first reading a week from tonight and a second and final reading Tuesday, Sept. 6.
The creation of the stormwater utility was part of Sellers’s original proposal and although the council talked about the fees that will be required to pay for it, those fees will not be a part of the ordinance(s) to be enacted during the next 13 days.
"The fee will not be set per the fee schedule in this budget," Sellers told the council tonight. "When a stormwater utility is set by state statute it has to go through certain notification and public hearing requirements. So the council gives direction to staff to begin that process and that could be tonight. We will also have other opportunities to have those hearings and the final adoption on that fee will come by an ordinance."
Stormwater guru Kathy Roecker, whose title will change officially from "guru" to "director" when the budget kicks in Oct. 1 (although I may choose to continue to refer to her as "guru" simply because Webster proclaims that word should apply to "an acknowledged advocate."), provided the council with a more specific timetable.
""At least 30 days prior, the city must publish in the paper the first notice of a public hearing to consider the adoption of a proposed rate charge," she said. "After the first public notice, the city must publish two additional newspaper notices prior to the hearing, but not necessarily 30 days as with the first notice. The public notices must contain the time/place of the hearing and contain the complete text of the proposed charge."
That means the earliest the notice could be published in the Hays Free Press would be in its Sept. 1 edition, which translates into the first public hearing being held in October, presumably at the council’s Oct. 4 meeting. Whether that Oct. 4 meeting would contain a public hearing on the actual proposed ordinance for the fee is debatable, but, giving the benefit of the doubt that it does, that means the second reading would come Oct. 18 . I would imagine the ordinance may provide at least a 60-day grace/education period, meaning the fees would start being imposed in January, 2017. I mentioned that schedule to one council person who preferred to remain unidentified and than council member told me early 2017 was probably a fairly accurate guestimate.
It’s also fairly certain that the ordinance that will come before the council next Wednesday will contain a tax rate that’s a penny lower than the current rate of $.5848 per $100 valuation, which might come as a shock to those who complained tonight during citizens comments that they were being "priced out of their homes." If that is indeed the case it’s because the value of their property has increased (which a savvy investor would argue is a good thing), but not because of higher tax rates. And there is little doubt that property values in this area are appreciating rapidly.
In fact, because of higher than anticipated property valuations, the city discovered last week it had $518,500 more available to them than originally anticipated. Through a series of amendments from individual council members last week, that amount was whittled down to $63,500. Council member David Wilson originally proposed to take $25,000 of that toward the seed funding of a process that would lead to the creation of a Veterans Memorial somewhere in Kyle. Mayor Todd Webster initially objected to the idea, not because he was opposed to the memorial, but because the money would sit encumbered without being used at all until the next fiscal year at the earliest.
But Mayor Pro Tem Damon Fogley offered to amend a proposal he made last week which was to take $25,000 from that original $518,500 to fund a rescue boat for the Kyle Fire Department. Fogley said he discovered during the course of this past week that the actual cost of the boat was $15,000 and the other $10,000 was to be used to pay for training. As a policy, the council has approved capital expenditures for the Kyle Fire Department, but not operating expenses since KFD technically is not a part of city government. So initially, Fogley offered to reduce his rescue boat amendment by $10,000 and give those funds to Wilson to add more money for the memorial. Instead, hearing what Webster said about encumbered funds that are not used during the course of the fiscal year, Wilson just decided to ask for Fogley’s $10,000 to be set aside.
"I was listening to you," Wilson told the mayor, "but this $10,000 is an important placeholder and we will generate private funds to supplement that."
Wilson’s proposal was approved 5-2. Council member Daphne Tenorio said she voted against it because Wilson’s idea was still in the concept stage and she wanted to see a concrete proposal before she would vote for it. Council member Travis Mitchell voted against it, as he voted against all the amendments that took money from this fund, because he wanted to keep it as "a buffer" in case sales taxes fell as far below expectations during the upcoming fiscal year as they have this year.
For the second week in a row, no one appeared to speak during the public hearings on the budget or the tax rate, although six persons addressed these items, at least peripherally, during citizens comments. Of the six, only two observed the three-minute limit that’s supposed to be imposed on speakers during this period and two of the six speakers, Dave Douglas and Kay Rush (who was absolutely clueless about how festivals and monument signs are being funded in the budget), hogged the speaker’s podium for more than five minutes each.
On the positive side, this was only a five-item agenda and so the entire meeting only took an hour and 46 minutes and that included a 31-minute executive session.
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