Council votes to increase proposed stormwater fee, raise police pay, eliminate transportation subsidies

At the end of the council’s nearly two-hour discussion Wednesday night on changes individual council members wanted to make to City Manager Scott Sellers’s proposed budget, Mayor Todd Webster congratulated Sellers on the document he put forward.

Webster told Sellers this was a more difficult budget to amend "because you guys did such a goof job of paring it down. There weren’t any big targets out there, things that we didn’t need. I recognized that sitting there watching us mess around with the edges of your budget might not be the most comfortable thing but I really think you did a nice job and your staff did a nice job. You could see that this budget was really well thought out."

Apparently the rest of the city agreed with the mayor on this because Wednesday night’s meeting was the first of two opportunities for citizens to come before the council to vent about how their tax funds are being spent and whether they are receiving the proper amount of city services for the tax money they must shell out each year — this was the open invitation for any citizen to come before the council and proclaim "I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!!!!" — and you know what happened? Not a soul showed up. No one. There were two public hearings scheduled on the agenda. The first one offered citizens the opportunity to say anything they wanted to say about the budget, about the idea of creating a stormwater utility along with a proposed fee to pay for it, about whether a penny should be added to the city manager’s proposed tax rate to align the city’s police pay scale with surrounding communities, whether to keep subsidizing rides on Buda Taxi. The second one offered the citizens the opportunity to say anything about the proposed property tax rate — higher, lower, stay where it is — anything at all. But no one came. This signals either (a) a completely satisfied community or (b) a completely disengaged community. I’m not going to argue which, at least not at this time.

Of course, there’s another opportunity to collect citizen imput on these matters some may find important. Two more public hearings — just like these — are scheduled for next Wednesday’s City Council meeting. It will be interesting to see how many, if any, citizens show up just to talk about the changes the council made to the budget at this meeting.

One thing I don’t expect to change, however, and that’s the city manager’s recommendation to set the tax rate at $.5748 per $100 valuation, a penny less than the current rate. The last time the council met to discuss the budget was July 30 at a workshop designed just for that purpose. At that time, however, the Hays County Appraisal District had not released its certified tax rolls. So the city was putting forth educated guesses on how much revenue a $.5748 tax rate would produce. The Kyle Police Association argued it was not high enough for its members to achieve pay parity with surrounding police forces and asked that the tax rate be kept at $.5848 with the extra $200,000 that one-cent increase would produce be devoted to police pay parity.

Now, however, the city has those certified roles and the property appraisals exceeded their most grandiose expectations. In fact, lowering the rate a penny to $.5748 would produce $518,000 more than the original forecasts. So, Sellers suggested, the council could take $200,000 of that for the parity the police were asking for, another $118,000 for provide pay increases for workers not covered by civil service and still have a nice $200,000 to tuck away for that proverbial rainy day. But as everyone has no doubt noticed, we’ve been having those rainy days this week, so the council found ways to spend most of that $200,000 between the rainstorms on Wednesday. Council member Shane Arabie asked for half of that amount fo pay for two additional wastewater employees and Mayor Pro Tem Damon Fogley got his wish for $25,000 to pay for a rescue boat for the Fire Department.

Other than police pay, the most noteworthy budget amendments were one from council member Travis Mitchell to raise the proposed stormwater fees paid by homeowners from $3 to $5 a month and one from Webster to eliminate the city’s subsidizing of taxi services. Mitchell’s proposal passed 6-1 with only council member Daphne Tenorio voting against, which seemed to be a 180-degree turn from what she was saying on this same subject during the July 30 budget workshop. The vote to eliminate the taxi subsidies was 5-2 with Fogley joining Tenorio in favor of maintaining the subsidies. The important thing to remember here is that taxi service from Buda Taxi will still be available to citizens of Kyle (as are other ride-sharing options). The only difference is the city won’t be subsidizing the service, meaning those using Buda Taxi could be subject to higher fares.

Webster said normally he wouldn’t quibble about a program that’s only going to cost the city $10,000 during the upcoming fiscal year ($50,000 was allocated for it currently) "but there’s definitely been sabers being rattled about lawsuits related to that program and a program that essentially only serves eight people I’m not willing to expose the city to litigation over it. It’s less about the $10,000, but more about we’re doing something that’s walking us down a path that’s going to get us into some trouble."

No one really mentioned the over-arching problem with this program. Municipally subsidized public transportation programs have one — only one — primary goal: to provide a transportation option for citizens to travel from their place of residence to their place of employment and then back to their place of residence. Sure, other riders use it for other purposes, but that goal – getting people to and from work – is the primary reason for a municipality providing a public mass transportation option. That’s why there are well-established formulas to determine whether a city actually needs mass transportation and those formulas are based on two factors: residential density and job density. And, to be honest, Kyle meets neither of those two criteria. And none of the up to eight total users of the city’s subsidized service was using it to get to and from work. They were using it for shopping or to go to a medical provider. Not that either of those reasons are trivial to the person needing them, but they do not meet the standard of providing taxpayer subsidized service.

In other action Wednesday night:

• The fire chief, albeit unwittingly, asked the council do something illegal and that’s take sides on a matter going before the electorate. The chief asked the council to pass a resolution encouraging a "yes" vote to create an EMS district. City Councils are not even allowed to pass resolutions encouraging "yes" votes on their own bond proposals.
• The council approved a development agreement with the Walton Group for a proposed, predominantly residential, development just southeast of the Kyle City Limits on Ranch Road 150 called Pecan Woods. The council also approved the creation of a PID for the project so that bonds could be sold to repay the developers for their infrastructure investment. Arabie voted against both measures because the developers failed to assure him the development would actually happen. Tenorio also voted against, but she has vowed never to vote in favor of a PID until ice skating becomes a regular feature on Plum Creek in August. And maybe, not even then.
• Reconsidered a decision, that was voted down 3-2 at the last council meeting, to join the Central Texas Clean Air Coalition because two council members were absent at that meeting. Those two council members split on their vote Wednesday night and, as a result, this time the vote was 4-3 not to join. It appeared to me going into the debate that Fogley was in favor of joining, but wound up voting against. I didn’t take advantage of an opportunity to ask him why — or even if he actually did — change his mind, but if he did, I’m guessing it had a lot to do with Sellers’s revelation that the deadline had passed between the last council meeting and this one for applying for a grant that city had a slim chance of obtaining had they joined the coalition.
• Sellers told the council that Kyle Field Days, originally scheduled for next month, will be delayed until spring, mainly because the city’s special events guru has left the city and a replacement has yet to be hired. This postponement, Sellers said, "will give us a little more time to work on it as well as advertise appropriately. The other evens that are being planned (presumably Hogwash) are being planned well. We’re seeing good numbers for those right now, but Kyle Field Day, which is coming up pretty quickly, we’re not."
• Sellers also told the council "We are systematically upgrading our street signs throughout the city, starting with Center Street. So, if you noticed, as you drove in, instead of the typical green sign, you will see a very sharp red and blue sign. It’s attractive. We’re going to try to match our wayfinding and adopt-a-street signage after the same color scheme. We may even look at doing some backlit signage on some of our signal-light intersections, trying to preserve the same color scheme. A little bit of branding and it looks sharp."