Is Kyle beginning to over-regulate?

I hate yard work.

Detest it.

I may be the world’s foremost proponent of artificial turf.

Perhaps these feelings stem from the fact that I was born and raised on the Lower East Side of New York. If we wanted to see a tree or even a patch of grass, there was always a neighborhood park within easy walking distance. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that my parents finally succumbed to the lure of the suburbs and purchased their first house, complete with a yard. Bet you’ll never guess who got stuck with doing the yard work. The lure, to be frank, was hard liquor, a difficult temptation for a teen to pass up back then. Specifically, it was an ice cold, perfectly refreshing Tom Collins my mother always had ready for me after I completed my Saturday yard chores. I absolutely loathed the chore of mowing/trimming the law and pulling weeds, but I loved those Tom Collins.

As a result, for the overwhelming majority of my adult life, I studiously avoided residing anywhere that required anything remotely connected to landscaping. The closest I came was that I would purchase a potted plant every now and then, but I only managed to keep them alive for a month at most. Then I discovered places like Michael’s that sold realistic looking fake indoor trees and plants. Whoopee!!

A little more than 20 years ago, however, I found myself in a position where it would advance my professional standing if I became a homeowner. After much consideration, I finally opted for a townhouse in a location where the homeowner’s association was responsible for all the landscaping in the front of my townhouse and my only concern was a small yard enclosed by a six-foot tall wooden fence in back. But it wasn’t long before, in my war with nature, the weeds declared victory. I tried everything this side of napalm. I hired a professional landscaping firm that moonscaped my back yard, then blanketed it with heavy duty plastic and applied a nice looking mulch on top of that. But the weeds were not to be deterred that easily. They managed to punch through that plastic and once more take over the yard. Finally, I just said "The hell with it," and paved over the entire thing. Made one big patio out of it where I enjoyed some fine cookouts with family and friends. After all, this was my backyard. My personal property. I could do whatever I wanted do with it as long as it didn’t have a negative effect on a neighbor’s property.

Now all this took place in Dallas where its stormwater fee, both commercial and residential, is based on the amount of impervious cover on your property. My penalty, if you want to call it that, was after paving over the back yard, I had a higher monthly stormwater fee. Fine with me. At least I didn’t have ugly weeds. At least I didn’t have yard work.

Have I mentioned that I hate yard work?

I bring all this up because last Tuesday the Kyle City Council, on the same night, passed a yin and a yang of ordinance revisions. The yin revised the landscaping ordinance and the yang revised the impervious cover ordinance. And after that I began to thinking to myself that the entire globe is divided into two parts: those parts covered with impervious surfaces and those covered with some form of landscaping, whether or not it is actually landscaped in the formally accepted use of that term. Or, to put it another way, the earth is covered either by surfaces that are impervious or those that are not. And by regulating one, you naturally regulate the other. Not only that, the council decided swimming pools were not impervious. The word "impervious" is an adjective and it means "not allowing fluid to pass through." If a swimming pool is not "impervious," it desperately needs repair. One of the many listed synonyms for "impervious" is "watertight," and anyone with a swimming pool that isn’t watertight needs to replace it quickly with one that is. The council, in its attempt to make sure every homeowner who wants one can have a pool in his or her back yard has made a declaration that is tantamount to declaring "from now on three plus three in Kyle will equal 33 because, as everyone can see, that’s what you get when you put two three’s together."

But the council can achieve its "chicken in every pot" goal and yet still acknowledge that there is a difference between a swimming pool and the water contained in that swimming pool (contained, of course, because swimming pools are indeed impervious). And the way to do this is to abandon the notion that every concern can be solved with another ordinance, another regulation.

The solution to this is very simple: First, a carefully crafted landscape ordinance can include whatever impervious cover standards are needed, mainly because these standards should only apply to commercial and multi-family developments anyway. Forget about, do away with, the notion that the government should regulate what an individual homeowner can or cannot put on his or her private property, unless, of course, it fails to conform to land-use regulations already in place, violates criminal statutes or his patently and obviously offensive to the public. But we’re over-regulating when we decide percentages need to be firmly established on how much impervious cover a homeowner can have on his/her private property.

Here’s how ridiculous this whole thing is: Under the impervious cover ordinance amendments that will have a second reading at the next regularly scheduled council meeting Oct. 18, a homeowner is restricted on the size of a patio he or she can have in their back yard, but it will be perfectly allowable to convert an entire back yard into a fish pool that will become a natural breeding ground for Zika-carrying mosquitos.

Look, if a family with five teen-aged children living at home and all the members of that family have their own automobiles, want to construct a large circular driveway in their front yard to accommodate all those vehicles, they should be allowed to do so. If a family that likes to entertain wants to construct a large patio in their back yard, they should be allowed to do so. It’s their property. But let their monthly stormwater fees reflect these personal choices they have made.

The city is coming up with all kinds of excuses for why all residences should pay a flat stormwater fee. The truth is, city officials simply don’t want to go to all the trouble to determine the amount of impervious surface on each piece of residential property, even though Mayor Todd Webster predicted during last week’s discussion on impervious surfaces that the day will come — and sooner rather than later — that residential fees will be set by their impervious cover amounts. I’m betting that a well programmed and outfitted drone flying over Kyle one afternoon could provide all the photographic evidence needed that could allow city officials to accurately measure the amount of impervious surface on every residential property in the city. But, instead of doing that, the city is taking what it believes is an easier way out – passing regulations that establish the maximum percentages of allowable impervious cover on every single piece of residential property.

So my answer to the question I posed in this headline is a resounding "yes."