Tomorrow’s City Council meeting appears, on the surface at least, to be one where, if you plan on staying until adjournment, it might be best to bring a good book along with you.
Possibly more than one.
There doesn’t seem to be much on the Council’s agenda (which you can read for yourself here) to spark any sort of meaningful debate (although I have personal objections to changes in the animal control ordinance which I describe in detail at the end of this report). The council’s proposed executive session, on the other hand, lists discussions on 12 different subjects. A five-minute discussion on each means an hour-long executive session and you can bet the ranch that such subjects as the renewal of City Manager Scott Sellers’s contract, pending terms for funding for the Chamber of Commerce, a development agreement for property about to be annexed, "the purchase of property for a municipal purpose" (which could mean anything up to a major purchase of land to develop a brand new city center at, say, the northeast corner of FM 1626 and Kohler’s Crossing) as well as five — that’s right, five! — pending economic development projects, are going to take longer than five minutes each to discuss.
As far as the agenda items are concerned,, council member Daphne Tenorio will most likely vote against spending the money for the preliminary engineering studies required if the city ever hopes to move the Union Pacific railroad siding to a place where stopped trains no longer block traffic on Center Street, but that vote has everything to do with posturing and nothing to do with sound fiscal policy.
What could be the most contentious items, plans to rezone land in Old Town Kyle, probably won’t even be considered because the Planning and Zoning Commission postponed consideration of them until its meeting on runoff election day. (A side note: Here’s hoping the city manages to fix whatever it is that’s preventing the room divider in the council chambers from operating, so that voting won’t be taking place in the same room as next week’s P&Z meeting. At the same time, I also find it interesting that the upcoming meetings section of the city’s website fails to list a Dec. 13 P&Z meeting.) A number of citizens living near this property have swallowed a lie that the project planned for the property would promote flooding when the truth is it would have exactly the opposite result. But I imagine many of them will show up in force to continue to spread the falsehoods promulgated by the city’s no-growth element, simply because no one has bothered to tell these people what is really going to happen. Here’s hoping, however, the council doesn’t make the same stupid mistake as the Planning & Zoning Commission and allow these misguided individuals to have their say during the public comments session of the meeting and not order them to wait until the public hearings attached to these items, hearing which should never be started if consideration of the items are going to be postponed, as expected. If they are to be postponed, and that decision should be made before the council goes into session, the mayor should announce that fact right at the beginning of the public comments session and then allow those who came to speak during those postponed public hearings the opportunity to have their say during public comments. That way all rules involving public hearings are followed and no one’s free speech is abridged, unlike what happened at the most recent P&Z travesty of a meeting.
I will admit I am anxious to hear what council member Travis Mitchell has to offer on the agenda item captioned "Small Business Incentive Program." If there is any meat on those bones, such a program could have major effects on the city's future.
The council will consider an even more convoluted series of amendments to its vendor ordinances, ones regulating food trucks, that the council sent back to Planning & Zoning several months ago because they were too convoluted. This time, the ordinance contains additional provisions for a food truck park, provisions which were not a part of the originally rejected amendments. Personally, I’m a big fan of food truck parks, but, technically speaking, this sounds like a land-use issue and not a vendor issue and, as a result, has no place in an ordinance designed to regulate vendors. Of course, this council has earned the reputation of expediency instead of standing on principle and if that is the case here the council will likely pass the ordinance simply because the members are tired of dealing with it. If you don’t want to buy a pig because it’s too fat, why in heaven’s name would you be willing to accept a fatter pig as a replacement? Just because you’re tired of haggling with the pig farmer?
The proposal to approve and adopt an updated Parks Master Plan, which I wrote about extensively earlier, is also back on the agenda after being mysteriously postponed at the last meeting,
There’s also an item to execute a $975,671 Texas Capital Fund Grant with Texas Department of Agriculture. Money from this fund is earmarked for "rural business development, retention and expansion by providing funds for public infrastructure, real estate development, or the elimination of deteriorated conditions." In other words, this money could go a long way towards fixing a lot of the current and recently discovered problems with the Kyle Housing Authority, but since there are no advocates demanding that some of this grant money be used for solving those problems, I doubt it will happen.
The agenda includes an amendment to the animal control ordinance that I find somewhat worrisome. For reasons too complicated to go into here, a possum found its way into my house when I lived in Dallas. The dang thing would wander around at night, pursued by my trusty Golden Retriever. It wound up crashing through my wine cabinet, smashing all kinds of drinking glasses and bottles, and destroying table lamps and other items in my home.. I went to Home Depot and purchased a live trap and baited it every night without success. Then someone told me, the varmints recognize a trap so you have to disguise it. The next night I draped a blanket over the trap and voila, that night I was awakened by the sound of the trap snapping shut and the next morning I got up, went downstairs and found the rascal in the trap. I called Dallas Animal Control, which came out immediately to remove the pest from my premises.
What I did to rid myself of that possum problem would be illegal here in Kyle under the terms of the proposed changes to the city’s animal control ordinances which, if approved, would now state "It shall be unlawful for any person, other than animal control officers, to set, trigger, activate or otherwise use or cause to be set, triggered, activated or used … any … trapping device, including ‘live traps,’ unless it is loaned to the person by the animal control division…" That means if that same possum invasion happened to me here in Kyle, it would be illegal for me to simply to go Home Depot and purchase one of the many traps the store sells. Instead, I would have to go to animal control and see if they had a trap available I could borrow. Speaking from personal experience, I don’t like this change. This comes across as government interference in the worst possible way.
The ordinance does say "This subsection is not intended to prohibit the prudent use of traps on one’s own property to control rodents." But here’s the (pardon the pun) trap in that sentence. A possum is not a rodent. It’s a marsupial.
So there’s that.
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