Give the prisoner, if not a pardon, at least an allowance

Question: What do City Manager Scott Sellers and the 422 inmates at the Kyle Correctional Center have in common? Answer: They are the only persons forced to live in Kyle.

Think about it: Every single Kyle adult resident, besides the above referenced 423, lives here because they chose, for one reason or another, to live here of their own free will. Only those locked in the hoosegow and the city manager live here because the law says they must.

Now you can try to argue, albeit unsuccessfully, that the city manager also had a choice — no one put a gun to his head and said he had to accept the position of city manager. By the same token, no one put a gun to the head of James Bernard McGary either and told him to kill someone, but that’s not the point because he was convicted of murder with a deadly weapon in Harris County back in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison. He now spends his days and nights at the private penal facility alongside I-35.

Sellers would have had a choice if his place of residence had been a condition of his employment; i.e., a portion of his employment contract subject to negotiation. But that’s not the case, although it should be. The city manager must live within the city limits of Kyle because the law (in this case, the city charter) mandates that the city manager live in Kyle. Look, there’s no law that exists anywhere that requires the President of the United States to live in Washington, D.C., let alone the White House. Yet the law in Kyle requires its city manager — and only the city manager along with the 422 inmates of the Kyle Prison Unit — to live within the city limits of Kyle.

And that presents a problem. And as proud as most of us who chose of own free will to live here, the truth is that the available housing stock in Kyle is severely limited. You have your basic start-up single family residences and then you have your multi-family three-story (at most) apartments. No executive homes. No garden homes. No zero-lot-line homes. No semi-high-rise luxury apartment complexes. An extremely limited selection of townhomes. What’s available here is your standard three-bedroom, two-bath home found in any subdivision in America listing for about $230,000.

And that might be just fine for those young-marrieds with two kids. But what about the more established family with, say, as many as six children? Where in Kyle can they live, especially if they want to stretch out on a larger home on a bigger piece of land? The answer is no such living accommodations are available here, so that family will have to live somewhere else. Unless they can’t. Unless the law sentences them to live in Kyle.

That might not be the exact circumstances, but it comes close to describing the predicament the City Council found itself in when it came to renegotiating an extended contract for City Manager Scott Sellers. To the credit of the council members, they recognized the dilemma and decided to actively and decisively deal with it. But then the green-eyed sheep that comprise the majority of the population here got their dandruff ruffled by a couple of deranged shepherds spreading all sorts of rumors, innuendos and misinformation. The sheep stampeded City Hall and the council got out of their way, albeit with a nifty bit of aplomb. Council members couldn’t admit they were wrong in deciding to provide a future residence for this and all future city managers, because the decision wasn’t wrong. It was smart. It was wise. It could have produced the most valuable asset on the city’s ledgers. But there’s no reasoning — it’s fruitless, perhaps even life threatening — to employ logic and common sense to stop a herd of stampeding sheep. So they engineered this carefully crafted masquerade by having the city manager take the hit and announce to all the world "You know, this house idea was really not in my family’s best interests, so let’s forget about all that for the present." And the sheep returned to grazing in the grass.

So what happens now? One thing is obvious: That provision must be stricken from the charter. If the City Council wants to make in-town residence for a city manager a condition of employment it has every right to do so. But there’s a distinct difference between a negotiated condition of employment and a mandate. The charter states, in Section 13.08, "The council shall review the charter every two years to determine if any amendment should be considered." Last year, a council-appointed Charter Review Commission made some changes to the document, all but one of which were accepted by the voters. But does that count as a "council review"? That’s probably up to the lawyers to decide, but I could argue, by the strictest definition, a charter review by an independent commission is not the same thing as a council review and it’s been more than two years since such a review took place. I know because I’ve attended every dang council meeting for the last 26 months and a council review of the charter has not made an appearance on any City Council agenda during that time.

So the council should grant the city manager a pardon by scheduling a two-year council review of the charter for the sole purpose of amending it to return to its original language on this subject which was: "The city manager need not reside in the city when appointed but shall thereafter, within a reasonable period of time established by the council, reside within Hays County or an adjoining county." Incidentally, if you do a search for "City Charter" on the city’s Web site, that’s the language in the charter that pops up. (Section 7.01)

If the city is not willing to grant the manager this humanitarian pardon, it should at least have the decency to establish a housing allowance that’s renewable at the beginning of each fiscal year to provide the manager with some sort of financial housing assistance. The city was planning on reducing the manager’s salary by, as I recall, something in the neighborhood of $27,000 per year which would count toward the manager’s lease payments on the house. Instead, make the housing allowance $27,000 a year. That’s much less than that $550,000 plus closing costs the council was planning to shell out this fiscal year for the manager’s new residence. You could give the manager a $27,000 housing allowance for more than 20 years before the $550,000 level is reached. And, as any well-meaning, fair-minded observer can attest, the council definitely owes the manager at least this perk to make up for how badly the communications on the residence proposal were managed.

I bring all this up now because, according to the agenda for the City Council’s meeting planned for 7 p.m. Tuesday, it plans to retire into executive session to discuss the city manager’s contract. I would like to be a fly on the wall to learn whether the above-mentioned options or others that actually address and solve the housing issue are addressed.

Other items of interest on the agenda include:

• An ordinance increasing Kyle’s water and wastewater impact fees by a whopping 67 percent making them among the highest in the region. Only New Braunfels and Austin would have higher fees. The impact fees in San Marcos, to cite just one example, would be $570 per connection lower than Kyle’s. Those fees are paid by developers and the only effect they have on residents is the higher the fee, the higher the cost of a new home.
• An ordinance requiring all that all future hike and bike trails "be constructed of concrete and be no less than eight (8) feet in width." The use of the word "concrete" bothers me; I hope this allows for pervious materials to be used in the construction of most of these amenities.
• Three rezoning items that are likely to face some resistance will most likely be postponed until the council’s second meeting in January at the earliest since the Planning & Zoning Commission will not decide on them until its planned Jan. 10 session. The delay is required because the council needs to deal with the next item which actually establishes the new zoning being requested.
• An ordinance creating above-referenced new zoning standards along with changing residential building requirements that currently require a five-foot garage setback from the front wall of a house. This one is kind of tricky. Under the new proposal garages on new residences will still not be allowed to protrude from the front wall of the house, nor will they be permitted to be flush with the entire front of the house. Instead of requiring the garages to be set back from the front of the house, the new ordinance would require that at least part of the front of any new single family residence in Kyle be extended in front of a front-loaded garage entrance. Follow?
• The consent agenda includes the approval of an interlocal agreement among Kyle, San Marcos and the Hays Caldwell Public Utility Agency to study the feasibility of constructing a wastewater treatment facility that would serve those areas from south of downtown Kyle to the Blanco River, extending east into Caldwell County, including Needville and the San Marcos Municipal Airport. Kyle and San Marcos would each finance about a quarter of the study’s cost with the rest being paid for by HCPUA.