The Kyle Report

The Kyle Report

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Do warning labels serve a valuable purpose?

It’s time once again to play Let’s Pretend. This time, let’s turn the clock back 50 years and pretend you’re a member of Congress in the mid-1960s with a background in the medical/health field. Being part of that austere body you are one of the first to learn In 1964 that the surgeon general of the United States is about to issue a report which states unequivocally that the nicotine and tar in cigarettes cause long cancer. As a health practitioner as well as a lawmaker, what do you do?

You could, of course, propose a complete ban on cigarette sales in the United States. That, however, would be a risky move. After all, tobacco has a long and storied history. It was the first crop grown for money in North America: In 1612 the settlers of the first American colony in Jamestown, Va., grew tobacco as a cash crop. It was their main source of money. Tobacco helped finance the American Revolution. George Washington, the recognized "father of our country" and the first President of the United States, grew tobacco, for crying out loud. By 1944, U.S. tobacco companies were producing and selling 300 billion cigarettes a year (helped immensely by the two world wars during which the tobacco companies shrewdly distributed cigarettes for free to American servicemen.)

But then, 20 years later, the surgeon general issues his report. A complete ban, you figure, will never pass muster because of the political influence of the tobacco industry so you try the next best thing — an end run. You propose legislation in 1964 to switch regulatory control of the tobacco industry from the Treasury Department to the FDA. Because the tobacco industry was smart enough to realize it could make millions of Americans hopelessly addicted to their products by handing them out for free to American servicemen during wartime, they are also wise enough to see through this plan and realize such a switch in regulatory authority would have exactly the same effect as an outright ban. So they marshal their immense lobbying and campaign financing power behind an effort to kill your legislation and are ultimately successful in that effort.

Then the next year, another bill is introduced on this subject, one that doesn’t ban tobacco products, but which mandates that every cigarette pack must have a warning label on its side stating "Cigarettes may be hazardous to your health." (Of course, this is not pretend, It was called "the Cigarette Labeling and Packaging Act" and did, in fact, pass Congress in 1965.) But the question I want to pose in our Let’s Pretend game here is this: How do you vote on this proposal? Do you vote in favor of it because you feel that such a label will, at the very least, protect your constituents by warning them of the possible health hazards of smoking? Or do you vote against it on the principle that when it comes to selling tobacco products, nothing short of an outright ban will suit you?

City Council member Daphne Tenorio faced that identical situation at last night’s council agenda meeting and chose the latter option.

The subject was Kyle’s screw-the-homeowner PID policy which Tenorio wisely opposed when it was introduced and passed in 2015 after the so-called "experts" the city hired to formulate and administer the policy lied to the council and the public about how PIDs work. As I’ve written many times before, the problems with the city’s PID policy is that (1) it amounts to taxation without representation (an idea early Americans so opposed they staged a revolution to fight it); (2) it forces a homeowner to pay twice for the same thing; and (3) the "I" in PID stands for "improvement," but Kyle doesn’t use PIDs for improving properties, it uses PIDs for developing properties. Conceptually, one could argue "improving" and "developing" are the same thing, but semantically there are major differences between the two terms.

Last night, the council considered amendments to that PID policy, and one of those changes would, in effect, slap a huge warning label on neighborhoods with PIDs. This label that would essentially state "Warning potential home buyer: Purchasing a home in this subdivision will cost you a lot more than purchasing that exact same home in another subdivision that does not contain a PID." Then, if the homeowner ignores the label and decides to purchase the home anyway, the purchaser forfeits the right, according to theory, to complain about getting suckered later, much the same way, in theory, the smoker forfeits the right to blame the tobacco company for the smoker contracting lung cancer since the packaging on the product warned the smoker in advance this would be the probable outcome.

The PID amendments passed 6-1 with Tenorio casting the lone dissenting vote.

In other action last night:
  • The council awarded Matrix Consulting Group a contract to conduct an audit of the Kyle Police Department. I’m a big believer in a concept known as 3-E Government, a concept that requires governments, particularly municipal governments, to be effective, efficient and economical. Now those goals may seem overly idealistic, but unlike beauty, to cite one example, they are not subjective — they can actually be measured quantitatively. And one of the best ways to measure whether a municipal government is fulfilling its promise on these 3-E deliverables is through a performance audit. So during that brief interval between item 16 on last night’s agenda, the city manager’s report, and item 17, executive session, I asked City Manager Scott Sellers whether this audit that was just approved would reveal whether (1) the police department was operating at peak efficiency, (2) the department was effectively serving its customers and (3) was the department wisely spending taxpayers’ dollars. This is what Sellers told me: "Absolutely. Absolutely. This audit should confirm the great job we say we are doing. If there are recommendations from the audit or findings that don’t substantiate our commitments to quality, our commitments to culture, our commitments to being responsible stewards of the taxpayer dollar, then we want to address those. We want to have the best police department that we can possibly have. There have been a lot of comments over the years about our police department, for good or for bad. But we want to make sure we can put substance behind what we say about our police department and rectify anything we need to." I will admit, Sellers is a shrewd manager and may have intuitively told me only what I wanted to hear. But, I must admit, I trust the guy and  his response did alleviate most my concerns that the audit was structured only as a platform on which the department could complain it didn’t have enough resources. Not only that, his response did give me ammunition — however effective that ammunition might be — to use in case those police complaints are the only findings of the audit.
  • Sellers also spoke more on a subject that was announced last week — for the first time in the city’s history, a MUD was planned inside the city limits. I didn’t write about it at the time it was announced because the printed announcement did not say who was asking the Texas Legislature to create the MUD or the purpose of it. As the city manager explained it last night, the MUD would be implemented by Plum Creek to pay for the infrastructure required to create a commercial corridor on close to 400 acres located on either side of FM1626 north of Kohlers Crossing, 176 acres south of Kohlers and east of the Union Pacific tracks and another 37 acres also south of Kohlers just west of 1626. Sellers told me there are conceptual, but not specific, plans for development on one or more of those properties. "I believe it was around July of 2015," Sellers told me, immediately after he addressed the council on the MUD, "we talked about an agreement for an uptown project that would include a relocated city hall. That could be surrounded by a variety of other developments similar to Southlake, Sugarland or Bee Cave. It’s that same uptown development that we continue to move toward. The MUD helps in that conversation. Since the MUD is intended to be all commercial or industrial, that is really what we are targeting here. But I can honestly say there is not a specific commercial component today that we are negotiating with." Coincidentally, during that time the council was in executive session, in the council chambers Parks Director Kerry Urbanowicz, Finance Director Perwez Moheet, Economic Development Director Diana Torres, City Secretary Jennifer Vetrano and Chief of Staff Jerry Hendrix were talking about how crowded it was at City Hall, with Torres claiming there were no more additional electrical outlets available in city hall; Urbanowicz claiming that even if such an outlet existed, one more attachment would overload and collapse the building’s electrical system; and Moheet specifically discussing the idea of installing temporary buildings between the current city hall and the police headquarters, an installation that might be problematic since the city recently extended the lease of Wells Fargo’s drive-through facility, which is currently located there.
  • The council applauded and congratulated Public Works Director Harper Wilder for completing the emergency repairs on the Lehman Road bridge at a cost that was 22 percent below what was budgeted for the repairs.
  • The council unanimously passed on first reading (which means there will not be a second reading) an ordinance to rezone land many residents of both Kyle and San Marcos feared would be the location of a truck stop from agriculture to retail services, a zoning designation that does not allow for such a use.
  • Council members unanimously approved granting a taxi franchise to the recently formed On Tyme Taxi & Courier Service.
  • The council unanimously approved a pest control measure that allows residents to purchase their own live traps to capture unwanted critters on their property instead of being forced to have Animal Control loan them such a trap. The amendments also allow pet owners to register their pets at a veterinarian’s office.
  • An ordinance that would have prohibited the mass release of balloons and Chinese lanterns in city parks was rejected on a 5-2 vote, with Mayor Pro Tem Damon Fogley and Tenorio registering the two affirmative votes.
  • Council member Shane Arabie was appointed, on a 6-1 vote (Tenorio voting against) to replace Mayor Todd Webster as one of the city’s representatives to the Hays Caldwell Public Utility Agency. Webster said Arabie’s engineering background as well as his interest in water projects made him the best qualified member of the council to serve on an agency whose stated mission is "resolving the long-term water needs for its participants" (those participants being Kyle, San Marcos, Buda and the Canyon Regional Water Authority). Tenorio said she voted against it because the agency doesn’t publicly post the qualifications needed to be a member. The agency does, however, have a frequently-asked-questions page on its web site which states "If you have a question about the agency not answered in the FAQs above, we're happy to answer it. Please fill out the form below and someone will get back to you." So there’s that.

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