City Council member Daphne Tenorio, who might have known better had she attended last Tuesday’s City Council meeting, has gone on Facebook to make false and misleading claims about Saturday’s special council meeting that calls for the first reading of an ordinance to annex into the city 119 acres of the Blanco River Ranch property and de-annex another 242 acres.
"Why does our city want to hide information from you?," she asked rhetorically in a Facebook posting dated Wednesday (I am only just learning about this posting because the council member, in an attempt to hide information from me, has "unfriended" me on Facebook. The posting was passed along to me just now by a third party.) "Where is the transparency your sainted council members preach?"
Well, to answer her first question, the city is not trying to hide anything. Notice of the public hearings have been posted, as required, in the Hays Free Press. To answer her second question, had she attended Tuesday’s city council meeting (admittedly her absence was the result of what was described as a "major medical emergency"), she would have been able to participate in a discussion over a resolution precisely dealing with this move.
"Why can’t this wait until our next scheduled meeting?" she wrote. "So why a special meeting? Most people are with their families shuffling children from event to event. Not to mention Saturday is election day and Hays CISD is having their (sic) 50th anniversary parade."
What she failed to mention is that this meeting was scheduled as a budget workshop long before the scheduling of school district’s self-congratulatory parade. She should also know by now these budget workshops are routinely held on Saturday mornings. The truth is she probably does know, but that fact doesn’t fit her polemic.
As far as waiting until "our next scheduled meeting," this is, in fact, the council’s "next scheduled meeting" following the passage of the resolution at the meeting she missed.
Her Facebook rant also said: "I know most don’t care what the city council does (my personal Politifact meter rates this as "mostly true"), but when they call a meeting on a Saturday to talk about annexation??? (my Politifact meter rates this as "Liar! Liar! Pants on fire.") Saturday’s meeting was not called "to talk about annexation," it was called to discuss one of the most important jobs a council person has — providing input into the direction of the next fiscal year’s budget. The only job more important than that is the actual details of that budget.
Not only that, simple mathematics should inform Tenorio that since the proposal calls for the city to de-annex more than twice as much land as it is incorporating, this is a more of a meeting "to talk about de-annexation."
If she had attended Tuesday’s council meeting, or even watched the recording of it later, she would have known, as Planning Director Howard Koontz said at the meeting, "Effectively, this is just a cleanup of the prior annexation that has already taken place. The area that is being re-annexed will consist nearly exclusively as right-of-way. The areas that are being re-annexed back into the city coincide with right-of-way lines where the street network will be located. The largest area of the land we are losing is proposed to be a residential area. That will be in the county and out of the city limits."
Assistant City Manager James Earp added "The only thing changing here is the actual alignment of the road" and he noted at the same time that this was planned for the council’s meeting Saturday, additional proof this has been on the schedule for a while now. In fact, Mayor Todd Webster said at Tuesday’s council meeting immediately after the council unanimously approved a corresponding resolution on the motion "We’ll revisit this on Saturday."
Had Tenorio been there she might have heard that.
I’m not saying she should ignore a "major medical emergency" to attend a council meeting. That, by definition, could be and most likely was prohibitive. But this Facebook rant indicates she’s adhering more to the Donald Trump Tweeting School of Communications than responsible stewardship concerning the promulgation of city programs and policies.
Now, where I have a problem with tomorrow’s agenda is Item 2, one to adopt a resolution for accepting a petition to create a Public Improvement District in the Blanco River Ranch Development. My problem is the last sentence of the memo, dated tomorrow, May 6, that accompanies the item and says "The proposed public hearing date is today, June 6 2017." Besides the fact that "today," in this instance, is May 6 and not June 6, that later date is also the date set aside for the council’s first meeting in June, Not only that, even though that May 6-dated memo says "the proposed public hearing date is today," the agenda for Saturday’s meeting contains no mention of a public hearing on this PID proposal. So, are we to assume the public hearing will take place on June 6 and not "today"? Personally, I found this confusing, but only enough to mention it here and not go into a rant on Facebook about it.
Incidentally, the only other item on the agenda besides the budget workshop and the subjects addressed above is one to accept a reimbursement from the Blanco River Ranch project developers for "the costs expenses associated with retaining the consultants" needed for the development of the aforementioned PID.
That should get absolutely nobody in an uproar, but these days you never know.
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