And, frankly, I am beginning to wonder why this one came with such a strong recommendation. It is a tad melodramatic for my tastes and it lays on the angst of the story’s titular character way too thickly. I will admit to admiring the audacity of creating a television series around a despicable human being — in this case, a serial killer — but Dexter is not the first TV series based on that premise: both The Sopranos and Breaking Bad handled that concept far more successfully than Dexter.
But the real problem I’m having with the program is that I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the show actually believes its main character is a "hero," a "good guy." It seems they are buying into their own false premise that it’s OK to murder your fellow human beings if, in the opinion of the murderer, the victims "deserved:" to be murdered because of some heinous crime they may have committed but escaped justice for. I have no idea how the series ends — and I don’t want anyone to spoil it by trying to tell me how it ends — but I’m going to be furious if this guy doesn’t get the punishment he deserves, i.e., a gruesome demise.
I mention this only because I want to pose the argument that it is inherently wrong for a city government to use public, taxpayers funds to repair private property. Stated like that, I think most people would agree with me. The City of Kyle, however, appears set to go all Dexter on that argument. Just as Dexter seems to be arguing its OK to diabolically, gruesomely murder another human being if the murderer feels the crime is justified , the city is prepared to make a similar exception to the "using taxpayer money to repair private property" rule when it applies to sidewalks.
It’s a dangerous precedent that simply doesn’t stand up to the arguments against it. However, of the six council members who attended last night’s City Council meeting (Mayor Pro Tem Damon Fogley missed last night’s meeting due to a death in his family), the only one who agrees with me on this is Shane Arabie.
I don’t have enough time or the energy to enumerate and elucidate on all the problems with this notion ventured during last night’s City Council meeting, but I will mention a few of them.
First of all, the council is lying. Well, perhaps, not really, but based on last night’s conversation most observers are going to walk away thinking the city is now willing to accept responsibility for the maintenance and upkeep of all sidewalks in Kyle. And, going forward, if this hair-brained scheme is approved, that’s the message that the public will her and absorb. But that doesn’t appear to be what the city is planning on doing. What the council discussed last night was strictly a relatively inexpensive way to fix a sidewalk in certain situations, specifically one in which a crack in the sidewalk has caused the walkway on one side of the crack to be lower than the walkway on the other side. That’s it. If you’ve got a hole in the sidewalk, forget about it. It doesn’t appear the city is going to repair that. If a tree root has busted through the sidewalk, effectively splitting it in two with a space between the two sections, I don’t think the city plans on coming to your rescue there either. What the city is actually planning, according to council member David Wilson, is contracting with a private company that will inject a polymer under one side of a sidewalk to elevate that side and make it even with the other side. That’s it. The cost will depend on the number of inches one side needs to be raised, i.e., how much polymer is required.
Now Wilson said the city has identified 270 instances in Kyle that could use this type of repair and the decision the council needs to make at some future date is whether to budget the money needed to make these 270 repairs over a five-year period. Which raises even more concerns that I will address momentarily.
But let’s get back to my original problem. The public is going to perceive that the city is going to be repairing and maintaining all sidewalks and that doesn’t appear to be true: it only plans on leveling those 270 sidewalk locations and even that will take place at what appears to me to be the incredibly slow pace of one sidewalk leveling repair per week over a five-year period. So what happens when some homeowner sees the city repairing a sidewalk across the street, but then learns the sidewalk repairs he needs are not leveling, but, say replacing? How is that homeowner going to react?
Like I said, it’s a slippery slope, a dangerous precedent.
If a homeowner carefully examines the deed for his/her property, that homeowner will see the front of the property line extends to, at least, the curb of the street on which the property fronts. That means the sidewalk is on private property and thus is the responsibility of the owner of that private property. "But," council member Travis Mitchell argued after last night’s meeting," that sidewalk is a public right-of-way and the homeowner doesn’t have the right to remove it," True, but neither does the homeowner have the right to remove all the landscaping from the property and just pave it all over to avoid landscaping time and costs. However, under the city’s new sidewalk rule, if the fact that a homeowner can’t remove a sidewalk is to be used as justification for the city to make and pay for (certain) repairs to that sidewalk, doesn’t that mean the city can he held responsible for maintaining the property’s landscaping as well? If Code Compliance can cite a homeowner for, say, overgrown weeds, and order that homeowner to fix the problem, why not simply have Code Compliance site the homeowner for needed sidewalk repairs as well?
Now the city will claim that the reason it is getting this great price break for the repairs is because of the amount of such repairs that is required in the city is such a high number and individually those numbers would not work for the contractor at that reduced price. Bull-pucky. If the city cited a homeowner and the citation noted that the homeowner had one year to repair the deficiency or would be subject to a fine greater than the actual cost of the repair, the homeowner would most likely not only contract to get the job done but possibly even thank the city for finding a company that could make the repair at such a reasonable price. Not only that, the repair could be made within a year and the homeowner wouldn’t have to gamble on whether his address in the city’s lottery would be at the beginning or at the end of a five-year period. That means the company gets five times the volume of business in one year than it would under the city’s plan.
The reality here is the city wants to Dexter the sidewalk issue: "Yes," the city will argue, "it is wrong to use taxpayers funds to pay for repairs on private property, but when it comes to sidewalks we’re going to find a way to justify it." It’s not right, but it’s politically expedient (until the public finds out it isn’t entirely true).
Here’s another fallacy in Mitchell’s "public right-of-way" argument. Suppose a water pipe located beneath the foundation of my house breaks resulting in a major water leak. Whose responsibility is it to fix this? Technically, that water is not my property. It haven’t "purchased" it from the city until it flows into my hot water heater or I turn on the faucet or flush the toilet and it actually enters my home. The answer, however, is obviously it’s the homeowner’s responsibility to pay for the excavation, perhaps though the home’s foundation, and repair of that water line. But if the city is now going to assume responsibility for maintaining certain items of private property, what’s to prevent some hotshot legal mind from deducing it sets a precedent that covers all such repairs, including those that involve the delivery of any city service, i.e. water? Certain responsible city governments do assume a limited amount of liability in matters such as these. I realized I faced a potential major water leek under my home in Dallas when, for two straight months, my monthly water bill, which normally averaged a little more than $100 a month, was close to $500. After I arranged for and paid for the needed repairs (which resulted in a major hole having to be drilled and later refilled in my kitchen floor), the City of Dallas had a plan which allowed me to take the two $500 water invoices (which I had also paid — I didn’t want my water turned off) along with invoices from those same two months the year before, to Dallas Water Utilities which then credited me with the difference. I didn’t have to pay for water again for almost a year. But it didn’t assume responsibility for fixing the leak. In fact, Dallas, like the overwhelming majority of city governments in this country, doesn’t use taxpayer funds to pay for any repairs on private property, including sidewalk repairs.
To his credit, Arabie disagreed with this entire Dexter approach on both a practical and a philosophical level. But, unfortunately, he was the only one with the courage to do the right thing and not to bend in the political winds.
On the practical side he questioned "What is the life span of the poly-fill? What is the longevity of the poly-fill? What’s the weight-load capacity of poly-fill? What are we going to do if we have problems later on. I have a problem with all of those." And then he asked the pertinent question I addressed earlier: "What are the percentages of the sidewalks that will be fixed with the poly-fill.?" And if the city decides it needs to fulfill the promise it appears, on the surface, to be making and that is to assume all responsibility for sidewalk maintenance and repair, Arabie wanted to know "What are the percentage of sidewalks that will be fixed with conventional methods? How many miles are we going to fix? How much tax dollars are we going to appropriate towards this?"
Then he made what I believed is the concluding argument: "If we’re going to consider this, then it’s going to be a policy that we’re going to fix the sidewalks. So what’s the policy standard we’re going to fix them to? The reality is, this idea doesn’t fix all of our (sidewalk) issues. The soil will still flex and still move. We’re still going to have problems with sidewalks. The policy decision that needs to be made is whether we’re going to assume responsibility to fix the sidewalks. That’s the policy decision, not what we’re going to pay for. So I don’t necessarily agree with the way we’re moving forward right now."
After the meeting, I posed the more philosophical side of the question is Arabie and he replied "I vehemently oppose using taxpayer funds to repair any private property."
So there’s that, as well.
In other matters worth noting from last night’s City Council meeting:
- The city appeared to be leaning in favor of spreading over a 30-year period, not 20 years. Kyle’s $60.1 million share of the total cost of the Hayes Caldwell Public Utility Agency’s project to transport water from the Carrizo aquifer to local customers, even though Mitchell, noting a 20-year option would save taxpayers $21.3 million in interest payments, argued for the shorter time span. The reason given for the longer period is that would allow for additional customers moving into the area during years 21-30 to share in the pain of having to repay the note. City Finance Director Perwez Moheet estimated the average water customer could see as much as a 42 to 50 percent water bill increase under the 30-year plan, although Mayer Todd Webster said some of the debt could be repaid from available moneys in the General Fund. "There was a time not that long ago when the city hadn’t adequately planned for water" and the result was "we didn’t have water," Webster noted. "I went through the experience of trying to turn the faucet on and the water didn’t work. A number of times. And that was one of the two things that prompted me to get involved and be part of the solution. That solution grew into and became a regional collaborative to try to bring water to the region and that’ has evolved into the HCPUA And Kyle was actually the prime mover and the ones that initiated the thing." Webster acknowledged residents will suffer sticker shock when they see the effects the three proposed bond sales ($8.99 million this year, $24.19 million two years from now and $26.92 million in 2021) will have on their water bills "but I can assure you the cost of not doing something is far more than this." The city did not officially make any decisions on this issue — it really didn’t even give city staff a clear direction on how to pursue the matter — but the overall impression I got was the majority of the council is leaning in favor of financing the project over 30, not 20, years.
- The council voted to create a PID in the Blanco River Ranch Development project, a decision that was little more than a formality since the PID had already been part of a previously negotiated Development Agreement.
- On a 3-3 vote on a motion to approve it, council members initially failed to OK the rezoning of a subdivision in far east Kyle that would have increased its density to the maximum allowable. However, Mitchell, who not only voted against the motion, but forced a change in the mid-term update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan because of his opposition to high-density projects on the city’s borders, sought and won a reconsideration of the vote. His subsequent motion to table discussion on the issue due to Fogley’s absence last night was approved 4-2 with Arabie and council member Daphne Tenorio, who both joined Mitchell in opposition of the original motion, voting against the delay.
- On another zoning issue, the council affirmed its decision last month to defy the Planning & Zoning Commission’s recommendation and voted to rezone a half-acre of land at 1408 W. Center Street from Construction Manufacturing to Community Commercial. P&Z had recommended a more restrictive zoning.
- The council passed on a 5-1 vote the final reading the mid-term amendments to that 2010 Comprehensive Plan. Tenorio cast the one opposing vote. She failed to give a reason for voting no, but, according to last week’s edition of the Hays Free Press she opposed its passage because she felt there had not been enough public input into the plan, which, in true Tenorio fashion, is her way of blaming others for her own shortcomings. She (and the rest of her colleagues on the council as well) needs to realize that the main, direct link between the voters and the city are the members of the City Council, not the city staff. Voters don’t elect the city manager, or the city’s chief of staff or the communications director; only the mayor and the council members. It is the council members’ responsibility to absorb the wishes of their constituents into their service and decisions on the council. During the almost two-year period this update was in the works Tenorio failed to schedule even one town hall meeting on the subject. Admittedly, none of her other colleagues did either, but they also did not achieve Tenorio’s level of duplicity by voting against the document, supposedly because of lack of public input, a situation she had the power and the authority to rectify if she really wanted to, if it really was that important for her. But once again Tenorio proved she is not interest in substance, only in posturing. I will have more to say on this subject in a later post.
- The council held a 52-minute executive session which was incredibly brief since the session’s agenda called for engaging in negotiations on eight different economic development projects. After the session, I asked the mayor if he could tell me, without divulging confidential information, if any of these projects were major job creators. "I think so," he replied. "Certainly by our standards. Any of them individually and all of them together will have a substantial economic impact. Without getting into details, which I can’t obviously, I will say I am very excited about these opportunities and they are just opportunities — nothing’s done. What the volume of these opportunities means is that all of our investment in infrastructure and capacity building and getting things straightened out here are starting to pay off now. Regardless of whether any of these come through there’s going to be dozens more. Regardless of the outcome of these negotiations, I feel optimistic. It affirms all the work that’s gone into the city’s increasing the ability to accommodate these kinds of things. It hasn’t paid off yet because we haven’t got there, but it’s a sign that the corner’s been turned."
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