Chalk it up, if you will, to my extreme leftist leanings, but I got squeamish when I read the "Presentation" section of Tuesday’s City Council meeting. It made me uncomfortable. Uneasy.
I guess I really shouldn’t be all that surprised that the council that officially declared in July 2016 that "black lives really don’t matter," has waited until Black History Month is more than two-thirds over before coming out with a "Black History Month Mayoral Proclamation." This is not a recognition, it’s an insult. One of the first things that came to my mind when I saw this on the agenda was "I bet it wouldn’t even be there if it wasn’t for council member Dex Ellison." And, what do you know? In this case, my paranoia proved well-founded. When I mentioned my concerns to Ellison, he wrote me: "I agree that this recognition should have been done back on the February 6 agenda (or even last meeting in January as you suggested), but regretfully neither myself nor another council member/mayor made a proposal for that to be on the agenda until I called for it to be on this upcoming agenda last week. Nevertheless, I feel the recognition is still important (to my knowledge we haven't had such a proclamation since 2012), therefore it will be recognized on next Tuesday's meeting."
The first time since 2012 — that confirms all my previous thoughts about how this council and, by extension, this city views racial issues. Yes, according to 2015 figures, only 5.77 percent of Kyle’s population is African-American, which means it’s relatively safe to ignore this constituency without raising much of a furor. But that doesn’t make it’s the right thing to do. And it certainly isn’t right to rub other facts into the collective face of this constituency.
But that’s exactly what the next two presentation items do. At a time when it has become somewhat of a national outrage that, while African-Americans comprise between 12 to 13 percent of the total American population, they make up 37 percent of the American prison population, Kyle has lumped his abhorrently late recognition of Black History Month with presentations on racial profiling and "enhancements to crime data reporting."
I am not accusing the council of doing this purposely, with the intent of deliberately insulting the city’s black population with the facts arrived at by the NAACP that blacks have nearly six times the prison incarceration of whites or a 2013 study that "confirmed that black men were much more likely to be arrested and incarcerated than white men." No, what I am accusing them of is worse than that: The council is clueless. When it comes to matters of race, especially in dealing with the black constituency, this council appears to be completely ignorant about what is happening in the real world.
Police Chief Jeff Barnett will be presenting the profiling report which will show that during this most recent reporting period, out of the 3,528 vehicles stopped by Kyle police officers, 7.88 percent were driven by "African" motorists. It’s interesting to note that 7.88 percent is 37 percent higher than Kyle’s black population percentage. Of course, there’s no way of determining how many of those motorists had Kyle addresses. In fact, I posed that exact question to Chief Barnett and he wrote to me around 2:30 p.m. yesterday that "We are running various reports to see what can be extrapolated." That was the last I heard anything about that.
But I want to make it clear that I am not lodging any racial complaints against the Kyle Police Department. In fact, its numbers look pretty good,. Actually, it could be argued that if any population was singled out for motor vehicle stops, it would be the Caucasian one. While 46.9 percent of the city’s population is listed as "White," Caucasians comprised 56 percent of those stopped by the police. And only 34 percent of those stopped were Hispanic while statistics place Kyle’s Hispanic population at 44.8 percent. It’s a mathematical disparity: Because of the relatively small number of African-Americans living in Kyle, any deviation from that base number is going to represent an out-sized percentage differentiation.
So it’s not the numbers on the racial profiling report that bother me. It’s the pairing. It’s combining the overly-late recognition of Black History Month with a report on police racial profiling. And to think it all could have been avoided if this council had recognized the reality that black lives do, in fact, matter and, thus, something like Black History Month should be recognized properly. You don’t begin selling tickets to the baseball game in the seventh inning.
As far as the rest of the agenda goes, the one item that could cause some discussion, consternation and hand-wringing is one to rezone 17.19 acres on Sledge Street to allow for the development of a housing subdivision on the property. There’s a public hearing on this issue and the usual band of no-growth NIMBYs will, no doubt, be out in force to protest the zoning request, just as they were at last week’s Planning & Zoning Commission hearing at which the zoning was recommended by a 5-2 vote. The two who voted against the recommendation argued for less-dense residential zoning than the one being requested, but the fact is this property, which was probably considered to be located "way out in the country" when it was purchased many years ago, is now, in fact, practically near the center of town, which is where the more-dense development should occur. It should also be noted that the city’s latest Comprehensive Plan, approved as recently as late last year, recommends this particular zoning for this property. But that won’t stop certain folks from trying to stick their fingers in the dike.
One other agenda item intrigued me and that’s No. 14 which bears the caption: "Limited Right of Entry License Agreement with Walton Texas, LP." What, in heaven’s name, does that mean? It almost sounds like some kind of restraining order. It could be nothing, of course, but then it could be something. So I asked city spokesperson Kim Hilsenbeck late Thursday night if she could provide some additional explanation, but she has opted to ignore my request, putting another chink into the city’s armor of transparency.
Update: Since the agenda was originally posted Thursday evening, the city has added background information to that Item No, 14. It turns out it is both nothing and something. It’s nothing to be overly alarmed about, but it’s something worth noting. It is an agreement that allows students of Hays High School and others to access portions of the Plum Creek Trail on March 3 for what is being billed as the "Great Texas River Cleanup."
"The City’s planned improvements for the trail include flagging and staking the boundaries of the trail, clearing brush, trash and other debris from the trail and the areas adjacent to the trail, maintaining the trail in a general, ‘native’ state, constructing and installing barriers reasonably necessary to protect public users of the trail from any and all identified hazards on or near the trail, and continuously supervising and inspecting the condition of the trail and promptly performing corrective measures as reasonably necessary to ensure the safety of public users," the proposed agreement states.
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