City announces Easter-related activities, summer camp

 City manager Scott Sellers informed the City Council Tuesday about a series of Easter-related events, including an Easter-egg hunt and a photo contest, hosted by the Parks and Recreation Department, and the City followed Sellers’ announcements with an official statement on those events and others Wednesday.

In addition to the hunt and the contest, Sellers said Parks and Rec will also conduct Easter Egg basket giveaway and a summer camp, although the actual dates of the camp were not revealed.

The City, in an official prepared announcement, said Parks and Rec will be giving away free Easter egg baskets to the first 50 families to register here for the Easter Egg Basket Giveaway. Registration closes March 29 or once all spots have been filled.

“When signing up, register only once per household and not per child, then under the enrollment field enter how many children are within the household,” the City said. “Participants will then be able to pick up baskets from the Parks and Recreation Office, 700 Lehman Road, Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. by no later than Friday, April 2.”

Those who wish to participate “in the first ever Easter Trail Hop Egg Hunt,” scheduled for Saturday, March 27 along Plum Creek Trail at the Waterleaf Park, may do so by clicking here. Registration closes March 24 or once all 30 available spots have been filled, according to the City’s announcement.

“By registering for the event, attendees will get a 20-minute fun filled egg hunt experience along the Plum Creek Trail,” the City said in its announcement. “The path will be designated by rope and timers will be handed out to help keep track participant time limits. City staff will also be stationed along the trail to assist.”

Up to five children can be included in each registration, which cost $8 for Kyle residents and $10 for non-residents. An additional $1.50 will be charged for an egg basket.

“Participants are asked to arrive at least 30 minutes prior to their time slot to allow proper check-in,” the City said. “Masks will be required for this event and the Parks and Recreation Department will provide hand-washing stations and hand sanitizing stations.”

Those wishing to participate in the Easter-related photo contest can do so by e-mailing their photos to agarcia@cityofkyle.com no later than Monday, April 5. The City will select five winners, each of whom will be notified by email no later than Thursday, April 8, and will receive a gift basket. 

Information about the City’s Summer Camp, as well as a link to register for the camp, can be found by clicking here. A special early registration weekly fee of $135 per camper plus a non-refundable registration fee of $20 is available now until Friday, March 26. After that, the weekly fee will be $150 plus a $32 non-refundable registration fee.

“Kyle Summer Camp is a day camp that runs from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday,” the City’s announcement said. “The weekly fee covers two field trips per week, two pool days, two daily snacks, two T-shirts (must worn on field trip days) and daily supplies for activities.”

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Due to COVID-19, Parks and Rec has reduced the maximum number of campers accepted to 80 — 60 second-to-fifth-graders and 20 who are in grades six to nine.

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“The camp does not supply breakfast or lunch; therefore, each camper will be required to bring a water bottle and lunch each day,” the City’s announcement cautioned. “Parents are asked to make sure their child's lunch contains an ice pack if it needs to remain cool, as the camp is unable to refrigerate camper lunches. Campers will be required to wear a mask, where it is feasible. All Camp Staff will also be required to wear the masks.

“In order to ensure campers receive the requested shirt size, completed forms, payments and/or deposits must be received by 5 p.m. April 30,” the City said. “Participants may register after April 30, if spots are still available, but the shirt sizes for campers will not be guaranteed. Registration remains open until filled or until the payment deadline has passed.

“All cancellations will come with a fee of $45 with no exceptions. To hold a camper's spot for a week, parents can pay a minimum of a $50 non-refundable deposit. Late fees will be added in the amount of $20 to any account that does not pay by the deadline.”

 

How the Council voted Tuesday night

(Editor’s note): Mayor pro tem Rick Koch was not present at the beginning of the meeting.

CONSENT AGENDA
Item 6: Consider a resolution suspending for 45 days the effective date proposed by CenterPoint Energy Resources Corp., South Texas Division (“CenterPoint”) in its application filed on or about March [2021] pursuant to section 104.301 of the Gas Utility Regulatory Act.
Item 7: Authorize award and execution of a purchase order to The Brandt Companies, LLC., through BuyBoard purchasing cooperative contract #638-21, for an estimated amount of $20,000.00 to investigate and repair damages in the plumbing system located underground and inside walls at the James Adkins Pool. Final repair costs may exceed the initial cost estimate.
Item 8: Approve Task Order No. 1 to CP&Y, INC., Austin, Texas in the amount not to exceed $131,210.00 for amending the City of Kyle's wastewater treatment plant discharge permit.
Item 9:Approve task order No. 2 to CP&Y, INC., Austin, Texas, in the amount not exceed $50,000.00 for updating the Transportation Master Plan.
Item10: Approve Task Order No. 3 to CP&Y, INC., Austin, Texas in the amount not to exceed $52,675.00 for developing the City's Risk and Resilience Assessment and Emergency Response Plan as required by S.3021 - America's Water Infrastructure Act of 2018.
Item 11: Approve Task Order No. 1 to K Friese & Associates, Inc., Austin, Texas in an amount not to exceed $171,889.83 for providing a preliminary engineering report  to investigate and evaluate drainage issues located along Sledge St., Scott St. and the Hitching Post subdivision.
Item 12: Approve Task Order No. 1 to Pape-Dawson Engineers, Inc., Austin, Texas in the amount not to exceed, $48,165.00 for providing a preliminary engineering report for drainage improvements in the Quail Ridge subdivision.
Item 13: Approve Task Order No. 1 to Cobb-Fendley & Associates, Inc., Austin, Texas in the amount not to exceed $88,787.25 for developing a Reclaimed Water Master Plan.
Item 14: Approval of Cadence McShane’s design-building design proposal in the amount of $400,000 and authorize the city manager to execute an addendum to the Cadence McShane design build agreement for the 104 S. Burleson project.
Approved 6-0

ITEMS FOR INDIVIDUAL CONSIDERATION

Item 4: Approve a letter agreement confirming Roxy Stevens of Denton Navarro Rocha Bernal & Zech, P.C. as attorney assigned to Cause Number 19-1492; 1200 S. Old Stagecoach Road, LLC v. City of Kyle, Texas; pending in the 22nd Judicial District Court of Hays County, Texas.
Approved 6-0

Item 15: [Postponed 3/2/2021] (First Reading) An ordinance amending Chapter 53 (Zoning) of the City of Kyle, Texas, to rezone approximately 19.5 acres of land from Retail Service District (RS) to Multi-Family Residential-3 (R-3-3) for property located at 5492 Kyle Center Drive, in Hays County, Texas.
Voted 6-0 to postpone consideration to the next council meeting.

(Editor’s Note): Koch joined the meeting at this point.

Item 16: [Postponed 3/2/2021] (Second Reading) An ordinance amending Chapter 53 (Zoning) for City of Kyle, Texas, for the purpose of assigning original zoning to approximately 29.8 acres of land from Agriculture (AG) to Single Family Residential-3 (R-1-3) for property located southeast of Lehman Road and south of Lehman High School, in Hays County, Texas.
Voted 7-0 to postpone consideration to the next council meeting.

Item 17: A resolution of the City of Kyle renaming the entirety of West RM150 to Veterans Drive and give direction to staff for signs to be installed on or near Memorial Day, 2021.
Approved 7-0

 

Police still investigating hoax call

The Kyle Police Department continues to investigate the prank call involving an active shooter that alarmed the Silverado subdivision yesterday, a City spokesperson said today.

“At this time, there is an investigation underway but no other updates are available,” Communications Director Samantha Armbruster said late this afternoon. “No arrests have been made.”

Police responded to a call at 4:02 p.m. Wednesday of an active shooter who was harming individuals inside a home in the 100 block of Brazos Lane and also threatening law enforcement officials. The City issued a shelter-in-place alert to residents in the vicinity and police evacuated persons from homes in the immediate area. However, when officers entered the home in question, no one was found inside.

“Kyle Police believed the call was a hoax attempting to lure law enforcement into the area,” another City spokesperson said yesterday in a prepared statement.

"We train our officers and staff to respond to these active-threat situations in the fastest most efficient way possible because lost time can lead to lost lives,” Kyle Police Chief Jeff Barnett said in that same prepared statement. “When someone makes a false report of this nature, they are not only wasting the valuable time and resources of our police department, but they are also engaging in a very costly and dangerous prank."

The City stressed that making a false police report is “a criminal offense.”

Once again, City seeks resident input with annual survey

 The City has placed its 2021 survey on-line (click here to take the survey). City Manager Scott Sellers not only uses the results of the survey to develop his budget priorities, he typically announces the results of the survey the first Saturday in August when he formally unveils his proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

“We encourage the public to take part in the 2021 Community Survey and have their voices heard on the projects and priorities that are important to them as well as the changes they would like to see," Sellers said Friday in a prepared statement accompanying the presentation of the latest survey.

Participants are supposed to be at least 16-years old and residents of Kyle. (Attention high school civics/government classes: Completing the survey as a class project could not only be a good learning tool but serve as topics of class conversations for days.) Participants may only submit one survey per person.

As an extra incentive, the mercenary among you who complete the survey prior to its April 12 deadline can email communicationsdept@cityofkyle.com to be entered to win something the City is calling a “Treat Yourself in Kyle Prize Pack.”

Sellers fails to say the words citizens wanted to hear

 On Sept. 29, 1982, the first person in the Chicago area died after taking an Extra Strength Tylenol that had been deliberately contaminated with cyanide. Within a week, six more persons had died and Johnson & Johnson had pulled 31 million bottles of Tylenol off the shelves. Tylenol had commanded a 35 percent share of the U.S. market for acetaminophen before the poisonings. That plummeted to 8 percent immediately after. To date, the person responsible for the injecting the Tylenol capsules with the cyanide has never been found and a $100,000 reward offered by Johnson & Johnson remains unclaimed. 

The poisonings were not the fault of Johnson & Johnson. Even so, J&J still took quick and decisive action. Within weeks, the company introduced tamper-proof packaging for its medicine featuring a container “with three barriers to entry.” It replaced the Tylenol capsule with the “caplet” that could not be penetrated with poison. Within a year, Tylenol sales had rebounded to its pre-poisoning levels and J&J’s response to the crisis is still regarded as a premier example of superb crisis management.

I spent 20 years of my professional career in the field of crisis management. I wish I could claim even a small amount of credit for the Tylenol program, but the facts are I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I did have my share of crises to manage, however: the Coors Beer boycott, the Killeen Luby’s massacre as well as the San Ysidro, Calif., McDonald's massacre, a city’s contamination of its entire water supply, the Austin yogurt murders, the salmonella scare at major  snack maker’s Tennessee baking facility, to name just a few. In all those situations, my goal was the same: “Find the caplet.” What could be said and done to restore confidence among consumers.

City Manager Scott Sellers outlined the City’s response Tuesday night to the damage inflicted on its residents because of last month’s winter storm and although he said a lot of things that were positive and nice to hear, he failed to deliver the caplet. He never uttered the reassuring words: “Here are the steps we are taking in an effort to prevent our citizens from ever again having to endure five days, at least, without running water because of another winter storm.”

What he did say was “Typically, when we receive weather reports that our temperatures are going to drop into freezing or sub-freezing temperatures we will weatherize our pipes and our equipment. We did do that for this event. We went through our protocols with weatherization — sanding roads, etc. What we were not prepared for was the blackouts. When we lost power to our pumps at our well sites and when GRBA (Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority) lost power to their pumps, things started to freeze up pretty quickly. Once they froze we were not able to get our pumps up and running.”

Admittedly, the City took admirable actions during the crisis, many of which Sellers spoke about. “We created a warming shelter at the United Methodist Church,” he said. “We had agreements with PEC (Pedernales Electric Cooperative) to try to isolate our water tower sites or our pump sites at the wells to keep those from being shut off. We had warming buses. We did a mass food distribution event. We supplied potable water at Hays High School. We even had portable showers taken to some of our residents that were without water for an extended period of time.”

But two important questions weren’t answered: (1) why isn’t auxiliary power available at the pumps to be employed in such emergencies and (2) why doesn’t the city have alternative water sources that can used when similar weather events occur?

As to that second question, Sellers said such an alternative source will be available, but not for another two years at least.

“Council has been very pro-active over the last five or six years — really back to the early 2000s when it was realized that our water situation was not going to keep up with our growth,” Sellers said. The Alliance Regional Water Authority (ARWA), the city manager said, “identified a large supply of water in the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer and we have been working for years now on securing those rights and building infrastructure to get that supply of water to us. That would be our third source of water — from wells, from GRBA and then ARWA. Our estimated timeline of when that construction will be done is a couple of years now — basically 24 months to bring that additional water source to the city. So in the event we do have another outage, another event like this, we’ll then have another source of water to rely on.”

As regards the first question, Sellers essentially said the City is going to abdicate that responsibility to the state.

“We have been in communication with our state representatives,” he said. “Our hope is that through this legislative session there’ll be relief not just for Kyle but for all Texas cities that would be a large assistance especially for weatherization for generators that we need. We’re optimistic that our state representatives can authorize that legislation for us.”

Translation: the City is willing to replace action with optimistic faith in state legislators. Sure. Fine. Whatever.

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“I apologize if I sounded as if legislation was required to winterize our generators,” Sellers said the day after the council’s meeting. “What I meant to communicate was that our state representative (Erin Zwiener) is sponsoring legislation to provide funding for weatherization for our critical infrastructure and generators. If state/federal funding is not approved for these items then we will need to utilize funds from our water utility.”

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Sellers also told that Council that:

• Citizens may go this website to learn, among other interesting pieces of information, who supplies their water.
• The City’s annual resident survey will go on line by the end of the week and will include additional questions about trails in the city
• The City Council’s Vision Workshop that was cancelled because of the winter storm has been rescheduled for Saturday, April 17, but he did not say where it would be held; and that its first budget retreat has been rescheduled for Saturday, May 1.

Our sex offenders are OK, yours are degenerates

The City Council once again postponed action last night on a proposed sex offender ordinance so that the city attorney could add language that would exempt offenders currently living in the city. In addition, it did not seem council members were close to a consensus about exactly what the restrictions should be.

As initially proposed by the Police Department, the ordinance would prohibit a registered sex offender from residing “within 1,500 feet of any premises where children commonly gather.” The ordinance defines such premises as “a public park, private or public school (excluding in-home schools), day-care center, or private recreational facility, including a park, water park, pool, playground, skate park, arcade or youth athletic field owned by a residential property owners association, or for which an entrance, admission, or rental fee is charged.”

Interestingly, the proposed ordinance would not prohibit sex offenders from going to any of these “premises,” or even “hanging out” at a pool or an arcade or a park. They just couldn’t live within 1,500 feet of them.

According to Police Department data, some 60 registered sex offenders currently live in Kyle and Council members apparently were concerned that passage of this ordinance would force at least some of them to relocate, quite possibly out of the city entirely. That concern was intensified when the wife and 9-year-old child of a registered sex offender living in Kyle spoke during the citizen comments portion of last night’s meeting. 

The council’s feeling appeared to be that (1) those Kyle homeowners currently registered in the state’s sex offender database should be “grandfathered” from the provisions of the ordinance and (2) those Kyle renters in the database should also be protected when they are required to renew their leases. City Attorney Paige Saenz was asked to draft language for the ordinance to meet these requirements and enough council members said they wanted to actually read that language before they voted on a first reading that consideration of the item was postponed until the March 16 meeting. Saenz warned the Council that granting exemptions to the ordinance could make it more liable to legal challenges.

To put it simply, the ordinance, if passed with the new language, would only require registered sex offenders who wish to relocate to Kyle after the ordinance goes into effect to live in one of the city’s sex offender ghettos, but those already residing here would not be affected in any way.

How large those ghettos will be is also still undecided. Mayor Travis Mitchell favored the 500-foot restriction, arguing that offenders should not live “in the line of sight” of any area where children might congregate, but pushing them further away was too punitive. Council person Ashley Bradshaw, who is coming across as the most extreme hardliner on this issue, appeared to favor a 2,000-foot restriction, which, for all practical purposes, would prohibit anyone in the database from relocating to Kyle. And Council member Yvonne Flores-Cale said she was willing to split the difference, and approve a 1,000-foot barrier.

Council member Dex Ellison was successful in forcing the removal of one clause in the ordinance that said “WHEREAS, the City Council finds from evidence and statistical reports reveal that the recidivism rate for released sex offenders alarmingly high, especially for those who commit their crimes against children;” arguing that, in fact, the Council had never been presented with any such “evidence and statistical reports.” 

How the City Council voted Tuesday night

 CONSENT AGENDA

Item 12: Consider authorizing the city manager to execute a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the City of Kyle and Hays County for the implementation of E-Recording Services in order to electronically transmit and record official City documents with the Hays County Clerk.
Item 13: A resolution by the City of Kyle, Texas suspending the April 12, 2021, effective date of the proposal by Texas Gas Service Company, a division of One Gas, Inc., to implement interim grip rate adjustments for gas utility investment in 2020 and requiring delivery of this resolution to the company and legal counsel.
Item 14: Authorize the City's Director of Finance to dispose through an auction facility eight (8) City-owned police vehicles determined to be surplus vehicles by the Police Department.
Item 15: Authorize the City's Director of Finance to dispose through an auction facility police equipment; to wit: emergency lightbars, vehicle seats, prisoner dividers, consoles, weapon locks, computer mounts, spotlights, speakers, light control modules, identified in Lots #1-8, all city owned and formerly being attached to City-owned police vehicles that has been determined to be surplus property by the Police Department.
Approved 7-0

ITEMS FOR INDIVIDUAL CONSIDERATION

Item 16: [Postponed 3/2/2021] (First Reading) An ordinance of the City of Kyle, Texas, regulating sex offender residency within the city and establishing child safety zones; amending Chapter 23 of the Code of Ordinances entitled “Miscellaneous Offenses” by adding Article XI to be entitled “Child Safety Zones;” making it unlawful for certain sex offenders to reside within 1,500 feet of premises where children commonly gather; providing exceptions to the ordinance; prohibiting property owners from renting real property to certain sex offenders; providing penalties for violations of the ordinance; repealing ordinances or parts of ordinances in conflict therewith; providing a severability clause, findings of fact and providing for open meetings.
Agreed without voting to postpone consideration until next meeting March 16

Item 17: [Postponed 2/23/2021] (First Reading) An ordinance amending Chapter 53 (Zoning) of the City of Kyle, Texas, to rezone approximately 19.5 acres of land from Retail Service District (RS) to Multi-Family Residential-3 (R-3-3) for property located at 5492 Kyle Center Drive, in Hays County, Texas.
Voted 5-0 (Koch, Bradshaw absent) to keep the public meeting open and postpone consideration until next meeting March 16.

Item 18: (Second Reading) An ordinance amending Chapter 53 (Zoning) for City of Kyle, Texas, for the purpose of assigning original zoning to approximately 29.8 acres of land from Agriculture (AG) to Single Family Residential-3 (R-1-3) for property located southeast of Lehman Road and south of Lehman High School, in Hays County, Texas.
Voted 6-0 (Koch absent) to postpone consideration until next meeting March 16

Item 21: Take action on items discussed in executive session.
Approved 7-0 land conveyance agreement from Mountain Plum to the City of Kyle for two parks — Heroes Memorial Park and Central Park — in the Uptown area in the form outlined by the city attorney in executive session