Knight joins Tenorio trying to rile conspiracy theorists with false information

City gadfly Lila Knight has joined co-conspirator council member Daphne Tenorio in taking to Facebook to make false accusations about yesterday’s City Council meeting and workshop.

Knight wrongly accused the city on Facebook of editing the video of the meeting to eliminate Mayor Todd Webster’s harsh but well-deserved criticism of Tenorio because of false and misleading comments she made on Facebook about the council’s scheduled meeting earlier in the week.

Tenorio re-posted Knight’s comments on her Facebook page. I’m not sure why, exactly, because Webster’s comments actually held Tenorio up for public ridicule and incurred the wrath of her colleagues on the council. One could argue that Knight should be thrilled there is no video record of her ally being the object of such a tongue-lashing.

The truth is the folks in the room behind the council chambers simply forgot to hit the "record" button until after the meeting was called to order. I can sympathize. I made the same error on numerous occasions, back in the days when a VCR was the only option to record something on television.

Yesterday’s city council recording begins during a verbal altercation over Tenorio’s false claims between Tenorio and fellow council member Becky Selbera, an altercation that seemed to be veering from the vocal to the physical. (I’ve heard oddsmakers were giving 25-1 odds in favor of Selbera in the event of any such physical encounter.)

Calling the false claim of editing, "shades of Richard Nixon," Knight ended her comment with "Please. Don’t mess with government documents."

Knight claims to be some sort of a historian, but if she truly was one she would know it was Rose Mary Woods, not Nixon himself, responsible for editing 18½ minutes out of June 20, 1972 audio tape of an Oval Office meeting between Nixon and H.R. Haldeman. Woods claimed she made roughly the same mistake as the video recorders at Kyle City Hall. Woods told a grand jury that more than a year after the date of the meeting — on Sept. 29, 1973 — she was reviewing a tape of the Nixon-Haldeman conversation when she said she had made "a terrible mistake" during the transcription. While playing the tape on a Uher 5000, she answered a phone call. Reaching for the Uher 5000 stop button, she said that she mistakenly hit the button next to it, the record button. For the duration of the phone call, she kept her foot on the device's pedal, causing a portion of the tape to be re-recorded.

It is also worth noting that the City of Kyle’s video recording is not "the official" recording of the meeting. The official one is an audio recording made by City Secretary Jennifer Vetrano. It is a public document and available to any citizen who wants to listen to it. It is also the recording Vetrano uses to compile the meeting’s written minutes.

It is no secret that I have often been accused, most harshly by My Hero, of being overly critical of our city officials, but, unlike Tenorio and Knight, my criticism concerns actual comments said/left unsaid or actions taken/not taken. For example, I wrote yesterday how disappointed I was in the council’s discussion following the presentation of City Manager Scott Sellers’s initial thoughts on the FY17-18 budget. At no point in the discussion did the council members mention the fact that Sellers warned them water and wastewater fees might have to be hiked dramatically in order to overcome a potential $26.5 million deficit in the city’s Utility Funds. Instead, the council talked only about the property tax rate. It was if the council purposely did not want to draw the public’s attention to these possible rate hikes and instead were positioning themselves politically as the person who will go the farthest to cut taxes in order to prepare for a November mayoral run.

Every other involved citizen is free to have a different opinion. They are free to opine that talking about the property tax rate is far more important than discussing utility fees. But that is a disagreement about something that actually transpired (or, it could be argued, didn’t transpire),

If Lila Knight truly believed what she wrote, instead of merely blowing smoke, she would file tampering charges against city officials. I’m betting she won’t because she knows that all she is really doing is spreading false information.

Recall effort initiated against Selbera

A group of citizens, led by an individual who once contributed to Becky Selbera’s election campaign, has filed a recall petition against the District 2 council member for "misconduct and abuse of her power." Specifically, the petition claims Selbera improperly solicited a job offer, used "city personnel for her own personal gain" and recently voted to raise taxes for Kyle property owners "but she has not paid her own property taxes for many years."

"She is an embarrassment to the City of Kyle," the recall effort’s leader, Lila Knight, told me. "The people of Kyle deserve better."

Early yesterday, I e-mailed Selbera seeking her response to each of the allegations, but she has yet to respond. She, along with Mayor Todd Webster, offered a statement to the authors of an Austin-American Statesman story concerning the recall effort, but both sidestepped the issues raised by the petition.

Yesterday, city spokesperson Kim Hilsenbeck told me "The recall petition against Council Member Becky Selbera was filed by Lila Knight. It has been certified by our City Secretary Amelia Sanchez as having all the information required by the city charter. Ms. Knight can begin attempting to collect the required signatures. She has 90 days to return the forms to be verified. "

In those 90 days, Knight and her group must collect somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,450 signatures, which raises an interesting ethical question I don’t have an answer for: Should registered voters in Districts 1 and 3 be able to unseat a council person elected only by the voters of District 2? Incidentally, the number of signatures required is about 13 times the number of votes Selbera received in her last election in 2014.

Selbera told the Austin newspaper that Knight "has run people against me and she has failed." Knight told me that not only is Selbera’s statement untrue, but that she actually wrote Selbera a check for $160 for her 2011 election campaign. Her support for Selbera waned, Knight told me, once the council member started being forced to appear before the Ethics Commission to answer various complaints lodged against her.

She also said this effort is not hers alone. "We have an informal group of people who are involved in this," Knight told me. "We've been talking amongst ourselves for a long time about this. I was the one who pulled the trigger on actually submitting the petition because I know the Election Code pretty well. There is no way in hell I could do this alone.

"How successful the recall effort will be depends on the voters of Kyle," Knight said. "Do they really want a council member who refuses to pay their taxes, year after year, setting their tax rate and voting on spending? Do the voters of Kyle want a council member who is repeatedly charged with ethics violations? This is not about the ‘survival’ of Miss Selbera. It’s about the survival of the citizens of Kyle.

"I do not have a personal vendetta against Miss Selbera. I am, however, personally offended that an elected official would vote to raise taxes while being delinquent in paying their own — year after year. The taxpayers of Kyle deserve better."

According to the article that appeared in Saturday’s American-Statesman, Mayor Webster claimed the recall effort was launched by "no growth" advocates who are trying to gain influence on the city council.

"No one in their right mind would think they could be ‘no growth’ and simultaneously gain any influence on the city council,’ Knight countered "The vast majority of the people of Kyle are pro-growth, including myself. But the council should be listening to the people — they do not want, for example, a roundabout, soccer fields in Waterleaf Park, or higher taxes. Our council is not listening. I am for ‘smart growth.’ Frivolous spending resulting in the raising our tax rate to the highest of any municipality in Hays County - and higher than any town on the I-35 corridor does nothing to encourage our growth as a city. Quite the contrary. It kills it.

"By the way, none of this has anything to do with the recall of Miss Selbera," Knight added. "And the Mayor knows it. If the mayor wants to comment on the recall petition, he should address the facts stated in the petition. His inability to refute the facts speaks loudly. The mayor and Miss Selbera are left only with attacking my character and my motives. But that is a common political ploy, regardless of how distasteful it might be."