On sales taxes, parades, Sunday deadlines, administering by committee

• Kyle’s sax tax receipts for April were $1,159 more than anticipated for the month, but the city still has yet to overcome its dismal haul from two months ago. For the year, Kyle’s receipts are $82,682.32 less than what the fiscal year budget forecast. Again, that does not mean the city is that much in debt, only that it has that much less available to spend than it planned. Plus, the city’s strong reserves more than compensate for this budget gap. The main contributor to this gap appears to be the fact that consumers spent far fewer sales tax dollars during the Christmas holiday period than anticipated, resulting in February’s receipts being $56,000 less than forecast. April’s numbers were a scant 0.24 percent above what was projected; however they are $46,055, or 10.37 percent, higher than April 2016's collections, a sign that the local economy continues to grow.
• Interestingly, Mountain City has established a Sunday deadline for those wishing to be considered for its city administrator position. Sunday seems like a strange deadline to me, but who am I to tell Mountain City how to conduct its business. I have to wonder, however, who gets to man City Hall that Sunday to wait around in case Federal Express brings one final delivery or someone personally delivers a resume in a plain brown wrapper sometime before 5 p.m. As outlined in the official job description, "The city administrator (CA) serves as the administrative manager under the direction of the mayor and city council and is responsible for the efficient administration of the affairs for the city. The CA will work closely with the mayor, council, city personnel and support staff towards accomplishing short and long term objectives. The CA supervises and coordinates city activities to ensure that all laws and ordinances are faithfully performed and enforced. The CA should be a positive leader, a self-starter, and a person of high moral character and integrity. The CA is expected to be responsive to the needs of all stakeholders and strive to work toward positive, effective, and fiscally responsible solutions." The notice also says the city administrator must be a resident of Mountain City, so I guess that means anyone wishing the job who lives outside the city only has less than a 100 hours in which to relocate.
• In preparation for writing the story on possible fixes for the Lehman High neighborhood parking kurfuffle, I asked city spokesperson Kim Hilsenbeck whether the city manager had given any consideration to forming a separate department to handle any and all situations involving mobility and the city’s street infrastructure. Her reply: "We have an internal committee that functions the same as the department you proposed. The committee is made up of the chief of police, our public works director, the city engineer, and several members of our city administration team. Those folks make decisions about mobility infrastructure together." So therein lies the problem, folks. By definition, such a committee could not accomplish what a separate department composed mainly of engineers trained in municipal mobility issues could achieve. It could, however, produce proposed ordinances like the one the City Council wisely and unanimously shot down earlier this week. As we’ve recently seen, such a committee can come up with answers to a problem, but not solutions.
• Received a notice from the Hays CISD yesterday announcing it will be staging a parade eginning at 10 a.m., Saturday, May 6, the day, according to the notice, that "marks the anniversary of the vote taken in 1967 to consolidate the Buda, Kyle, and Wimberley school districts into one." I’m trying to convince myself that it’s just a coincidence that this parade will take place the same time the Kyle City Council will be conducting its first workshop to consider ideas for the 2017-18 fiscal year budget. And I am the last person in the world to be considered a conspiracy theorist. But, still …