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.
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