So much for a morning council meeting

At the end of last week’s regular City Council meeting, City Manager Scott Sellers announced a special meeting would have to be called for this week, presumably to be held on Wednesday since the regular Tuesday date was reserved for a Planning & Zoning Commission meeting and the Park Board had Monday reserved. The consensus at the time seemed to be the best time for the meeting would be Wednesday morning. The question that loomed was would the meeting begin at 8 a.m. or possibly even earlier.

Now the meeting has been posted officially and it’s for the normal 7 p.m. time, except on Wednesday instead of the regular Tuesday. I’m guessing that in polling all the council members, Wednesday evening was the only time a quorum would be available, which seems strange to me — back in Dallas where I worked for 47 years before moving here two and half years ago — no city meetings of any kind were ever held on Wednesday evenings because that was considered "church night," by a majority of Christian denominations. I guess that’s not the case here. (There was also the fact that Dallas City Council’s meetings began at 9 a.m. on most Wednesdays of every calendar year, but normally they adjourned well before 6 p.m. giving everyone plenty of time to attend to their individual religious obligations that evening.)

But even if Wednesday is a big church night in Kyle as well (truth in advertising: as a Jew, I really don’t keep up with the religious practices of my Christian colleagues), there’s no real reason for anyone other than at least four council members, the requisite city staff and the smattering of news junkies to break their normal Wednesday religious routines because Wednesday’s meeting is a strictly non-newsworthy housekeeping session that should last, oh, I don’t know, all of 10 minutes at the most. Here’s the agenda for the meeting; check it our for yourself and see if you can find anything on there that’s going to shake your soul.

The only question I have about all this surrounds Agenda Item 3, a change order for $141,826.03 for reconstructing 150 feet of Lehman Road, starting from its terminus at Goforth so that Lehman will have a designated left and right turn lane at that intersection. As I understood this project, from how it was described at last week’s council session, this is simply money being lifted from the Lehman Road account created as part of the 2013 bond package and added to the Goforth Road account, so that construction of these lanes can be completed before fall classes resume at Lehman High School, located right at that intersection. All the paperwork accompanying this agenda item details how it’s being added to the Goforth project, but there was no corresponding accounting to show it’s being removed from the Lehman project’s books. So is this really a $142,000 cost overrun? Hopefully we’ll learn that Wednesday.

Watch this space.