Council to consider potentially provocative agenda

As I see it, the Kyle City Council is divided between two conflicting camps with opposing agendas. The first camp wants to establish policies that would enable a staff to continue to expertly manage the day-to-day operations of the city as well as to create optimistic, innovative, creative, yet realistic targets for the city’s future. The second camp wants to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of that well-managed machine forcing progress to grind to a halt, to drag the city back to a somewhat corrupt and self-serving management style prevalent during its not-too-distant past. I purposely used the word "divided" and not "split," because "split" denotes there is roughly, if not exactly, an equal number of council members in each camp, which is obviously not the case. The overwhelming majority of the current Kyle City Council belongs to the first group. They may have conflicting ideas among themselves about the exact nature of the policies that will insure their objectives are met, but at least they agree on the objectives. I am not going to identify which council persons belong to which group. I’ll let the local population make their own judgments on that. I will say, however, Tuesday’s city council agenda will make that identification task as easy as counting from one to seven (the latter, of course, being the number of persons on the city council). And I have this sneaking suspicion, although absolutely no proof to support this suspicion, that the agenda was set up with exactly this in mind — for the public to easily identify who’s who.

The reason I say this is because the "consent agenda" has reappeared. For those who might not be familiar with the mechanisms of a legislative hearing, a "consent agenda" is a device designed to expedite the process — it’s a group of supposedly non-controversial, largely routine matters that can be acted on collectively, items where it is felt individual debate on their merits has either been exhausted or is not needed. It’s not unusual, for example, for the second reading of an ordinance to be on the consent agenda because all debate on its pros and cons should have taken place when the measure was considered on first reading — any further debate would simply be redundant and lead to demagoguery. A consent agenda has been absent from the last couple of Kyle City Council agendas because council members were pulling every item from the concent agenda — they were demanding that each item be considered individually anyway, so the concept of a consent agenda became irrelevant and its inclusion became unnecessary.

But the consent agenda is back. Why did it make a reappearance for this special called meeting? Whether this was the intention or not, I will tell you it will serve as a valuable tool for separating the pragmatists from the obstructionists, should the latter decide to run the risk of deliberating exposing themselves and their motivations. It’s quite possible they will decide not to risk public exposure. The wise thing to do would be to simply keep mum and continue to work deviously outside the view of all but their most fervent base of supporters. But I have found that for some reason it’s impossible for the obstructionists to shy away from the spotlight. The term "quiet demagogue" is an oxymoron. These people simply can’t help themselves. A perfect example of this is Donald Trump’s tweets. It’s the story of the spider and frog all over again — it’s their nature.

And because it’s their nature, that’s why I think (and I not usually a conspiracy theorist) this agenda was constructed to expose them, to possibly call them out for who and what they are and why they are trying to achieve, or, to be more accurate, what they are trying to prevent the city from achieving.

To put it quite simply, those who have joined Darth Vader on The Dark Side (i.e., the "second camp" as described above) can be spotted because, unwisely, they will deliberately expose themselves by pulling, at least, items 4 and 5 from the consent agenda, two items that were discussed and debated at length at last week’s marathon council meeting, were passed, each with only one dissenting vote. Not only is it unlikely that either will attract more dissenting votes this time around; it is far more likely that each will receive one more affirmative vote. So what would be the point of pulling them off the consent agenda? There would be no point, except to give a demagogue an opportunity to inflame a shrinking political base, shrinking in terms of percentage if not actual numbers.

The goal of Item 4 is to improve the quality of life in Kyle, particularly in future residential neighborhoods, to advertise to the world Kyle is synonymous with quality, perhaps a little higher quality than other communities might be willing to demand. The goal of Item 5 is to strengthen the city’s ethics code, to not only remove loopholes that allow city officials, either elected or staff, to escape punishment for ethical violations through technicalities, but also to eliminate politics completely from ethical considerations. Or, to put even more directly, Kyle wants to show the world it is a city governed and run by individuals above reproach because its judgmental and evaluation processes are above reproach.

Both of these ideas, which are commendable, are somewhat new to Kyle. While the city did have housing standards, they were so strict they prohibited a lot of diversity in housing stock and they created residential areas devoid of many of the amenities that made them actual communities. Although one can lament the fact, no one can deny that the concept of creating "neighborhoods" has been abandoned in favor of the concept of suburban sprawl. But that doesn’t mean a city has no choice but to create what will become, in 20 years or so, a series of suburban residential ghettos and Kyle has decided to take the steps now to try and prevent just such an eventuality. And one would think it would be a wise move to tell the outside world it is adopting an ethics code to proves to one and all that decisions made by Kyle’s government will be based on merit, not on politics.

But the simple fact that these are changes is proof that this is not the way the government in Kyle has always operated. Kyle is now adopting a philosophy of a government that serves the best interests of all the people, just not a handful of long-time residents. And any council member who pulls these two items from the agenda will be identifying themselves as someone who wants to return to that latter ideal because they are among those long-time residents who benefitted from those non-inclusive policies.

There’s also one other item I found interesting on the agenda, one that might cause some consternation among the more politically devious of our citizenry. And that’s Item 10, the first reading of a "just-in-case" ordinance authorizing an election to be held Nov. 7 for any council seat that might be vacated between the time this story is published and the 5 p.m. Monday filing deadline. This is designed to prevent a council member from waiting until the very last minute to file to run, for instance, for mayor, with the belief that should he or she not be successful in that endeavor, the candidate could still have time seek to hold onto his or her council seat in a future election. I brought up this subject Saturday during a lunch I had (at the Texas Pie Company, of course) with someone regarded as a legendary political strategist in Central Texas who told me this is a common strategy used by most cities to prevent this sort of backhanded political tomfoolery.

Tuesday’s agenda also contains yet another opportunity for citizens to voice their opinions during public hearings on the city’s proposed budget for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 as well as a proposal to lower the tax rate by 3.3 cents, which is likely to make the city of Kyle the only taxing identity in all of Hays County proposing a reduction in its tax rate. Similar public hearings were held at last Tuesday’s council meeting and I bemoaned the fact that no one took the city up on its offer. A "concerned citizen" pointed out, however, that, in truth, .002 percent of the city’s population did appear. So I stand corrected. At the same time I would argue that if we made an agreement that for every dollar you gave me, I would give you .002 percent of that dollar in return, you would quickly complain that, in reality, I was giving you nothing back. With that, I rest my case.

This is probably also as good an opportunity to punch holes in some myths I’ve heard floating around the city recently concerning the proposed budget. Myth #1 concerns a $100 million debt. Not only is this not true (the city’s current debt is $85.6 million), that debt has been managed so expertly that the percentage of the city’s tax rate used to pay off the debt has been reduced from 58.33 percent in this budget to 52.97 percent in the proposed one. Second, the size of a debt is secondary to the ability to pay off that debt. I, for example, would find myself in serious trouble if I was $1 million in debt. Mark Zuckerberg, or Warren Buffett or Bill Gates would not find that situation much of a problem.

And, yes, additional debt is proposed (although not yet even authorized. let alone issued) to pay for the expansion of the wastewater treatment plant as well as an economic development project. But General Fund money (i.e., money provided by the property tax rate) will only be used to repay that debt in the unlikely events that Utility Funds are insufficient to completely cover the cost of the former and Hotel Occupancy Taxes are insufficient to completely cover the costs of the latter.

Second is the myth that the city manager’s proposed municipal beautification plan included $14,000 to relocate the electronic sign at City Square Park. The sign’s removal has absolutely nothing to do with the city manager’s beautification proposal. In fact, the sign’s removal was not even proposed by the city manager. And finally, anyone who attended last week’s city council meeting or watched it from a remote location knows it was recognized by all involved that, if needed, the sign could be successfully relocated for a fraction of that $14,000 figure.

Other items on the council’s agenda for this coming Tuesday include ones that would allow the city to have some say as to where wireless carriers can place antennas, approving a utility franchise agreement with Pedernales Electric Cooperative that’s far more favorable to the city than the existing contract (another example of that city staff management expertise I referred to earlier), a housekeeping provision to rezone a sliver of property along Old Highway 81 from residential to retail services, and the authorization of a 45-day extension of an agreement involving the use of reclaimed water to irrigate of the Plum Creek golf course to ensure that the agreement will be transferable with the sale of the course.