City Manager Scott Sellers told the City Council tonight that the equivalent of 25 percent of the city’s population made the pilgrimage to Gregg-Clarke Park March 24 for what was billed as the Easter Eggstravaganza, but next year that same pilgrimage may offer slightly different pathways.
"It was a very well attended event," Sellers told the council. "If you lived close to the Gregg-Clarke Park, you were probably impacted in some way by the traffic."
Sellers said larger-than-anticipated attendance was the result of having the city’s annual Easter egg hunt on a weekend day this time around and the fact that the city partnered with Icon Church which had already planned a helicopter drop of eggs.
"There were probably a dozen or so different items we need to rectify for next year," the city manager said. "This being the first year of this new approach, there were quite a few things we saw we could do better. All in all, I was very pleased. We estimate we had 10,000 people attend, which is a very large attendance for an Easter egg hunt. But we had attendees from Austin and San Marcos and south. So I was very pleased with how it turned out."
Sellers invited and encouraged public input into how the event could be improved in 2019, "but, like I said, we have probably a dozen or so different, fairly significant changes for next year."
Sellers didn’t enumerate those ideas during the meeting, but when the council moved into executive session he revealed two of the changes he would most like to see involved the management of both traffic and young children.
Sellers said on the date set aside for next year’s Easter-themed event "We plan to make Center Street one way from 150 around the (Wallace Middle) school then back toward the Post Office. That way we can funnel everyone through. We can handle parking better that way, too."
Sellers said he took his 3-year-old child to the event and next year "I will not allow segregation of 4 and younger and parents. We can’t have that."
He said different hunts were separated into respective age groups, but that the parents were not permitted to be with their children during the actual egg searches. As a result, he said, with the younger children "We had a lot of kids who were stranded. There were a lot of names being called out for parents to come and pick up their kids. It’s too young for kids 4 and under to be alone, away from a parent and then to have a helicopter almost land on them."
He said most of the other changes had to do with the specific layout of the event.
Sellers also announced the new time and date for the Steeplechase Park Dog Park groundbreaking for all those out there who get all goose-bumpy at the sight of ceremonial dirt being overturned: Friday at 10 a.m.
Every item on tonight’s council agenda was approved by a 6-0 vote (council member Daphne Tenorio, citing a conflict, did not attend) with absolutely no debate and not that much discussion. The one exception was the 30 minutes spent on Item 7, review and acceptance of the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report as well as the independent audit of the city’s financial records for the preceding fiscal year. Mayor Travis Mitchell had a number of questions he directed to the city’s Finance Director Perwez Moheet and Joel Perez, a partner in the firm that conducted the independent audit, about the methodology of each.
Mitchell said after the meeting his questions did not come from any concern he might harbor about the state of the city’s finances. It was simply the opportunity to discuss financial issues, an opportunity Mitchell said the city council doesn’t have all that often.
"I undergo extensive annual audits from my bank and I know how audits can go," the mayor said at the conclusion of tonight’s meeting, "I just want to make sure we are acting in an exemplary manner and the audit is serving the people well."
He said the answers he received from Moheet and Perez satisfied his concerns "for the most part. You don’t want to get too nit-picky from the dais."
The one area that concerned me was that Kyle, unlike other cities I have reported about, doesn’t have a dedicated fund set aside for legal contingencies — moneys available to settle nuisance lawsuits that happen, say, when a city owned vehicle rear-ends a private one or a careless motorists crashes into barricades erected by the city. Sellers and City Attorney Paige Saenz told me that Kyle was protected by the Texas Municipal League in situations like those.
Speaking of lawsuits, at the conclusion of the executive session, Mitchell made a motion to authorize Sellers "to execute a settlement agreement related to the property located at 1001 and 1003 Windy Hill Road." This is a zoning dispute in which the city is (was) attempting to prevent the owner from developing an apartment complex on the adjoining properties by denying him the necessary zoning. The owner maintained Hays County guaranteed him the right to build the apartments before his property was annexed by the city. Sellers said details of the agreement should be available by the council’s next meeting April 17.
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