The city council has found itself stuck in a “Renaming Rebel Road” quagmire of its own creation and the more it tries to extricate itself from the quicksand, the more it becomes entrapped.
This all began with good intentions — to vanquish the racist connotations attached to the name Rebel Road, just as, weeks earlier, Hays High School rid itself of the racist connotations attached to its Rebel school mascot. The problems began when the council came up with a simply horrible name to replace Rebel.
Rebel Road, or Ranch-to-Market Road 150 as it’s now officially called, courtesy of an ordinance finally passed at last night’s council meeting, is one of the city’s major arteries, a road not only traveled by residents of Kyle, but by anyone driving the 25 miles between, say, San Marcos and Driftwood. The council’s suggested name for the new road, Fajita Drive, had many problems but chief among them was that the name was trivial; it simply lacked the gravitas that should be associated with the importance of a road such as RM 150. It was not only a mistake to make the road’s name sound so trivial, but it was also seen as a slap in the face — an insult — to many in the Hispanic community. And I completely understand how it could be viewed that way.
The council mistakenly did not take this road renaming as seriously as it should have. Instead of first even asking the city’s staff to prepare a list of possible new names and then putting those names through a thorough vetting process, one or more members of the council simply thought Fajita Drive was a good idea without thinking it through and talked the rest of the members in going along with it.
The result of that mistake quickly became evident. So what does council do about it? It compounds the mistake by last night voting to create an ad-hoc committee to recommend one or more new names for RM 150 for the council to consider at some later date. The council said this committee is needed “in order to get input from the public.”
I served on one such ad-hoc committee appointed by the city council and have scrutinized and reported on the activities of at least three other such committees. What they succeed at is providing recommendations to the council. What they are not good at is reflecting public opinion. They conduct public meetings which are completely ignored by the public. Perhaps one or two persons will appear at one or more of these meetings, but one or two persons certainly don’t represent the public at large and these one or two persons are the same folks who appear at just about every pubic meeting held by an arm of the city, individuals with a personal agenda that also don’t reflect the opinions of the city as a whole. I can guarantee you from personal, first-hand experience, the recommendations from such a committee will not reflect the opinions of the citizens but only the opinions of a majority on that particular committee. And, depending on how strong the chair of the committee is, it might only reflect the opinions of a chair who managed to successfully impose his or her will on the rest of the committee. I’ve often seen that dynamic play out.
Cities rename streets all the time. I would be willing to wager that way more than 50 percent of the streets currently named after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., once bore a different name. Two things I have never seen before I witnessed it here the last couple of weeks in Kyle, was a council rushing through a street re-naming so quickly, as though they were cramming the new name down the collective throats of the citizenry, and a citizens committee named to recommend a new name. I have seen citizen-driven street renaming before, usually via a petition process. That’s actually quite common. But even with that, the process involves a series of public hearings, usually conducted by a body similar to Kyle’s Planning & Zoning Commission, before a recommendation is forwarded to the city council.
Hays High School is handling its mascot renaming much better than the city is handling its street renaming, a fact that was noted last night by Mayor Travis Mitchell who was the lone vote against forming this ad-hoc recommendation committee. First, the school conducted a referendum involving students, faculty and staff to determine whether the mascot should even be replaced. When the results of that referendum demonstrated it should, the school board voted to follow the results of that referendum. But the school and the district wisely decided not to rush into naming a replacement. In fact, there’s an excellent chance the school might not decide on a replacement until next year and one should assume that process will involve additional referendums conducted among students, faculty and staff at the school.
Which brings me to the November elections which will include the opportunity for voters to amend the city charter to allow the city council to conduct such referendums. You want to solicit public response on an issue? There’s no better way than to creatively design a weighted ballot referendum on the subject. The city also likes to tout the results of its on-line citizen surveys and the truth is these surveys go a long way in deciding the emphasis that will be placed on the next city manager’s proposed budget. A similar survey would provide far more citizen input — both in quantity and quality — than you’ll get from this ad-hoc committee.
But that still ignores the obvious question: Why is all this necessary anyway? Name all the times a city established any kind of ad-hoc committee or conducted any sort of formal input mechanism to select the name for a city street. The process is just the opposite. A name is selected and then public hearings are conducted over a period of time to garner input on that change. Does this mean that from now on, an ad-hoc committee will have to be formed any time the city wants to rename a street? I would argue that, legally, it does, and that creates a nightmarish problem.
I would also argue — and I know there are those who will say this is undemocratic or that, as they say about any city action, “it lacks transparency” — that it’s not up to the entire Kyle public to decide on a new name for RM 150. The only “public” that really matters in this process are those that either have a business or a residence with an address on that street. Sit down with, engage in conversations with, solicit the opinions from, every single member of that “public.” There’s really not all that many of them that would make that task all that burdensome. Listen to and weigh what they have to say on the matter and use those conversations, that input, to drive the decision-making process.
But the single most important thing to do is to make it a process, not just a symbolic gesture — such as forming this ad-hoc committee — or a quick decision, the mistake that got the council in this quicksand to begin with.
Maybe the next thing that should happen is to make the principal of Hays High School the chair of the committee. Just joking. But then … again …
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