The Kyle City Council is a mess

There’s a semi-joke enjoyed by sports afficionados about attending a boxing match when suddenly a hockey game breaks out. I have that same kind of feeling watching the Kyle City Council in action these days.

Ever since the election, accepted rules of decorum for city council meetings — rules generally adhered to by all city councils I have covered — have been completely ignored by this City Council. Council members, especially Yvonne Flores-Cale and often Robert Rizo, don’t wait to be called on before speaking. They just blurt out their comments as though this was a discussion being held in a saloon and not in a government meeting in which procedures should be followed.

I also have a problem with Kyle’s City Council’s voting procedure, and both this and the lack of decorum can be rectified with a modest investment in available technology — technology currently employed by a number of city councils — that enables council members to electronically enter a speaking que and to vote. It is all quite simple. During the specified discussion period of any item, if a council member wishes to speak on that item, he or she simply needs to press a button at his or her seat. A screen at the seat of the meeting’s chair registers the names of the persons wishing to speak in the order in which they were entered and the chair simply recognizes the person at the top of the list after the last person has finished speaking.

This same device is used to vote on items requiring a roll-call vote. This is important because you don’t want one council person’s vote to be swayed by the previous vote of another council person. Each council person gets to make an independent decision. Screens used for visual presentations are strategically placed around the council chambers and it would be easy to project the results of the roll call votes on these screens.

The consent agenda is a tool used to streamline council meeting procedures by collecting and grouping routine, noncontroversial topics into a single agenda item that can be discussed and passed with a single motion and vote. The Kyle City Council abused the concept of the consent agenda last night when Police Chief Jeff Barnett took to the speaker’s podium to discuss two of the consent agenda items and then council member Robert Rizo asked Barnett questions about them. Not that this shouldn’t be allowed, but the accepted procedure for doing that is to remove those items from the consent agenda and discuss and vote on them individually. 

The Kyle City Council is ignoring all accepted rules of decorum for city council meetings and is abusing the intent of the consent agenda. It is a mess and needs to be fixed.