Council approves 15th holiday for city workers

 After debating whether Kyle should become one of the 3 percent of Texas cities who offer their employees as many as 15 paid holidays, the city council voted unanimously Tuesday night to join Galveston and Austin in adding Juneteenth to the list of official holidays for city employees.

Galveston, the city in which on June 19, 1865, Union troops arrived on the shores of Texas and told the enslaved people they were free, actually declared the date a city holiday the week before President Joe Biden officially declared the date a federal holiday.

Kyle council member Dex Ellison proposed the holiday idea here, but it was one of his colleagues, Yvonne Flores-Cale, who became its most vocal proponent. Mayor Travis Mitchell suggested it might be preferable to substitute Juneteenth for another holiday already on the city’s calendar. City staff currently have 12 paid holidays that correspond with recognized federal holidays, plus two “floating” days they may take off.

“The question is not whether we should support Juneteenth as a city holiday,” Mitchell said during a discussion in which all decorum was abandoned as council members tried to interrupt one another, “but whether we should go from a total of 14 days off to 15 that puts us in the 3 percent of Texas cities (that offer that many paid days off to its employees).”

“We don’t have to be like every other city,” Flores-Cale countered. “We can just be Kyle. My point is our staff deserves this. Adding one more day to make it 15 is OK in my book.”

“We would say ‘no’ because our vacation/holiday policy is disproportionately lenient compared to other cities and in particular as compared to the private sector,” Mitchell countered. “In my mind, if you reframed it from a 12-2 policy to a 13-1 policy to designate Juneteenth as a holiday but take a floating day away that would be a way to honor the day without going into the percentage that is pretty far out there” ignoring, as most in Kyle do, the reality that many non-Christians use floating days for religious observances such as Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Al-Hijra, Ramadan, Wesak, and/or Maha Shivratri, and that those days may be more meaningful and important for them than days off for, say, Good Friday or even Christmas.

“We already know we can’t compete with the private sector when it comes to pay,” Flores-Cale said. “So, likewise we shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to them when it comes to holidays. If we’re not going to pay our employees the same salary they can make doing the same work in the private sector, then at least incentivize them with days off they couldn’t get in the private sector.”

Councilman Robert Rizo patronizingly said the city manager’s budget calls for a pay increase for city employees “because we are losing them to the private sector” as if that increase would close the public-private sector pay gap in any meaningful way.