If it looks, swims and quacks like a duck, is it really a duck?

The basic purpose of a city council Consent Agenda is to group routine, noncontroversial topics into a single agenda item that can be discussed and passed with a single motion and vote. The Kyle City Council uses (and often abuses) the concept of the Consent Agenda at just about each council meeting except those called specifically to handle emergency items and sometimes when the council has called a special meeting to discuss just one subject, such as the annual budget.

There is a strange item on next week’s city council Consent Agenda. It’s the last item on there and it reads: “Discussion and approval of a Sludge Handling Services Agreement with Wastewater Transport Services.”

Here’s the basic overriding question: How, in heaven’s name, can you have a “discussion” on this specific item if it is part of a Consent Agenda. Now such a discussion can be held if this item is “pulled” from the Consent Agenda. Pulling an item from the Consent Agenda is the accepted parliamentary procedure that permits the council to discuss this item separately from the other seven items on the Consent Agenda.

Of course, our city council routine abuses accepted parliamentary procedures so there’s no way to predict what it might do here.

Now here’s a second basic question: As of this writing, Friday at roughly 5:30 p.m., this agenda item contains no backup material. It might facilitate a better-informed  “discussion” if the agenda included the agreement to be discussed. Of course, the city could be trying to prevent the public from reviewing the agreement for whatever reason and therefore passed it on to the council for members’ “eyes-only” viewing. But why engage in that sort of subterfuge? 

Overall, this is simply the wrong way to handle this thing — wrong in so many ways!