For anyone who has been following the current iteration of the Kyle City Council, Monday’s embarrassing council meltdown comes as no surprise. The military can pluck some rube who happens to be a crack marksman from the backwoods of Nowheresville, but he still must complete a vigorous training regimen before that military puts a loaded weapon in that person’s hands. Here in Kyle, we pluck that same ignorant rube from the ranks of the unknown and say “Here are the keys to driving the city. No license required. Try to keep the collisions to a minimum.” When you think about it, the question is not what caused Monday’s multi-fatality head-on, but why did it take this long for the calamity to occur.
For those that missed the sorry spectacle that was on display at City Hall Monday night, the meeting de-evolved into a name-calling session in which council members completely over-stepped their authority, let their egos create havoc, put their collective ignorance on the subject of the function of municipal government on public display and irreversibly soiled much of the reputation many in Kyle have been trying to build as well as possibly dealing a blow to the city's economic future.
And the reason for this horrific show is simple to explain. No one on the Kyle City Council — not one single member — trusts anyone else. What they proved Monday night is that not only do they don’t trust each other, they don’t trust the city staff, they don’t trust the people they appoint to boards and commissions and they certainly don’t trust you and me, those of us who live here. They don’t even trust that small minority who actually take the time to vote in municipal elections. Trust is completely gone from the city council dais. It has been replaced by their own false-impressions of their own self-importance.
Back in August, I wrote these words on this journal: “…too many members of the city council simply don’t have the expertise, the experience, to competently set policy for Kyle and its citizens.” I hate to say it, but the council’s actions Monday proved this beyond any doubt. In that same story, I also wrote “In a rare example of graciousness I am not going to single any of the minor leaguers out by name.” Like I said, that was a “rare example.” I am not going to be that gracious this time around.
But before we get to the really bad, let me toss out a couple of bouquets. They go to Mayor Pro Tem Rick Koch and District 4 council member Ashlee Bradshaw, the only two persons on the City Council who realize that when you don’t have anything of worth to say, it’s preferable not to say anything at all. Bradshaw is rapidly becoming my favorite council member. She seems to know how to act constructively without trying to draw attention to the fact that she knows how to act constructively. Like Koch, and, unlike the other five council members, she knows how to speak effectively, economically and only when it’s necessary.
That’s why it came as such a shock Monday when Koch sharply accused fellow council member Dex Ellison of grandstanding. With the possible additional exception of Mayor Travis Mitchell, the other four members of the council — Ellison, Yvonne Flores-Cale, Robert Rizo and Michael Tobias — spend too much time telling irrelevant stories and talking at length about items of no importance. Their sole aim seems to be not to further the intellectual discussion of the item at hand, but to get their name in the paper or their face on TV. They seem to be aspiring to be media darlings at the expense of being competent in the job they were elected to perform. I have one small piece of advice for them: “Shut the %*#@ up!” The two worst examples of this are Rizo and and Ellison, both of whom are indeed guilty of grandstanding. The length of a city council meeting could be slashed by 50 percent if they just could learn that we don’t want to hear them wax ad-nauseam about every single item on the council agenda, especially when most of the time they are waxing about the proverbial tree while ignoring the forest. Memo to Rizo: We are tired of hearing how “great” you think everything the city council votes on is. Let us make up our own minds what is great and what is simply OK. In fact, to the overwhelming majority of people living in Kyle, the only thing the city does that is truly “great,” is when they fix whatever particular roads local motorists drive on regularly. As for everything else, unless you are about to do something that might “foul” their particular neighborhood, the locals can take it or leave it. They don’t think every action the council takes is “great.” Just get the job done, don’t waste everyone’s time patting yourself on the back for doing the job you were elected to perform.
Kyle operates under what is called “the council-manager” form of government, which is the preferable method for cities like this one. Basically, this means the city council hires a manager to serve as the CEO of the city and the council is the body that formulates policy, the public-sector equivalent to a company’s board of directors in the private sector. The other popular form of municipal government is the mayor-council form of government, which is preferable only in cities with much larger populations than Kyle (any city with a population under 500,000 should stick to the council-manager form, as should most cities with even more people living in them). In this form, the mayor is the city’s executive branch of the government and the council is the legislative branch. A third form of municipal government found in the United States — and this type is usually only found in communities with extremely small populations — is what is known as city commission government in which, as the name suggests, the city is run by a commission of between five to seven persons elected at large by a plurality who not only serve as the city’s legislative body but whose individual members are also assigned specific executive functions such as the public works director, the finance director, etc.
It would go a long way if council members knew how the council-manager form of government is supposed to function. District 2 council member Flores-Cale, doesn’t have a clue. But to make matters worse, she revels in her own cluelessness. She, as well as a few other council members, need to absorb the fact that under a council-manager form of government, the council doesn’t run the city, the manager does. The council is the body that establishes the governing policy under which the city operates. But the day-to-day municipal operations are controlled by the city manager and carried out by the city staff. And, fortunately for the citizens of Kyle, the city has a superb city manager and an extremely competent and professional staff.
Proof that Flores-Cale doesn’t get it was on full display again Monday when she decided that she should review every single application for every single board or commission submitted by a Kyle resident and thus told City Manager Scott Sellers he should forward those applications to her when the city receives them. Look, I find it personally embarrassing to discover I know more about council policy than sitting council members, but that could also be the result of something else I find personally embarrassing: that I have witnessed perhaps 100 times more Kyle City Council meetings than Flores-Cale. I find it personally embarrassing for the city I call home that a member of the council is so utterly clueless about events that preceded her tenure (and that citizens, however small that number was, elected someone with so little practical education in city affairs to the council). But the facts are that the council created, debated and ultimately passed a formal procedure for appointing individuals to boards and commissions and this procedure did not involve sending one council member all applications. Second, the city manager is also prohibited from corresponding to one particular council member in this fashion. If Flores-Cale was educated about the council-manager form of government, she would know this. There’s one other major problem with her request. Flores Cale has also proved to the world writ large that she is also absolutely clueless when it comes to the topic of zoning. She can’t grasp the concept of zoning as a land use procedure. Watching her flounder around, debating irrelevant subjects when a zoning issue is being discussed on the council dais, is also embarrassing to witness. The idea of someone with this little knowledge about the zoning process pestering an applicant for the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission is too devastating to contemplate.
What she is trying to do here is politicize a process that should never be politicized. Memo to citizens to Kyle: This is not the time to be applying for positions on Kyle’s boards and commissions.
Memo to council: If Flores Cale is hellbent on politicizing the boards/commission appointment process, the path of least resistance might simply be to completely and enthusiastically embrace the idea. Scrap the current policy of appointing commission members, since it apparently is not going to be followed anyway, and simply have each council member recruit and submit to the council their own personal picks for each board and commission with the mayor having the ability to recruit and name the chair of each. Each board member would serve on their respective board for as long as the person who appointed them remained on the council or until they decided to resign.
Of course, council members might have problems recruiting citizens to serve on the various city panels, which brings me back to that overall lack of trust I mentioned earlier. The City Council as a whole — and every single member of the council must share in this blame — doesn’t trust the individuals they appoint to those boards and commissions; or, at the very least, they don’t trust those boards and commissions to perform the duties and functions they should be performing. The Planning and Zoning Commission, to cite just one example, should be renamed the Zoning Commission. The City Council has so emasculated P&Z it has been, for all practical purposes, stripped of any of its planning responsibilities and capabilities.
A couple of weeks ago, the council unveiled this incoherent, incomprehensible, simply ludicrous document it called a “Citywide Trail Master Plan.” That’s right, the agenda listed it as “Trail,” singular, one trail. Why do you even need a “master plan” for one trail? But that’s not the worst part. The actual name of that master plan for a singular trail that turned out to be more than a single trail was “The Vybe Kyle.” Are you kidding me? What does that even mean? There’s no such word as “vybe” in the English language. “The Vybe Kyle” has “Fajita Street” beat all to hell.
Yet, this was called a “master plan,” and one would think that anything that had the word “plan” attached to it should have been vetted through the Planning & Zoning Commission. And anything remotely involving a trail system should have also passed muster through the Parks Board. Yet, neither of those bodies had any involvement in the formulation of what turned out to be a complete mess, but might not have been if it had been properly vetted in this way. Why were these bodies bypassed in this way on this particular subject? The only logical reason is because the council doesn’t trust these groups to do the jobs they are supposed to be doing.
Instead of being reviewed, edited and rewritten in the proper fashion by the requisite boards and commissions, “The Vybe Kyle” was a product of something the council calls a task force. What is a task force exactly? It’s another product of both the council’s lack of trust in each other and the inflated egos of the various council members who believe that they, they alone, have all the knowledge, that they are smarter than anyone else in the city. I mean, so their thinking goes, if we weren’t smarter than everyone else, why would we even be elected to these positions?
If the council actually had any trust in their board appointments, it would have first set aside the needed funds to accomplish the feat of creating a first-class Trails (plural) Master Plan in a the annual budget. It would then have assigned the task of actually crafting the first draft of the plan to the Parks Board, which would have visited communities the size of Kyle with trail systems already in place, would have gone out in the community to conduct public hearings (not forced the public to come to City Hall as the egotists on the council require) and would have solicited testimony from those with expertise and experience in developing municipal trail systems. Then the Parks Board would have discussed and ultimately prepared an initial draft of a master plan. That document would have been sent to the Planning & Zoning Commission, for public hearings and open meetings to decide if it was in complete harmony with the city’s Comprehensive Plan and its long-range land-use plans. Only after the Parks Board and P&Z had signed off on the document, would it be presented to the city council for final adoption.
But because the council doesn’t have that trust in the boards, the commissions or anyone else for that matter, it was going to go along a different route — the secretive, behind-the-scenes route of the task force.
First and foremost, a task force is something this council has created to avoid violating the state’s open-meetings statutes. When four or more of the seven council members gather in the same place at the same time, that is known as a “quorum,” and when there’s a quorum it comes under the jurisdiction of the open meetings statutes, meaning all sorts of requirements must be adhered to. But when there are less than four council members in the same place at the same time, they are not required to adhere to the open meetings statutes. They can call themselves a task force, meet outside public scrutiny and exclude all those other council members in whom they have no trust as well as the rest of the world’s population who are simply not as smart as the task force members from messing things up.
Of course, if you get too many task forces and combine that with that overall lack of trust among council members, the result will be one group of task forces is not going to trust those in the other task forces. And that, ladies and gentlemen, along with deep-seated acrimony among individual council members, is exactly what boiled to the surface during “The Monday Night Meltdown” that resulted in the city council, in a fit of pique, voting to eradicate all task forces in the city. At least, abandon them until such time as a formal task force policy can be adopted; in other words, a formal policy that will allow a trio of council members to meet behind closed doors because they don’t trust other council members, the city’s boards and commissions and the public at large which, undoubtedly, will produce “The Vybe Kyle Part Deux.” And of course, six months after that, a clueless public will elect an equally clueless person to the city council who has absolutely no knowledge of “Vybe Task Force Policy” and will make demands of the city manager that violate the guidelines of the council-manager form of government.
And I have yet to mention when the council was at its absolute lowest point of “The Monday Night Meltdown” — that moment when council members were outright calling each other liars over what happened during a meeting involving Mayor Mitchell, Mayor Pro Tem Koch and former Planning Director Howard Koontz that apparently took place in the City Hall’s second floor, largely glass-walled conference room. I doubt the world will ever know what actually transpired during that meeting. I did ask Koontz, who is now the planning director for Dripping Springs, if he heard about what happened Monday night, and he said “Yes, I have heard about it from several persons. Respectfully, I won’t be reviewing the footage (of the council’s meeting) and I’ll not comment on it.” Personally, I like Koontz. I respect him. And I understand his decision not to get into a mud-wrestling match that could not produce a winner. Because that council brawl Monday night produced only losers.
I hate to keep harping on her, but the truth is, Flores-Cale also initiated this mud wrestling match by placing on the council’s agenda an item captioned “Evaluation of expectations, from city council and city manager, when presenting direction of council, to staff.” Sounds innocuous enough, although it demonstrates once again Flores-Cale’s lack of understanding of the council-manager form of government and only her unbridled desire to nuke any progress this council is trying to pursue on behalf of the city. If she understood it, she would know council does not give direction to the city staff. The council gives direction to the city manager. The city manager gives direction to staff. But what this was really about is the fact that Flores-Cale doesn’t like and doesn’t trust others on the council, particularly Mayor Mitchell and Mayor Pro Tem Koch, and those feelings are reciprocated by Mitchell and Koch. She also doesn’t like and doesn’t trust anyone on the city’s staff. In fact, I’m not sure she likes anything other than the sound of her own voice. And her entire argument was the product of hearsay evidence, testimony that wouldn’t be allowed in a court of law. She was complaining and making accusations about the Koontz-Mitchell-Koch conference I mentioned earlier — a conference of which she was NOT a participant. This was not a debate, it was not a discussion; it was airing dirty laundry in public and, as mentioned earlier, shameful name calling — a public spectacle that only delights that segment of the public that prefers mudslinging to policy making. This was an example of a council member trying to destroy governmental processes, not constructively shaping them.
One other thing bothered me, as well: Flores-Cale’s presentation was not extemporaneous — she was reading from a script. Which made me wonder: Are these really her words or did someone else write this? Is she speaking for herself or is she merely an ax-wielding marionette whose strings are controlled by someone with far more sinister and vitriolic motives?
Memo to Mayor Mitchell: Establish a rule that allows only city staff and the mayor to place items routinely on the council’s meeting agenda and, should one of the six other council members wish to have an item placed on the agenda, that council member must present a form containing a description of the agenda item, a reason for its inclusion on the agenda AND the signatures of two of the other five council members. Now the council members signing the form are not agreeing to support the item by signing the form; they are only agreeing the item is worth being debated during the council’s meeting.
I’m not saying such a procedure would eliminate the lack of trust, the acrimony, the egotism or the ignorance. Unfortunately, those qualities seem systemic. In our body politic, they began and flourished in Washington, D.C. It’s just a shame that those who are supposed to be representing our local interests are emulating those very qualities that has led to the dysfunction in our nation’s capital.
What I fear the most is that dysfunction leading to government paralysis is their goal. And, if that is allowed to continue, this city is headed for a very troubling future. Gone are the days when citizens with noble aspirations of statesmanship, leadership and public service aspired to serve on the city council. They have been replaced by those who only want to erect barriers.
The best position to be in these days would be that of an economic director of a city competing with Kyle for major economic stimuli. If I was recruiting a major business to come to my city and someone from that business told me “You know, Kyle really has a lot to offer,” I would simply show that business a video of Item 24 of the Oct. 3 edition of the Kyle City Council — the “Evaluations of expectations” item — knowing that seeing that video would eliminate Kyle from any consideration.
It’s sad. But it’s true.
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