During the course of a three-hour, 39-minute meeting Tuesday night that included a 57-minute executive session nominally for the purpose of discussing the federal lawsuit former police sergeant Jesse Espinoza filed against the city (I find it difficult believe the council spent that much time talking about that one subject, but so be it), the council, while not outright killing a plan to remove all those stalled trains blocking Center Street, at least left it on life support; reneged on a vow to pay for the newly created stormwater utility strictly from the stormwater fees it plans to charge; and, for the sake of political expediency, patently ignored its own electronic billboard ordinance, creating a potentially ugly precedent, as well as state regulations governing the composition of an advisory board.
The discussion on the train issue was especially troubling because it involved witnessing council debate the completely irrelevant subject of the Hays County bond proposals, that supporters of which, it must be said, are distributing false and misleading information themselves. The subject of the discussion was whether the council should approve spending $270,000 for preliminary engineering services that would be required as an initial step to relocating the Union Pacific Railroad siding, the current location of which is the cause of all those trains stopping in places that block traffic on Center Street. Those engineering services are required to pinpoint more accurately the actual cost of such an undertaking.
A majority of the council wanted to postpone discussion of the item until after next week’s election that will decide the fate of the bond proposals because one provision of Proposition 2 in the Hays County bond package calls for the county to contribute $1.5 million toward the cost of relocating the siding. Here’s the problem with that kind of thinking. The total cost of moving the siding is estimated to be around $15 million. Hays County is not going to toss its $1.5 million into the pot until all the rest of the financing is, at least, pledged. And those moneys are not going to be pledged without those preliminary engineering services. Not only that, the $1.5 million Hays plans to contribute to the project is contingent on Kyle contributing an equal amount..
Here’s another reason why the postponement puts the entire process in dire straits. After the joint matching contribution from the county and the city, where is the rest of the estimated $12 million cost coming from? The plan is to ask the state for some and Washington for the rest. The Texas Legislature convenes in about 60 days and various legislators are already preparing and putting into the hopper their preferred spending bills. By the time the council gets around to approving these preliminary engineering services (in the unlikely event the item even appears on a future council agenda) it will possibly be too late to have any impact in Austin. The other problem is it’s highly unlikely the legislature or Congress would approve spending that amount of money when the city council of the town where the siding is located is on record as being so sharply divided on allocating the comparatively meager funds needed to complete the necessary engineering services. They could be thinking the entire project is simply one city council election from being scuttled on the local level so why should they commit their resources and their reputations on such a flighty project?
There’s that point in Texas Hold ‘em when the player who is convinced he has the best hand declares "I’m all in." That’s what the Legislature and Congress wants to hear from a local community before they open their respective checkbooks. They want to be shown that the community is "all in." Balking at approving funds for preliminary engineering services does exactly the opposite of declaring you’re "all in."
In fact, to give another example of how this council is not "all in" on this project, council member Becky Selberra informed her colleagues she has lived in Kyle for a long time now, that she has gotten used to the trains blocking Center Street, and that it really is not that big a deal as far as she is concerned.
So there you have it. A nail in coffin.
But this is not the first time the city has employed a wrongheaded approach to projects such as this. When the city was contemplating a decision in 2013 on asking voters to approve the sale of bonds for a series of major road projects, the council inexplicably decided not to spend the money on advance engineering studies but instead to pay for those studies from the bond revenues. As a result, the city was forced to scale back on some of its, perhaps overly grandiose, plans for these roads.
What is lacking here is political conviction and this, unfortunately, is creeping into many other places besides Kyle. Political "leaders" are more concerned about what actions they need to take to get themselves re-elected than what actions are in the best interests of the community they serve. The signal the council sent to the rest of the world was simply this: "We are not firm in our belief that moving this siding is in the best interests of our city. Our support of this project is completely conditional, based on the whims of the voters of Hays County." Of the six persons present at Tuesday’s meeting (council member Daphne Tenorio, as I understand it, missed the meeting to deal with a vitally important personal issue), only Mayor Todd Webster advocated for acting in what he believed were in the best interests of the city and not in a way that was simply politically expedient. And long-time readers of this journal know I have not always had the kindest of words for our mayor. But this time around he seemed to be the only person on the council to realize that if you want and need money from those higher up on the governmental food chain you must (1) be firm in your conviction that this is absolutely needed for your community and (2) not wait until those higher ups have already pledged all their available funds to other projects. The majority of the council decided to do neither.
As a result, as it stands right now, don’t expect any relief from stopped trains blocking Center Street and other rail crossings in the city, at least at any time during this half of the century because the council voted to delay indefinitely consideration of performing these engineering studies. It’s possible the council could reconsider this in two weeks but those two weeks comprise about 25 percent of the time between now and when the legislature convenes.
During the public discussions on this year’s budget, which contained the language creating what is effectively a new department within the city officially known as the Storm Drainage and Flood Risk Mitigation Utility, but which I will refer to as the Stormwater Utility or Stormwater Department, the council said the costs of operating the new department will not come from property and sales taxes that flow into the General Fund, but strictly from the dedicated stormwater fees to be paid to the city by its single family residential and commercial customers. And the discussion surrounding the first reading of the ordinance to actually create the department and the means for funding it followed that script, even after City Engineer Leon Barba said he wanted a drainage Master Plan to serve as a guide for moving forward.
"There are two components to the stormwater utility," City Manager Scott Sellers to the council. "One is maintenance and one is construction for the CIP projects. (Capital Improvement or CIP projects are generally considered those with at least a 20-year shelf life.) The first year we will dealing fairly predominantly with the maintenance aspect of that. We have a very good idea of what areas need to be maintained obviously. Year one we will acquire additional equipment and additional staff to maintain. We’ll put the plan together to know where to move forward in the future on the capital side. I hope to have something available by next budget year, by next fiscal year. But just through our own maintenance we should have a pretty clear picture of the low-hanging fruit capital projects. What we hope to attain with this drainage master plan is a long-term flood mitigation proposal for the council."
Mayor Webster responded that there is some action needed sooner than that and inquired whether Parks Department employees could be used for that before the new department has its own employees and the funds to pay the salaries of those employees.
Still, Public Works Director Harper Wilder stuck to the accepted script in responding to the mayor. "The money’s gonna come in around January so we’ll be acquiring staff and equipment. It’ll take a little bit of time in acquiring that equipment and people."
Council member Travis Mitchell pointed out "From a financial aspect, there’s really no chance that we can get anything done until summer or later. If we’re talking about $100,000 to $200,000 for a master plan and equipment, the revenues (from the stormwater fees) are going to be coming in somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 per month, hopefully, It’s just going to take some time. I would not want people to think that when that first bill comes on they’re going to start seeing anything for several months."
When Wilder said he thought they were projects that could be tackled immediately, Mitchell pressed even further, asking Wilder whether these projects would be financed through a loan from the General Fund. Wilder, apparently realizing he was getting boxed in a corner, hemmed and hawed and never really answered Mitchell’s question and instead talked about areas of the city that needed to be addressed instead of where the funds would come from to pay for dealing with these issues.
That’s when Sellers stepped in to announce, effectively, the promise had been broken.
"We are already as a city maintaining certain areas of right-of-way," the city manager said. "We have two Parks positions that will be moving into this Stormwater Utility once the funds are there. In the interim, those positions are being funded from the General Fund for stormwater maintenance."
The council unanimously approved the ordinance on first reading. The second reading, as well as a public hearing on the proposal, is scheduled for the council’s Nov. 15 meeting.
Speaking of promises broken, the city council approved back in August of last year an amendment to the city’s LED billboard ordinance that required the removal of four traditional billboard facings for every digital billboard erected. At Tuesday’s meeting the council signaled it was okay with the idea of allowing the owner of the property on which the Kyle Speedway is located to not only erect a digital billboard with no conditions attached but to allow that billboard to have a video component. This not only sets a dangerous precedent but it announces to one an all that while Kyle may have ordinances, they don’t need to be followed — a way can always be found to get around them, once again for the sake of political expediency. What’s to prevent every single owner along I-35 in Kyle to realize "I can get additional revenue by erecting one of these electronic gizmos, too"?
Another rule the council chose to ignore, selecting the path of political expediency at the cost of choosing to accomplish a task legally and correctly, was Chapter 395 of the Texas Local Government Code that regulates the composition of a Water and Wastewater Impact Fee Committee. That chapter requires one member of that committee to be a representative of the "real estate, development or building industry." And, if the impact fees the committee discusses, are to be applied in the city’s ETJ, the committee must also contain a representative from the ETJ. The council voted last month to name the members of the Planning & Zoning Commission to the committee and last night it unanimously approved the appointment of Freddie E. Dippel Jr., to fill the ETJ requirement. As far as the requirement for one member to be a representative of the "real estate, development or building industry," the council expressed confidence that one P&Z commissioner, Lori Huey, just might possibly fulfill that requirement, ignoring two salient facts: (1) Even if she was such a representative, her term has expired and she is no longer on the commission and (2) even when she was a member, she attended none of the meetings at which impact fees and what this committee must rule on were outlined and discussed.
But, it seems, the feeling of this council once again is: "Rules? We don’t need to follow no stinking rules."
In other action Tuesday night, the council
- Heard from Barba about the microsurfacing projects on roads in Kyle, all of which, except for Waterleaf Boulevard, should be completed by the time you read this and the Waterleaf project, according to Barba, should be done by Saturday. The only thing left to do on these projects, he said, is the striping which should take place "in a week or two."
- Approved the appointments of Mike Torres and Rick Koch and the reappointment of Allison Wilson to the Planning & Zoning Commission. Torres and Koch replace Huey and chair Mike Rubsam. Wilson was originally appointed to complete the term of Michelle Christie who resigned from the P&Z earlier this year, and this reappointment was for her own full term.
- Held the second and final public hearing regarding the annexation of 5½ acres southwest of FM 2770 and FM 1626 and, just as was the case at the first public hearing, no one cared enough one way or the other to take the time to come and speak to the council about it.
- Voted 4-2 (council members Mitchell and Shane Arabie dissenting) to rezone five acres at 245 Lehman from agricultural uses to retail services with a special provision that allows the property to contain a structure nominally reserved for areas zoned for warehouse use. The majority of the council felt that retail services are not coming to this stretch of Lehman anytime soon, so why not put something on there that will produce additional revenue for the city.
- Approved on first reading on ordinance exercising the city’s right of eminent domain on private property the city claims it needs to acquire to complete the Burleson Road project approved as part of the 2013 bond package.
- Unanimously approved a policy that effectively takes politics out of the decisions on where to locate stop signs in the city by removing the city council from the decision making process on unwarranted stop signs.
- Unanimously approved a three-way warranted stop sign at the intersection where Lockhart dead ends into Front Street.
- Unlike in the decision concerning the rail sliding, approved with no debate the spending of $203,625 for engineering services regarding the upgrading of a wastewater line from 12 inches to 18 or 21 inches as part of the Center Street Village Wastewater Improvements project.
- Approved 5-0 (the mayor temporarily left the chamber when this item was being considered) without any discussion, what Economic Development Director Diane Torres said were "just some technical amendments" to the previously approved RSI grant/loan agreement "just to clarify language and to clarify responsibilities within the agreement," and followed that by also approving 5-0 a $480,000 loan to RSI, called for in the agreement.
- Was told by Sellers the city is still awaiting word from the county and TxDOT about whether those two entities are willing to share in the cost of installing the four additional culverts required to fix a flooding problem on FM 2770 near the Precinct 2 headquarters. "If we do not receive (their commitments) we’re not sure how to proceed," Sellers said. "This is something that is holding up building in a phase at Plum Creek. The total cost, engineering included, is around the $410-415,000 range. So there is going to have to be some sort of understanding between the city and Plum Creek about funding moving forward." Sellers said he hoped to have a better update in time for the Nov. 15 meeting.
