Sunday, September 21, 2008

Time Off for Bad Behavior

We'd like to thank the latest blog about town, The Trouble With Wilmer, for their timely coverage of the Sept.18 City Council Meeting as we have been recuperating from that event. Joey Dauben posted some reports on both Best South West Blog and The Ellis County Observer. We haven't seen any press updates as yet from Wilmer's official news outlet the Ellis County Press.


On a positive note, the council adopted the practice of voting by hand count instead of voice voting, eliminating any doubt of who voted for what or not (abstain). Also, the council seemed somewhat more professional in their demeanor conducting business by eliminating the practice of stating "I'd like to make a motion" in favor of the more correct "I move..". Small steps, but in this reporter's view positive ones in the right direction.

Unfortunately, this reporter was unable to attend the entire meeting, primarily due to the nauseating stench emanating from the bath room area. We have to wonder why the indoor plumbing at the community center has to smell like an overlooked sanican.

The big news of course was Commissioner John Wiley Price in attendance at the City Council meeting. He and the director of planning (sorry I missed his name) for the county did an admirable job of trying to educate the council and the public, but it appeared that the elected ones weren't ready for a learning experience. At one point, Allen Group's Leslie Jutzi got the floor to rebut Commissioner Price and the public (okay, it was three times). The problem of course was that our city council wants no outside governmental influence in the way they govern our town - and developers just don't want any type of regulation that may affect their already-made-in-the-best-interests-of-the-city plans. Fortunately, it got clarified that participation in the planning process and funding for the Pleasant Run overpass weren't contingent and therefore Wilmer could get in on the funding for the overpass and still thumb its' nose at Dallas County and the North Texas Council of Governments planning process.

While it was no surprise that the council reconsidered and passed the annexation of the Xebec property west of town off Belt Line Road, it was a bit of a surprise that the rezoning the plot to "PD4" occurred without comment or incident. As the P&Z Commission hasn't met since they rejected the annexation and zoning proposal, we were expecting a point of order on the rezoning issue. Mr. Guerrero and his attorney were in attendance but had no comments during the proceedings.

Former Mayor Linda Root was also in attendance and quite actively questioning the proposed budget figures. This reporter had received a "preview" of the proposed budget on Sept. 10 at City Hall and found that only the current budget and actual expenditures had been prepared at that point - ALL proposed budget line items were blank. Unfortunately, there were additional details presented in the proposed budget documents discussed at the meeting (ED NOTE: We had assumed that with no planned income or expenses in the proposed budget, the City had finally come to the realization that discontinuing operations was in the best interests of the residents, but we were again disappointed.)

We missed a lot of the details in this meeting, but the highlight of the evening was when Mayor Hudson had two police officers escort activist Lorrie McDonald and her mother out of the meeting, for Commissioner Price and the rest of us to observe.

1 comment:

The Associate Moderator said...

Thanks for the mention Joe. My hat will always be off to you for the inspiration, and I am happy to "do my small part".