Mertzon City Council Meeting September 16 2024

A trot line on the bridge at Brim’s Crossing.

Below is the agenda for the September 16, 2024 City Council meeting, with my combined agenda and meeting analysis underneath. Here are the meeting documents.

Agenda

A. Agenda and meeting analysis:

1. Why my posting on this meeting is different: This meeting almost escaped my attention. So, I am posting about it after the meeting date.

   
   

2. Who attended and who should have attended: On behalf of IC ISD, present were Board members Maegin Carlile (President), Ashley Hill, Taylor Douglas, and Superintendent Moore and two representatives from Parkhill. For the City, their attorney, Jeff Betty, was present, and Councilmember Holland was absent. Other than myself, no member of the public was present. Finally, no representative from one of the key stakeholders at City Park, Irion County Commissioner's Court, was present.
   

3. Why this meeting was so significant: IC ISD and the City of Mertzon are each making genuine efforts to stem the tide of stormwater flooding that is so damaging to our city streets, private property and City Park, which is co-owned/managed by the City of Mertzon, the Irion County Commissioner's Court and IC ISD. If the representations made back in April before the bond election by Parkhill on behalf of IC ISD are true, the $800,000+ being dedicated by IC ISD to the retention walls in item 6c of this agenda will slow the flood waters down so their impact will be less destructive. The distrust between the City and IC ISD is longstanding, and it was made all the worse by the School Board's mismanagement, to be polite, of its relationship with the City Council during the expenditure of the 2019 bond funds. So, any time there is a public meeting where IC ISD and the City Council are doing the public's business together is hugely significant. Moreover, the absence of the Irion County Commissioner's Court is significant because that is a sure signal that my request that the County be more proactive with stormwater flooding, a community wide problem, has indeed fallen on deaf ears. Their apparent apathy concerns me because it means there is no reason for the County to consider ongoing improvements to our facilities at City Park given their indifference to its flooding.
   

4. What was accomplished, item 6a: The proposed MOU, a draft found here in the meeting notes, between the City and IC ISD was not adopted, but, in a nutshell, the Council voted to grant Mayor Stewart the authority to negotiate terms with IC ISD. This keeps hope alive for the retention projects, which are still not a sure thing at this stage. They are not a sure thing for a host of reasons, but one significant reason is the bad blood spilled on both sides involving the street closure of 4th Street for the new gym paid for with 2019 bond funds.

   Sometimes it is important to memorialize the precise wording of motions because their specificity can limit - or expand - a governing body's authority. Here is the verbatim motion, made by Councilmember Lindley, that was approved by the Council: "I make a motion to authorize the Mayor to enter into an agreement which will ultimately provide for better traffic flow at the school district facilities, address drainage issues related to said property and facilitate construction of those facilities." If you are a regular reader of my site, you might recognize this as the quid pro quo that has been in the works for some time now - the City will agree to abandon 3rd Street in front of the school if and only if the District addresses the drainage problems they have already created. But, it is more complicated than a mere quid pro quo, because a public hearing is involved in closing a city street. (More on this later, but here’s my post on the street closure wreck back in 2020.) I spoke briefly about the proposed MOU and pointed out that there needs to be written acknowledgement that IC ISD will also maintain any retention structures. (Coincidentally, commenting at the time of an agenda matter is permitted under the Open Meetings Act. See 551.007(b). Just request it at sign in when you state you want to speak during open forum.)
   

5. What was not accomplished, item 6b: After an urgently requested executive session effectively demanded by Mr. Betty, the Council punted on item 6b and did not approve any of the retention projects options on pages 7-9 of the handout. Mayor Stewart said the Council would leave it to the District and its engineers to choose. This means the District was left hanging without any clear guidance on which of the plans to pursue. Why was the District left hanging? In part, I believe it had something to do with advice from its counsel during executive session that the City Council did not want to be in the business of prematurely approving any plan that might later include changing the flow of the stormwater coming off of the District's new construction. Such approval could create legal exposure for the City as well as the District. Indeed, topo maps will show that the District's proposed bus barn is going to require a redirection of stormwater around a private residence...and onto my property. These thorny problems may well complicate whether it is in the public's interest to close that portion of 3rd Street that the District is wanting. For my tag "How to read a public meeting" take note: always pay attention when the governmental body's lawyer interrupts the meeting and tells the chair to immediately call an executive session, as Mr. Betty did here. I've done that before, and when its done one reason is to shut the meeting down so that a board member is stopped from saying something compromising. I think that is exactly the case here, as the stopping point had to do with the direction of the flow of stormwater.
   

6. Who Gets the Gold Stars: Mayor Pro-Tem Jayton Lindley gets some redemption for making the motion I mentioned above that will hopefully start the clean up that is necessary because of the closure of 4th Street for the new gym, which he supported back in 2020. Also, when I spoke I took an opportunity to thank Board President Maegin Carlile for leading a school board now taking stormwater seriously. Notwithstanding my urging at the time, the previous board leadership did not take it seriously...and we are all now paying the price for that because they worsened what was known even then to be a community wide problem.
   

To put the tax base expansion that Irion County and IC ISD are about to experience in perspective, this photo shows two Matterhorn Pipeline workers in December 2023 leaving the welding box where two joints were welded together. That's a 42 inch pipe that will carry high pressure natural gas through the county, and the pipeline and value of the gas will be taxable for ad valorem purposes. The City of Mertzon will not receive any of the revenue, however, unless it undertakes a paradigm shift and regulates the growth of IC ISD so that it will pay it more. I documented the entirety of the Matterhorn construction project, from the initial ground surveys to the reseeding of the land. Gas pipelines are an oddity in Texas law because they are considered a public utility and private companies like Matterhorn have been granted eminent domain authority.

B. What else did the City Council do at this meeting, items 7 and 8: In brief, they raised some revenue to pay for some mandatory expenses, and they approved hiring an additional office position. If I thought Mayor Stewart and the Council were mismanaging the public trust here, I'd dig in. But, I think these are good decisions that, in time, I will be covering in this blog.

Copyright 2024 G Noelke