One might think that topics like ICW, parking, or the last PnZ meeting antics might be good things to discuss at this meeting. Instead, stricter code enforcement for residents and grass mowing were discussed. Feeling perplexed? You’re in good company. Lets get on with our ever intriguing meeting analysis.
First things first, here is the council from left to right:
Seat 1: Mark Campbell
Town Secretary (Mayor Verus): LeAnn Strait
Mayor: David Gensler
Seat 3 (Mayor Pro tem): John Crowe
Seat 4: JT Trevino
Seat 5: Robert Simmons
We first open up the meeting with citizen comments regarding incompetency, lack of respect and misleading statements that specific members of our town government have demonstrated. Due to these unacceptable behaviors it was requested that the mayor resign.
It seems that the election agenda items were added to address Texas statutes that require the town to hold elections even though they may be uncontested. It is unclear on whether elections will be contested as of yet. It was voted that Collin County election services should run the election, which is good. Presumably, this means when you vote for our state representatives our local elections will be on the same ballot. Of course, our town secretary brought up the cost of no election to be $75 vs around $7500 for having the election. But, fortunately, that cost is already baked into the cake that is called “democracy” and we have a surplus so there is no need to complain about this.
In order to accommodate our town attorney, the town council meeting will likely be moved to the 1st or 2nd Thursday of the month. However, the vote was postponed until the next meeting so that all council members would be present and have input.
00:31:45 Disbandment of the Ordinance Committee
This is where we come to the disbandment of the ordinance committee. In general, Councilman Crowe, Secretary Strait and Mayor Gensler demonstrated that they do not believe that citizens have the wits to provide input sufficient to change the town code of ordinances. Leave that to the experts, they imply. An authoritarian regime knows how to better manage town issues, don’t you worry. Councilmen Trevino and Councilmen Simmons provided an alternative point of view and emphasized the importance of citizen involvement (i.e. the way democracy works). The resulting vote to disband the committee was a tie and the Mayor eventually voted to disband the committee.
On a related note, we, as citizens are of course free to form whatever committees we want and provide input to council members who care. Therefore, I would like to revive the citizen ordinance committee. If you have any interest in helping to fix our ordinance problems, please email me at stpaulpost@gmail.com or simply reply to this article.
During this discussion Councilman Crowe commented that there were many freedom of information act requests and it was taking a lot of time to fulfill those requests. Perhaps there would be far fewer requests if the town enforced code, but that’s just speculation. At 56:05, there was an attempt at sarcastic trash talk about the Post.
1:12:00 Maintenance of Town Hall
No news here, just increased spending on town hall maintenance that is within budget.
This is were I thought maybe a certain parking situation would come up about a place that shall not be named. But, instead things like stricter enforcement of grass overgrowth was mentioned; super important topic considering the circumstances.
It was also mentioned that putting liens on properties doesn’t typically result in immediate revenue to the town as the lien is only enforced when the property is transferred. However, these types of issues can also be resolved in a county court since they share jurisdiction. Seems like at a fine of $2k a day, that might be something worth looking into, but the town officials think otherwise evidently.
Ultimately, it was decided that our code enforcement officer should have the action of coming up with a standard for delivering different levels of ordinance violation notifications.
The council agreed to pass the motion to contract with General Code to supply online code hosting services.
The council voted against buying the land between Sonic and Country Club because there is not really much the town can do with it.
Some additional standard items are going to be added to future agendas including Project Status and General Announcements.
General Conclusion
The town continues to generate excuses for not enforcing ordinances and failed to even mention the most egregious violations brought up from the last PnZ meeting. The only thing that will change this behavior is an election.