elpasospeak

As we know, the city is suing the attorney general of Texas claiming that personal emails involving the mayor and city council officials that pertain to city business should not be subject to disclosure to the public under state law.

The attorney general ruled that they are subject to disclosure after a citizen requested access to the documents.

Now the city is using our taxpayer money to fight the public’s right to see the documents.

The situation might change after the election tomorrow.  The mayor and at least two of the city representatives will not be re-elected to their posts because of term limits.  We will have a different city council and mayor.

I hope that the new council stops the lawsuit.

Then we should learn more about how city hall got torn down and the ball park deal was created.  I suspect that the lawsuit is not about principles, misguided as they might be.  Instead it appears that these people have something to hide.

We might know soon.

Eternal vigilance is the cost of liberty.

Cato

City council held a special meeting on Tuesday, June 4, 2013.  The regular city council meeting started at 8:30 AM.  The special meeting was scheduled to start at 9:00 AM.  It actually started at 2:04 PM.

What’s so special?

City ordinance number 17616 established deadlines and procedures concerning city council meetings and their agendas.  The CFO of the city needed to get her agenda item to the city clerk by 12 noon on the Thursday before the council meeting.  That did not happen here.  Rather than wait one week it was decided to call for a special meeting of the city council.  The ordinance requires either the mayor or the majority of council to approve the special meeting.

The posted time of the special meeting was to be 9:00 AM.  That is during the regular city council meeting.

Here once again city staff chose to circumvent the rules and manipulate things so that one agenda item could be heard on Tuesday.  What was so special was that the rules were inconvenient to city staff and so they chose to ignore those rules.

It was still a violation of Texas law.

The attorney general of Texas published “2012 Texas Open Meetings Act Made Easy”.  The following comes directly from the question and answer portion of the document:

17. May a governing body change the time of its meeting without posting a corrected notice
for 72 hours before the meeting starts?

The Act requires literal compliance.  For this reason, a governing body has no authority to
change the time of its meeting without posting the new time for at least 72 hours before the
meeting.47 Nonetheless, it is not necessarily a violation of the Act if a governing body or one of
its committees starts its meeting a little later than the scheduled time. At what point the change
in time would present a legal problem would be a fact issue. Local entities should consult their
legal counsel if they decide to change a meeting time.

They posted the meeting for 9 AM and held it at 2 PM.  I believe this makes any actions taken voidable if someone wants to sue the representatives or the mayor personally.

Deliberations

City council members had a lot of questions.  They were told that the city manager and city attorney had handled the negotiations and contract matters leading up to the proposed contract matters.

Both the city manager and the city attorney were absent.  Council members were understandably upset that they were being asked to take action on an item that was sprung on them as a surprise and that none of the people familiar with the details were available.

Ultimately council declined to do the city manager’s bidding.  Council is upset with the way city management railroads issues, as well they should be.

In this case council stood up to staff.  Unfortunately as far as city staff goes,

We deserve better

Brutus