It was a short meeting of the Shoreacres City Council last night but as with every one of these meetings lately, there were a couple of oddities.
5.0 Council Reports and Requests
5.2 – Alderman Moses gave an outline of the process of selecting a new police chief. City Administrator Stall will take the 58 applications received thus far and create a chart listing the qualifications of each applicant. Then a committee comprised of Stall, Moses, Mayor Webber, and interim chief Massey will evaluate the chart and do a first line cut. The second cut will be more thorough with background checks.
- 12/3 – Decision on final applicants
- 12/4 – Committee meeting to review the final six applicants
- 12/10 – Committee to decide the top three candidates
- 12/20 – Committee to conduct candidate interviews
- 12/23 – Finalists will meet city council members and interested parties
- 1/3 – Social event for finalists for public hearing
- 1/9 – Committee will select final candidate who will be the next police chief
- 1/13 – Council to hire selected person
5.3 – Alderman Bunker was to give a report on a solution to the speeding at the curve on S. Country Club and W. Country Club. He was unable to come up with a solution so he asked interim chief Massey to come up with a list of recommendations for the next council meeting.
6.0 Public Hearings and Public Comments
No comments from citizens.
7.0 Administrative Reports
7.1 – General activity report – Stall
- Street upgrades for Oakdale and Forest will start 12/9 and should be completed in 90 days, weather permitting.
- ByWay water line – all lines are in the ground and three fire hydrants added. The hydrants were installed at the wrong height and have to be raised. The contractor needs to sanitize the lines and add valves to complete but needs a couple days of dry weather.
- Police dispatch transition – Continuing to make progress on the switch. Some “partially” unanticipated expenses have arisen. Software for four vehicles will be $2,700 plus an annual fee of $576. Also two radios will not be compatible when the system rolls over to City of Houston specs – each radio will cost $3,500. Shoreacres will be able to use the LaPorte Records Management system if we want at a cost of $300/setup plus an additional $400/month for a fiber optic connection.
- There was a house fire over the weekend at 222 E. Forest. The pressure was maintained at acceptable levels and the booster pumps kicked in automatically, which was an improvement over past experiences. Citizen Gerry Victor was on the scene and noted some concerns with the distance to the nearest fire hydrant. Apparently the first truck that arrived did not have enough hose and a second truck brought more. Stall stated that the master plan was to have hydrants a maximum of 600 feet to any house and that some of the additional hydrants have been added but not all.
7.2 Financial report – Stall
The city moved $100,000 from the TexPool reserve fund to the General Fund. Stall said that this was due to the timing of deposits from the tax payments. You can find that amounts on hand in all accounts on the city website, pages 7-12. There was an increase in Sales Tax revenue of 78{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} over the previous year.
8.0 Business
8.2 – The council unanimously approved changes to the substance abuse testing policy.
Commentary
Regarding Item 5.2 above, if you will recall, a “hiring committee” for the police chief was discussed at the last council meeting (agenda item 8.3) and no action was taken. Apparently, in the time between the last meeting and this one, a committee was formed and installed. During the discussion on a proposed committee at the last meeting, citizen Diane Victor suggested adding a citizen to the proposed committee. I’m not sure how or why council or the mayor or whomever made the decision to form the committee chose to leave a citizen off of it. Or why it was discussed at city council then no discussion was had on the actual committee formation. It is yet another example of a council that came in saying that they wanted to “listen to the people” not listening to the people. I don’t know if it makes any difference or not, I’m just pointing this out.
As for the “partially” unanticipated expenditures that Stall discussed, it is yet another example of the problems with the budget that was adopted. There was no discipline involved in creating the budget in the first place and these expenditures should have been budgeted for. The radios are especially egregious – the original budget included them as part of purchasing two new vehicles. When the council cut the vehicles from the budget, Stall should have advised them about the radio situation. As a city, we keep going further in the hole and there seems to be no end in sight.