Tag Archives: Amarillo City Hall

local news

Lesson learned from camera

redlightcamera

I once told Ellen Robertson Green that she was my “favorite Amarillo city commissioner.”

Heck, I even wrote it in a column for the newspaper.

Why the statement of respect? It was her blunt retort to those who came before the City Commission to bitch about the deployment of those pesky red-light cameras at intersections around the city.

She told them, in effect, to stop griping and simply obey the law and “don’t run through the red lights.”

Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing!

Well, I learned that lesson myself — the hard way.

I got careless. I wasn’t paying attention. I apparently zipped through a red light without being aware of it. The camera caught me red-handed.

I’ve made a personal vow to be more attentive on the road. Indeed, I should thank the city more forcefully now for deploying the technology.

Therefore, I shall to do so right now. Right here.

Thank you for humbling me and for giving me even more reason to pay attention to what the heck I’m doing while I’m driving through Amarillo.

OK. I’m done commenting on this now.

Lesson learned.

local news

Bully for red-light cameras!

shutterstock_red_light-camera

I am so busted!

I got home from work this evening and found something on the dining room table I did not expect.

It was a report of traffic violation that I committed near downtown Amarillo.

I drove through an intersection where the city had deployed a red-light camera.

Snap! I was caught.

Hmmm.

But here’s the thing. As of today, I have no memory of getting caught. I didn’t blaze through the intersection and see a flash go off behind me as I scooted on down the street.

For that matter, I didn’t even see the “Photo Enforced” sign the city posts 300 feet before every intersection where the lights are set up.

I won’t make an excuse. I have none. I got caught. I’ve written the check and I’ll pay the fine. I won’t contest it.

What’s more, I continue to be a big supporter of the devices. They serve to deter motorists who commit deliberate acts of red-light-running. I will continue to applaud the city — under the leadership of then-Mayor Debra McCartt — for enacting the ordinance that established the enforcement system and for resisting efforts to persuade City Hall to take the cameras down.

The closest thing I can find for an excuse, though, might be that the sign posted prior to the intersection wasn’t visible enough for me. Then again, in all likelihood it is my own damn fault for not being alert enough to notice it.

I’ll take full responsibility.

Moreover, I know this as well. Now that I am fully aware of that particular camera has been set up, I’ll be extra careful when I travel through that intersection in the future.

While I’m at it, I probably ought to acquaint myself with all the red-light-camera locations around the city.

I also will be more alert and work harder to avoid running red lights.

business news, local news, Sports news

City seeking a commitment to use MPEV

baseball-pic

Amarillo wants a commitment, a signed contract from the potential tenants who’ll want to play baseball in the city’s proposed downtown ballpark.

I get it. What’s next, though, is beginning to get a bit murky.

San Antonio’s Missions baseball team declined to sign a letter of intent to move from South Texas into the proposed MPEV in downtown Amarillo.

Amarillo’s Local Government Corporation is going to proceed with negotiations with a sports group that owns several baseball franchises, including the AA San Antonio Missions.

The Missions might move to Amarillo after San Antonio lands a AAA franchise that will play in a stadium there.

Amarillo Deputy City Manager Bob Cowell says it’s still a possibility, but that the city has “less breathing room” than it had before.

I’m getting a bit nervous about this. I don’t seriously doubt the merits of what Amarillo wants to do. I am beginning have concern that the LGC is capable of nailing down the commitment from the Missions to actually move here by, say, 2019.

Amarillo wants to open the MPEV for business by the spring of 2018. A city official in the know told me today that the city plans to start knocking down the now-vacant Coca-Cola distribution center on the MPEV site later this summer.

If the Coca-Cola site is demolished, it should stand to reason to expect that construction on the MPEV would commence shortly thereafter. Is that right?

Well, have we seen any design yet? Has the city received a definitive cost of the ballpark/MPEV? It started out at $32 million, but the cost rose to about $50 million when the LGC announced plans to go after the AA franchise.

I understand the reason for the inflated cost.

What’s beginning to make me sweat, though, is whether the LGC is able to juggle all the balls required to ensure that we’ll have a tenant in the MPEV when the city cuts the ribbon to open it.

I will remain optimistic. With caution.

 

local news

Time flies at Amarillo City Hall

city council

Where does the time go?

A year has passed since the Amarillo municipal election occurred that seated three new City Council members.

It’s worth noting this month as the first anniversary, given that the final new guy — Mark Nair — had to win his seat in a runoff that occurred more than a month after the initial balloting.

I’ve tried to give the city the benefit of the doubt as the new folks have settled in.

I am left, though, to give them a mixed rating — at best.

I’ll stipulate up front that I am acquainted with just two of the new councilmen — Elisha Demerson, who I have known from a distance for many years, and Nair, who I only met recently and with whom I had an informative and cordial conversation. I have not yet met Randy Burkett, although I’ve been quite aware of his presence on the council.

What continues to trouble me is the discord that seems to have infected the council. There once was a time when the council sang in nearly perfect harmony on the big issues.

Granted, it wasn’t always pitch-perfect. The late Jim Simms was known to be a contrarian on occasion, as was the late Dianne Bosch in the late 1990s. They would make their objections known and then would back whatever decision the majority of their colleagues made.

That doesn’t seem to be the case these days.

The new guys took office and immediately began damning the performance of then-City Manager Jarrett Atkinson. One of them called for the termination of the Amarillo Economic Development Corporation board. Then came a temporary truce.

The truce came undone when Atkinson resigned. The council brought in Terry Childers to serve as interim city manager.

AEDC executive director Buzz David quit, as did City Attorney Marcus Norris. Assistant City Manager Vicki Covey retired. Other senior staffers bailed.

The council seated new members on the Local Government Corporation. One of the founders of the LGC, Richard Brown, walked away, taking with him a trove of experience at business development and promotion.

The director of Downtown Amarillo Inc., Melissa Dailey, also walked away from a job that had produced some stunning progress in the evolution of the downtown district.

What’s left? Who’s running the show?

Terry Childers will be gone eventually. He might get to hire a new police chief to replace Robert Taylor, who is retiring in just a few days.

Meantime, the City Council must choose a new council member to replace Dr. Brian Eades, who’s leaving town to set up a medical practice in rural Colorado. That selection process has been something of a cluster hump, too, with the council deciding how to handle some pithy and crass social media posts delivered by one of the finalists for the council appointment; there appears to be disagreement among them over the significance of those comments and whether they should be considered as the council ponders this decision.

Yes, we’ve seen considerable progress in the city.

Construction is proceeding on the Embassy Suites Hotel and the parking garage. Xcel Energy’s new office complex is well underway. The council has instructed the LGC to negotiate a deal to lure a Class Double A baseball franchise to Amarillo, where it will play ball in the ballpark to be built across the street from City Hall.

The fate of the MPEV, though, might be in doubt if the council cannot learn to at leat pretend it is working together.

Not long ago, Mayor Paul Harpole stormed out of an executive session to protest what he said was a lack of “trust in the process” of selecting a new council member. Although I generally support the mayor on most policy matters, I am dismayed at the public pique he exhibited — and the message it might send beyond the city’s borders.

The three new council members vowed to bring “change” to City Hall. They brought it all right.

I won’t give up on them just yet.

However, my own patience is wearing a bit thin.

Let’s step it up, shall we?

legal news, local news, national news, political news, Uncategorized

Seeing some symmetry between SCOTUS and APD chief picks

14910136_0

Am I hallucinating, or do I see a certain symmetry between two appointments: one at the highest level of government, the other right here at home on the High Plains of Texas?

One of them deserves the opportunity to do his duties as an elected public official. The other one also has earned the right to perform his duty as an appointed one.

Amarillo interim City Manager Terry Childers has selected Ed Drain to be the city’s interim chief of police; Drain is set to succeed retiring Police Chief Robert Taylor on July 1.

There might be a point of contention, though. You see, Childers won’t be city manager for very long. The City Council already has begun looking for a permanent city manager and Childers has declared his intention to retire completely from public life.

The council, though, has given Childers all the authority that the city manager’s position holds. Childers can hire — and fire — senior city administrators. He also is able to enact municipal policy changes when and where he sees fit. What the heck? He was able to bring changes to the city’s emergency communications center because he misplaced his briefcase at an Amarillo hotel, right?

Now, for the other example.

Caplan-Merrick-Garland2-1200

President Barack Obama has named Merrick Garland to a spot on the U.S. Supreme Court to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The voters delivered the president all the power he needs to do his duty when they re-elected him to his second and final term in 2012.

Republicans in the U.S. Senate, though, have said: Hold on a minute! The president’s a lame duck. We don’t want him appointing the next justice. We want the next president to do it. They, of course, are hoping that Donald J. Trump takes the oath next January. Good luck with that.

Here’s the question: Should the city manager be allowed to appoint the permanent chief of police, or should the council demand that the decision be left to the permanent city manager?

My own take is this: I’ve railed heavily against the GOP’s obstructing Obama’s ability to do his job. Republicans are wrong to play politics with this process and they are exhibiting a shameless disregard for the authority the president is able to exercise. The president is in the office until next Jan. 20 and he deserves the opportunity to fulfill all of his presidential responsibilities.

Accordingly, the Amarillo city manager will be on the job until the City Council hires someone else and that permanent manager takes over.

Thus, Terry Childers ought to be able to make the call — if the right person emerges quickly — on who should lead the police department … even if he won’t be around to supervise the new chief.

local news

Interim police chief gets a leg up

drain

Amarillo has a new interim police chief, who’ll assume his new post on July 1, when Police Chief Robert Taylor retires, climbs aboard his Harley and hits the road.

I join many others in wishing Chief Taylor well and thank him for his 36 years of law enforcement service to the community.

Back to the interim chief selection. The new top cop is Ed Drain, currently on the staff of the Plano Police Department. He got the job after being appointed by the city’s interim city manager, Terry Childers.

The city manager made an interesting statement after he chose Drain to take over as police chief. The question dealt with why Childers went outside the department to find an interim chief. He thought it would be best if he leveled the playing field for all Amarillo PD applicants who might want to seek the police chief’s job.

That’s fine. It levels the field for all the in-house applicants. Ed Drain, though, has a leg up on getting the permanent job if he seeks it, too.

http://www.newschannel10.com/story/32265897/interim-police-chief-named-for-apd

I’m a bit curious as to why the need to go outside the department in the first place.

The last time Amarillo brought in an outsider to run its police department was in the early 1980s, when the late City Manager John Stiff hired Oklahoman Jerry Neal to lead APD.

I wasn’t here in 1981 when Neal got the police chief job, but I’ve heard all about the circumstance he inherited when he came aboard. He took command of a dysfunctional police agency. It wasn’t working.

The police department needed a progressive leader and Stiff found one in Jerry Neal.

Is the Amarillo Police Department in a similar state of disarray now? Hardly. It is working well. Hey, the city witnessed a police department handle a potentially explosive hostage situation just a few days ago with supreme professionalism.

I’m going to presume that the interim chief understands the dynamics that drive a police department such as the one that serves Amarillo. As Drain told NewsChannel 10: “My goal here is to analyze the things that are going on in the department and any areas where I think there needs to be improvement,”  Drain said. “Some of those obviously I’m not going to get done as an interim, but you heard the city manager say incremental improvement, so I want to do that.”

I don’t intend to get ahead of the game here. The new chief is an interim pick, after all. However, his hiring is beginning to look like a done deal.

It makes me wonder: Do we really need a fresh approach to the police department, which I believe is running pretty well?

business news, local news

Mayor creates a scene where none was needed

mayor and nair

I know that politicians hate hypotheticals … at least that’s what they say.

Here’s one anyway.

You’re a business owner looking for a place to relocate your business. You hear that Amarillo is a business-friendly city with an economic development agency that parcels out sales-tax revenue to new businesses looking to expand local payrolls.

You think: Hey, that sounds like a good place to live and work.

Then  you hear about the City Council’s current state of dysfunction. You understand that three new council members joined the panel in the spring of 2015. Two incumbents got ousted; a third council member didn’t run for election. The three new guys have butted heads with the two holdovers publicly.

One of the council holdovers then announces he is leaving the city this summer. The council puts out a call for applicants. They get 14 of them; the council winnows them down to five finalists. Then word hits the street one of the finalists has put out some unflattering and insulting social media commentary. The council is getting pressure to rethink whether to interview this individual.

And on top of all that, the mayor storms out of an executive session, declaring to the public that he doesn’t “trust the process.”

Is this still the place where you want to relocate your business?

Maybe … then again, maybe not.

I mention this because of Mayor Paul Harpole’s demonstration of petulance this week. He knows how much I respect him and that I generally support his agenda for the city. He’s a good man with a solid personal history; I consider him a “brother,” given his Vietnam War experience.

Harpole is a passionate advocate for Amarillo and if you’ve ever listened to his speech about downtown redevelopment efforts, you might be inclined stand and cheer.

I just wish he hadn’t made such a show of the executive session episode, which well might have telegraphed to business owners just like my hypothetical example that Amarillo’s municipal government is in a state of serious dysfunction.

Amarillo doesn’t have a “strong mayor” form of government. The mayor casts one vote that carries precisely the same weight as the other four City Council members. The mayor, though, does preside over meetings of the governing council and is in a position to exert his “bully pulpit” authority over the rest of the body.

I haven’t discussed the events leading up to this spate of pique with the mayor. They did occur in private session, so he’s not obligated to say what happened when the council was meeting in secret.

Perhaps he thought he was making an appropriate political statement by leaving the session in the hands of his colleagues.

He also well might have made another kind of statement about the quality of leadership that exists at City Hall.

I fear the mayor has inflamed an already inflammatory environment.

local news

City Council schism widens again

10731514_G

Amarillo City Council members cannot seem to get past the divisions with their ranks.

Three new guys got elected a year ago promising “change” in the way the city does business. They want more “transparency,” more “openness,” more “accountability.”

Good deal. We’re all for it.

The schism seem to narrow a bit when the council agreed unanimously on some steps to move the downtown revival strategy forward.

Then a vacancy developed at Place 2. Brian Eades wants to move to Colorado to set up a medical practice. He intends to resign his council seat effective later this summer.

Now comes yet another controversy to sweep in over the rest of the council.

One of the applicants for Eades’ seat, Sandra McCartt, has posted some rather blunt and unflattering commentary on Facebook.

The divide between the three new guys and the two “old-timers” has widened once again.

The three newbies — Randy Burkett, Elisha Demerson and Mark Nair — believe McCartt’s comments do not disqualify her. The other two, Eades and Mayor Paul Harpole, believe they do.

Harpole walked out of a closed council meeting Tuesday, saying he didn’t “trust the process.”

http://www.newschannel10.com/story/32170046/online-comments-from-amarillo-city-council-applicant-cause-tension

Suppose the council had instituted a vetting protocol that would have discovered these social media posts earlier in the process. Would they have been able to make a determination on the five finalists? Perhaps. Then again, they might have argued vehemently among themselves as they began culling the list of applicants from 14 to the five finalists.

It’s a new day at Amarillo City Hall, all right.

The “change” that city voters sought is looking once again to be something quite different from the “change” they got.

Pass the peanuts and the popcorn.

local news, media news

Right idea on council selection; just need more ‘vetting’

social-media two

Amarillo City Councilman Mark Nair is correct to favor a new way of filling vacancies on the body on which he serves.

It needs to be more open, more accessible to the public. Nair helped design the new process for filling those vacancies, which he said used to be done in secret.

The new process also requires a good bit of tinkering and tweaking to avoid the embarrassment that appears to have developed in the search for someone to replace Councilman Brian Eades, who’s leaving the council this summer.

At issue are weird Facebook comments attributed to Sandra McCartt, one of the finalists being considered for the Place 2 seat. There are some doozies out there. The council didn’t see them coming.

According to the Amarillo Globe-News: “’Nothing in the process said if someone said something goofy or bone-headed in the past,’ it would determine their worthiness,” (Nair) added.

“Nair said in the past, council would have appointed a candidate in a back room and none of the conversation would have been public. He said he designed the current process because he wanted the community to be a part of the conversation, and things such as McCartt’s — and other candidates — comments on social media will be part of the discussion.”

Social media platforms are everywhere. Facebook is just one of them. People have Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr accounts. They are likely to say just about anything using any of these social media outlets.

This push for openness has created an opportunity for the City Council to work even harder to ensure they find the right people either to fill vacancies on the body, or select a city manager — which is another task awaiting the council.

Indeed, the city manager selection ought to include a thorough vetting of the men and women who make the list of finalists for that job.

The council said it was intent on invoking “change” in the way the city did business. That’s fine. The change, though, also seems to require a bit more care and attention to detail from the folks who are seeking to reform the way City Hall does its business.

A more thorough vetting of social media accounts is a reasonable place to start.

legal news, local news

Texas Open Meetings Act can serve as shroud

TOMA-Slider

Amarillo City Council members are going to hold a series of public hearings to interview five individuals who’ve applied for an opening that’s about to occur on the five-member governing board.

It should be interesting to hear the five hopefuls make their case in public, in front of those they want to serve.

Then it’s going to get interesting.

Council members likely then will huddle in private to talk about who they want to join their ranks. They’ll declare their intention to discuss “personnel matters” that are exempt from public review.

I wish they would finish the job in the open, too.

The Open Meetings Act allows governing bodies to meet in secret only under certain circumstances. It’s quite clear:

Personnel issues; real estate transactions; potential or pending litigation. There also are a list of other subjects that might or might be covered under those general provisions.

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/files/og/openmeeting_hb.pdf

I totally understand the reason for hiding many of these provisions from public scrutiny. The governing body doesn’t want to reveal their negotiating strategy involving the sale of real estate, which could cost a lot of money. Nor does the body want to talk about privileged legal information given to it by legal counsel; they have this attorney-client provision to honor.

Personnel-related issues also are spelled out. If a city employee is being disciplined, then that person has a right to have his or her privacy protected. The Open Meetings Act, though, does allow the affected employee to request — or demand — that the discussion occur in public.

The interviewing of City Council candidates, I submit, doesn’t fall into the same category of “personnel” matters as the example I just gave.

These individuals aren’t being disciplined. They are seeking a public service job — and a volunteer job at that, given that council members earn a whopping 10 bucks per meeting.

They seek to sell themselves on their commitment to public service. Why not, then, allow the public access to the views expressed by those who make the appointment?

I’ve noted before that most of the current City Council members were elected in May 2015 on a promise to bring more transparency to city government.

Here’s their chance to show they mean what they said.

And please, gentlemen, do not use the Open Meetings Act in a manner that is contrary to the principles on which it was enacted. Let’s not hide behind some provision that empowers you meet in secret.

Empowerment doesn’t make it mandatory.