tony jeter dot com

I have had several people question me on one of the revisions I made to my proposed Charter amendment.  They were wondering why I deleted “appointive officer” from the draft.  It’s pretty simple really - I don’t think it is wise to exclude people that do business with the City from serving on our City boards.  While it is no secret that I think our appointment process is somewhat flawed I don’t think this prohibition should be added to that mix. In truth it is up to the Council to vet its appointments and work diligently to choose the right people for the right boards.  In the instances that there is a conflict of interest on one of these boards the party(s) involved will just follow the rules as stated in our Charter.  So is this a double standard?  I think not.  When it comes to conflicts of interest I believe that elected officials should be held (or hold themselves) to a much higher standard than our City board volunteers.

There have been many red herrings tossed on the floor concerning this conflict of interest hullabaloo.  Over the next days I will attempt to briefly address various diversions that have been used so effectively - until now.  Before I start the rebuttals I want to make very clear my issue has to do ONLY with the practice of Council Members, directly or indirectly, benefitting from the hundreds of millions of construction contracts that have been awarded since I have been on the Council.   Everything else is nothing but a distraction.

1. The argument that my beef is politically motivated is entirely correct. This issue has everything to do with politics. You have two opposing views on this issue by elected officials that have yet to be reconciled.  Everything is politics when you get into disagreements.  The real issue is that the majority of the Council have worked together to keep the issue from the voters, virtually killing any meaningful discussion. Click here, here and here to view three posts on this particular smokescreen.
2. “The city could lose some talented people if it prohibited council members from doing business with the city.” This is one of the more bogus claims by pro-conflict of interest folks in town. This, by the way, is the same rationale used for the continual re-appointments of people to key City boards like TEDC and Reinvestment Zone. Does anyone seriously believe that in a booming City of 60,000 people that would that we be perilously lost if a few couple of dozen people couldn’t serve on the Council or on City boards (for 100 consecutive years)? Gimmee a break.  Click here, here & here for some posts on this diversion.
3. Contractors only deal with independent engineers not City staff.  One of the comments attributed to a Councilman in the Sunday article was “We don’t deal with the city directly when we’re doing (bidding) a project. We deal with an engineer who has been hired by the city.”  If this comment is taken at face value one would think that there are no City staff that interact with contractors during the duration of the job.  In reality this is not the case. The City has an entire construction safety department that is tasked with making sure all construction in the City meets the requirement as set forth by standards, codes and job specifications (for City jobs). Our purchasing and accounting departments handle the processing of change orders and payments respectively.  It is just not possible to exclude staff from the construction process.  Click here & here for my thoughts on this one.

I will work on more later.

I have been blogging about City stuff for six months now. So how we doing so far?

Let’s see…
The taxpayers dodged a $2.7 million bullet that would have provided no bang for their buck. We’ll call this a win!

I’m sad to say that the taxpayers will see an increase in their solid waste rates while at the same time we will see more trash on the streets for longer periods of time. The vote was 4 to 1. Can you guess who the loser was?  My only consolation is that the trash will only be out on the streets a maximum of 9 days instead of 14+ days. Since it didn’t turn out as bad as it could have we’ll call this a draw.

The conflict of interest issues that caused me to launch this blog are still hanging out there for all to see. All that is needed to put this issue to bed is a Charter Review.

If a truly independent group of citizens serving on a Charter Review committee were to bless the current, and unprecedented, practice of awarding multi-million dollar construction contracts to a sitting Councilman I would be more than happy to turn loose of this albatross. So far I am on the losing end of this stick.

Finally, It would appear that I have, for the moment, lost in my quest to curb the practice of perpetual reappointments of the same people year after year to City boards. I have been adamant since my first day on the Council that we need to continually be appointing new people to these boards. It is ironic when you think about the fact that the handful of folks that want to serve in perpetuity were once newbies themselves.

If you are new to this blog please don’t assume that I only write about the stuff that I don’t like. I have spent considerable time writing about a lot of the great things going on in our community. I think this is important too since our local media’s glass can tend to be half empty a lot of the time.

1 win, 2 losses and a draw. I’m kinda sorta, almost batting 500.  Don’t worry I have 18 months left.

I have had many requests for a list of the board appointments from the August 21 Council meeting as well as the current rosters for all City boards.

Click here for the list of board appointments made on August 21st

Click here for the current board rosters.

This will be my final post concerning the TEDC Board appointment debacle that occurred during last week’s meeting. The following five items will hopefully provide a good summation of my concerns.

1. I always thought the purpose of term limits was to limit terms. Since the Council instituted term limits over four years ago the Council has too often bent over backwards to do anything BUT limit terms.
2. The practice of having people serve on multiple boards in the name of cross-pollination is, in my opinion, nothing more than a tactic used by some groups to maintain control of those boards.  Advocates of this practice argue that cross-pollination facilitates communication between various boards. I believe that there should be a limit on the number of boards an individual can serve on. My preference would be one board appointment per individual.  This policy would not preclude boards from allowing members from other city boards to serve in a non-voting capacity.  It would, however, significantly expand the number of citizens that could be involved in city government.
3. Continuity is another argument for keeping the same people serving on boards until the end of time.  The feined anxiety over losing continuity on a board because a few people rotate off borders on ludicrous.  How can a board with 15 members completely fall apart because a few people rotate off? There is no single board member that is so important. I can attest that the world does not stop when an immediate past Board Chair rotates off the board.
4. At the above referenced Council meeting three of the boards that were up for new members picked their own appointments.  These boards were The Developments Standards Advisory Board “DSAB”, the Airport Board and TEDC Board.  This was unprecedented in my six years on the council. Giving boards the ability pick their own members is bad policy.  This is a responsibility given to the Council by the City Charter.  It is one thing for an advocacy group to submit a list of their members for consideration but it is entirely different for board chairs to hand pick their board members.
5. There are very few appointments that require a certain type of education or skill set as a qualification for service. The DASB board, for instance, must have some members that have backgrounds in construction, engineering, etc.  Over the last few years some on the Council have adopted the attitude that they are the arbiters of all knowledge when it comes to determining whether a person is qualified to serve on various boards. The subjective criteria often used appears to be more focused on who the person is instead of what kind of job he or she would do as a board member. One qualification that doesn’t seem to matter these days is independence. The best board members are those that are independent. Independence means not having to worry about voting to please your boss, your customers, your bankers or anybody else that might have leverage over you.  It is this very qualification that allows me to write this post without having to worry about retribution from the irritated masses.

When the Council instituted term limits several years ago for our board appointments there were concerns expressed by some citizens that we would end up with a dearth of qualified candidates.  Other arguments were made on behalf of experience and continuity making the case that it could take six years before anyone could be up to speed on how things “should” go. Thankfully, the Council at that time saw those arguments for what they were and proceeded to institute the policy.  Since then we have had very little trouble filling the boards. We have also jumped through hoops on several occasions to circumvent the spirit of the policy while not breaking the letter of the policy.  The policy was put into place to specifically limit the amount of time an individual can serve on any given board.  What occurred last week is yet another example of going against the spirit of our policy while adhering to the letter. Three of the five Council members (a majority) voted to reappoint a person to the Temple Economic Development Corporation “TEDC” for a third term. Technically it was only his second term, because one of his terms was a result to an earlier acrobatic maneuver by the Council to allow various boards to “own” seats on other boards thus creating automatic appointments.  In this instance, this individual served one term on the TEDC board, because he was the Chairman of the Reinvestment Zone Board.

My question is this. What’s more important: the spirit or the letter of the policy? The Council has gotten pretty good about focusing more on the letter and less on the spirit.

Click here to view a video clip of the 7-minute discussion from last Thursday’s Council meeting.

Out of the more than 51 applications from our civic minded citizens we apparently had no one qualified enough to serve on the Temple Economic Development Corporation’s “TEDC” Board of Directors. Due to this experience deficit, the Council, with the blessing of the TEDC board, reappointed an individual with six years of service to another three-year term. In addition to serving on the TEDC board this individual also serves on the Airport Board and the Reinvestment Zone Board.  These are the three most highly sought after board appointments year in and year out.

Lets do a quick analysis of our “skimpy” applicant pool.

Aviation

• Pilot with 40 years and 5,000 pilot hours
• Pilot with 20 years USAF, 15 years with American Airlines & 6 years flying private jets

Business/ Professional

• Controller for a national manufacturing company based in Temple
• Finance Director for regional college
• USDA Senior Auditor
• HR Director (also former School Administrator)
• Retired Budget Analyst for the U.S. Army
• Current owner of a national construction company
• Retired MIS Manager
• Investments
• Retired Automotive Engineer (Ford)
• Insurance

Health Care

• Research RN
• Retired Nutritionist

Legal

• Retired Judge
• Retired Police Officer
• Attorney

In the more than six years on the Council I have never seen such a quantity or quality of applicants.  There is something definitely wrong with our appointment process.  Nine years is too long to serve on any City board when there is a list of supremely qualified folks waiting in line for a turn to serve.