Did you know that
City Manager Brenton Lewis and Mayor Mikel Virdell have, once again, violated the law
to secretly change the zoning ordinance?
Last week,
City Manager Lewis and Mayor Virdell tried, and succeeded, to secretly
fund the
preparation of a Comprehensive Plan which is required by law before they
can overhaul the Llano zoning ordinance.
They have learned from their previous illegal
zoning changes that zoning changes must conform to the City's
Comprehensive Plan. Brenton Lewis had scheduled a
meeting at Lantex
to form a volunteer committee. 13 volunteers signed up to finish
the almost complete citizen Comprehensive Plan effort, but he never did
organize the committee. Instead, he secretly had Doris Messier try to
write a new one. That didn't work so this latest effort was to hire an
outside company to prepare a plan without citizen involvement or even
knowledge.
Why not just organize the citizen committee and save $40,000? Presumably
because citizens wouldn't recommend the changes that Mayor Virdell wants.
The P&Z Committee has been working for almost two years on changes
to the zoning ordinance for some still unknown reason. This is
backwards. The Comprehensive Plan is always done first and drives changes should they be needed.
The plan should have been done two years ago.
One change that we know Mayor Virdell and City Manager Lewis want is to
change
South Ford Street from residential to commercial. This would never
appear in a comprehensive plan because Llano already has enough vacant
commercial property. Citizens know that but a company hired by the city
would put anything in the plan that the city (Virdell & Lewis) told them
to put in.
So at the
2/2/15 City Council Meeting, Agenda Item H-1 was a request for $40,000
for
“Planning Elements for
Planning and Urban Environmental Design” and the benefit was for “Low to
Moderate Income Residents.”.
Nowhere in the agenda did it say Comprehensive Plan so no citizen was there to say
that there are plenty of citizens to do it for free.
This is a misdemeanor violation of the Texas Open Meetings
Act. See the details in
this
paper.
Fortunately, the consulting group speaker let the words
Comprehensive Plan slip or we still wouldn't know.
So, we citizens will pay for Mayor Virdell's, City Manager Brenton
Lewis', and Planning & Zoning Chair Diana Firestone's overhaul of the
zoning ordinance and we still don't know why. They don't understand, or
care, that we citizens own the property and thus own the city. The
comprehensive plan, by law, is merely to allow the city to plan for
services for what WE decide to do with our property.
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