City Council - Regular Meeting

approved by council member motion second all right all in favor aye any community interest items anybody wants to talk about coming up want to know about Why don't you do that in citizen participation in just a minute. That's coming up right next.

That's right now. So we're going to have any community interest items to speak about. So we'll go straight to citizen participation. So if you'd like to come up.

I don't need to come up.

Yeah, you do. Please give your name. My name's Jack Brooks.

I'm the new Republican Party chairman, Franklin County. On the 25th of August, we're going to have two state representatives and a lady named Krista Shields, who is an expert on this Islamic movement, coming to give a speech and give a program at 7 o'clock at the airport here in Franklin County. We'd love to see some of y'all there. Good citizen participation. Thank y'all.

Thank you, sir. Anyone else? All right, so we'll move on to the items to be considered. Number four here is consider request for replat of property located at 811 Miller Street, Mount Vernon, Texas, 0.465 AC, Gabriel Keith Survey, A-261 Mount Vernon, City of Mount Vernon, Texas.

Mr. Lester?

Mr. Lester, you wanna talk about?

Would you please come up?

Yeah, so my name is Alex Lester. So basically I need to replant those piece of property to two lots and we're gonna build some single home families there for starter homes.

Okay, on this replat, the zoning will not need to be changed. It will still remain R2 zoning, and it meets all the minimum setback requirements and meets the minimum square footage. She's taking a lot that is basically 19,000 square foot and cutting it in half. And on R2, you have to have a minimum of 5,000 square foot for the lot. So you won't need to come back to change the zoning is what I'm telling you. Okay.

All right. Yeah. All right. All right.

Everybody out. So we have new numbers which all have been provided and the new voter approval rate is 0.58

Help me here. 102, correct? Which is 0.000014 cents less than what was originally published. The net effect of that is about $2,800. But given that this document has been put out there, according to, we need to go ahead and redo this next week. And council doesn't take any action on this. They will propose a rate next week after we have had this just out in the public again. So I'm grateful for all the work that Melissa has done on this and Andrew has done on this. And folks, this is a very complicated calculation. It's very time consuming. And I wish everything could be perfect. when we put it out there, but sometimes it's just not. So Melissa gave us the new numbers, or the corrected numbers today at about four o'clock, so they're out there. The good news is that the tax rate has actually dropped. So that's always a good thing. Anybody have any questions on that?

Can we have a motion on that one there?

No action.

No action needed, okay. I didn't hear it.

I apologize.

Number six, consider a contract for the municipal judge. I believe Mr. Sears, that's you. Would you mind giving us a little background about yourself and kind of let us know

I grew up here in Mount Vernon. Went to East Texas State University and graduated with a bachelor's degree there. It's Texas A&M Commerce now. Was working for the Sheriff's Office. I spent about five years working at the Sheriff's Office. Got employed by Texas Department of Public Safety. Was a state trooper there for about 25 years. After retiring from there, I managed the Preford Logistics Safety Department for them for about 10 years. I've been retired for about five months now from that. And of course, my wife and I own a real estate company here in Mount Vernon. They approached me about doing this and I thought it might be a good fit for me and be able to help the city, Mount Vernon also. That's kind of where we are today. I'll answer any questions if anybody has any that I can answer.

I have a couple of things that I want to say. We searched for months to find somebody that we felt would be a good fit for this or was qualified for this. And I'm just very grateful that Stacy stepped up. With his experience as a DPS trooper, experience in law enforcement and his connection with the community, I just felt like he is a great, great fit for us, and we really look forward to working with him. We've met with him. Christy has met with him, and we're, you know, we've got a plan ahead of us, and we're looking forward to having you, calling you your honor, okay?

Leanne's going to do that now, too.

Yeah, yeah.

That ain't happening. Council, do you have any questions on the agreement?

Do you have a motion to approve that?

I'll do a motion to approve.

I'll have a bunch of seconds. Motion approved. All right, on to number seven. Consider suggested ordinance amendment. Ordinance number 2026-03 regarding officers appointed by council. In order to make day-to-day operations more efficient, this amendment does not create any entitlement or take away from any existing roles.

If you look at the proposed changes to the ordinance, you'll see that the appointed officers of the city will include a municipal judge, city administrator, city attorney, chief of police, and other officers that the city council deem necessary. The big change here is that it is removed the city secretary from being appointed by the council and placed her in the organizational chart under the city administrator and that is the only change on this on this ordinance all right anybody got any questions about it motion proof motion i'll second all right

All right, number eight. Consider the ordinance amendment, amendments ordinance number 2026-04 regarding defining and clarifying the role of city administrator. This role has been a job held in the city for at least 20 years. This ordinance serves to memorialize

the city has budgeted and paid for a city administrator for at least 20 years but it's never been in the ordinance to have a city administrator this actually officially creates the position of city administrator and as you saw by the ordinance it was just that y'all just passed the council has the authority to appoint whoever they want to to that position if you've read through this you'll you'll see that the city administrator serves at the will of the council and the ordinance also describes the duties and authority and responsibilities of the city administrator so it basically codifies the position and makes it legit so once this is done I will actually be legitimate council i wanted to bring you up to speed on where we are with the little creek park project I want to get a little background out there in the public about this, just to kind of maybe clarify any concerns or questions that folks may have about this. Those of you that have been serving on the council for a while know that Back in 2024, we applied for a grant for what was phase one of the Little Creek Park project, and that basically was some shade structures, new playground equipment, and that was pretty much it on that. The grant was approved. We actually got notification of the approval of the grant. We had applied for this probably in September, of 2024 is when the application was submitted. We were notified that there would be a forthcoming award in January or February of 25. we got the award notification, the official award notification, where we actually, it's an award date of 9-15-25. That's when it was actually awarded to the city. The performance period for the phase one project starts on 10-1-2025 and runs through 9-30-2028. During that period, around October of 2025, we were approached by the representative of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Program and encouraged to apply for phase two of Little Creek Park project during the 2025 consideration of applications. We submitted that. We were not awarded phase two. Our plans, we didn't begin construction in 2025 because we were told go ahead and apply and then you do construction at one time. get better bids, everything's done at once, save on engineering costs and everything. We submitted that, we were notified earlier this year that we were not awarded phase two, so that kind of went out the window, and so we got back with the grant writers and decided to go ahead and start planning just to do phase one. Good news is that they have actually started on the design on phase one. They were here Saturday doing surveying at the park. identifying where everything was going to be. The design period will be approximately four to six months, at which time, once that's done, they will bring the preliminary design to council, and we'll have a public meeting and have everybody give their public comment about that. y'all want anything changed you can tell them they'll change that they'll take that back two months later they will start going out for bid on the actual construction of the park project I've got a map for y'all's purposes here to kind of take a look at what has actually been going to be done what is actually going to be cut And as you can kind of see that we've gone back basically just to some shade structures and to relocating the playground equipment from down by the tennis courts to up by the splash pad, which makes a whole lot more sense. And that will be... know the kids can run from the playground to the splash pad that just makes a lot of sense and then they'll be adding a couple of shade structures but that'll be all that's in phase one now we've been encouraged to reapply possibly this next year for phase two phase two included the resurfacing of the basketball courts resurfacing of the tennis courts and also the amphitheater We'll see how that goes. We'll apply and see how that goes out. But we're not gonna slow down the construction on these and wait another period of time. We're gonna go ahead and get this playground built as rapidly as possible. So that's kinda where we're at. With grants, I think it's important for the public to understand that it is not unusual to write a grant and then finally see the money three years later. Carthell and Arrington is a perfect example of that. We actually wrote the grant for Carthell. That was actually submitted in September of 2021. We finished the project, completed the project, and that's everything. All the finance is going back in in March of 2026. So that's federal grant money, and this is federal grant money, and this is, it just, it doesn't happen fast, and I'm sorry. I wish it did, but there's a whole lot of hoops to jump through, and it just takes time. The thing to know here is that on Little Creek Park, we have until 9-30-2028 to finish this project. This will be finished sometime in 2027. I want to bring everybody up to speed on that. Anybody have any questions on it?

Not on that. I got a separate question. You probably answered this pretty quick. I got an email from the TDA Go about the OSPR. What was that grant for? Did we get that or did we not get that? That was a CD. Still working on that CDBG project.

Well, it said something about how you had to fill out the OSCQR in order to get it or something. The OSCQR. Closeout documentation. Closeout documentation. That was about our audit. And the Oscar has to do with if you receive more than $500,000 in one year of federal funds, it has to be audited. We didn't receive more than $500,000, so we're exempt from that.

I didn't read into it. It just said something about it was going to be on hold. I hardly ever read through those, but that one just kind of struck me. I didn't know if anybody had seen it or something.

Any future funding would be on hold. But I think we've received all the payments on that grant already. The future funding would be on the poll, but that's been taken care of. With federal money, you're dealing not just with vets but you're also dealing with a state agency that handles money for the feds so it's triple layer of bureaucracy and it's just jumping through a whole lot of hoops so um and even on our criminal justice grants it takes a while and there's a lot of paperwork leah is that not correct even if it's a ten thousand dollar ground yeah

we'll call it then motion to adjourn