July 6th City Council Meeting, (Part 1)

The most confounding item – and ultimately anticlimactic – was the Lobbyist Registration measure. Where to begin.

This is Commissioner Baker’s ordinance. It came out of a committee that spent six months or so researching and writing it. The key provisions are:

• You are a lobbyist if you are paid to make contact with a city official or city staff, or if you stand to profit from an issue
• If you want to make contact and try to persuade an official on an issue, you must register as a lobbyist, and then report all contacts every two months.
• There are some exclusions – private citizens are allowed to speak up about zoning issues, for example, without registering.

In Citizen Comment, about 18 people spoke up against the ordinance. They were mad that it’s onerous, would stifle speech and business, etc etc.

The item comes up, and instantly both Commissioner Scott and Commissioner Baker mumble motions into their microphones, but Mayor Hughson sides with Scott and gives him the floor. He moves to postpone the agenda item until November 3rd, which is after the election, and so there will be new councilmembers.

Recall that at the June 1st meeting, they debated postponing this endlessly. It was tiresome! And it failed! And yet we’re right back there.

Commissioner Baker is furious and lights into Commissioner Scott, who has openly mocked the Ethics Review Commission on other occasions. Mayor Hughson reprimands Baker to stay on topic, and Baker argues that this is entirely relevant, and the two of them get entertainingly snippy with each other around the 1:40 mark, (should you feel like listening to grown ups act like cranky children for yourself. It goes on and on! Hughson comes off looking like an overly controlling parent who wants to micromanage her sprog.)

Commissioner Scott can’t really explain why he wants to postpone. First he says, “So it can be re-written”, but he is reminded that it can’t be re-written on postponement. Then he says that he can review it with other people, which is unsatisfying.

Commissioner Derrick points out that it seems like this is an attempt to get a new city council in place first. (Who is up for election? I’m not sure. Garza, Scott, Gleason and Mayor Hughson were all elected last year. So some portion of Baker, Derrick, and Gonzalez could be up.)

Apparently CLEAT (Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas) wrote a letter to the paper which had enough errors that the City Manager, Bert Lumbreras, felt compelled to write a response to the paper to clarify the errors. The key refutations were:

• This does not prohibit free speech. It just requires registration
• SMPOA and the Firefighters Org were specifically mentioned in order to clarify their status, but if their names are removed, they’re still included as meeting the definition of “lobbyist”.

This detail is so bizarre that we should dwell on it for a moment. In the original proposed ordinance, SMPOA and the Firefighters Org are explicitly named as lobbyists, and no other organization is named. It’s such an inflammatory way to write the ordinance that it borders on self-sabotage. Who actually chose to explicitly name those two groups? Was it someone who wants the ordinance to pass, or was it someone on staff who actually does not want the ordinance to pass?

I truly have no guesses. It’s just such a lightning rod. Such an unforced error if you actually were fighting for this ordinance to pass. (This may have been removed in the latest draft? it’s hard to tell.)

Mayor Hughson wants to massively pare down the ordinance, and make it so that only councilmembers must report. But that’s not up for discussion, since they can only discuss whether to postpone or not.

Councilmember Baker is clawing out of his skin in frustration, and rightly so. The thing that’s most clearly in his favor is that the proposed legislation uses the language of existing lobbyist policies in surrounding cities. It’s nothing special or onerous. The outsized backlash is more damning than anything else, in the sense of raising my eyebrows and making me wonder what exactly people are trying to hide.

A persistent exchange is one where the someone yelps, “but why? why do we need this when there’s no problem?!” and Baker patiently explains, “We don’t actually know if there’s a problem because it’s all shrouded in secrecy and hidden right now. That’s why we need this.”

Finally it’s time to vote.

Postpone: Scott, Gonzalez, Gleason, Hughson, and Garza all vote to postpone.

Against: Only Derrick and Baker.

Garza gave a very naive speech about how she favors the ordinance, but maybe we can use the next four months to educate people and bring them around.

There is a real point, buried in the flotsam: that paperwork – or the specter of paperwork – will inhibit participation from a largely uninvolved batch of citizens. Behavior is shaped by gentle nudges, and if you’ve vaguely heard that there’s red tape surrounding making contact with council, it could easily dissuade a mostly-checked-out community member from speaking up when there’s an issue that actually does affect them. That would be a worthwhile discussion to hold.

However, postponing discussion is how you drown legislation in the bathtub, and this move is not happening in good faith. But that’s what it is. I told you it was anticlimactic.