$60,000 "fee in lieu of landscaping" question

This has always been a rule in the UDC since 2018 to allow industrial only to pay a fee in lieu for trees for up to 50%. If my memory serves this money came from the concrete industrial customer that moved to off of 130 back in I think 2020. It came to P&Z when I was on that board and it passed there and then was approved by you and the rest of council after that. One could argue that by council approving the fee to plant trees elsewhere is basically tacit approval for staff to plant trees at Arbor day. The process then is for the developer to get 3 bids on how much it would cost to place trees on their site and then P&Z approves the fee amount based on that bid process.   In this case, I am pretty sure it was the middle bid that came in at 45k. Also council has directed that the fee goes into the parkland improvement fund. This fee is only paid to essentially allow an industrial development to pay to plant trees somewhere else in the city. As such I can see your point, but following the UDC, that fee can and should only be spent on trees/ irrigation because the fee is not to do what we want with it as you suggest above but to ensure we are still putting trees somewhere in the city. Based on my thinking, this fee that comes in rarely and only for industrial development should be encumbered to tree plantings only. If the developer was not doing the fee then those trees would have been placed on the industrial site. I agree that before something is spent that is not budgeted we need to have approval as a council even if we later add it officially in the mid-year budget update.   Lastly, now that P&Z only handles platting council did not see the one in Oct 2021, which was from Titan that had a bid process of 60K.  In future all budgets going forward staff should just have an encumbered line item for tree plantings that come from the UDC industrial fees from the previous year that will auto carry forward until Parks uses those funds for trees thus negating the need to council to even consider it because it will then be handled as a streamlined spec that conforms to the UDC intent for tree plantings.  This is why my motto is follow a spec or change a spec. The city manager and the current CFO have created new approval checks so this can't happen again. As long as we keep increasing the expectations and processes we will continue to show continuous improvement.

 Councilmember Clark, the statement "One could argue that by council approving the fee to plant trees elsewhere is basically tacit approval for staff to plant trees at Arbor day", scares me to death!  Fees collected per  UDC Sec. 10.407.5.1.3, go to the Park Improvement Fund.  No where does it say that you collect fees for trees and spend the money on trees.

Where in the UDC is this at "This has always been a rule in the UDC since 2018 to allow industrial only to pay a fee in lieu for trees for up to 50%."  I know of the above UDC Sec. 10.407.5.1.3.  It doesn't specifiy Industrial.  Section 10.407 is just landscaping.  It doesn't sound like you understand the code or are remembering it correctly.

Does this mean that when staff collects $1,000,000 in traffic impact fees that that gives staff "tacit approval" to go spend $1.0M on a road somewhere?

Mayor Pro-Tem Gordon, "I fail to see how that was not an appropriate use of funds", to me, it is ONLY appropriate, IF it is in the budget AND approved by City Council.  And, as with Councilmember Clark "$55k was spent planting and maintaining trees using money that was collected through the UDC for the purpose of planting and maintaining trees."  WHERE in code does this say anything like this??


*****UDC 10.407.5.1.13 STATES ""In some instances, site constraints make it impossible to plant the minimum required amount of trees.  The Planning and Zoning Commission may authorize up to a 50% reduction in the required tree

planting with a fee in lieu with tree planting is shown to not be feasible or practical. These fees will be paid to the City of Hutto and held in the Parks Improvement Fund.""***


So, reading this code, how are you all coming up with what you stated below?  No mention of having to plant trees.  It only talks about collect $$ from not planting trees.  No mention of Industrial uses.

Are you all ready this incorrectly on purpose?  Or are you all really believing what you are writing?  And, if you believe what you are writing, then why do we have a City Council?  We have 2 jobs.  Manage the City Manager and manage the money.  And we spend a lot of time fighting about why we shouldn't manage the money or why we should trust others to manage the money.  Basically, we don't want to do our job.  We want to trust someone else to do our job.

The fact that the unapproved spending went to a legitimate project is certainly much better than if it went to something completely out of bounds, but it doesn't really make the overall problem much better. And, while it may be a good idea to restrict use of funds like the fee in lieu of planting to specific purposes, that restriction still doesn't authorize spending those funds until budgeted and/or approved by council. (The "or" case requiring council to accept that a future budget amendment will address it.)

We just had the situation where we needed a budget amendment to fit in a salary and position study that was already budgeted. Part of the reason for the amendment was spending on a different item that wasn't in the budget. I recall hearing that the city had found a better EAP plan for this year. That's great, EAP is a benefit some people may not be aware of, but when you need it, it's a lifesaver if the help you need is part of the plan. The problem there is I don't recall anyone saying the new EAP plan was going to cost $15,000 more than budgeted. Or that the difference was going to come out of a fund that would then hamper our ability to do the salary and position study that was specifically requested in the budget. (If I'm wrong and there was discussion of the increased amount required, please point me at the agenda item where it was discussed. But, if there was, then we failed as a council to ask questions to identify the downstream effect of pulling that money from the appropriation we had planned for the study. Staff could have flagged this too, and hopefully would, but the responsibility to ask those questions falls on us, not on staff.)

Accepting each one as an isolated incident is harder to do as we find additional incidents.

To be clear, I'm not looking to "micromanage the Parks Department on how many trees to plant and where".

BUT, I am looking to have a conversation on was $55,000 on trees and irrigation, the BEST use of the money??  Was the improvements done in an area that will NOT be redone with some of our upcoming park updates??  We have a long history of dropping money on projects, only to come back in a couple of years and tear it all out.  At a HUGE waste of taxpayer money.  The sidewalks along Limmer/1660 and the lift station by the 9th grade center are the two most recent examples.

So, I do agree that we "set the vision".  What is our vision of the Parks?  I don't know of one and when I brought up the lack of investment in them at the budget meeting, it wasn't a big deal.

We "manage the money" by approving a budget and tax rate.  Agree?  So, if we set the tax rate to be $0.421980, we expect that to be the rate, right?  We wouldn't let the City Manager come back AFTER we approved the rate and have a different rate.  Same with the budget.  So, if we approve a budget, only to have people break the budget, then seriously, WHY APPROVE THE BUDGET??  We are wasting our time if no one is going to follow it.

Which brings me up to the Charter.  There is a process for when someone spends money that wasn't approved.  So, are we going to follow the Charter?  Or give another pass?  We "Trust but Verify".  So, I've verified and the City Manager has verified, that the Charter was NOT followed and money was spent that was NOT approved.  So, what are the consequences for this?  This isn't the first time, nor the second, nor the third.  It is a constant, repeating issue.

I'm not looking for praise or anything for pressing this.  I'm actually tired of being the only person outraged that money just gets spent with no regard for what the City Council approved.

If staff cut our pay in 1/2, someone on City Council would balk at that.  It seems that people only worry about the money when it is in THEIR best interest.  I'm up on the Dias to approve a budget and make damn certain that the people tasked with spending the money do so as it was approved.  Now, does that mean that things come up and we should hammer someone for the unexpected?  No sir.  But, someone should have come to the City Council before the 2nd restroom payment was made and said, "hey City Council, we need to amend the budget, we forgot about this" or something like that.  $15000 in trees and $40,000 in irrigation for those trees?  That is worth a conversation because I can't believe that $40,000 was spent to keep trees living.  I mean, dang man, they were planted in the fall and that is a hell of a lot of irrigation $$.  

Approach works two ways.  We can be so soft that as one person has said on Council "One could argue that by council approving the fee to plant trees elsewhere is basically tacit approval for staff to plant trees at Arbor day.", which by the way to me is a complete dereliction of duty as a Councilmember or we can stand for following the Charter and the budget.

If we had more Councilmembers expecting people to follow budgets, you'd have a lot less howling from me.  But when all I hear is "we need to continue improving our budget process", like something is broke, when in fact the policies are fine, the enforcement of the policies is the problem, then you'll continue to see me pressing the issue.

We can't give out better pay and benefits if we go over budget each year.  Well run companies, that don't have LAYOFFS (I've personally worked for such a company for almost 30yrs that has never had a layoff), are run by following budgets and being conservative.  I'm never going to allow a repeat of 2020.  But, if each department goes over budget $100 or $200k each year, that is over $1,000,000 dollars.

Lastly, I'm of the opinion, that City Hall needs to start working on where to cut spending to make up for the overspend.  The Parks item is separate as it came out of a dedicated fund.  And, people should know that the person in the Parks Department FOLLOWED the rules by asking executives what to do.  As I understand it, the CFO said "go ahead and I'll do a budget amendment later".  Well, that is a scary comment to hear that we had a CFO who just flippantly allows money to be spent to get a budget amendment later.  I mean, what happens if we don't approve the amendment?  Money is already spent.  Too late.  Luckily, this was $100k.

Remember when the City spent $8,000,000 in unapproved money?  Borrowed $4,000,000 in unapproved money?  What's the penalty?  "We'll do better"?  Not working for this guy.  Following the Charter always works for me.