This past Thursday, Friday and Saturday, I attended my first Lewisville City Council Retreat - a yearly event where our City Council and City Manager and Staff meet to discuss our local issues in much more detail than they normally would have time for.
There were two sessions on Thursday night that I wasn't able to attend, but these were covered by Council candidate (and fellow blogger) TJ Gilmore in his live-blog of the meeting. My Thursday night video sucked because I was missing my tripod mount and had a crappy angle. But my video from Friday and Saturday turned out remarkably well.
I should note that I shot all of this video in HD, but I compressed it down in order to more quickly post it online. If anyone wants an HD copy of any of this, just bring me a thumb drive or CD-R
Thursday Night
(Thursday's Videos were poor quality because of no tripod - sorry!)
My Thoughts: I think our department does very well by hiring well, but I want the police response times to be much quicker than 7:39 for a Priority 1 call. I think we need to give the Chief enough budget to begin adding officers that would get us to at least a 50/50 level of committed vs. uncommitted time in our patrol division. We need to be creative in how we do this - maybe thinking about adding a Reserve Officer program, or raising taxes enough to support more officers. (1/8th cent sales tax for a crime control district is one option)
Friday Morning
Friday Afternoon's Sessions were Closed sessions to discuss economic development
My thoughts: At some point, when citizens are able to proactively check their own status and correct problems on their own, maybe E-Verify can be used as a screening tool. But not today. Until there is wider spread adoption we might hinder our ability to get enough bids on our projects. I support Lathan Watts' idea to put a question on our bid documents asking whether a company has been found in violation of IRCA in the past 5 years. If they have, they can't bid. If they get caught lying, we can cancel the contract with penalties. All of that said, I think we need to research this and see what percentage of our current contractors have this problem. I also think this should be something that staff has some discretion in, since we may need to come up with alternatives if we can't find bidders for our projects.
My Thoughts I support recording all meetings, if for no other purpose than for documentation that any citizen can download and view. As you can see with these recordings, the quality is not TV quality, but it's enough for you to watch and see what's going on with your city. More thoughts on videotaping...
My thoughts: I support moving Western Day(s) to a two-day instead of one-day event. If we step it up and focus our efforts on it, we could turn it into a money-maker for the city. I support compressing the events for Holiday at the Hall, and cutting some costs in order to do it.
As far as Fourth of July fireworks, I understand that we spend a lot of money on something that essentially just goes up on smoke. But it's an opportunity every year for people to come outside, get out their lawn chairs, and get to know their neighbors and fellow citizens. I'm open to the idea of moving it to the lake, if adequate parking can be proven. I'd hate to see this be cut in a bad year, because of the psychological effect on our citizens. Times are tough, indeed - but killing this would just add to the despair and shake people's confidence. If we decide to kill it, we should do so quietly in a good year, and make it known that we're just shifting the money to another event.
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Musical Interlude - Cross-Canadian Ragweed
