Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, January 11, 2011,
Citizens Communication
Citizens communication is first, this item gives residents an opportunity to address the court on any matter not on the agenda.
any matter not on the agenda for up to three minutes.
kevin mcdonald is here for the item no.
4, right?
>> I'm not here for any item on the agenda.
>> all right.
then you are the first speaker.
the second one is gus pena.
the third one is ronnie reeferseed.
are you ready.
>> yes, sir.
>> my name is kevin mcdonald, I'm president of the board of esd 4.
our budget for 2011 is about 2.5 million, we have a surplus with the same amount in unencumbered reserve funds.
we accomplished this despite annexations that removed more than half of our tax rolls.
they are eroding the bases of other Travis County esd's that what have no experience dealing with the problems causing annexations, the challenges are increasing and it's going to get messy, the mission of every esd is the protection of life and property.
esd boards make life and death decision.
an esd board is not a garden club or neighborhood association.
they cannot afford members that need on-the-job training who polish their resumes, who engage in political networking or personal profiteering.
they must be mature, solid individuals, fire, e.m.s.
experience helps, they must have experience in budgeting, contracts, state bureaucracies, Texas health and safety code and construction methods, even.
if esd boards are not chosen carefully to balance these skill sets, they will fail.
we have an esd in Travis County whose audit revealed more than $100,000 unaccounted for.
where employees ran personal businesses from fire stations.
where massive piles of official public records were destroyed in blatant violation of state law.
where ghost employees were hired.
equipment was stolen and credit cards were used for personal expenses.
now we have another esd that is bankrupt.
and other well managed esds are being asked to solve that problem.
I'm told this bankrupt esd's audit for 2009 is nearly a year overdue.
under state law that is grounds for the removal of that entire board.
nine of the 13 esds in Travis County have not had new iso rating for five to 12 years.
this means that emergency services in most of those 13 esds in Travis County have not substantially improved in the last five to 12 years and that taxpayers in those esds have been paying 20 to 40% more for homeowners insurance than they would otherwise.
the solution to this problem is the creation of a single county-wide esd, you've heard that from me before, that would raise professionalism, create economies of scale and propose a single efficient chain of command and could better absorb annexations than 13 small esd's.
fire chiefs and some Commissioners in Travis County have tried to address this problem from an operational approach with innovative ideas like shared management and a patchwork of automatic aid agreements.
I support those efforts, but they are band-aids not solutions and they don't yield the benefits of a single county wide esd, creating such an esd will require a legislative act and support from each one of you.
I think you need to become better acquainted with what esd's do and make better appointments to esd boards.
I propose we create an independent task force to audit every esd in Travis County.
to inspect their records, examine their budgets and analyze their response times, verify their compliance with state and federal standards and assess their effectiveness and report back to you what they find.
our fire chiefs, firefighters and e.m.s.
responders are doing splendid work, but many of them have been failed by their esd Commissioners.
I served eight years as a firefighter and else responder, e.m.s.
responder, the last
>> [indiscernible] years as a board president.
after 25 years I thought you might endure three, maybe three and a half minutes of candidiasesment.
if you don't like what I said you can replacement.
>> thank you, mr. Mcdonald.
>> I'm determined to see Travis County residents get the best fire and e.m.s.
service their tax dollars can provide.
I hope you are, too.
thank you.
>> thank you.
>> gus pena.
>> good morning, judge.
Commissioners, gus pena.
first of all, I would like to thank e.m.s.
for the outstanding work they provide, the 70s they provide to -- the service they provide to the people, usually the Austin police department or fire department that get the accolades, but the e.m.s.
is hardly recognized by everyone.
I want to recognize them very much.
anyway, b back in -- my dad was born, if you mexican american citizens, hispanics, whatever we call ourselves now know that the political movement was started in crystal city.
it wasn't started at corpus christi, it was started in crystal city.
my dad brought it to Austin, Texas in 1928, started the east fifth area and here I am, he was fighting for education, equality, et cetera.
here we are fighting for the lives of our students who want to attend pre-k at Austin independent school district and throughout the state of Texas.
the school board yesterday proposed to cut pre-k.
what a catastrophic, irresponsible thing to do to our kids.
I'm a former educator.
I taught english as a second language as a federal eso instructor under the 1986 immigration reform and control act when millions became temporary and permanent resident citizens.
this is not acceptable, judge.
I know that you serve on the community action network, I know that you have a good heart.
you know when we speak of this coming from the community, we cannot afford to loose the pre-k system for our kids, we are trying to capture the minds and hearts, become productive members of our society, sending a bad message to our community.
please join the effort to retain pre-k.
it's vital, necessary.
please support your -- I'm sorry, please show your support and appreciation for all of our military personnel that have served in harm's way, iraq, afghanistan, repeat ptsd, I told you last week, 29 veterans are dying each week of suicide.
they need suicide prevention, treatment, ptsd treatment, job training, housing.
they need our support and our love and appreciation.
nobody likes war.
you know, somebody has to do it.
nobody likes war, I don't like it, I don't support it.
but I don't support my military veterans.
I'm a veteran of the united states marine corps serving during vietnam.
the last thing that I wanted to say is judge and Commissioners, dropout prevention truancy, reduction, mentor, tutors funding is going to be cut to the legislature.
budget shortfall.
I'm seeing 30 million.
I spoke to the state senators, representative just Friday, closer to 34 billion to balance the budget.
I do have a friend and I'm a democrat, but speaker of the house joe straws is going to be reelected.
democrats, republicans, everybody, other parties, we need people to work with each other, not divide each other.
it's going to be a catastrophic session this legislative session.
judge, Commissioners, I'm going to leave it at that, but please show support for your veterans, god bless you all f.
society's worth is measured as the treatment of less fortunate, I will wrap it up, I was titled the youth and senior citizen advocate.
we need to show our appreciation to help officer seniors who pave the way for us.
god bless you, have a good day.
>> ronnie reeferseed is next, followed by
>> [indiscernible] howell.
>> thank you, gus, ronnie reeferseed expressing deep sadness and we all lost a great job who had the wisdom and guts to stand up and the brave patriot ms. Giffords who was one of the few who truly loves protecting our sacred constitution.
this shocking was the senseless murder of that nine-year-old girl for whom her farther, mr. Green, warned us to not allow this horror to take away any more constitutionally guaranteed rights because he knew his daughter would feel the same way.
not on peep from our main stream media of crooks and schemers who instead chose to milk this tragedy with catch phrases and slogans, quote, never let a crisis go to waste, close quote.
remember that slogan rahm emanuel spewed that.
this does not mean the american people suddenly want to surrender our priceless constitution to the globalists, or to the ultraviolent mexican drug cartels.
I predict here now just the opposite.
every day u.s.
citizens are realizing the counter productive futility of our stupidly ongoing war on hemp enthusiasts an family farms. Absolute freedom is the key.
defending organized criminals drug thugs by instead granting absolute freedom here at home to faltering family farmers to grow whatever without restrictions like peanuts, tobacco, hemp, marijuana, et cetera.
absolute freedom for family farmers is the key to keeping all of our freedoms according to me.
maybe of our founding fathers grew hemp marijuana like thomas jefferson, and others, george washington both grew it and smoked it.
look into it.
I object evidentably our jails are -- inevitably our jails are filled with violent people drunk on alcohol, meanwhile there are non-violent hemp offenders.
what a waste of peaceful taxpayers, what a waste of innocent taxpayer dollars.
we cannot afford to keep this hog wash anymore.
to learn more please visit infowars.com.
for learned articles, films and more.
also visit ronpaul.org, lewrockwell.com.
also visit www.americanfreepress.org for a sampling from our nation's greatest newspaper.
call 800 triple 8 for weekly updates for founding fathers channeled through dr. Paul's weekly updates.
keep learning, take nothing for granted.
celebrate life every day, come to your senses to stop killing any babies for any reason, including, of course, the unborn, iraqi babies, palestinian babies, afghanistan -- afghani babies, somali, iranian babies, stop the killing.
>> thank you, pick howell is next, followed by a.r.
martinez.
>> judge, Commissioners, as you may be aware, on November 17th, the lcra board voted to sell all its water and wastewater utilities, basically 32 different systems that range from matagorda bay up through burnet county.
there is a group or a coalition of affected parties that got together last week and tried to identify a way to deal with this.
for the municipalities, the worse case scenario would be that they actually lose a bonds rating because a water system that serves them, they no longer have any control over the rates.
our best -- or best case they would have to go to tceq for a rate case if a private entity owned that system.
so for the municipality that I represent, the city of Leander and in discussion with the other affected parties, there was a petition that was developed.
some of the points briefly in it, were -- were the deadline for negotiation was set at 60 days from November 17th.
as you might imagine, negotiation of a multi-million dollar system would be somewhat problematic within that period of time.
we're asking that that deadline be extended at least to the end of the year because there's some of these systems that probably don't cash flow.
they were originally purchased and -- and improved by the lcra because they were perhaps polluting a lake or a river or what have you.
and so it was actually the right thing for them to do at that time, but from the standpoint of just those customers paying for their system, their rates would -- you know, double or quadruple in some cases.
I think the lcra feels like by selling the entire package, that some of that can be absorbed by what would be the cherries out of that group, such as westlake or Leander or the city of elgin.
but in fact it would definitely raise the rates of everybody involved.
so what we're hoping to do through this coalition is to slow down the sale, to give the affected parties opportunity to put together perhaps their own purchase plan, so they can at least maintain their control and therefore their predetermination of rates over time.
and we feel like we'll reach a better agreement
>> [buzzer sounding] for both the lcra and for the affected parties.
I encourage you to adopt this petition.
if at all possible.
I have a copy of it here and then also the original press release.
from the lcra if you need this.
>> thank you.
>> thank you very much.
>> mr. Artimes.
ms. ?
>> yes.
okay.
>> I have presented to -- to county judge samuel Biscoe a two-page document.
the first is an e-mail thread.
now, I went to your office and one of your staff people, using a county computer, went to the Travis County website to subscribe me on the automated subscription system so that I could be appraised of the upcoming Commissioners court meetings.
as you can see an auto responder sent out Monday December 20th at 4:28 p.m., it says two ways to subscribe, just reply with your name or apply -- reply anonymous.
and you can see that on December 20th after 4:55 p.m., I indeed followed the directions and subscribed with my name, I want everybody on the planet to know who I am, I'm not anonymous, so I followed the directions.
now, on the second page, you will see I got an auto responder to that 4:55 p.m.
reply...
[Due to technical difficulties, the remainder of the Citizens Communication item was not captioned.]
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Tuesday, January, 2011 12:12 PM
