Mertzon City Council Meeting November 3 2025

Agenda Analysis | Meeting Review | Meeting Documents | Commentary | Last Meeting

REMEMBER TO VOTE ON NOVEMBER 4

A contractor for the new cafeteria at IC ISD, overseen by Gallagher Construction, continues to add caliche in the City’s right of way on 4th Street known to flood.

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A. Agenda Analysis

1. Ordinance 1.05, item 5: This appears to be “new business” for the Council. I’ll report more after the meeting. Today we think of the word “ordinance” as municipal made law. The Oxford English Dictionary, however, claims the first evidence of its use was in The Statutes of the Realm, laws of the English Parliament, before 1325.

2. Everything else: The remainder of the agenda is the Council’s stock agenda.

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Aerial of the caliche piles, circled in red. The top center and right is where the old elementary and gym once stood. Bids for the new construction at that location were approved by the IC ISD board on October 27, 2025.

B. Meeting Review

1. Here are the meeting documents.
   

2. Ordinance 1.05, item 5: This ordinance was approved by the Council. It's significance is that it modernizes the City's previous ordinances about how an ordinance becomes law. As required by the Local Government Code at 52.011, also page 5 of the meeting documents, ordinances that impose a financial penalty, fine or forfeiture have to be published in a local newspaper for a period of days.

   What happens in the situation where the Council approves an ordinance that doesn't relate to a penalty, fine or forfeiture? Section 52.011 is silent about that, and that is interpreted to mean that the Council can pass an ordinance with a simple majority vote and it can become law without publication in a newspaper. An example of an ordinance that arguably doesn't have to be published is one where the City closes a street or alley, as I argue in my Meeting Review at B 3 at this meeting and at Meeting Review at B 2 of this meeting. To make this abundantly clear, and to highlight my arguments at Alley Oops where I contend that the closure of 4th Street and the alley for City Gym were unlawfully done because there the City did not pass an ordinance, below is Ordinance 4.01 relating to the July 2025 closure of an alley:

   
   

   

   Closing a street or alley requires an ordinance like this one. The City did not do an ordinance when it gave up 4th Street and an alley for a new gym.

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Here’s an example of a best practice of using an erosion fence around a pile of caliche on sloped pavement at a mall in Austin. The concept is simple - the fence holds the caliche in so that stormwater doesn’t wash it onto the pavement.

C. Commentary

1. Laws, as imperfect as they often are, often help us maintain order and protect both public and private property. Municipal made law, ordinances like 1.05 and 4.01, are the backbone of the proper functioning of city government. Citizens have a right to know how their law is made, and they have the right to expect that it will be applied fairly among all citizens. The City and Irion County ISD were both aware that state law required an ordinance to close 4th Street and the alley at the time. I told them about the law. But their elected leaders at the time chose to ignore it. One consequence of ignoring that law is the worsening of our urban flooding.

The grading of the parking area at the new IC ISD transportation facility was completed last week. Parkhill’s design folks have designed the slope so that the majority of the stormwater will run down a City owned alley, marked in red. My PIA requests indicate that they have done so without any consultation with the City.

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Copyright 2025 G. Noelke