More Milestones

No matter how cold the winter or how dry the spring, in this part of West Texas each March you can count on the native Agarita bush to bloom. I've taken to occasionally watering the ones behind the gravestones of my Great Great Grandparents, Alice and Ferdinand Noelke, in the Mertzon Cemetery.

As I wrote twelve months ago, I recognize two anniversaries each year in March. This website and my advocacy efforts to end the storm water flooding in my community are a year older. Government in the Sun has been online now for 2 years. And, I've now been working to end stormwater flooding in my community for 9 years.

"Democracy does not race, it reaches the finish slowly but surely," said German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear," said George Orwell. These two ideas capture the slow, steady and frank direction of my efforts in these pages this past year. Here are a few statistics for the year. I wrote 53 posts in the last twelve months. (There are now 140 posts total on the site.) Of those 53, the vast majority covered Irion County ISD Board meetings and Mertzon City Council meetings. Each post this year involved 1 to 3+ hours of attending the meeting, and another 2 to 4 hours of writing and analysis. Each post about an IC ISD Board meeting also involved a Public Information Act request each month to Dr. Nikki Moore, Superintendent. (I address her, and other superintendents, as "Superintendent" in these pages for historical convenience.) Each of those requests required 15-25 hours of writing, analysis and legal research.

There were 3,755 post views of the entire site this last year. The top two most viewed pages were this post about former Athletic Director Jacob Conner and this post mostly about the IC ISD budget.

I continue to manage the site entirely on my own. I have no staff, no editor (though on occasion I've used Chat GPT as an editor to tighten things up) and I do my own photography, including drone shots. I receive no subscription or advertising fees. The site itself has never been about earning an income, though my advocacy effort has certainly been about ceasing the economic damage to my property, my neighbors' property and the public property we all share and pay for with our taxes.

I continue to avoid using social media to promote the site. I'm not interested in the anonymous swipes and extra grief that it will bring my way. Thankfully, fewer folks this past year have trolled me. This might be because my practice is to not engage in debate with folks who want to argue anonymously. (That would be anti-sun, maybe even cloudy.) My intent is to create a record of simultaneously supporting local government and public education, while at the same time being critical of it. If you are reading these posts as if I am a "hater" of government then you likely are misunderstanding me. The most important accomplishment for me this past year has been that my presence at public meetings and this blog have played some role in getting IC ISD and Irion County voters to dedicate over $800,000 of the 2024 bond funds to stormwater management. The Mertzon City Council has also been more proactive on flood issues than ever before. Their MOU with IC ISD is an example of their resolve to remedy flooding issues that have for too long been ignored. This also says a lot about the positive character of the leadership at IC ISD and the City, Supt. Moore and Mayor Aubrey Stewart.

At the same time, the last 12 months have seen other factors at play initiating change. There is no doubting that the free market drive to get a piece of the tremendous ad valorem wealth of Irion County was one factor in the dedication of the IC ISD bond dollars to stormwater management. I wrote this year that there were still some on the IC ISD Board not wanting address stormwater flooding, and more likely it was Parkhill and Gallagher, the design and construction team, who initiated the change of direction. Private companies earning their way with public dollars want no part of construction projects that flood homes, and they especially don't want the reputation of helping government flood itself. It's bad business, isn't it, to live off of the public dollar while helping destroy government by flooding it? They don't want either the hit to their business reputation or the potential legal liability. Governmental immunity is not a sure bet when the dangers are so well known, as I've also written here and here.

That said, since the previous IC ISD board, superintendent, athletic director, contractor and architect knew about the flooding before/during/after the previous bond (2019) build out and still made the flooding worse, I am compelled this upcoming year to continue to write about the construction at IC ISD. I continue to believe that citizens who sit on their hands when there is this much money involved ($18 million in 2019 and $53 million in 2024) will have their homes washed down to Spring Creek. Here's my post about the school bond industrial complex, perhaps instructive on my point that our community is but a drop in an ocean of money and special interests. In short, I fear our community is getting played, and there may be hell to pay for local taxpayers when we no longer have the income to afford to pay for all these school buildings and their maintenance.

So, expect more posts about the construction at IC ISD in the upcoming 12 months. I would rather spend my time feeding the deer up on Cowboy Hill or biking down on the border. But, Irion County News (on Facebook) and The Irion County Newsletter (monthly, available locally only in paper) are not enough of a 4th Estate to challenge IC ISD and the City of Mertzon to do the right thing and be a good neighbor. And, that's really what I've been asking in these pages.

Be a good neighbor.

I also anticipate posting more documents from my monthly PIA requests to IC ISD. Of course, I will also continue to attend City Council and Board meetings. Time permitting, I will attend County Commissioner meetings. The County to date has been absent on flooding issues, but it may become an flood actor as it moves to rebuild the Community Center this year and next. IC ISD's football stadium is in the direct path of the County's stormwater runoff, so the time is closer to seeing whether there is yet another chapter in this government flooding itself story. This year I have also asked the County to be responsible about flooding issues. I will also continue inserting some commentary here and there about state and federal government in the upcoming year. For example, I recently opined that the federal efforts to abolish DEI was really a bullying effort to create public dissent because our President wants to declare Martial Law. I'm not going to ignore what I consider seismic changes currently taking place in our democratic system. As a lawyer by profession, I have a unique opportunity - and I think responsibility - in these pages to preserve the representative democracy currently under attack. And, let me be clear as I start up the next 12 months - I do believe our constitutional foundation is being challenged like never before.

Thank you for reading these pages the last 12 months. “The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself - always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.” President Jimmy Carter

Enduring 10 -15 degree temperatures in January and no rain since mid-December, this Agarita still found a way to bloom this March.

Copyright 2025 G Noelke