“Public trust comes first,” Mayor Gerard Hudspeth proclaimed at the Aug. 15 council work session.
Sara Hensley, who became city manager in March 2022 after serving as interim for a year, has stressed that transparency with the community is of utmost importance.
One important way for the city and the City Council to be transparent and build public trust is through the agenda committee. It’s a committee that consists of the mayor, the mayor pro tem and the city manager and serves as a valuable function for city government for several reasons.
It’s one of only two routes that Denton City Council members have of getting items on an agenda for council discussion. The other route is a two-minute pitch during the council’s work sessions.
As council member Paul Meltzer, the former mayor pro tem, explains, it allows the city and council an opportunity to get fresh eyes on the meeting agenda before it goes to the public. For example, Meltzer said it keeps them from ending up with having an important topic not posted for the council to give direction.
“And secondly, and even more importantly, it’s an opportunity for the mayor and the mayor pro tem to make sure the priorities of council are getting due focus amid the many, many obligatory things staff must do, to ensure that there are goals and deadlines so that those priorities will come before council within an acceptable timeframe,” Meltzer said.
Since early April, the city of Denton’s agenda committee hasn’t been meeting to review and approve the agenda before it’s posted on Fridays, even though it’s required by the city code. In fact, the next time the agenda committee is scheduled to meet to review and approve the council’s agenda is in early September.
Section 2-29 of the city code says of the council agenda: “The order of business of each meeting shall be as contained in the agenda prepared by the city manager, which shall be reviewed and approved by an agenda committee composed of the mayor, the mayor pro-tem, and the city manager.”
Instead, Hensley has been posting the agenda without the official review or approval of the committee.
“While it goes on to say that the agenda shall be reviewed and approved by the agenda committee, past practice informs the interpretation of the rule,” Chief of Staff Ryan Adams said in an Aug. 17 email to the Denton Record-Chronicle. “In this case, the long-standing practice has been that, when the agenda committee is unable to meet, the City Manager’s agenda is brought forward to the Council at the meeting.
“Additionally, if an agenda item arises after the Agenda Committee meeting, the City Manager will add that item to the City Council agenda,” Adams said in a previous email.
Adams said the agenda committee usually meets on the first Thursday of the month and couldn’t meet for five months due to scheduling conflicts and the Independence Day holiday.
This year’s July Fourth holiday fell on a Tuesday, two days before the committee would have been scheduled to meet.
Last year, the agenda committee canceled only two of the 12 meetings scheduled, one in February and the other in October, according to the city’s public meetings webpage.
“My understanding is it’s due to scheduling conflicts, but not from me,” Mayor Pro Tem Brian Beck said in an Aug. 15 email. “I’ve been available for all scheduled times. I’m not precisely sure who or what was the source of any conflicts, though my cursory (and therefore perhaps wrong) understanding is that staff have generally been available.”
This isn’t the first time that scheduling conflicts may have plagued the agenda committee.
According to the city’s public meeting website, the first six months of 2021 when Hudspeth took over as mayor shows nothing but cancellation notices for the agenda committee meeting. Committee members had 24 meetings scheduled for the year but met for only seven of them.
There were 40 meetings scheduled in 2020 when council member Chris Watts was mayor. After they met for seven of them earlier that year, the cancellation notices began appearing online in March when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. They continued until the end of the year.
The agenda committee didn’t meet for seven of the 37 meetings scheduled under Watts’ tenure in 2019. Those cancellations happened periodically throughout the year, with three of them occurring in November.
In 2018, also under Watts’ tenure, there were no agenda committee meetings canceled out of the 34 scheduled, according to the city’s website. One of those meetings occurred on a Thursday, two days after the July Fourth holiday.
And while city code stipulates that the agenda committee is supposed to review and approve the agenda before posting it, Adams said the agenda committee decided in July 2021 to meet only on a monthly basis.
“When meeting once per month, the committee will typically review the draft agendas for multiple upcoming meetings,” Adams said.
Yet, those agendas often change before they’re posted, as council members have pointed out.
Adams wouldn’t confirm whether it was Hensley or Hudspeth who has been canceling the meetings. Hudspeth didn’t respond to a request for comment.
When the agenda committee does meet, Adams said that typically the city manager’s staff, the city auditor and city attorney will attend the meeting, which he said only lasts about an hour, to answer any questions that may come up regarding the agenda.
In his Aug. 15 email, Beck echoed what Adams said and pointed out that the committee meets with city staff to review the schedules, identify any confusing elements and ask for clarification as well as accelerate, decelerate or add items to the agenda.
“This process has been hampered by not meeting, in my opinion,” Beck said. “I’ve reached out to senior staff to emphasize that we skip no more agenda committee meetings, regardless of the conflicts, as I personally believe it may be impacting prioritization and review.”