08.17.07

Judge Gatttis, Commissioners Court, Playing Games At Meeting

Posted in Commissioners Court, Bad Government Republicans, Landfill, T. Don Hutto, Williamson County at 12:56 pm by wcnews

I received this report via email:

Tuesday’s (Aug. 14) meeting of the Williamson County Commissioners Court was one of the most bizarre sessions ever witnessed:

After posting an initial agenda on the county’s website the previous Thursday which listed public comments and action on the landfill issue as the first item on the agenda after the uncontested items, the county distributed a hard-copy agenda on Tuesday morning which removed the landfill from its top spot and pushed it to the very end of the agenda. People planning to arrive at the 9:30 start time, make their comments and then leave (to go to work, for example) faced a difficult choice. The agenda item involving the T. Don Hutto prison controversy also was at the very end of the agenda, but Judge Dan Gattis moved that item to the very beginning—to the public comments section—so people who planned to arrive in mid-meeting to comment on the prison contract at the end of the meeting got there too late. (It gets worse.) As commissioners proceeded through the agenda, Gattis saw some landfill-interested citizens leave the hall to prepare comments for the landfill item at the end of the agenda, so at that point he moved the landfill item forward immediately, apparently hoping to get through it before the landfill-interested citizens could return. (He was unsuccessful—they returned in time to comment.) THEN, he announced that the previously-announced date for voting on the landfill contract (Aug. 28) was being changed to Aug. 21, and that on Aug. 21 he would allow NO PUBLIC COMMENT on the landfill.

On August 7, when people were signing the sheet to speak on the landfill, the sheet noted that they would each have three minutes to comment. After several had signed up, WilCo PIO Connie Watson pulled down that sheet and replaced it with a sheet that said people would have two minutes in which to make comments, and she asked everyone to start over and sign that sheet instead of the other one.

Who’s on first?

Very nice. Is this what Judge Gattis meant when he campaigned on his,”..dedication to always upholding the principles of honesty and integrity at each turn”?

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