by JONATHAN YORK
The August heat was at its worst, and Lanny Lambert kept hearing that a developer was letting water run into the street.
You can’t water the pavement under Kyle’s rationing laws, and Lambert, the city manager, was sick of hearing about it. After all, the company had let this happen five times.
“Give ’em a ticket,” he told the building official, Mario Perez.
“We can’t,” Perez said. The code enforcement officer wasn’t authorized to write tickets.
“I’ve never seen that,” Lambert said, relating the exchange at a City Council meeting last month. “The code enforcement officer’s always had tickets wherever I’ve been city manager.”
So he sent the police.
Lambert was asking the council to pass a law allowing city inspectors to write water-violation tickets. That wasn’t a good use of police time, he said. They seemed to agree with that.
“We’ve got an understaffed police department, and if we can take a little more work off their backs and give it to the code enforcement officers, that’s a great thing,” said Councilman Russ Huebner.
But the proposed law would also have allowed an inspector to write tickets for such nuisances as junked cars and overgrown lots. And council members were not in any rush to give those powers away.
Instead, they sent the proposal to the public safety committee, which met the week before last.
“We totally agree with the ordinance to allow the code enforcement officer to write those citations,” Kyle Police Chief Jeff Barnett said at that meeting.
Lupe Gil, who could actually be writing these tickets, asked the chief about basic detective work: how do you prove that someone is doing something when you don’t catch him in the act?
Barnett explained that she could talk to witnesses, gather evidence and prepare a file for municipal court.
Battalion Chief Mike Vasil of the Kyle Fire Department said, “No, you can’t carry a gun.”
Someone else joked, “At least not that you can see.”
And the committee agreed to recommend that the council let her write tickets. (The council is expected to revisit the issue in December).
Lambert expects to see more water-use violations. Last week’s morning storm was strong, but it was brief next to the predictions for the drought, which the state climatologist has said could go on for a decade. He continues to believe the proposal would make city government more effective.
