Brittany Kelley
KYLE — Kyle City Council voted to approve a policy requiring staff to post all procurement card receipts online, with redactions, at its Feb. 3 meeting.
Prior to discussing the policy, council approved the first of two readings of an ordinance to eliminate council credit cards and move to a reimbursement-only policy. The presentation specified that this is an interim solution until a compensation committee is established to determine long-term compensation structure.
The creation of the committee, which last convened in 2022, was approved 7-0 by council. In order for the committee to have ample time to discuss changes prior to the start of budget meetings, council will appoint its nominees at the Feb. 17 meeting.
Beginning the presentation regarding the proposed policy to require staff to post credit card expenses and supporting documentation was assistant director of Finance Joshua Chronley.
“I’m going to walk you through a presentation that does just that, but I also felt it was important to provide some background on the staff purchase card program because I think there was some understandable confusion between how staff operate their card program versus the way that council had operated their card program,” said Chronley.
A purchase card is a restricted procurement tool governed by policy and law, he continued. It is not a line of credit, rather it is paid off each month, with each charge directly reflected in the city’s financial statements. These have a single swipe maximum of $3,000 — with monthly limits based on department need — and are used for low dollar, high volume operational needs and reduced administrative workload, which is why they’re used across the state of Texas.
Those eligible to have a card are issued one only with department directors and Finance approval. Additionally, there is a training requirement and a cardholder agreement.
According to the presentation, external and independent oversight is also conducted.
Chronley explained that of the 93 active cards, two are program related — Uber 3.14 and financial services to pay city utilities — and account for 52% of spending. In total, $2,742,885 was spent in fiscal year 2025, which was from October 2024 to September 2025.
“When we look at what was spent on utility bills and the Uber program, that’s about $1.4 million. The remaining amount is $1.3 million,” he explained. “We can break that down further … That $1.3 million happened over about 5,170 transactions, which means that the average monthly transaction was about $254.”
Currently, documentation requirements include: an itemized receipt; business purpose; proper account coding; and missing receipt forms, if needed. Repeated violations will result in suspension, said Chronley.
The new policy requested by council could be one of four options. The first of which is full posting with receipts and redactions.
“One important consideration is going to be, again, the costs potentially associated with this posting requirement. In order to comply with state law, we will have to do some redactions. We have to make sure, if the intent is to have the actual statements from Wells Fargo, we’re going to have to redact all the card numbers. If you guys want all the receipts, we’re also going to have to redact the card number from all the receipts and then, just also make sure that we are not releasing any individual personal information for staff. We think that’s about between 70 and 95 hours a month,” said Chronley. “That cost range, and it just again depends on who is assigned to the task, is between $2,000 and $4,700 a month, for an annual cost of $25,000 and $55,000.”
Alternatives to this include:
Department-level summary reporting
• An annual cost of $2,500-$5,000
• Lower cost and minimal privacy risk
Transaction-level reporting without receipts
• Increased visibility into individual transactions
• An annual cost of $6,250-$13,750
• Moderate workload and reaction considerations
Utilize the monthly financial reports
• Leverages reports already reviewed by council
• Provides comprehensive view of all spending types, not just purchase cards
• No incremental cost and low operational risk
“I do have a couple of concerns. Although the presentation was very informative, the agenda item is regarding posting credit card expenses online and I didn’t see very much on that,” said Mayor Yvonne Flores-Cale. “We just consumed a lot of information and a lot of it kind of pointed towards, ‘Hey, this may not be a good idea.’ For me, it was kind of skewed.”
Chronley noted that staff was not asked to make a recommendation regarding posting, so he provided information that could clear up miscommunication and provided potential numbers.
“I just want to be very, very clear that this policy is simply about posting receipts and that’s it. There’s no additional context that will be provided as to why that was done,” said council member Claudia Zapata. “I just think this would be a terrible use of staff time. I did ask, in preparation for this meeting, what would potentially, if we spent this much time — approximately 70 to 95 hours a month — on something else that was actually geared towards transparency, accountability [and] auditing, then what could we do? Staff pointed to the fact that we could use this time to further improve, build on our dashboards, improve our transparency portal. Those are things that will actually provide the public context needed to understand our finances.”
Supporting Zapata’s sentiment was council member Lauralee Harris, who added that this policy would invite challenge and extra staff time.
Council member Courtney Goza shared that there were items in the council policy that were consistently missed each month, so she “doesn’t have a whole lot of faith that there aren’t errors that are going through on the staff side, as well. So, that was one of the things [of] why people were like, ‘Well, I want to see these. I want to see what’s going on.’”
Zapata rebutted, stating that conflating the council policy and staff policy is doing a disservice to the strict policies in place for staff. For example, she noted that staff has a $3,000 limit per transaction in accordance with state law, while council set its own limitations.
After reaching out to the audit company, Flores-Cale shared that she was told that there would be upcoming suggestions for changes to policies, but it has yet to be determined what specifically.
“I also understand that we have residents that have asked for these open records and I, myself, being one of them at one time being charged a significant amount of money for information that we should already be enabled to get,” said the mayor. “Is it time consuming? Sure. Can it be kind of annoying? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, we sit here to serve them.”
The motion to approve the item as presented, with full posting of receipts and redactions online, was approved 4-3, with council members Marc McKinney, Harris and Zapata dissenting.
Chronley did note that the receipts will always be two months behind because there needs to be time to redact after a month is finished.
To listen to the discussion, visit bit.ly/4bCepOv. Kyle City Council will meet next Tuesday, Feb. 17.
