Letter from Mayor Lofton (March 17, 2021)
Greetings Marlinites,
I wanted to provide some context as to how city government works. There appears to be some confusion as to how decisions regarding city business are made.
Our city is run by a seven member council elected by the citizens. Our governance is mandated by a City Charter. The Mayor is elected at-large by the citizens. The remaining six council members are elected by the citizens who reside in the represented precinct.
The council functions as one body. It takes four council members to make a quorum of members. For a meeting to commence and any action to be discussed, there must be a quorum of members present. All decisions regarding city business must have a majority vote of the council. The majority vote for Marlin city council is a consensus vote of four members.
A motion is made by one member and seconded by another. All members vote to confirm or deny the motion. The motion passes when a majority (4) of members confirm the motion. The Mayor, nor City Manager, can make major decisions regarding city operations independent of the council. The City Manager, Fire Chief, Police Chief, and City Secretary are hired, and/or fired, by the council. The City Manager has operational oversight over their budgets.
The City Manager manages the day-to-day operations of the city. All department heads report directly to the City Manager. At each monthly council meeting, department heads provide updates to the council regarding their operations and needs. If there is a need that requires council action, it is placed as an agenda item for discussion and/or action. Individual city purchases above $7,500 must go before the council for approval prior to purchase. No one council member has any authority to make decisions independent of the council.
The Mayor can make emergent decisions but schedules a Special Meeting the discuss the urgent matter or discuss it at the next regular council meeting, whichever comes first. Between June and September, the council reviews the budget for the upcoming year. The fiscal year runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. Any provisional needs are included in the budget at this time. The city operates according to this budget for the full year. Any deviations from the budget require council approval. If money is moved from fund to another, council must approve this move. No one individual has the authority to do this independent of a council vote.
Matters that city personnel deem appropriate to move this city in a positive direction are placed on the agenda for council members to discuss and vote on. The matters are presented to the council by the department head, City Manager, any council member, or Mayor regarding potential city needs. The council then considers and takes a vote on whether the matter should be approved or denied.
An example of this is the street bond proposal. The matter was brought to the council by the Mayor and City Manager to have a special election for the citizens to decide if they wanted to increase properties taxes to create a designated account for street upgrades. The bond was to establish a plan to repair streets in each precinct over the next 7-10 years. Each precinct councilmember would hold a town hall in their precinct to decide which major streets would be designated for repair based on households and travel stipulations.
An engineer assessed our streets and determined that the streets were in such bad condition that they needed to be torn up completely and replaced. This would include replacing the water and sewer lines in areas that the grant was not going to replace. The details were presented to the council and a vote was taken to have two town hall meetings to assess citizen interest. The citizens present at the first town hall were interested in having the bond go to a citizen vote.
The council met on Feb. 9, 2021, and discussed the matter again. Councilmember Moore made the motion that the item be placed on the May 1 ballot for citizens to vote up or down. The deadline to place the item on the May 1 ballot was Feb. 12, 2021. The motion failed to receive a second from the three other councilmembers present. Two councilmembers were absent during this meeting. The Mayor cannot second a motion. Because the motion failed to receive a second, the matter did not pass.
This means that despite our desire to initiate a long-term plan to replace our aging infrastructure through this bond measure, the matter will not be put to a vote during the May 1 election. We brought the matter back in the last council meeting on March 9 to see if we could place it on the November ballot and learned that if council votes to place the matter on the November ballot, it would be August of 2022 before the council could begin the process of securing a sponsor for the bonds. This could place any needed street upgrades to late 2022 or 2023. So, despite best efforts of city personnel in charge of making the needed upgrades we seek, if the council does not approve it, it cannot be done.
When the budget was set last year, there were limited amounts placed in reserves that could be used for some street repairs. However, with the amount of streets that need upgrades and the cost to upgrade them, we do not have the millions needed to take on such a task in our reserve account. Eddins Sreet alone cost nearly $70,000 to upgrade. Foster Street is estimated to cost $1.5 million to upgrade. The city has approximately 150 miles of streets with water and sewer lines needing to be upgraded as well. The city needs a long-term plan in place to begin to correct the years of neglect that this city has seen in past years. Sadly, that plan will not come soon enough due to the measure failing during the February meeting.
We are constantly seeking grants for infrastructure upgrades, but city infrastructure should be maintained by the municipality. It is unfortunate that ours was not. The city has a bond debt of over $900,000 annually that is factored into our budget as well.
The city receives water revenues from a little over 2,500 households and businesses monthly. Our city does not have the benefit of having a significant number of large water customers to help shore up our economic base. Most households are paying approximately $150 per month for water. Five percent of this goes to a designated bond account to repay our most recent bonds awarded in 2019.
Our city has relied on bonds approved by the state and has not made any attempts to secure local bonds voted on by the citizens to improve our conditions here. We do not have the benefit of a 5–6-digit customer base that would provide revenue to complete the upgrades we need. Our last census population count put us at roughly 6,000 persons. We are going to have to put a long-term plan in place or we will be forced to continue patching streets that do not last past the next rainfall, which is a colossal waste of money.
In 2017, our city purchased a Durapatcher to repair streets. This machine cannot be used to repair streets that are beyond repair. Once our repair upgrades are complete, this machine will be a huge asset and will be paid for. Our streets need to be ground up and replaced. The water and sewer lines beneath the street must also be replaced. That is the only solution at this time that will create streets that will last.
Honorable Mayor Carolyn Lofton
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