Who Runs Hawk Cove? Not the Council, According to the Council

The City of Hawk Cove has an agenda item called Public Comments. On Tuesday night, the mayor ruled that no one could comment on it.

It is item five. It is printed on the agenda. When a speaker raised it, he was told that item five is "a procedural item," not an agenda item, and that public comment is limited to agenda items. He was ruled off agenda, at the agenda item, for discussing the agenda item.

That is a small moment in a town of a few hundred people. It is also the arrangement in miniature. Hawk Cove has a mayor and five aldermen, chosen by the residents. On paper the council governs the city. In practice, by the account of its own members, the council is told what it may discuss, when it may discuss it, and what it is permitted to see.

A Council That Says It Is Kept in the Dark

Tuesday's regular session ran forty-four minutes, from 6:33 to 7:17. In that time the council took up a federal loan its own attorney described as one the lender is "done being patient" about, a utility billing increase residents were never notified of, and a countywide emergency services question that will appear on the November ballot.

Council members said plainly, on the record, that they do not know what their own city is doing.

"As a council, we don't know anything that's going on," one council member said. He wanted to know what would be discussed with the USDA the following night. "What are you guys discussing with him tomorrow that we don't know?"

Another council member went further. "We've been shut out as a council," she said. "We weren't sitting in those meetings that they were in. We weren't in those bi-weekly sessions that they had directly with them. We weren't involved in that. We didn't get any records."

She was talking about the United States Department of Agriculture, which holds the debt on the city's sewer system. USDA representatives came to Hawk Cove on June 16 and inspected the sewer plant and all seven lift stations. Asked whether he attended, the mayor said he was there "only for part of it." Asked whether the council would receive a report on what the inspectors found, he said, "We don't know. We don't have that information. That is internal to the USDA Special Assets Unit."

When a member asked for an engineer's assessment of the plant, she was told the city is working on it. When she asked whether the council could prepare questions in advance of the USDA's presentation, the answer was that questions would be collected afterward.

The Rules About the Rules

Why does a five-member council have so little room to move? Part of the answer may sit in a stack of ordinances.

Otto the Watchdog, a Texas journalist who has covered Hawk Cove since 2018, provided me with scanned copies of nine ordinances numbered 2023-05-31.1 through 2023-05-31.9. The copies carry blank signature lines and no adoption date, so I am not yet in a position to say they were adopted or that they are in force. I am requesting certified copies from the city, along with the minutes showing their passage. What I can report is what the documents say.

They say the city administrator holds "the sole right, responsibility, duty and final authority" to decide every item placed on every council agenda, for regular, special, and executive meetings.

They say council members may not contact "Contractors," a term the documents define to include "all past, present, or prospective entities, business vendors, business candidates and similar contacts, and particularly governmental entities," without written authorization from both the mayor and the administrator.

They say a council member who wants to look at city records may do so one member at a time, supervised, for up to one hour, after signing a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement. The member may not photocopy or photograph anything, must surrender any recording device, and may take handwritten notes only if those notes are handed to staff to be photocopied at the end of the session.

They set a fine of up to $500 for a council member who violates these provisions, and provide that each violation counts separately.

They provide that repealing any of them requires a vote of the entire council, either unanimous or four of five with all five present, depending on the document.

One Person, Two Offices

They also describe a second office. The police chief, in these documents, is "the sole administrative authority" over the department "without the requirement, or reporting, of any of the Police Chief's actions to the Mayor or Council." The chief may protect department records "including from any public forum, the Mayor and/or Council," hires and fires without the approval of either, and "shall not be required or caused to give any information in any public forum or to any person."

In Hawk Cove, the city administrator and the police chief are the same person.

So the office that decides what the council is allowed to discuss, and the office that answers to neither the council nor the mayor, are held by one individual. That is the arrangement those nine documents describe, and it is the plainest answer available to the question of who runs this city.

As reported by Otto the Watchdog, on May 25, 2023, in the window between an election and the seating of a new administration, the outgoing council signed a slate of ten-year employment contracts, with a package approaching $2 million. The ordinance establishing the city administrator's office states that the city "presently is under contract to City's present Administrator," that the term "shall continue indefinitely," and that discharge is governed by that contract. It does not state a length.

The Law They Cite

Texas Local Government Code Section 22.038 says the governing body of a Type A general-law city "shall determine the rules of its proceedings," and that the mayor "shall call a special meeting on the application of three aldermen." Each of the nine documents rests its authority on a single recited line: that it is "a function of the Council to regulate itself," citing Local Government Code Section 22.072(b). That section is titled Powers and Duties of Municipal Officers; Bond. Subsection (b) reads in full: "The governing body may prescribe the powers and duties of a municipal officer appointed or elected to an office under this code whose duties are not specified by this code." Chapter 22 specifies a great many of an alderman's duties, including the duty to determine the rules of the council's own proceedings.

The Texas Attorney General examined these provisions in 2020, in Opinion KP-0334, answering a question from a different Type A general-law city. The opinion cuts both ways here. It reads Section 22.072(b) broadly, saying a governing body may appoint officers and prescribe their powers and duties in a way that "could include certain managerial responsibility." It also names the limit. A Type A city may regulate its affairs by ordinance only where that ordinance is, in the words of Section 51.012, "not inconsistent with state law." The Attorney General went no further, writing that his office "does not advise municipal officials about how to comply with their own ordinances."

A city may plainly give an administrator duties. Whether these particular provisions sit consistently with a chapter of state law that assigns the council itself the power to determine the rules of its own proceedings is a separate question, and it is one the Attorney General left to the city and, if it ever comes to that, a court.

That same opinion quotes another part of Chapter 22. Section 22.042 makes the mayor "the chief executive officer of the municipality," required to "actively ensure that the laws and ordinances of the municipality are properly carried out" and to "inspect the conduct of each subordinate municipal officer." Set that beside a document stating that the police chief answers to neither the mayor nor the council, and the consistency question the Attorney General left open stops being abstract. Readers can compare the two and draw their own conclusions.

Who Checks the Books

Item C on Tuesday's agenda asked the council to receive a profit and loss statement for April through June, "as presented to USDA Special Assets Unit." The wording is worth reading twice. The council received the document after the federal lender had already been given it. There was no action to take. "This is what we gave him," the mayor said.

The same member who said the council has been shut out told the room the city has no line-item budget and holds no budget meetings. "We don't have a line item budget that breaks all that down," she said. "It's a dump. So we're not able to actually physically see any of that."

The trash bill went up in June. Residents got no notice. A flat monthly billing fee was added on top of the contractor's own increase, and she told the room the contractor's increase is a small fraction of what residents are now being charged. She asked for a vote at the next meeting to remove the fee. Whether that item reaches an agenda is, under the documents described above, the administrator's decision.

At the June 16 meeting, the city attorney told the council that reviewing a records request from one of its own council members costs the city more than $3,000.

As reported by Otto the Watchdog, the city has not produced a valid state-required audit since 2014, and budget documents have been submitted to the USDA carrying a city secretary's signature without being shown to or approved by the council. I have not confirmed either of those claims against city records. I filed a public information request with the city for every annual audit since 2014, for the budget documents it sent the USDA, and for the minutes of every meeting at which a budget was adopted. I will report what comes back.

Wednesday Night

The council meets again tonight at 6:30 at 1585 Maria Street, and the USDA will be in the room to present repayment options and re-amortization proposals on the sewer debt. The city has not said publicly how long a restructured term would run. That is one of the things the meeting is for.

The mayor addressed the rumors directly Tuesday. "There is some sort of crazy rumor going around that the USDA wants to repossess our wastewater facilities," he said. "That is so far from the truth. That's the last thing anybody wants." He said the city is working to restructure the note.

Hawk Cove does not record or stream its own meetings. Tuesday's session filled the building past capacity and residents were turned away at the door. The only public record of what happened is a livestream filmed by a private citizen. A resident asked the council to consider an ordinance requiring the city to stream its own meetings, which seems like a modest thing to want in a city deciding how it will carry a federal debt.

Tonight will be no different. Otto the Watchdog is livestreaming the meeting on his YouTube channel, and he is already at Hawk Cove City Hall. I am watching his stream as I write this. If you want to watch a city of a few hundred people take up a federal loan workout in real time, join him there. It is the only place it will be shown.

Why I Am Getting Involved

I am going to Hawk Cove for tonight's meeting. Part of why I am going is to introduce myself to the mayor, to the council, and to the people who run the city day to day, and to learn who they are from them directly rather than from a livestream video.

I have not printed the names of the council members quoted in this article. They spoke in an open meeting that anyone can watch, so their identities are not a secret. I would simply rather meet the people I am writing about before I start attaching their names to things.

I have already filed a public information request with the city for every annual audit since 2014 and for the budget documents it submitted to the USDA. Two more are going in behind it: certified copies of the nine ordinances with the minutes that adopted them, and the employment contracts signed in May 2023. Every claim in this article that rests on someone else's reporting is a claim I am asking the city to confirm or contradict from its own records. The city has ten business days to answer each one.

The events at Tuesday's council meeting and the statements several council members made on the record are what moved me. Elected officials saying out loud that they do not know what their own city is doing is not a small thing, and it is not something residents should have to learn secondhand.

I am adding Hawk Cove to the list of small Texas cities where I document matters of poor governance, and I intend to join the advocacy effort of steering a struggling city toward a better direction when it cannot seem to afford to help itself.

If you live in Hawk Cove and there is something you want me to be aware of, send it to me. I read everything.