City Council Highlights from March 5th Meeting

Courtesy of Peter Gordon, Hutto City Council Place 4 and provided here with his permission. This recap is from the March 5th City Council meeting.

Photo courtesy of Peter Gordon

To watch the meeting, go here.

Here are the highlights from that meeting:

Council received updates on our current CIP projects, with details on which projects are falling behind and what actions staff is taking to try to get them back on track. I reiterated that Council has been hyper-focused on cost and scope (quality) of our projects, so when anything goes wrong in a given project, if we're not willing to change scope (or sacrifice quality) and are resistant to increase cost, the natural outcome is increased timelines.

We are holding our contractors more accountable for missed dates, which is a step in the right direction, but I think some of the frustration on council has been that we want to have all projects done quickly, cheaply, and at the highest quality. Something has to give in one of those areas when things don't go according to plan.

As an example, we also approved two amendments to the Hutto Lake Park Project. One was to increase the timeline by 113 days instead of increasing cost. The second change was to order the playground equipment earlier than we typically would, in order to remove that step out of the critical path and help ensure the timeline doesn't get delayed any further.

In order to speed up the timeline to get Live Oak extended all the way to Ed Schmidt Blvd, Council approved the use of Community Benefit Fees to purchase the designs and get the project started. The plan is to reimburse those funds back to the Community Benefit fund once we have the road bond dollars available.

I requested an item to be added to the March 12th meeting to appoint a Charter Review Commission, made up of seven Hutto citizens. These individuals will work with our City Secretary and Legal department to review the current Charter for any possible amendments. The Council will receive their report of recommended changes and will have the final say (via record vote) in what goes to the voters for approval. The charter was last updated in 2024, so the plan is to give them six months to review and for us to put any recommended changes on the November ballot.

Next Council Meeting will be this week on March 12th due to Spring Break next week, then we'll meet again on our regular schedule on April 2nd.

Written by Peter Gordon, Hutto City Council Place 4