City council discusses annual bonds, city manager recruiting

By LYNETTE SOWELL

Cove Leader-Press 

The Copperas Cove city council passed a resolution on Tuesday night that authorized the notice of the city’s intent to issue annual certificate of obligation bonds. However, the measure was decided 4-2, with place 2 councilman James Pierce Jr. and place 6 councilman Marc Payne voting against it. 

The nearly $10 million in annual bonds will fund $2.8 million for the Killeen/Cove 20-inch transmission line relocation and a little more than $1.9 million for an elevated storage tank. Among the tax-supported projects are Parks and Recreation improvements of $378,029, $206,000 toward the South F.M. 116 sidewalks along with $416,838 toward The Narrows sidewalk project. The bond would be repaid on a 20-year schedule. 

During the discussion prior to the vote, Pierce had initially tried to amend the motion by removing the $1.065 million in funding earmarked for the engineering and design of the Business 190 median. Pierce said he wanted to see that decision go to the Copperas Cove voters, to “see what the voters of our city would like to have on Business 190.” 

“I think it’s prudent to see the design before we decide what we’re going to do,” said place 4 councilman Jay Manning. “I made a comment that I would support it if it had six lanes of traffic. I don’t know if we’re going to have that or not.”

Place 7 councilman Charlie Youngs said the staff did the best it could do, going with the old city manager and old city council, but there “has been a change of feeling,” from the change of staff and change of council about the project. 

“I have really yet to see a design other than some PowerPoint slides. I really haven’t seen any, and to go this much in debt concerns me, especially within the short time I’ve been on council to have enough people speak up and be violently opposed to the 190 project,” Youngs said. At this point, Youngs questioned if the council should leave the project in the proposal, but at the later time if the council decided, it could remove the project without penalty. 

Haverlah said the Business 190 project was identified as a need by the Business 190 Master Plan committee, which held public meetings and invited businesses to attend and determined through those meetings, that improvement of Business 190 from a safety and business throughway perspective was needed. He said the project was also ranked the number-one project by the Killeen-Temple Metropolitan Planning Organization, along with its regional partners to include neighboring cities and TxDOT.

Currently the engineers have reached the 30 percent completion of the design, noted Haverlah. In fact, the council should be receiving an update by mid May ahead of a scheduled May 31 public forum on the project. 

“I can’t speak for what gets published in the newspaper, but what I can say we had a public meeting with KTMPO last week, but through that discussion with citizens who came in violently opposed to the project, once they left, they had a different opinion once they received the facts about the project,” Haverlah said, adding that there is a lot of “bad, inaccurate, incorrect information that has gone out about this project.” 

The council also discussed two requests for qualifications received by the city from recruiting firms CPS HR Consulting and Springsted Waters. Both firms submitted proposals to conduct a search for a new city manager.

Initially, councilman Dan Yancey asked if the city could reach out to other recruiting companies that did not respond to the RFQ and find out why, to see if they could expand the opportunity to look at more than the two presented. Haverlah said they could, but the council would have to reject the two RFQ submissions first, due to the fact the deadline had already passed, and start over. 

Ultimately, the council directed Haverlah to invite the two firms to come and make presentations to the city council at a future meeting. 

Also on Tuesday evening, two local businesses, Kletus Rack Room and Yong’s Oriental Market and Korean Grill in Cove Terrace Shopping Center, were granted variances to the city’s code in order to serve beer and wine to customers. Presently, the city’s code prohibits the sales of alcoholic beverages within 300 feet of a church. The approval was not unanimous, but passed 5-1.

Councilman James Pierce Jr. objected to the variance although the pastor of the nearby church wrote a letter stating he had no issue with the requests. 

“I understand the letter the pastor wrote, but what’s going to prohibit someone from doing the same thing where any of our citizens go to church. Where are we going to draw the line at? 202 feet? 175 feet?” He called the passage of the variance a “dangerous precedent.”

“We have an ordinance in effect….when they applied to that TABC, they should have known what the ordinance said.”

Councilman Charlie Youngs said the reason he was for approving the variance is because the pastor of the church, Christian Freedom Ministries, said he did not have a problem with the establishments serving beer and wine. He called the variance a “tool” for the council to use.

The city council held an executive session, during which it discussed with the city attorney litigation against the city from Kempner Water Supply Corporation. The council also met to discuss a complaint against Place 6 councilman Marc Payne. However, the council emerged from the closed-door meeting to take no action on the discussions.