Odem council rejects illegal budget

If last week’s city council meeting was any indication, the city of Odem has a financial – and administrative – problem on its hands.

“[The mayor and city administrator] think money grows on trees,” said council member Lynnette Tidwell. “This is a mess.”

Cities in the state of Texas operate on fiscal year budgets – most beginning Oct. 1 and ending Sept. 30 the following year. That is the case for Odem, yet city council members unanimously rejected a last-minute effort to pass a budget that should have gone into effect Oct. 1.

In part, the budget proposed by Mayor Virginia Garza and City Administrator Janie Martinez failed because it is not allowed by the state of Texas.

According to the Texas Local Government Code, a “budget officer shall prepare each year a municipal budget to cover the proposed expenditures of the municipal government for the succeeding year.”

In other words, there must be enough revenue budgeted to “cover”

the expenses, which means the budget must be balanced.

That was not the case in the budget proposed for approval last week. Instead, it said the city would have $1.8 million in revenue and $2.01 million in expense, which meant the city would show a deficit of more than $230,000 in the coming year.

In a phone interview from San Antonio later in the week (Odem officials were at a government conference there), Martinez said she could not review budget numbers until she was in the office the next week, after press deadlines.

“I am the one who put the budget together, along with our bookkeeper [Hilda Gonzalez], and I have nothing to hide,” Martinez said. “I just don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I’ll be happy to sit down and go through it.”

Becky Veit, who worked at the city for more than 16 years, was the only member of the public to address the council last week. She listed numerous reasons the budget should not pass, including a tax levy that passed before the city even knew how much revenue it needed to cover expenses.

“Where is your financial and fiduciary duty to the city of Odem?” she asked.

A deficit wasn’t the only reason the budget failed, according to Mayor Pro Tem Jesse Falcon, the alderman for Place 4. At the beginning of last week’s council meeting, he expressed concerns about the short time council members had to review the budget, and cited state law about allowing the public to inspect the budget.

“This should have been done back in August,” Falcon said.

State law is also clear on what access the general public must have to a proposed budget.

“The proposed budget shall be available for inspection by any person,” the law reads. “If the municipality maintains an Internet website, the municipal clerk shall take action to ensure that the proposed budget is posted on the website.”

The city of Odem does maintain a website, www.cityofodemtx.com, but the budget was not available until Wednesday, Oct. 5.

“It has never been posted. I was not aware it was supposed to be posted,” Martinez said during the meeting. “We have copies right here, and we have had copies in the office.”

The legal website requirement went into effect in 2007.

Council members also voiced frustration at how the city administration tried to rush the budget through council.

“In the workshop, I asked if we could have more time for research instead of making us make a decision because of crunch time,” Alderman Isaac Dominguez said.

During the council meeting last week, Dominguez said anything would be better than the one day council members had to review the budget.

Tidwell, alderman for Place 1, also said council members had just a single day to review the budget.

With no budget passed, members of the council, along with Mayor Garza, agreed to meet as soon as possible to continue working on the budget. Until then, the city will operate under the prior fiscal year budget.

“We have all these things we’re supposed to do, and we didn’t do it,” Falcon said.