By PAMELA ROBINSON, Register Staff Writer
Changes to the bylaws for the Texoma Council of Governments were summarized by Cooke County Pct. 3 Commissioner Pct. 3 Al Smith during Monday’s Commissioners’ Court meeting.
Smith, who serves on the executive committee of TCOG, a volunteer organization of local government units for Cooke, Grayson and Fannin counties and the cities therein, said the changes are to bring the organization into compliance with state law.
“This is important because this organization has a budget bigger than the county budget,” Smith said. “It is growing and growing and this year with the stimulus package there is more and more money that this organization is passing out for Title 8 housing and for weatherization programs and lots of things.”
Smith said that more than 500 members of organizations belong to TCOG and that every school district and so on, has the opportunity to belong.
“We were asked to change our bylaws,” Smith continued. “On Feb. 18, the executive committee agreed to propose a letter vote for the amendment to these TCOG bylaws. Texas local Government Code 391.006 is the enabling legislation that created council of governments and requires that at least two-thirds of the governing body of the commission must be elected officials of participating counties or municipalities.”
Smith summarized the amendments to the bylaws for the court.
“Under the current bylaws of TCOG, we now have only one-half of the members of the governing body that are required to be elected officials, elected either by the city or by the county,” he said. “And so we want to get in compliance with this government code as quickly as we can. So, we’re moving with due haste to correct that by amending the bylaws. The current organization of TCOG is, there’s an executive committee and then there’s the general assembly, and all have voting members.
“To get in compliance, we are creating a 15-member governing board,” Smith continued. “We’re doing away with the executive committee and basically just shrinking the overall general assembly down to be the total governing board of TCOG. We will create a 15 member governing board and we will reserve a position on the governing board for the mayors of Bonham, Denison, Gainesville and Sherman, and for the judge of each county. We will reserve a position for the mayor of a general law city in each county to be rotated annually in alphabetical order, this is like Callisburg, Muenster, Lindsay, Valley View, and so on. We’re going to reserve a position for a community member from each county, to be appointed annually by the County Commissioners’ Court of each county. (We will) reserve a position for school districts with 1,000 or more students to be rotated annually in alphabetical order...in each county there is only one school district with 1,000 or more students, so it will be Gainesville, Sherman and then Bonham. We will require that the officers of the governing board be elected city or county officials to comply with the state law, and we will eliminate standing committees, including the executive committee and the budget and bylaws committee...and we’ll eliminate the requirement for a letter vote when amending the bylaws and provide for an effective date of June 1, 2010.”
There will also be a position for community college districts, to be rotated annually in alphabetical order.
Smith said that anticipating the future, the national trend is that more and more money will be passed to the TCOG through federal grants and state grants to be deliberated on and passed on to the counties.
“These include home land security grants, housing grants, disaster kind of grants, educational grants,” he continued. “You know you name it and we’re dealing with those kind of grants. It’s a very important deal. It is out of these TGOGs sometimes that you find road plans and all kinds of things can be done statewide level out of this.”
Smith said that these proposed changes have come after a lot of discussion and deliberation, to make sure that all of the people that have an interest are included.
Following the review, Cooke County Judge John Roane gave his comments.
“My only reservation for the alignment that they propose there, which would be myself, would be the Mayor of Gainesville, would be a small city Mayor,” he said. “Now, in the past we have not had a lot of interest from the small cities, and I would like to see that different. Especially now that it’s on a rotating basis. I would like to see, and evidently the TCOG leaders are going to speak to the small cities, but I would like to actually see the Callisburg, Muenster, Valley View, Lindsay leaders take part in TCOG and with, if they will do that, then I won’t have any reservation at all with the alignment. I’m going to vote with the approval for the alignment as it is anyway. And then the fourth person would be Commissioner Smith, for a lot of reasons, number one being his length of time he’s been on the TCOG board, his history with the board, and the fact that he has a lot of corporate knowledge that we really can’t afford to lose. So with that, that’s the only comment I have.”
Later, Smith responded that putting him back on the board is a separate issue.
“I’ll speak to that since he (Cooke County Pct. 1 Commissioner Gary Hollowell) brought it up,” Smith said, “I don’t know if all of the judges of every county will sit on this or not, or if they will defer to somebody else. I don’t know if they’ll appoint a community member, being it someone from the court. I think that the community member from each county needs to be someone who can well represent the minority status of the county and the community. That was, has been and is my argument in that arena. We need to make sure, we had great minority representation on the old board, and we need to make sure that on any boards going forward that we protect our representation...When you’re doing a lot of what I call entitlement programs for Section 8 housing and so on, that representation is important. And so we need to make sure that we are covered, and we will.”
The goals of TCOG are to develop better cooperation, reduce duplication of efforts and increase efficiencies by taking advantage of the economies of scale. They were organized under the Chapter 391 of the Texas Local Government Code and is organized into four departments: Administration and Finance, Area Agency of Aging of Texoma, Community and Economic Development and Housing and Client Services.
Following discussion, members of the Commissioners’ Court voted unanimously to approve the motion made by Smith, for both Roane and himself, to vote ‘yes’ for the amendment to the TCOG bylaws. Smith said the votes must be submitted by March 22.
