Every city council meeting, there is that item that seems to slip through the cracks. Two weeks ago, it was an item related to pay for garbage collectors.

When I looked at item 33 on the Dec. 12 council agenda, it looked like one of those items. However, after hearing the discussion by council members in the Trinity River Committee, it definitely wasn’t going to slip through the cracks.

I commended the committee for asking good questions and having reservations about moving forward with spending taxpayers’ money on the design for the Texas Horse Park.

The gist of my story was that Texas Horse Park, Inc. (THPI) had only raised approximately $300,000 of the more than $15 million it needed to come up with before September 2008. The city spent $750,000 on the master plan of the horse park, and the agenda item would authorize another $2.7 million to be paid for the design.

I was interested to see how this would play out in Wednesday’s council meeting, but I noticed Monday morning that the item was deleted from the agenda. Because I was following this story closely, I wanted to talk with the person who removed the item and ask them a couple questions.

I didn’t think there was a major conspiracy going on here. Items are deleted from the agenda regularly. In fact, I assumed my follow-up post would say something along the lines of this person’s removal of the item was a good thing and they deserve credit for not feeling pressure to push this one through. Then I’d ask them about what was ahead for this item, etc.

Pretty typical reporter-type stuff.

So on Monday at 9:23 a.m., I emailed City Secretary Deborah Watkins asking her about the removal of the agenda item. Watkins and her office have always been very helpful.

Watkins emailed me Monday afternoon and said I needed to speak with Martin Riojas, one of City Manager Mary Suhm’s assistants. She gave me his number, I gave him a call, and he called me back later that afternoon.

I asked Riojas a very simple question. Who deleted the item from the agenda?

Riojas said he didn’t know. This struck me as strange because he works for Suhm who handles the agenda and addendum for the council.

So I asked Riojas to find out for me, and he said he’d try. This too was weird. Try to find out? His boss is the one in charge of this. It should have been very easy for him to find out.

Before I let him go, I asked about the process of getting an item deleted. Again, this is done routinely, but I’ve never needed to know the nuts and bolts of exactly what happens.

“City staff pulls items based on discussion with committee members,” Riojas said.

“So could it have been Paul Dyer [director of the Parks Department] or Rebecca Dugger [director of the Trinity River Project]?” I asked.

“It could have been, but like I said, I don’t know who it was,” Riojas said.

Riojas said he’d get back to me.

I hadn’t heard from him by Tuesday afternoon, so I emailed him at 2:23 p.m. to ask, “Have you been able to find out which city staff member authorized the deletion of item 33 from tomorrow's City Council agenda?”

“Someone is in charge of deleting the item from the agenda,” I wrote in the email. “Who is this person?”

Two minutes later, Riojas responded.

“I was able to find out that it was not a staff person that deleted the item. It was the Trinity River Committee that deleted the item. It was the committee’s decision to delete the item, and they are responsible for the item being deleted. The committee felt that they needed more information before this item went forward.”

This was terribly frustrating because the idea of the committee as a whole walking into the City Manager’s Office to request the item to be deleted is not believable.

I gave Riojas the benefit of the doubt and once last chance to clear this up.

Mr. Riojas:

Understood. However, there must be a person (not group) responsible. Perhaps my requests have been unclear.

Who is the person ultimately in charge of deleting the item from the agenda?

Who is the person (not group) ultimately responsible for communicating with this person to have the item deleted?

Thank you for your cooperation,

Sam

These questions are as clear as I could make them. Bottom line was I just wanted to know 1) who walked into the City Manager’s Office and talked with 2) someone to delete the agenda item. That someone became of interest only because Riojas was so evasive with his answers.

This was his reply.

“No. I'm sorry, but there is not person. It is the group that is responsible.”

Now I was officially pissed. Here I was asking very basic questions and getting the runaround for no apparent reason. This wasn’t a big deal. I simply needed some facts.

Riojas wanted me to believe that the entire Trinity River Committee walked into the City Manager’s Office and yelled out -- to no one in particular -- that they wanted item 33 deleted from the Dec. 12 agenda.

A human being must have told another human being, yes? These things don’t just happen on their own.

Before contacting Mary Suhm, I called Dave Neumann’s office. As chair of the committee, he must have known something.

His secretary, Melinda Medina, said she knew nothing about Neumann asking for an agenda item to be deleted. She said his assistant, Mindy Owen, was out of the office for the day and Neumann would be in and out of meetings.

So finally I contacted Suhm. Maybe you’re wondering why I didn’t do this in the first place. It certainly would have saved me a lot of frustration and hassle, but this isn’t something I should have to bother Suhm about. This was a very easy question that should have been easily handled by her staff.

I gave Suhm a brief description of my day’s events, and then asked the question.

“It’s a doesn’t-matter question,” Suhm said.

I explained why it mattered to me. It went something like, I’m a reporter, and I write stories. I like these things called facts for my stories. The readers seem to like them.

Finally, I found out what I needed to know. Mary Suhm told Mary Suhm to remove the item. She said she removed it based on the concerns brought up during the committee meeting. Suhm added that only council members or she can ask for an item to be deleted from the agenda.

Simple enough, but why was it so hard for Riojas to give me this information?

“Well, your questions imply some kind of conspiracy,” Suhm said.

She also told me that my “unfamiliarity with the process” made my questions confusing.

While I took some time to digest those comments, I found out that she plans to put the item back on the agenda next month after some of the committee concerns are resolved. She said another briefing isn’t scheduled but is likely.

Suhm admitted it’s unlikely that THPI will raise the funds by the September deadline, but she is confident they will be able to come up with the money. She said the horse park will be a huge boon for taxpayers, and getting the design going will help THPI reach its goal.

“I don’t think we’ll get left holding the bag,” Suhm said.

With her previous comments now digested, I had to ask about her claim that my questions imply conspiracy.

“When you ask questions like who did this and who did that, it just comes across that way,” Suhm said.

Wow. I was stunned. Asking who did this and who did that is kinda my job. Suhm then said it’s her job too. When things go wrong, she wants to know who made the mistake.

“I’m not saying it’s wrong,” Suhm said. “It just comes across that way.”

OK, then. I explained again that when I write stories, I need facts. These were facts that I needed, so how should I have done things differently?

“I’m not sure,” Suhm said.

So there you have it. A little taste of day-to-day operations down at City Hall.

I send an email, and Riojas appropriately hits the shiny red panic button marked “CONSPIRACY” since I asked who did something.

Riojas gives me incorrect information because I’m “unfamiliar with the process,” yet his answer actually attempts to describe the process, but it too turns out to be incorrect.

You see it wasn’t the Trinity River Committee that was responsible as Riojas said. And it couldn’t have been Dyer or Dugger since Suhm said only she and council members can delete items from the agenda. So I’m the one unfamiliar with the process?

I heard back from Owen, Neumann’s assistant, Wednesday morning before the meeting.

“It is my understanding that the city manager pulled the item from today’s agenda.”

She didn’t seem to have any problems sorting through any conspiracy issues. Maybe the button in Neumann’s office is broken.

The funny thing about this whole mess is that I wasn’t investigating a conspiracy. I even told Suhm that I wanted to know whom to give credit to because I wanted to see this item delayed.

Suhm said she didn’t want credit and was simply doing her job. However, city officials usually make the news because of the bad things they do, and this was a way for people to know that a good thing was done on this particular item.

I told her that sometimes people just want to know about the good things going on at City Hall.

But in the end, what was accomplished by the red-button response was not a conspiracy, but questions about the frustrating bureaucracy at City Hall.

Councilmember Mitchell Rasansky said something interesting in Wednesday’s council meeting. He said that when a council member calls a department as he did a couple weeks ago, the person in the department said Suhm instructed them to report what the council member wanted. Rasansky said he found this strange.

“I find that to be a little intrusion on our rights here at City Hall to find out why we’re calling a department,” Rasansky said. “I just thought I’d bring that up.”

Suhm had no response.

As CEO of the ninth-largest city in the country, Suhm has a tough job. Dealing with a reporter on a Tuesday evening isn’t high on her priority list. I appreciate Suhm’s willingness to talk with me and straighten things out.

However, there was never a time that I felt like she was concerned over this panic-like response to simple questions.

Like it or not, she has to realize that this response creates a feeling of conspiracy by me. I wasn’t looking to break a big story. I was just trying to get a few facts to follow-up on the horse park story. Then the bizarre response by her office created this story.

When I explained this situation to a council member, they responded, “Welcome to my world.”

The perception is that City Hall is much different now with seven new council members and a new mayor. What people forget is that a lot of the city staff has remained the same. Most notably Suhm, a very powerful and influential person, is still the city manager.

Suhm is doing a lot of good at City Hall, but there have been plenty of questions about the way things are being run. The scary part is that making information difficult to obtain for a reporter is one thing, but making things hard on council members is another.

In my story about the garbage collectors, both Carolyn Davis and Angela Hunt expressed concerns about Suhm putting items into the budget without properly briefing the council. I also wrote a story in May describing concerns about the way staff handled a letter from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

It’s clear some real changes are needed in the City Manager’s Office. A good start would be to trash the conspiracy button.

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