The Wimberley City Council is working to create two new positions, one of which has a familiar title.
At last week’s council meeting, the city council moved forward in the process of recreating the City Marshal position as well as formalizing the funding for a new hybrid Director of Tourism and Administrative Services Coordinator position.
The Director of Tourism and Administrative Services Coordinator will be partially paid for by Hotel Occupancy Tax funds.
“The allocation is going to be documented as to how much time is spent on tourism and things that would be funded by the Hotel Occupancy Tax and things that would be administrative at the city by virtue of time slips like if you were billing by the hour,” Mayor Gina Fulkerson said. “Then we will make sure that those funds are properly allocated.”
City Administrator Mike Boese said that an offer has gone out to fill the position, and he expects the new employee’s start date will be June 27.
Beyond the administrative portion of the job, the employee would coordinate the Hotel Occupancy Tax, make recommendations on expenditures and be a liaison between the city council, the HOT committee and local hoteliers. Fulkerson said that the HOT committee was working to create a list of priorities for the position using the example that the new director may be asked to prioritize off season or weekday tourism.
The new city marshal role still has more steps in the process before it can be filled, but the council’s action during the June 16 meeting formally created the position at the city.
The city has previously had a city marshal, but the position was dissolved in 2018. It was stated that this is a one-man job and not the creation of a larger office that would take on the scope of traditional law enforcement agencies.
“We have a really great relationship with Sheriff (Gary) Cutler and Constable (Don) Montague,” Boese said. “But they aren’t able to enforce city ordinances we adopt. We can pass them, but we can’t require these external entities to enforce them.”
Boese said that the idea of recreating the city marshal position stemmed from discussions with both local law enforcement agencies on the best way to enforce things like the city’s noise ordinance, truck traffic through neighborhoods and across low water crossings and even the fireworks ban.
“Those are things that are important to our community that those external entities can’t enforce,” Boese said. “The sheriff’s office does an excellent job. We are not trying to create a full service law enforcement office, but we can augment that work and really try and work down on those local ordinances that are really quality of life issues.”
Boese gave the example of a truck towing a large excavator that got stuck on the County Road 1492 low water crossing recently. The crossing was closed for 10 hours and took two tow trucks to remove. The city has an ordinance limiting the weight of vehicles allowed on the bridge and signs posted at the intersection of 1492 and Ranch Road 12. However, because those ordinances go beyond the laws written into the state transportation code, the driver was not ticketed in this instance.
“Due to the interpretation of some state laws from the sheriff’s office, they were not able to write any citations on that,” Boese said. “What we would really like to do is have our marshal go out and investigate a situation and if a citation is warranted, issue citations to those heavy equipment operators and truck drivers that violate our signs. (They) make those low water crossings dangerous for the public but are also causing damage to those low water crossings. If there is damage caused by that 100,000-pound excavator, that is something that our entire community has to pay for, eventually, to make sure those roads are safe for the public. So we really want the ability to enforce our city ordinances and make our community as safe as possible.”
Boese also stated that traffic enforcement would be another role for the city marshal in addition to potentially helping with more traditional code enforcement should a situation arise to a level that a citation is necessary.
The job for a new city marshal has already been posted. Following last week’s meeting, required paperwork can now be submitted to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which has to approve the creation of the new law enforcement office.
