JUDGE: Notes from the last week in Milam County
Firstly, this week in Commissioners Court we recognized Susanne Gelner for her 25 years of service to Milam County. Susanne works in the Milam County Clerk’s office and is the Milam County Court Clerk who manages the docket for my courtroom. In more ways than I can thank her for, Susanne is the catalyst that brings everything together and keeps our court on track to handle the huge caseload. Thank You Susanne – and NO, she’s not retiring!!
Monday Evening, around 50 folks came out for Monday Night’s Town Hall Meeting at Bea’s Kitchen in Cameron. With eight elected officials on hand, we had lots of good conversation about the topics affecting us all. From the solar developments to the emergency services district (ESD), to tax appraisals, to growth, to the budget; we covered a lot in the hour and a half of open format and stayed around answering questions for another hour or so.
Elected Officials in attendance included Commissioners Henry Hubnik, James Denman, and Art Neal, County Clerk Jodi Morgan, District Clerk Karen Berry, County Tax Assessor-Collector Sherry Mueck, Sheriff Mike Clore, Constables Oscar Lopez and Charlie West, Precinct 1 Justice of the Peace Greg Hoelscher, as well as County Health Department Director Robert Kirkpatrick and 1st Assistant County Attorney Brian Price. We also had a representative from U.S. Congressman Pete Sessions office on hand for questions as well. Overall, a great turnout of elected officials and I thank them all for being there and being available for questions as well.
In the future we will work to have city officials on hand as we had in Milano so they can answer questions more in their ballpark. We are working on a meeting in Rockdale and should have that information later this week. We will be putting that information out on our Wednesday radio programs at 7:45 a.m. on KRXT in Rockdale and at 9 a.m. on KMIL in Cameron. We will also have it on the county website at www.milamcounty.net or on the County Facebook page at “Milam County Courthouse”.
Just to touch on two of the topics covered, here are some of the highlights:
Solar Developments – Currently, there are six projects in various stages of construction with three others in the preconstruction phase. As of this week, three of the other projects still in the planning phase have reached out for abatement extensions. We have met with one of them, but we have informed them all that going forward, prior to any extensions being considered, there will have to be a Public Hearing held in a location near the project site. For instance, one of the projects is south of Thorndale so when the time comes, the public Hearing will be held in Thorndale.
ESD – The election for the ESD, to be held in the correct manner, will take place on the November ballot in conjunction with the biennial state constitutional election. This “re-vote” has to happen as the original election did not include all five county municipalities as well as the county as it should have.
While these are just a couple of the topics we discussed at the Monday Town Hall Meeting, I invite you all to come to our future Town Hall Meetings and find out more about the issues we are dealing with here in Milam County. We had originally planned to hold these meetings once a quarter, but they seem to be popular and there are a lot of places in Milam County, so we are looking at how to do more of them and to do them more frequently. In the meantime, please listen to the weekly radio program, or follow in the paper, or keep up with us on Facebook or on the website. See you soon.