July 2nd was just odd. I’ll get to the changes to the smoking ordinance in a moment, but first, we did cover one other item of import.

Parks and Recreation

Toyota of Lewisville Railroad Park uses untreated water from the Trinity for irrigation.  We were able to get a certificate from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to own water rights for the park.  This agreement saves the City approximately $427,000.00 in water purchases annually. I’m pleased that staff was able to negotiate this deal as it greatly reduces operational costs at the park and keeps our new fishing ponds full.

Smoking Ordinance Changes

The Lewisville Texan has a thorough summary of the changes here.  I voted to remove the exemptions for bars, restaurants, and bowling alleys that our previous ordinance provided.  You can hear my thoughts and reasoning here. I don’t have anything to add other than I’m grateful of the support businesses and the community have expressed.

The odd part was during the workshop discussion of tightening the ordinance.  Councilman Gorena made several recommendations.  My guess is that since he felt the change was absurd, it might as well be as absurd as possible.  His summary is here. I disagree with his statement that a smoking ban is ok at the State level and that he would support it, but that it’s not ok for a municipality to respond to citizen and business requests to create their own community standards.

He also tried to undercut the Chamber’s survey as being a small representation of the total membership, despite Chamber Director McCormick’s statement that the return on this survey was over 4 times the typical response and represented over 20% of the membership.  That’s a far greater representation than the roughly 2.5% or so of registered voters that elect councilmen in Lewisville.

I do want to thank my colleagues for working through this contentious issue.  Especially Councilman Durham.  He did vote against it, but if you’ve ever spent time with Mr. Durham, he is dead level consistent in what I consider his libertarian approach to property rights.  I respect that consistency in thought and action even though I don’t always agree with it.