By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
City Manager Shawna Burkhart has pledged to mend the “serious communication
breakdown” between her office and members of a local citizen activist group.
Members of The Border Organization spoke during Tuesday night’s council meeting,
decrying a lack of communication from the city manager and her staff, pointing
particularly to the cancelation of a meeting they said had been scheduled to discuss
problems and solutions for a south Del Rio neighborhood. (See previous story here.)
Burkhart spoke about the group members’ comments briefly during the “City Manager’s
Informational Update” portion of Tuesday’s council meeting.
Burkhart said, “At this time, if I could just take a moment to express concern over what
has been shared up to now, and my concerns are that we have a serious communication
breakdown in my office, and we will get that reconciled immediately, so there are no
further concerns for any organization, let alone The Border Organization, or any others in
terms of getting in touch with us.
She added, “I am not familiar with the cancelation of a meeting, but we will look into that
further and get an answer for them directly.”
The city manager went on with the rest of her informational report, starting with the
“tremendous” job she said city staff has done in working on the city’s Arundo cane
removal and eradication project along the San Felipe Creek.
Burkhart told the council, “We had all of our parks, streets, gas crews working tirelessly
to remove the Arundo cane.”
She showed several photos of the work crews pulling cane from the creek bank in the area of the San Felipe Springs Golf Course.
Burkhart also announced Halloween trick-or-treating at City Hall.
Wednesday, Burkhart traveled to a Texas Municipal League conference, and spoke on
the phone with The 830 Times about the complaints lodged by members of The Border
Organization.
Asked to comment on TBO members’ complaints, Burkhart said, “All I would say is that
I am trying to look into what date they were referring to about a cancelation of a meeting.
I am not aware of a cancelation that I initiated, but if there was one, we will re-establish a
date to meet, next week, hopefully, to re-establish any conversations we were having at
the time.”
She added, “In terms of getting in touch with me, I’m having our IT (information
technology) department look into any problems our phone system may have and any
nuances that we could upgrade to. I’m well aware of all the calls that come in. Just
currently, in the last two months, I have had all of my calls forwarded to my email, so I
not only get the voicemail, I also get the voicemail in my email, so I have a double
reoccurrence of it, if you will, and I can also forward those (voicemails) to who I need to
forward them to.
“That’s why I was very perplexed, I guess would be the word, because I do have a double
system right now, within the last two months, that would or should have caught anything
that I may not have been aware of, because (any call) would have come up a second time
in my email box. I was a little dismayed by all of it, but we are looking into it so we can
get it fixed.
“We certainly want to have a good relationship with all entities,” Burkhart said.
The writer can be reached at delriomagnoliafan@gmail.com
