Sandy Oaks Mayor Jim Clement stood outside Freedom Elementary School on election day November 4, 2014, greeting soon to be voters. Bellow is the 2nd part of a 4 part conversation with the mayor.
Mayor Clement admitted that he was in favor of a retroactive property tax on the City of Sandy Oaks. It would have given residents only a few weeks to come up with money for the entire year of 2014.
Clement agreed that some items in the budget he proposed were “absurd” and when asked why he wanted to allot $36,000 a year to the position of City Attorney he answered
That was a number that we came up with to try and satisfy a budget.
The current Sandy Oaks City Attorney is Art Martinez de Vara, who just so happens to be the Mayor of Von Ormy, a town that budgets only $12,000 for its own attorney. When Sandy Oaks Mayor Clement was asked if he researched what other cities payed their attorneys his reply was
Well they’re all considerably different. The one thing I had to go on was the ESD6. You know how much they pay their attorney? 200,000 dollars.
When it was pointed out that the attorney for a brand new city like Sandy Oaks doesn’t do much, Clement agreed, but he also said he wasn’t sure what Martinez de Vara actually does as a City Attorney.
Mayor Clement did say that he relies on Martinez de Vara
He’s there to assist. He assists me a lot with anything to do with the county.
At the Budget Hearing in September 2014, Mayor Clement said it was Art Martinez de Vara who created the budget that would require taxing the community retroactively while giving the City Attorney $36,000. When asked about it outside Freedom Elementary Clement said
We were relying on him
Comments are closed.