Watch the Other Hand! Elgin's political circus won't pay the bills
Opinion by Stephanie Lippke
Every magic trick works the same way. The magician makes you watch the hand that's waving. The trick happens in the other one.
Elgin is being shown the waving hand.
What the Mayor's group is doing
In my opinion, Mayor Theresa McShan, Mayor Pro Tem YaLecia Love and Council Member Arthur Gibson have made a choice: rather than defend their decisions, they have made the people asking about those decisions into the story.
Council Members Brenda Piña, Liston Crim and Tiffany St. Pierre have had their emails, texts and conversations pulled through open records requests. In my view this has become political intimidation. Make asking hard questions painful enough, and council members may decide staying quiet is easier than becoming the next target.
That pressure divides a council and discourages exactly the independence residents should expect from their representatives. And it works on the public, too: turn the questioners into the controversy, and their questions become easy to wave off. Residents argue about personalities while multimillion-dollar decisions get a fraction of the attention they deserve.
And it is not limited to records requests. At the last meeting, it escalated.
Public records absolutely deserve scrutiny and reading public records is how I got here. But a request for someone's emails is not evidence of anything. It is a request. If there is a specific allegation, state it plainly and support it. Absent that, "we looked at their messages" is not a finding. It is a posture.
And the standard has to run both directions. If communications between council members and constituents are now subject to formal review, then the Mayor's and Mayor Pro Tem's communications are subject to the same review, by the same logic, at the same time. Either it is a principle or it is a weapon.
McShan, Love and Gibson should have to defend their own decisions every bit as publicly as they scrutinize the people questioning them.
The absence they refused to excuse
If you want to see how this works in practice, look at what happened at the last meeting.
The Mayor's group declined to excuse Council Member Brenda Piña's absence. She was at her grandson's military graduation.
They have excused everyone else. That includes Council Member Jessica Jaimes, who missed back-to-back regular council meetings and was excused without incident. Here is why that distinction matters, and why this is not a matter of hurt feelings.
Section 8 of the Elgin Home Rule Charter provides that a council member forfeits office for failing to attend two consecutive regular council meetings without being excused by the council.
Read those two phrases carefully, because the entire provision turns on them.
• "Regular" council meetings. Jaimes' consecutive absences were from regular meetings — exactly the kind that count toward forfeiture. Piña's absence was from a special called meeting, which does not count toward that threshold at all.
• "Without being excused by the council." The excusal vote is not ceremonial. It is the only lever in the forfeiture provision. Excusing an absence is what stops the clock. Refusing to excuse one is what starts it.
So the council excused the absences that could actually have triggered forfeiture, and refused to excuse the one that mathematically could not.
That is not an oversight. In my opinion it is a message, and the message is not subtle: we are counting, we are watching you, and if an opportunity to remove you ever presents itself, we will take it.
They chose a grandson's military graduation to send it.
I would say this no matter who was sitting in which chair. The forfeiture clause is not a communication tool. It is the mechanism for removing an elected official from office against the will of the voters who put her there, and it should be treated with the seriousness that implies.
If the attendance standard is real, apply it to Jaimes. If it is not real, apply it to no one. What a council cannot do is apply it only to the member who asks inconvenient questions — and then ask residents to believe this is all about attendance.
I'm the resident. That's the whole scandal.
My name is Stephanie Lippke. I live here. I read the budget documents, the agendas and the backup packets, and I ask questions about what's in them.
Council members have talked to me. I've talked to them. Sometimes I knew something they didn't, because I'd read a line in a budget projection that nobody flagged for them. Sometimes they knew something I didn't. That is the entirety of it.
So if the big revelation is that elected officials in a city of 12,000 people spoke with a constituent who reads the budget. Congratulations, you've cracked it. That's the story. It's over. It took one paragraph.
In a council-manager city, talking to residents is not a loophole in the job. It is the job. An elected official who learns something from a constituent and then asks about it at the dais is doing precisely what the office exists for. There is no version of local government in which that is the offense.
Council members talking to a constituent is not the story. Everything below is the story.
Now look at the other hand
Here is what is actually in front of this council while we are busy discussing who talked to whom:
• A $3.11 million land purchase from the EDC, with no identified funding source.
• A proposed tax increase.
• Raises that appear to have created the very pay compression we are now being asked to fund a fix for.
• A city manager on paid administrative leave, with no public plan for permanent leadership.
• Confusion over who actually holds the finance director job.
• An EDC fund balance projected to fall about 94%, and a Utility Fund running negative.
Every one of those is a number with your name on it. Not one of them is what Elgin has been arguing about.
That is not a coincidence. That's the trick.
The city manager question
Robert Eads is on paid administrative leave. Beau Perry has been named acting city manager with full administrative authority.
So day-to-day operations have someone in charge — that part is settled, and I would rather say so plainly than let a rumor run. What is not settled is the permanent plan. Is Eads returning? Is the city conducting a search? What is the timeline, and what is paid leave costing while major financial decisions sit on the agenda?
The Council hires and fires the city manager. That is the single largest power this body holds. Residents are entitled to know how it is being exercised — not the confidential personnel details, but the plan.
Who is the finance director?
Residents have heard that a finance director was hired. The September 15 agenda still lists Pamela Sanders as acting finance director.
Both cannot be the current state of affairs. Either the hire hasn't closed, or it has and nobody told the public, or the agenda is out of date. Any of those answers is fine. Silence is not.
We are being asked to approve a multimillion-dollar purchase and a tax increase. Knowing who is minding the money is not an unreasonable prerequisite.
The tax hike and the compensation mess
The earlier compensation study was conducted by the current HR director, who is also serving as acting finance director.
Pay compression is what happens when employees with different levels of experience or responsibility end up earning nearly the same amount. Raising starting pay without correspondingly adjusting experienced employees' pay is one of the standard ways to cause it.
City employees deserve fair pay. I want to be unmistakable about that — none of this is an argument against paying people properly, and the employees caught in the middle did nothing wrong.
But taxpayers deserve to know how we got here before we are handed the bill:
• Who recommended the earlier raises?
• Who approved them, and what analysis were they shown?
• Was compression analysis part of the original scope of work? If so, why wasn't it caught? If not, why did no one ask for it?
• How many employees are affected now, and what does the fix cost?
If a tax increase is partly funding the repair of a problem the city created for itself, residents should be told that clearly, in public, before the vote.
The $3.11 million land deal
The EDC purchased the former Heavenly Hair and Railroad Ranch properties. The proposed agreement would have the City buy them from the EDC for $3.11 million.
The City would pay $1 million directly to the EDC within ten business days after the agreement takes effect. Roughly $2.11 million would remain at the scheduled October 31, 2027 closing, before other credits and closing costs.
The contract also offers extensions:
When | Payment | Effect |
Within 10 business days of effective date | $1,000,000 | Initial deposit |
October 31, 2027 | $1,000,000 | Delays closing to October 2028 |
October 31 in 2028, 2029 and 2030 | $370,000 each year | Each delays closing another year, ultimately to October 2031 |
These payments count toward the purchase price. The extensions are optional. The initial deposit is refundable during the 180-day inspection period — but exercising the first extension makes that first million nonrefundable, except under the stated seller-default protection.
All of this gives the City more time to pay. None of it explains where the money comes from.
The EDC's cushion was already shrinking
The FY2026 budget projection shows the EDC's fund balance falling from roughly $3.79 million to $224,133 — a reduction of about 94%. And that remaining balance assumes $1.3 million in property-sale revenue actually arrives.
The FY2027 proposal then leans on another $1.38 million from property sales, close to half its expected revenue.
These are projections, not outcomes. But they show an entity heavily dependent on selling assets while still carrying bills and economic-development obligations. Residents deserve to know which sales those numbers assume, and when that money is expected to arrive.
Where does the City find the money?
The City's base FY2027 General Fund budget shows roughly $17.7 million in and $17.7 million out. There is no built-in annual surplus for this purchase. Projected starting fund balance is about $2.92 million, so taking the initial million from that fund would consume roughly a third of the cushion.
The Utility Fund is already strained. Its reported share of pooled cash was negative $1.33 million in March 2026 and negative $1.81 million by June. Separately, the FY2027 budget projects a negative $1.29 million ending fund balance.
Reserves are not a savings account. They are the immediate backup. A major water-line break, a sewer failure or a storm does not wait for the next budget cycle.
And yet the land-deal summary marks current-year funding "N/A" and does not identify the account supplying the upfront million.
That is the sentence I would put on a billboard. A million dollars comes due within ten business days of an effective date, and the paperwork does not say which account it comes out of.
Moving property between two public entities does not create new money. It moves an obligation from one pocket to another, and both pockets are ours.
What to do about it
Elgin is small enough that showing up actually works.
Show up and speak. Sign up for public comment at the council meeting. Use your minutes on the $1 million deposit and the tax rate, not on the drama.
Email the Mayor and the entire Council. Every email to a city official is public record. Ask one specific question. Ask for a written answer. Ask again when you don't get one.
File your own public information request. Anyone can, under the Texas Public Information Act. Ask for the compensation study and its scope of work, the land-deal backup and funding memo, the finance director's offer letter and effective date, and any invoices for outside legal work in the last six months.
Ask the one question that matters, at every meeting: which account is the first million coming from?
Run, or find someone who will. The Ward 1 special election set for this November was cancelled because no challenger filed. Not one person. That should bother us more than it does. An unopposed seat is a seat that never has to explain itself. The next general election is May 2027, and it includes the seats held by Arthur Gibson and YaLecia Love, along with Liston Crim and Tiffany St. Pierre. Filing opens in January. If you have ever said someone ought to do something about this, that someone is on the ballot only if a person files.
And when someone tries to get you worked up about which council member talked to which resident, stop and ask who benefits from you being worked up about that.
Stand behind the council members demanding answers. Every time the conversation turns to who said what, bring it back to who approved what, and who pays.
They are counting on Elgin watching the waving hand.
Look at the other one.
The drama will pass. The bills will still belong to us.
