Amarillo City Council will meet on Tuesday to discuss various spending items, rezoning ordinances, approval of the minutes of the council’s controversial previous meeting, and more.

The spending items on the agenda, totalling just under $4 million, are all within the consent items portion of the agenda, meaning all items are likely to be approved via a single vote unless a member of the council requests a specific item be removed for separate consideration.

The two largest spending items are items 2R and 2S, which award contracts to various companies for various equipment. Those two items alone total over $2.5 million. A full list of the companies and amounts is included in a table at the end of this article.

The non-consent items are dominated by rezoning ordinances, with only two items not related to rezoning. The first item, item 3A, appears to close Southeast 6th street downtown between Johnson and Grant, as well as the alleyway from 6th to 5th between Johnson and Grant. This is likely related to the city’s plans to turn the Amarillo Hardware building into a new city hall.

The other item amends the city’s taxicab ordinance to lessen regulations in response to ride-sharing apps such as Uber. The amended ordinance replaces the minimum fare requirements with a requirement that taxicab operators report a maximum fee schedule to the police. This schedule may be updated once every six months.

One item related to the council’s previous meeting which may cause some controversy is the approval of the minutes of the previous meeting. During the previous meeting, an error regarding an item related to taxpayer funded lobbying caused some confusion, as the agenda had consideration of approval of recommendations to the Texas Municipal League’s lobbying agenda listed while the city apparently meant to approve its own taxpayer funded lobbying agenda.

The proposed minutes for that portion of the meeting appear as follows:

However, the motion made during the meeting by Powell was “I move to approve resolution number 09-13-22-1, which is adopting the policy recommending for inclusion in the 2023/2024 City of Amarillo legislative policies.” Since the meeting, the validity of the motion’s wording has come under scrutiny.

Those interested in speaking at the meeting may sign up on the city’s website, amarillo.gov. The signup period opens at 8:00 am on Sunday. The meeting is set for 1:00 pm Tuesday at City Hall. A button to download the full agenda packet is included below.