City ponders code overhaul

Did you know that it’s illegal to use white horses to pull a hearse through the streets of Olney? Or to play with “spherical objects” [such as marbles] on Elm, Oak and Bloodworth streets? Or to tie your horse up outside City Hall?

These are a few of the outdated rules that the City Council hopes to expunge from its municipal code with the help of either interested volunteers or as-yetunknown experts that councilmembers discussed at a recent meeting.

“This would be a great PR deal to get people to come down here and review our ordinances,” Olney Police Detective Dustin Hudson, who also handles code enforcement, said at the Council’s Sept. 12 meeting. “We could put three or four people together to review ordinances. We have ordinances that date back into the early 1900s.”

Mayor Pro Tem Tom Parker put the idea of “forming a working group to determine priorities and updating and creating city ordinances” on the agenda after watching Mr. Hudson “do a yeoman’s job” of overhauling ordinances governing RV parks. The city also recently updated its fire and safety codes and the codes governing leases and public use of Lakes Olney and Cooper.

Mr. Parker said the Council’s experience with these overhauls shows the need to review and organize the municipal code to make sure that recently passed ordinances don’t conflict with older rules, and that city residents can easily find all rules pertaining to their property.

“We’re given them one page out of the New Testament,” Mr. Parker told Mr. Hudson. “The city should give you a book so that you don’t have to interpret … which ones are valid and which ones are not valid any longer because societal changes have taken place. All sorts of things that have just moved on since buggy whips were in fashion.”

Councilmember Tommy Kimbro opposed the idea, saying the Council had more pressing matters to attend. Assistant City Attorney Dan Branum and Olney Police Chief Dan Birbeck suggested looking for a group of experts, such as the Texas Municipal League or the Texas Police Chiefs Association to go through Olney’s municipal code, remove redundancies and outdated rules, and to suggest best practices.

“We can ask for people … I think we want citizens that are interested,” Mr. Parker said. “People that are using [the ordinances].”

“You’re talking about getting citizen involvement, and that’s fine but at some point you’re going to have to have somebody look at it that knows the ramifications,” City Attorney Bill Myers said. “A lot of them do need to be repealed.”

The Council tabled Mr. Parker’s motion to explore what types of expertise is available to rewrite the municipal code.