BY ELENI HIMARAS
reporter@ltview.com
The City of Lakeway has dropped its lawsuit against the Lakeway Municipal Utility District, who has in turn abolished the ad hoc committee that had decision-making power in fighting the city’s legislation.

“The city does not intend to sue the MUD,” Mayor Steve Swan said at last week’s special meeting of the LMUD Board of Directors. “We just don’t believe that’s very neighborly and we don’t want to do that.”
In a letter from the city to the MUD, Swan asked the MUD to agree on a compromise that would allow two additional members to be voted onto the board in the May 2012 election that would represent out of district customers. It proposed allowing the city to appoint those two members to serve on the board until the elections could be held in 2012.
The LMUD planned to hold a special meeting on Wednesday, May 6, to discuss that compromise request.
There was some contention at the short meeting held May 1 when LMUD attorney Mike Willatt recommended retaining counsel to fight the litigation, even though the city had already filed for its dismissal.
“When the lawsuit was filed last Friday, we contacted the law firm of Graves Dougherty and asked them to mobilize and get ready to defend the lawsuit,” Willatt said. “The city has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit but that lawsuit is still on file.”
He said the firm had already spent money in those mobilization efforts. When questioned by MUD board member Kay Andrews on what authority he had to allow them to do that, he said that he and LMUD President Tom Rogers had decided it was necessary.
Willatt and Rogers would not answer a question from Mel Neese as to why Williatt could not defend the district by himself.
“Why do we need to pay a lawyer to preside over it being removed when it was a done deal?” board member Jerry Hietpas asked.
Andrews also questioned the amount of money being paid to Willatt, saying that his billable hours for the last month totaled more than $32,000. The Lake Travis View sent an Open Records request for those hours on Monday, May 4, but was told by Finance and Administration Manager Margaret Cathey that they would not respond until Willatt returned from travel on May 6.
The decision to retain the additional attorneys was tabled in a 3-2 vote with Jerry Hietpas, Kay Andrews and Allan Hitchcock voting to table the motion pending the dismissal of the suit.
At the same meeting, the board voted unanimously to abolish the recently formed ad hoc committee, which was at the center of the city’s lawsuit claiming the LMUD was violating the Open Meetings Act and had illegally delegated power to the board.
“The ad hoc committee was never activated. It never had any meetings. The ad hoc committee itself turned into kind of like a lightening rod,” Rogers said in advocating for its abolishment.
He said the committee was formed at the March LMUD meeting “to be able to respond to whatever the city was doing quickly so we wouldn’t have to have another full blown meeting.”
While the March meeting saw an agenda item allowing the board to take any and all actions necessary to fight the legislation, the notion of the ad hoc committee was not presented until the April 8 LMUD board meeting.
At that meeting, the board was presented with a report from the ad hoc committee containing a resolution outlining its responsibilities. Also at the April 8 meeting, Rogers said the committee had met in response to a question from Andrews asking how many times it had met.
“We had a meeting last week, Friday afternoon. We’re going to have one this afternoon,” Rogers said at the April 8 meeting.
He said that the meetings were attended by Hitchcock, himself, P.A. Penley, Don Iburg, and Willatt but that not all members of the committee were at every meeting.
Rogers said in a telephone interview Tuesday that he misspoke at the April 8 meeting.
“I called it an ad hoc committee before we had an ad hoc committee, ” he said.
He also said he didn’t know how or why a memo was sent to the board from the ad hoc committee before it existed, saying he’d have to go look through the files to see how that had happened. The memo was the cover letter for a resolution creating the ad hoc committee, which he said he and Mike Willatt wrote.