Rusk council takes no action on social media revision policy

RUSK – For the second consecutive month, Rusk City Council took no action on following discussion of personnel policy regarding Social Media revision during its Nov. 14 council meeting.

“At the last council meeting, I wanted y’all to wait until I could try to get some kind of dollar figure associated with what it’s going to cost us to do this. I don’t have a rate estimate of what it’s going to cost, but it is going to cost some money,” City Manager Bob Goldsberry told city leaders.

The policy concerns a Nov. 20 deadline for municipalities to set into place a state mandate to adopt a ban on certain applications and hardware to be used on computers, smartphones and other electronic communications devices for security purposes.

In researching cost, Goldsberry said that “just for an application that will create a second-factor authentication for us to sign on to our network is roughly $800 a year per device – laptop, cellphone, those kinds of things.”
This is in addition to other related mandates set forth by the state, and “it’s turning into being a whole lot more as we try to figure out how much it’s going to cost us” to cover city-owned devices used by members of the local police force, water department meter readers and a departmental director, he said. 

Because funds were not figured into the current fiscal year budget for this, “we’ll have to find something that we will have to cut back on, because this is a state mandate,” he said. 

One of the council members asked whether he had been in touch with officials from other cities about how they are addressing the issue.

“The people I’ve talked to are not taking any action on it because they’re trying to get back some figures, and they’re waiting on a response back from the Legislature for them to clarify they truly understand what it is that they do to us when they passed that law,” he replied.

Mayor Ben Middlebrooks – who noted that by not meeting the mandate, they go against the state, “and who knows what they’ll do to us” – recommended the council take no action.

Meanwhile, during the meeting, the council also:

• Approved a resolution to submit a 2025-26 TxCDBG application to the Texas Department of Agriculture, committing $750,000 in matching funds

• Adopted the 2024 Certified Tax Roll Levy, a total of $1,038,758.75 that was approved by the Cherokee County Appraisal Review Board

• Welcomed BSA Troop 405 member Jack Leggett, who is working toward his Eagle Scout badge. Leggett presented members of Rusk Police Department with special tribute stars created from retired US flags. The local youth has distributed approximately 1000 stars, and is half-way to his target distribution of 2,000.
• Approved meeting minutes that were part of a consent agenda, along with some of the financial documents listed therein. However, city leaders took no action on other financials that had not yet been reconciled because while processing information “we picked up $45,688.72 that I don’t know where it belongs, where it came from,” Goldsberry told the council. “These things can all be done once I can get all those reconciliations done. This is just to show you that I’m working on it and this is where I’m at.” Earlier this year, the city changed its accounting software program, but has had challenges in getting data seamlessly transferred over to the new one. 

At the beginning of the meeting, Mayor Ben Middlebrooks administered the oath of office to recently elected District 1 Councilman Jim Beindorf, who won the race with 133 votes to challenger Ben Mims’ 110. Beindorf was appointed by the council last spring to fill a vacancy left by the resignation of his predecessor, John Hood.

Rusk Police Department’s newest member, Officer Justyn Matthews also was sworn into office during the meeting. The addition of this newest member brings the force to 13.