Issue #20
July 17, 2025
Crayola's Colorful Canvas
Crayola brought a 9-year old Bastrop student’s drawing to life last week, turning Main Street in Smithville into a colorful canvas for the city’s 120th film production.
The commercial featured the Smithville High School Color Guard and Band, colored smoke pyrotechnics and streamers, which you can see at the end of our story.
In his monthly report, City Manager Robert Tamble noted that the production company said they would never film here again due to, “the exorbitant fees that had to be paid to some business owners to get the 100% approval” to close Main Street.
Tamble said the film industry standard for sign-offs is 80% and the city will be modifying the film permit guidelines accordingly to prevent issues in the future.
Council Love
Was it the summer rains cooling off tempers or just the lack of a contentious agenda? Either way, there was a whole lotta love at the July Smithville City Council meeting on Monday.
Learn what prestigious honor Council Member Jimmy Jenkins is vying for, get an update on how the Chamber is advertising the city, and see what new inspections will require a fee in our recap from the meeting.
Ethics Policy Explained
In March, the Smithville City Council adopted a Code of Ethics to formally codify into law what type of behavior our elected and appointed officials can and cannot do.
In our first video on the policy, we dive into section A of the Standards of Conduct section, and touch on some rules for filing a complaint.
Look for more videos about the city’s ethics policy on our YouTube channel in the coming weeks.
Become a Founding Member
There was quite a bit of confusion regarding memberships from last week’s newsletter, so we wanted to provide some clarification:
These are NOT regular newspaper subscriptions! We will have those once we get a full website up and they will be $7/month.
Memberships are for supporters who can afford to infuse extra capital into the business each month for the next 6-12 months and help us scale up.
To get the $7/month subscriptions going, we need to build a website, and unfortunately, we don’t quite have the capital to pay someone to build it yet.
This weekend we will be looking into a platform called Ghost, which has a lower cost and requires less technical skills. Look for an update next week.
What's On Tap For Next Week?
Monday July 21: School Board Meeting, 6pm, Admin Building
The Board will continue their budget discussions. Just a reminder, the school district rate is 49% of your property tax bill, and the City of Smithville is 30%.
The Board will also vote on a proposal to raise school lunch prices:
Brown Primary: from $1.75 to $2.75
Elementary: from $2.00 to $3.00
Junior High: from $2.00 to $3.25
High School from $2.00 to $3.50
Wednesday July 23: Budget Workshop #2, 5pm, City Hall
The City Council will hold a special meeting to discuss the budget. With lower property values decreasing revenues this year, City Manager Robert Tamble is expected to present a proposed budget 5% lower than the current budget.
Thank You City Workers
About 10:30 this morning, those of us on Gresham and Burleson were startled with a loud BOOM, followed by a loss of power.
City workers were on scene within minutes and discovered a bird had made the mistake of touching both the hot and ground wires, causing the fuse to blow in two transformers.
They were able to fix the fuses, and everyone had power back on in about 10 minutes.
Great work by our city workers!
From the Publisher
One of the questions I’ve been asked regularly is why I started Smithville Texas News. There were rumors going around that Tom Etheredge or Mitch Jameson asked me to start it, but there is no truth to that.
While they have both been supporters of the publication, we had never even formally met before I attended a Dec. 2024 council meeting.
But in a weird way, this is still all Mitch’s fault.
Read the full essay here.
Looking forward to see what we can build together,
~K
Kristen Meriwether
Publisher, Smithville Texas News
Kristen@smithvilleTexasNews.com
Follow us on X @NewsSmithville
