Beside the Point

If, indeed, it took a year to replace former police Chief Stan Knee – now likely ingratiated as thoroughly with Afghanistan's beleaguered citizenry as he was with Austin's at the peak of his popularity – just think how long it's gonna take to replace the best city manager on the face of the earth!

BTP's more persistent readers may remember the most pressing question at Toby Futrell's golden handshake/performance evaluation was whether our Toby was "the best in the country" (to wit, one Brewster McCracken) or "the world" (the Voice of the Municipal Almighty, Betty Dunkerley). With the bar so dizzyingly high, how long does Futrell anticipate the city taking to fill her shoes?

Eight to 10 months, right?

That was what we learned Monday, as Futrell announced her retirement. While she wanted to keep her plans quiet until after the 2008 budget adoption, she relented in the wake of "what feels like mounting media frenzy and conjecture."

Britney, Lindsay … meet Toby!

By announcing now, she's giving council eight months to complete a national replacement search – "if desired" – while leaving two extra months "for notice requirements and potential slippage." Thing is, in that process – as our police and water-utility search troubles testify – Austin can be dangerously akin to a thousand Astrogliding Slip 'n Slides.

More mysterious was Futrell's former timeline. Announcing after the budget adoption would have meant the earliest council could've considered replacement was in its Sept. 27 meeting. So if proceedings were to resemble the current course – discussing options in executive session during its first meeting back from break (next week, July 26) and likely issuing a formal search resolution the following meeting – we'd be well into October before the search truly began. While we all want to give Futrell her farewell tour (Don't Let the Door Hit Ya! '07, SRO), would it have been reasonable cutting that deeply into the search to do so?

We are replacing the best in the world, after all.

Is eight months enough? "I really do think so," says Council Member Mike Martinez. "When you're talking about a top-level executive position like that, you're not gonna have 60 candidates. You'll have 60 that want the job but not that much top-tier talent. There are five to maybe 10 candidates, at the most, and we'll whittle it down from there." Still, for a nationwide search, "the more time we have the better we are." Colleague Lee Leffingwell's a little less certain. "I think eight months is gonna be really tight," he says, citing the search for new Austin Police Department Chief Art Acevedo. "Certainly the police chief is very important, but the city manager's job is even more important than that; the police chief reports to her." Ultimately, he says, "I think waiting that long would have increased the pressure to get it done in a shorter amount of time."

Waiting also contains its own political calculations; with a tighter timeline, Futrell might have had more luck installing one of the replacements subject to deafening whispers at City Hall: assistant city managers Laura Huffman or Rudy Garza, Chief of Staff Kristen Vassallo, Austin Energy general manager Juan Garza – with Rudy and Juan (unrelated) still smarting from the fallout of Toby's big story last week. (The frantic backstage maneuvering bodes well for a national search, right?) But it's also likely council would've had less problem kicking her to the curb – 31 years of service or no, there'd be business at hand.

But now Futrell has more goodwill – and potential control in the selection process – than had she held out until the bitter end. As decreed last week by Betty Dunkerley, there's work to be done by staff and sympathizers – how unconscionable would it be for Dunkerley to leave the dais without dispensing her grandmotherly wisdom on the new city manager! Or even worse, having it devolve into something as base as – gasp! – an election issue! (For irony-deficient readers, Dunkerley's election worries, and the suggestion that frosh council members would be ill-equipped to choose Futrell's replacement, are as absurd as concerns council would be lost in the thickets of the budget without the tag team's guidance. But as long as they sidestep those responsibilities, blame lies with the council members.)

Tears or no, the behind-the-dais drama over when to begin Futrell's replacement search is the most push-and-pull between council and staff BTP's seen in ages. Council needs to assert its independence, to check and balance a city staff to which it has devolved too much decision-wielding power. Otherwise, we're left with the pseudo-consensual, gray-goo governance of the council-manager system, one that green-lights undifferentiated growth and cultivates bureaucratic complacency.

As they replace the Greatest, council members need to ask if council-manager is their official form of government – or simply the city manager's job description.

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Send your manager picks to BTP at wdunbar@austinchronicle.com. Council returns next Thursday, July 26. Can't say it's been boring in your absence!