City Hall Hustle: Take a Boardwalk With Me

Time accrues momentum as we age. Take summer, for instance. When you're young, those three school-free months seem to stretch out interminably. But as the years pass, time sails by in an ever-quickening procession.

Suffice to say, City Council's summer hiatus is imbuing the Hustle with a sense of childlike wonder, because time seems to be moving ... so ... slowly in the council's absence.

Mike Martinez's Facebook page contains a stream of updates from Colorado. Laura Morrison just returned from Arkansas, where she reportedly read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (self-help advice?). Chris Riley is staycationing (carbon-neutral, natch). The lack of council drama has made your humble author wonder whether he shouldn't cash in some of his accrued vacation time. When you're counting down the days until council's draft agenda is posted, well ... you begin to wonder.

That's not to say there's no action at the city – it's just burrowed down a little deeper. As we reported last week, council's Public Health and Human Services Committee is re-examining funding for social service contracts and ways to prioritize those needs and to gauge the return on the city's investment (see "City Hall Hustle," July 9). Morrison, who sits on the PH&HS Committee with Martinez and Randi Shade, e-mailed the Hustle on her way out the door last week, describing her own priorities going forward. "My concern in setting priorities is that we maintain the broad picture of the continuum of needs rather than narrowing it to only basic services. That also means having an understanding of funding from other sources and what their priorities are to minimize gaps. Obviously transparency and accountability are key in this process as is ensuring our allocations bring maximum benefits for least cost."

Morrison also addressed concerns with the prioritization areas the committee tentatively committed to last meeting – earmarking funding foremost for housing, food, employment, and social/functional skills, areas coalesced around the concept of self-sufficiency. "Our current comprehensive plan with its interim update actually lists the priorities that we use now," she notes, referencing the 14 unweighed categories that contracts currently address, running the gamut from basic needs to drug treatment and job training. "I would have some discomfort in modifying that to any major degree without including stakeholders in the discussion."

Other questions are currently swirling around the sensitive subject, but council still appears to be in info-gathering mode. Wednesday, as the Chronicle prepped for press, the PH&HS Committee (sans Martinez) was gathering for a staff briefing on the current contracting process from the Health and Human Services Department. And yes, this time the meeting will be televised. (At press time, Channel 6 was working to get the previous meeting online.)

Meanwhile, another discussion of how to best allocate the city's funds is under way – this time, pertaining to the Novem­ber transportation bond election and its unlikely crux of controversy, the Boardwalk Trail at Lady Bird Lake.

The citizens task force charged with examining the bond lent its approval to the package Monday on a vote of 6-0, but with two members abstaining. Aside from general complaints about the way in which the package was assembled, the tweaks to the boardwalk seemed to engender the most controversy. As task force Chair Sandy Baldridge told In Fact Daily after the vote, "Saying that it was $17 million [for the project] ... when they knew it would only be $14 [million] was, as far as I am personally concerned ... a stretch to the general public."

Tweaks to the package were trotted out last week in a memo from Transportation Director Rob Spillar, and they mainly addressed the boardwalk. True to Spillar's previous comments that the project could be phased, the revision calls for $9 million in bond funding for Phase 1, connecting from the end of the trail to just east of I-35. Phase 2, connecting the new Eastside endpoint to Lakeshore Boulevard, could be accomplished with $4.9 million in bond funding, plus a newly proposed $3 million contribution from the Trail Foundation, lessening the cost of the project by that amount. Those savings, coupled with an additional $5 million in bonding capacity (raising the overall package from $85 million to $90 million), are mainly farmed out to roads – projects and engineering along I-35, and on other street projects in a partnership with the county. The move lends credence to theorizing that the boardwalk – the largest single expense in the package – was developed as low-hanging fruit which could be plucked to appease the roads crowd. Not that the Hustle is necessarily in disagreement with them: Of all the traffic jams in town, the one along Town Lake Trail is perhaps the least concerning. On the other hand, no one donating their time to the transpo bond task force wants to feel like they're being taken for a ride.

Maybe this time, there's excitement without council after all ....

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The Hustle keeps it moving with the Daily Hustle at austinchronicle.com/tdh.