General Gus Garcia
The Victory of the Hordes
Fri., Oct. 27, 1995
With the globetrot-
ting mayor reportedly helping Muscovites employ an Austin-like emergency medical system, Gus Garcia's deputy leadership took center stage last Thursday, permitting an altogether unusual set of circumstances at the council chambers. To wit, the attendant hoi polloi were granted a right to gripe to an unheard-of degree, a consideration that contrasted starkly with meetings conducted under Bruce Todd's Rules of Order, which seem to grant more import to rapidity than debate.The pro tem's lax authority, either the result of naïveté, niceness, or just plain political posturing for a 1997 mayoral bid, guaranteed extra input for even the councilmembers' most disliked hecklers, like council regular John Johnson. Of course, judging from the reactions of the sparse audience, it also meant that the meeting bordered on tedium. Johnson, a former wheelman for the mob and ex-Todd opponent, used up 20 minutes of the meeting to complain that police brutality has depleted Sixth Street of nearly all of its vendors. True, the monologue came because Eric Mitchell wondered what the fajita vendor had to say, but the mayor surely would have removed Johnson by police escort as he did three weeks ago when Johnson attempted to grab additional speaking time.
Garcia's easy attitude also allowed about a dozen residents of the Rainey Street Neighborhood to speak against a proposal by Nations Bank to create additional commercial zoning in their area, despite the fact that consideration of the proposal was delayed until the next week's meeting. Since the postponement came by virtue of a last-minute request from the bank's lobbyist, Sarah Crocker, residents who had left jobs early to make the meeting were uninformed of the time change. Their complaints of inconvenience provoked Garcia to agree to "go ahead and hear the speakers since they're here."
Not surprisingly, the residents of the small multi-racial enclave -- north of Town Lake and west of I-35 -- requested that single-family zoning be maintained for the half-acre under question. Some focused on the sharp increase in accidents that the area's trend toward commercialization is causing in the historic district. Others jumped on the inner-city housing bandwagon, noting that the empty lots would make a cozy locale for homes transplanted from the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
The protests led to an unforgettable twist to the council tradition of heaping favoritism on developers. A frantic and put-out Crocker, previously assured by staff that her item wouldn't be discussed, had to rush down to the council chambers at the last minute for her "applicant's rebuttal." Crocker angrily pointed out that Nations Bank is not the owner of the land, as some of the residents had stated, but rather is the fiduciary agent for a little old lady in a Florida nursing home.
Crocker has an uphill battle for council approval: The residents have a valid
petition
against the proposed change. The council will need at least six
votes to override the petition -- thus the applicant's request for delay until
a full council is present. In this case, the zoning change will require
positive unanimity among all the voting members: Brigid Shea's residency in the
area requires her abstention.
A symbolic vote on one Garcia resolution got a little extra consideration with Garcia running the show. The item, to deem I-35 a NAFTA superhighway, was raised for council consideration not once, but twice. That's because after the first unanimous vote, Garcia snapped to and realized he had forgotten to allow citizens' communication. As it turned out, only Kirk Becker, a council gadfly, homeless person, and once the personal recipient of an Eric Mitchell verbal assault, had signed up to speak. The council opened the public hearing, closed the public hearing, then re-voted, giving the resolution a double stamp of unanimous approval before sending it off to Congress and the President.
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Remember all the to-do coming from the mayor last spring about how the tax abatement ordinance would provide wheelbarrows of money for high-tech job training? The idea is that the city will funnel 20% of those taxes collected from a corporation that gets a partial tax abatement to a Workforce Development Board (WDB). The board would oversee the training of the techies-to-be, with the implication that impoverished Eastside residents will be the greatest beneficiaries. As of last week, the mayor's pitch got one step closer to reality when he finalized his 16 appointments to the WDB (Travis County Judge Bill Aleshire is allowed another 15), but not without a couple of reprimands for idleness from the city's audit team.
As far back as September 22, auditors found that "little progress has been made" in implementing their recommendations to speed the creation of the WDB. The team advised that "progress may stall" if the appointments weren't made by October 4, 1995. The date was selected to allow orientation time for the WDB appointees before they replaced the area's current workforce development board -- the Private Industry Council.
Then, at the October 11 meeting of the council's Audit and Finance subcommittee, auditors pointed out that the "critical issue" of appointing WDB board members had still not been settled. Not until an entire week later were they made.
Todd's aide, Trey Salinas, said the mayor's office was "waiting on the judge's office because we had to coordinate [the appointments] together" -- to prevent overlap. Aleshire says he thought everything was on schedule. "Nobody contacted me to say I had a deadline."
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This week in council: No council meeting. Next week, Brigid Shea's resolution to combine the resources of the State Comptroller's Office, the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and the City of Austin to perform an audit of the city's Public Works & Transportation Department. The mayor asked for the delay so he can get in on the discussion. Also, the Rainey Street zoning case returns for a vote. n
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