Tension Mounts at City Council

How important are Capitol views to certain Austinites? In the late Nineties, since-departed Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock ordered the renovation of the Texas State Cemetery in part so that his spirit could get a better look at the pink dome from where he would eventually be laid to rest, and demanded the cemetery's flag be hoisted 150 feet into the air – high enough that he could see it from his Capitol office window. (Photo by John Anderson)

There's no regular City Council meeting this week – the next is Thursday, March 2 – and it's a good moment for a brief break, as last Thursday's session featured a couple of moments of tense melodrama and some prolonged disputation over matters that might not have seemed like flash points until council members begin to wade into them. In the morning, a proposal to increase nonprofit funding for immigrant legal defense sparked a tense exchange between Council Members Greg Casar and Ellen Troxclair – and a veiled, much later rebuke from Mayor Steve Adler against "getting too close" to personal attacks on the dais. ("Council: Robert Rules, OK?" Feb. 20.)

In the afternoon, members got crossways over how best to revise their own committee structure – they have agreed there are too many committees (cutting the list from 10 to five) – but not how to organize the ones left, or who should be on them. (They're also constrained by their own 2015 actions, when they ceded the appointments to the mayor and limited committee size to four members.) A consultant's report on the matter is anticipated in a few weeks – maybe he or she can sort out the inside-baseball differences, or at least sketch an agreeable path to move forward.

The conversation also got a bit heated a little later, over CM Ora Houston's proposal to explore adding more Eastside "Capitol View Corridors" – banning highrise construction that would obscure residential views of the Capitol – to the 30 that already exist. Houston called the matter a question of "equity" for Eastside residents – although some of the existing view corridors (protected as well under state law) do in fact protect views from the eastern sides of town. (One was waived years ago to enable an upper deck on Memorial Stadium, but then little in Texas is more sacred than football.)

The most telling testimony against additional corridors was by Central Health board member Juan Garza, who told Coun­cil that one of the corridors under consideration would directly obstruct the health district's plans to redevelop the obsolete Brackenridge Hospital site, intended to help underwrite the district's mission to provide indigent health care. Council agreed to treat that corridor separately – but otherwise, only CM Jimmy Flannigan seemed willing to review all the corridors (west and east) to consider whether they continue to make sense for a large city with serious sprawl and affordability problems.

Even the dead got involved in the dispute. The backup featured a letter of support from Benjamin Hanson, chairman of the Texas State Cemetery Committee, who pointed out that some of the Venerables interred there had their headstones oriented to the west "in order to face the Capitol building," and that former Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock had a high flagpole installed and a hill raised "to improve the view of the state Capitol." Apparently, Bullock and his departed cohorts can be expected to start spinning in dismay should they no longer be able to gaze eyelessly down upon their legislative successors.

Height was also at issue in the evening, when the Plaza Saltillo zoning case returned to the floor, for a second reading to consider whether 1) a tract at the western edge of the site, bordering I-35, should be granted a variance to allow an eight-story (instead of a four-story) commercial tower; and 2) landowner Capital Metro and the developer (Endeavor Real Estate Group) had been misleading in 2014 when they promised a 25% quotient of affordable housing. The former is a request from Cap Metro to stimulate ridership and increase agency (and city) revenue; the latter a dispute over whether it was made publicly clear that 25% affordability (promised by both competing development teams) was only possible with 10% city participation (the estimated difference would be 141 units vs. 200, among 800 units in all).

Mayor Pro Tem Kathie Tovo and CM Leslie Pool were particularly hard on Endeavor spokesman Jason Thumlert over the affordability percentage – arguing that Endeavor should have made the distinction clearer three years ago – with Cap Metro supporting the developer on that issue and on the request for more tower height. The two questions – presumably both potential improvements to the project – became intertwined and opposed in the discussion, and the project passed on second reading without the additional height variance, and Tovo and Pool dissenting. A perplexed CM Flannigan wondered, "If you can't build an eight-story building on a highway on a train line, I'm not sure where you can build those things." They'll all get to revisit the matter next week, along with a hefty list of other cases, including the foreboding northwest project, the Austin Oaks PUD.

Meanwhile, Council has received three Wednesday briefings on the FY 2018 budget, consisting thus far of ("voluntary") budget overviews of the public safety departments, police, fire, and EMS – presenting their total budgets, their major cost drivers, and the budgetary challenges they see coming down the pike. The theory is that if Council can dig into the overall budget numbers earlier in the year and prior to the city manager's formal budget presentation, everybody will have a better sense of the larger budget context. "At the end of these meetings," Mayor Adler told his colleagues, "we'll really know how to do it. We will have learned a lot and know whether or not we need to do this again next year, or whether we don't." Judging from the first three sessions, more likely is that they'll be doing it all again this year – beginning in a couple of months.