So many issues; so little time… As this issue goes to press, on
Wednesday, June 25, the newly elected Austin City Council is still enjoying their honeymoon.
By the time you read this, as of Thursday, June 26, the honeymoon will have ended.
That’s because tomorrow afternoon, Kirk Watson will call to order the first council
meeting of the new green era. And almost immediately, the council will be in the deep
end — they not only inherit a full caseload of knotty problems from the
previous, terminally deadlocked council and its lamest of mayoral ducks; they also must bear the
impossible hopes and dreams of a cadre of idealists who expect a governmental change
something akin to East Germany at the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The council’s main challenge is going to be taking all that pent-up
enthusiasm, and get it all pulling in roughly the same direction. Emotions and
expectations will be high, and patience will be in short supply.
The problem is, there are a lot of thorny issues — East 11th & 12th,
the Holly Street power plant, the Triangle development, traffic, watersheds,
transit, the development code rewrite, air quality, indigent health care… I’m out of
breath and I haven’t even gotten to the bugs and salamanders — that the new council
may find just as intractable as the last one did. Yet each of those issues has
its vehement, impatient advocates and supporters, and most all of them feel that this
council’s widely reported mandate is their mandate. It’s one thing to have
Ronney Reynolds tell you you’re a hopeless idealist; it’s quite another if Daryl Slusher
tells you the same thing. Expect to hear the word “traitor” become a larger
part of the public discourse.
That’s the bad news. The good news is, this council really does seem to
be, not just ideologically simpatico, but also smart and practical. To add our fuel
to the flame of public expectation, it really is time for the Austin greens to put
up or shut up. They’ve been the vocal opposition for so long, it will be hard to
change gears, redirect the rhetoric, and start making things happen, instead
of trying to stop them for happening. (It’s an issue we’re feeling acutely
around here. The Chronicle persona was built largely on opposition to the powers
that be. Now we have a council where we endorsed every member. It’s a strange
feeling.) But there’s an almost cocky optimism (so far) around city hall — a heady blend
of technocracy, which believes that policy can do good, blended with a populism which
believes that people can do good, if the fat cats are weaned from the public teat. It’s a
booster mentality — if a peculiarly alt-Austin take on one — and if anyone expects
this to be a no-growth administration, they’re living way in the past.
The last council that took office with this much environmental good will
behind it was the Frank Cooksey council of the late 1980s. That council was later
widely reviled in enviro circles for approving more new development than any other
before or since. Now the Watson council comes in on an even broader green tide, and
don’t be surprised if they break that record. Anyway, it’ll be an interesting
couple of years.
This article appears in June 27 • 1997 and June 27 • 1997 (Cover).